I’ve had one of these 3d printed keys in my wallet as a backup in case I get locked out for 5 years now. I certainly don’t use it often but yeah it holds up fine.

The couple of times I have used it works fine but you certainly want to be a little extra careful with it. I’ve got locks that are only 5ish years old so they all turn rather easily, and I avoid my door with the deadbolt when I use it because that would probably be too much for it.

Mine is PETG but for how thin it is, it flexes a lot. I figured flexing is better than snapping off, but I think PLA or maybe a polycarbonate would function better. A nylon would probably be too flexible like the PETG.

If your NAS has enough resources the happy(ish) medium is to use your NAS as a hypervisor. The NAS can be on the bare hardware or its own VM, and the containers can have their own VMs as needed.

Then you don’t have to take down your NAS when you need to reboot your container’s VMs, and you get a little extra security separation between any externally facing services and any potentially sensitive data on the NAS.

Lots of performance trade offs there, but I tend to want to keep my NAS on more stable OS versions, and then the other workloads can be more bleeding edge/experimental as needed. It is a good mix if you have the resources, and having a hypervisor to test VMs is always useful.

If you are just using a self signed server certificate anyone can connect to your services. Many browsers/applications will fail to connect or give a warning but it can be easily bypassed.

Unless you are talking about mutual TLS authentication (aka mTLS or two way ssl). With mutual TLS in addition to the server key+cert you also have a client key+cert for your client. And you setup your web server/reverse proxy to only allow connections from clients that can prove they have that client key.

So in the context of this thread mTLS is a great way to protect your externally exposed services. Mutual TLS should be just as strong of a protection as a VPN, and in fact many VPNs use mutual TLS to authenticate clients (i.e. if you have an OpenVPN file with certs in it instead of a pre-shared key). So they are doing the exact same thing. Why not skip all of the extra VPN steps and setup mTLS directly to your services.

mTLS prevents any web requests from getting through before the client has authenticated, but it can be a little complicated to setup. In reality basic auth at the reverse proxy and a sufficiently strong password is just as good, and is much easier to setup/use.

Here are a couple of relevant links for nginx. Traefik and many other reverse proxies can do the same.

How To Implement Two Way SSL With Nginx

Apply Mutual TLS over kubernetes/nginx ingress controller

The biggest question is, are you looking for Dolby Vision support?

There is no open source implementation for Dolby Vision or HDR10+ so if you want to use those formats you are limited to Android/Apple/Amazon streaming boxes.

If you want to avoid the ads from those devices apart from side loading apks to replace home screens or something the only way to get Dolby Vision with Kodi/standard Linux is to buy a CoreELEC supported streaming device and flashing it with CoreELEC.

List of supported devices here

CoreELEC is Kodi based so it limits your player choice, but there are plugins for Plex/Jellyfin if you want to pull from those as back ends.

Personally it is a lot easier to just grab the latest gen Onn 4k Pro from Walmart for $50 and deal with the Google TV ads (never leave my streaming app anyways). Only downside with the Onn is lack of Dolby TrueHD/DTS Master audio output, but it handles AV1, and more Dolby Vision profiles than the Shield does at a much cheaper price. It also handles HDR10+ which the Shield doesn’t but that for at isn’t nearly as common and many of the big TV brands don’t support it anyways.

I am not a SAN admin but work closely with them. So take this with a grain of salt.

Best practice is always going to be to split things into as many failure domains as possible. The main argument being how would you test upgrades to the switch firmware without potentially affecting production.

But my personal experience says that assuming you have a typical A/B fabric that is probably enough to handle those sorts of problems, especially if you have director class switches where you have another supervisor to fail back to.

I’ve personally seen shared dev/prod switches for reasonably large companies (several switches with ~150 ports lit on each switch), and there were never any issues.

If you want to keep a little separation between dev and prod keep those on different VSANs which will force you to keep the zones separated.

Depending on how strict change management is for your org keep in mind that tangling dev+prod might make your life worse in other ways. i.e. you can probably do switch firmware updates/zoning changes/troubleshooting in dev during work hours but as soon as you connect those environments together you may have to do all of that on nights and weekends.

Like most have said it is best to stay away from ZFS deduplication. Especially if your data set is media the chances of an entire ZFS block being the same as any other is small unless you somehow have multiple copies of the same content.

Imagine two mp3s with the exact same music content but with slightly different artist metadata. A single bit longer or shorter at the beginning of the file and even if the file spans multiple blocks ZFS won’t be able to duplicate a single byte. A single bit offsetting the rest of the file just a little is enough to throw off the block checksums across every block in the file.

To contrast with ZFS, enterprise backup/NAS appliances with deduplication usually do a lot more than block level checks. They usually check for data with sliding window sizes/offsets to find more duplicate data.

There are still some use cases where ZFS can help. Like if you were doing multiple full backups of VMs. A VM image has a fixed size so the offset issue above isn’t an issue, but if beware that enabling deduplication for even a single ZFS filesystem affects the entire pool, even ZFS filesystems that have deduplication disabed. The deduplication table is global for the pool and once you have turned it on you really can’t get rid of it. If you get into a situation where you don’t have enough memory to keep the deduplication table in memory ZFS will grind to a halt and the only way to completely remove deduplication is to copy all of your data to a new ZFS pool.

