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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • That’s what I was thinking, I know the pain of watching something run for ages, only to finally get past where it failed last time and run straight in to another stumbling block.

    I don’t envy you having to work in an SELinux environment with less than stellar developer understanding of policies and contexts.







  • It’s the right move.

    I tell you, the first time you’re sat in front of a CEO and an auditor and you have to explain why the big list of servers has a highlighted one called C-NT-PRIK-5 is when the fun stops.

    Explaining that it’s short for ‘customer network tester Mr. Prickles 5’, and is actually a cacti server never really seems to help the situation.

    At least a few of the customers got a laugh out of it being on the reports!



  • You had me digging through old hosts files and ssh configs to find some of these.

    I try to name them something that resembles what they do or has something to do with what their purpose is.

    Short is good, and if it can match more than one of the machine’s purpose/os/software/look, the better.

    If it’s some sort of personal machine, it gets a personal name

    Phones

    • traveller
    • pawn
    • rook
    • bishop

    Virtual Workstations

    • boxy

    • moxy

    • sandbox

    • cloud

    • ship lxc container host

    • dock docker host

    Laptops

    • ciel Razer blade stealth with a rainbow LED keyboard
    • arc runs arch.
    • lled is a dell

    Desktops

    • bench
    • citadel
    • bastion


  • Lots of people have been talking about products and tools. It’s docker, tailscale, cloudflare proxmox etc. These are important, but will likely come and go on a long enough timescale.

    In terms of actual skills, there’s two that will dramatically decrease your headaches. Documention and backup planning. The problem with developing those skills is, to my knowledge, they’ve only ever been obtained through suffering. Trying to remember how to rebuild something when you built it 6 months ago is futile. Trying to recover borked data is brutal. There’s no fail-safe that you haven’t created, and there’s no history that you haven’t written. Fortunately, these are also the most transferable skills.

    My advice is, jump in. Don’t hesitate. The chops in docker/linux/networking will come with use and familiarity. If it looks cool, do it. Make mistakes. You will rapidly realise what the problems with your set up are. You will gain knowledge in leaps and bounds from breaking a thing vs learning by rote or lesson. Reframe the headaches as a feature, not a bug - they’re highlighting holes in your understanding. They signpost the way to being a better tech, and a more stable production environment.

    The greatest bit about self hosting for me is planning the next great leap forward, making it better, cleaner, more robust. Growing the confidence in your abilities to create a system you can trust. Honing your skills and toolset is the entirety of the excercise, so jump in, and don’t focus on any one thing to master or practice before hand!


  • It’s the solution on the user experience side, but not the backend/server side. For both infrastructure and idealogical reasons. These two things don’t have to be the same.

    Disney parks wants park visitors to feel like their exploring, but design in such a way that thepy don’t actually stray that far from the preferred paths. Also they have clear sign posting.

    There’s no reason the fediverse can’t design the opposite. Helping users into feeling like there’s a set path, and that they’re doing the right thing, while subtly encouraging exploration.

    It’s just the opposite of where all talent and techniques of internet software design are right now, so it’s going to take some work.

    Edit: Most people don’t jump into a hedge to get off the main road, they find a small, unplanned trail or desire path, then learn to navigate the jungle when that path ends.









  • S3 is what people actually think of when they think of sleep mode, or modern standby. The running state of the operating system is stored in RAM, in low power mode. All context for the cpu, other hardware like disks and network is lost and those devices are completely shut down - bar the RAM. Basically, you close the lid at the end of the day, and you’re nearly at the same charge level the next morning.

    This saves a lot of power. On my older 8th gen intel cpu laptop, it loses maybe 1-2% charge per day in this mode.

    My new 13th gen laptop still has deep sleep, or standby (s3) as a hardware function, but it’s technically not supported. It actually doesn’t work when enabled, and just falls back to s1 (sleep, everything’s still on, just in low power mode). It loses about 2-3% per hour in this mode

    S4 (Hibernate) does roughly the same as S3, but the OS state is stored to the disk instead of ram, so that can be shut off too. Now the device is completely powered off, losing no charge while ‘asleep’.

    S5 is off

    S4 sleep takes much longer to wake up from than s3, so was less desirable. In the modern computing world (especially end user devices), commonly there’s full disk encryption going on, which adds a layer of complexity to resuming from disk, as you would when waking up from hibernation (s4).

    Making it resume without putting in a decryption password for example (using a TPM), isn’t simple, and breaks a lot when you do system upgades