Yeah, that’s probably a fair answer for some folks and systems. Depends on what your system is doing, your risk tolerance, and what money you’re willing to put into the thing.
If I didn’t have a backup system in place, say, that’d be much higher on my list than trying to ensure power isn’t cut off unexpectedly during power outages.
I agree that it’s less-critical than it was at one point. Any modern filesystem, including ext4 and btrfs, isn’t at risk of filesystem-level corruption, and a DBMS like PostgreSQL or MySQL should handle it at an application level. That being said, there is still other software out there that may take issue with being interrupted. Doing an apt upgrade is not guaranteed to handle power loss cleanly, for example. And I’m not too sanguine about hardware not being bricked if I lose power during an fwupd updating the firmware on attached hardware. Maybe a given piece of hardware has a safe, atomic upgrade procedure…and maybe it doesn’t.
That does also mean, if there’s no power backup at all, that one won’t have the system available for the duration of the outage. That may be no big deal, or might be a real pain.
Yeah, I listed it as one possibility, maybe the best I can think of, but also why I’ve got some issues with that route, why it wouldn’t be my preferred route. Maybe it is the best generally available right now.
The “just use a UPS plus a second system” route makes a lot of sense with diesel generator systems, because there the hardware physically cannot come up to speed in time. A generator cannot start in 10ms, so you need a flywheel or battery or some other kind of energy-storage system in place to bridge the gap…but that shouldn’t be a fundamental constraint on those home large-battery backup systems. They don’t have to be equipped with an inverter able to come online in 10ms…but they could. In the generator scenario, it’s simply not an option.
I’d like to, if possible, have the computer have a “unified” view of all of the backing storage systems. In the generator case, the “time remaining” is a function of the fuel in the tank, and I’m pretty sure that it’s not uncommon for someone to be able to have some kind of secondary storage that couldn’t be measured; I remember reading about a New Orleans employee in Hurricane Katrina that stayed behind to keep the datacenter functioning mostly hauling drums of diesel up the stairs to the generator. But that’s not really a fundamental issue with those battery backup systems, not unless someone is planning on hauling more batteries in.
If one gets a UPS and then backs it with a battery backup system, then there are two sets of batteries — one often lead-acid, with a shorter lifespan — and multiple inverters and battery charge controllers in multiple layers in the system. That’s not the end of the world, a “throw some extra money at it” issue, but one is having to get redundant hardware.
I’ll add one other point that might affect people running low-power servers, which I believe some people here are running for low-compute-load stuff like home automation: my past experience is that low-end, low power computers often have (inexpensive) power supplies that are especially intolerant of wall power issues. I have had multiple consumer broadband routers and switches that have gotten into a wonky, manual-reboot-requiring state after brownouts or power loss, even when other computers in the house continued to function without issue. I’d guess that those might be particularly-sensitive to a longer delay in changing over to a backup power source. I would guess that Raspberry Pi-class machines might have power supplies vulnerable to this. I suppose that for devices with standard barrel connectors and voltage levels, one could probably find a more-expensive power supply that can handle dirtier power.
If you run some form of backup power system that powers them, have you had issues with Raspberry Pis or consumer internet routers after power outages?
While laptop batteries may not have aged well, especially if they’re left discharged, one other nice perk is that laptops effectively have an integrated UPS.
Poison Ivy standing on an invisible plant?
I don’t think that that’s really flying. More…standing with style. Though maybe you could argue that it’d be in-character for Poison Ivy to be insulting someone without legitimate grounds to do so…
Jean Grey can fly, has worn a similar-looking yellow utility belt, and has red hair, albeit different clothes, but she’d be Marvel universe rather than DC, and Batman being in the image would mean that it’s DC universe.
…cosplaying as Poison Ivy!
Reserved for future use: krex & krox
Poor “kryx”.
Three-letter words that can be typed with one hand, since I have to type them frequently.