If you think this feature would still be useful for you, you might want to wait for 2.3 to release (which isn’t too far off) for the new fast dedup feature which fixes or at least prevents a lot of the major issues with ZFS dedup

More info on the fast dedup feature here https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/15896

Slows down then freezes sure sounds like an out of memory situation, so to add to yours here he might actually want less swap. Sometimes you would rather hit the oom killer sooner instead of waiting on swap to fill.

Ideally login via SSH from another machine to figure out what is using the memory (hopefully the system is responsive enough for SSH), and if it is your critical programs causing the problem then you should consider a memory upgrade.

Contrary to a lot of posts that I have seen, I would say ZFS isn’t pointless with a single drive. Even if you can’t repair corruption with a single drive knowing something is corrupt in the first place is even more important (you have backups to restore it from right?).

And a ZFS still has a lot of features that are useful regardless. Like snapshots, compression, reflinks, send/receive, and COW means no concerns about data loss during a crash.

BTRFS can do all of this too and I believe it is better about low memory systems but since you have ZFS on your NAS you unlock a lot of possibilities keeping them the same.

I.e. say you keep your T110ii running with ZFS you can use tools like syncoid to periodically push snapshots from the Optiplex to your T110.

That way your Optiplex can be a workhorse, and your NAS can keep the backup+periodic snapshots of the important data.

I don’t have any experience with TrueNAS in particular but it looks like syncoid works with it. You might need to make sure that pool versions/flags are the same for sending/receive to work.

Alternatively keep that data on an NFS mount. The SSD in the Optiplex would just be for the base OS and wouldn’t have any data that can’t be thrown away. The disadvantage here being your Optiplex now relies on a lot more to keep running (networking + nas must be online all the time).

If you need HA for the VMs you likely need distributed storage for the VMs to run on. No point in building an HA VM solution if it just moves the single point of failure to your NAS.

Personally I like Harvester, but the minimum requirements are probably beyond what your hardware can handle.

Since you are already on TrueNAS Scale have you looked at using TrueNAS Scale on the Optiplex with replication tasks for backups?

If you are accessing your files through dolphin on your Linux device this change has no effect on you. In that case Synology is just sharing files and it doesn’t know or care what kind of files they are.

This change is mostly for people who were using the Synology videos app to stream videos. I assume Plex is much more common on Synology and I don’t believe anything changed with Plex’s h265 support.

If you were using the built in Synology videos app and have objections to Plex give Jellyfin a try. It should handle h265 and doesn’t require a purchase like Plex does to unlock features like mobile apps.

Linux isn’t dropping any codecs and should be able to handle almost any media you throw at it. Codec support depends on what app you are using, and most Linux apps use ffmpeg to do that decoding. As far as I know Debian hasn’t dropped support for h265, but even if they did you could always compile your own ffmpeg libraries with it re-enabled.

How can I most easily search my NAS for files needing the removed codecs

The mediainfo command is one of the easiest ways to do this on the command line. It can tell you what video/audio codecs are used in a file.

With Linux and Synology DSM both dropping codecs, I am considering just taking the storage hit to convert to h.264 or another format. What would you recommend?

To answer this you need to know the least common denominator of supported codecs on everything you want to play back on. If you are only worried about playing this back on your Linux machine with your 1080s then you fully support h265 already and you should not convert anything. Any conversion between codecs is lossy so it is best to leave them as they are or else you will lose quality.

If you have other hardware that can’t support h265, h264 is probably the next best. Almost any hardware in the last 15 years should easily handle h264.

When it comes to thumbnails for a remote filesystem like this are they generated and stored on my PC or will the PC save them to the folder on the NAS where other programs could use them.

Yes they are generated locally, and Dolphin stores them in ~/.cache/thumbnails on your local system.

In any KDE app you can connect with SFTP in the open file dialog. Just type sftp://user@server/path and you can browse/open/edit files the remote server. ssh keys+agent make things a lot easier here obviously.

Updates for CrowdStike are pushed out automatically outside of any OS patching.

You can setup n-1/n-2 version policies to keep your production agent versions behind pre-prod, but other posts have mentioned that it got pushed out to all versions at once. Like a signature update vs an agent update that follows the policies.

I believe so. The package descriptions for most of the ZFS packages in Ubuntu mention OpenZFS, so it certainly appears that way.

You can still create pools that are compatible with Oracle Solaris, you just have to set the pool version to 28 or older when you create it and obviously don’t update it. That will prevent you from using any of the newer features that have been added since the fork.

Well worse than that, Oracle closed sourced ZFS, so OpenZFS was forced to become a fork, and they are no longer compatible with each other.

As for GPL the CDDL license that ZFS uses made sure that code contributions attribute copyright to the project owners, which means they can change the license as they please without having to track down contributors.

You would think with their investments in Oracle Linux and btrfs they would welcome that license change, but apparently they need excuses to keep putting money into Solaris, and their Oracle ZFS appliances instead.

One nice thing about KDE compared to most of the other DEs is that the window manager (kwin) is separate from the underlying components, and it can be replaced!

There are many walkthroughs like this one out there: https://github.com/heckelson/i3-and-kde-plasma

You get i3 for tiling window management but you still get to use KDE’s system settings to do configuration like display settings, themes keyboard shortcuts, etc, just like you did before. You can also pick and choose which parts of the KDE desktop you want to keep (menu, krunner, etc)

Since i3 is just a window manager and is lacking all of that system level stuff it really rounds out i3 to feel like a full DE instead of having to piece together other tools to do those things.

August 15th. https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/noble-numbat-release-schedule/35649