$ egrep "^([qwertasdfgzxcvb]{3}|[yuiophjkllnm]{3})$" /usr/share/dict/words
Ah, that’s the one modded by Merde, who likes this sort of thing. Yeah, only looked at the thumbnail earlier because I was in a public setting, didn’t realize that it was more than just a nude, thanks.
I don’t have an issue with AI-generated pornography per se, but note that this community explicitly prohibits pornography, and the instance on which the community is hosted, sh.itjust.works, prohibits pornography at an instance level, so it’s kind of not an option for the mods to permit it even if they wanted to do so.
There is a community on lemmynsfw.com that is created to host AI-generated pornography at [email protected], as well as some sister communities, like [email protected] and [email protected].
I’d say that it should be entirely fine to post to different (relevant) communities. The point of different communities is to let people who may have different tastes choose just the ones that they want.
The problem is that the software doesn’t presently do a great job of presenting these. Like, from a user standpoint, if browsing a list containing posts from multiple communities — be it All or multiple communities that I’m subscribed to — I’d like to see one entry for all of them, with sections for each cross-posted community.
That should really be fixed on the software side, not by users trying to patch around it via modifying their posting behavior.
I’m not entirely enthusiastic about the fact that the maintaining GitHub account is using an avatar that appears to be a flaming Pepe.
and uses btrfs send/receive to create backups.
I’m not familiar with that, but if it permits for faster identification of modified data since a given time than scanning a filesystem for modified files, which a filesystem could potentially do, that could also be a useful backup enabler, since now your scan-for-changes time doesn’t need to be linear in the number of files in the filesystem. If you don’t do that, your next best bet on Linux – and this way would be filesystem-agnostic – is gonna require something like having a daemon that runs and uses inotify to build some kind of on-disk index of modifications since the last backup, and a backup system that can understand that.
looks at btrfs-send(1) man page
Ah, yeah, it does do that. Well, the man page doesn’t say what time it runs in, but I assume that it’s better than linear in file count on the filesystem.
You’re correct and probably the person you’re responding to is treating one as an alternative as another.
However, theoretically filesystem snapshotting can be used to enable backups, because they permit for an instantaneous, consistent view of a filesystem. I don’t know if there are backup systems that do this with btrfs today, but this would involve taking a snapshot and then having the backup system backing up the snapshot rather than the live view of the filesystem.
Otherwise, stuff like drive images and database files that are being written to while being backed up can just have a corrupted, inconsistent file in the backup.
This is neat. AFAIK, nobody has made any models and software trained to generate vector images, but one can vectorize generated raster images. I don’t think that I’ve seen much by way of vectorized images here, though I’ve personally played with it a bit.
deleted by creator
If you mean the US, IIRC, we’re in the process of “closing a tariff loophole” where people sending small shipments were exempt from tariffs, which I understand contributed to Temu and Shein doing well because – unlike importers who imported in bulk – they didn’t have to pay tariffs if they shipped directly to customers.
kagis
Hmm. Looks like that got backed out, at least temporarily.
Trump Reinstates ‘De Minimis’ Tariff Exemption For Shipments Under $800—Boosting Shein And Temu
And we do have tariffs on cheese. Back around Brexit, the UK attempted to specifically negotiated a “mini-free trade agreement” just for cheese, as I recall.
The U.K. is keen to access the American digital services sector as well as artificial intelligence, while it has outlined aims to reduce trade barriers for British car manufacturers, ceramicists, and producers of the likes of…Cheddar cheese, which currently receives a 17.6 percent levy at U.S. customs.
The negotiations weren’t successful.
Hmm. It looks like Canada has far more enormous tariffs on British cheese:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68107263
Since the beginning of the year, UK cheese exporters have seen a 245% tariff placed on British cheese going to Canada, impacting prices.
Ooh, I didn’t know that someone had developed a mechanism to move issues and PRs.
I remember commenting on the fact that while it’s easy to move the source repo itself from location to location, as git makes that easy and self-contained, issues and PRs didn’t enjoy that.