I fell sick Monday afternoon so I’ve been resting mostly, but I also spent some time trying out sr.ht and eventually used it to build and deploy a simple static site blog with hugo. I have been wanting to blog a bit for a while now, not being able to do productive things and having to stay in bed was the perfect excuse.
$work: it’s a rather busy week with lots of various things. We just received word a potential new hire has been offered a contract so that’s some good news. In the meantime it’s just taking out small fires left and right, sadly.
!$work: I’m going to create a dating profile this week, and I promised myself to not get disappointed when absolutely nothing comes out of it. I’m actually not really looking forward to it but my psychologist and friends told me to go for it as I’m feeling ready but not confident I’m going to have matches.
I’m looking for a new place to live as divorce plans are now very concrete and I will be leaving the house at the end of January. So besides coping with the divorce, finding a new place to live is becoming very urgent.
I’m wondering where the gain is. Surely a move like this was bound to be a bad idea and scare people away. So after a takeover, the new operator started scaring people away almost immediately. This will end with everyone going away, and then what? What’s the use of operating an irc network that’s empty?
I’ve been wondering about this too. I would honestly have expected Freenode staff to lay low for a while, let the dust settle, present more of their bullshit about how it’s actually the fault of the old Freenode staff who were bad, and let their sheer size carry them through it. They would be left with a network that’s smaller than the old Freenode, but with quite a lot of concurrent users. I bet some of the projects who decided to leave would’ve come back, seeing as a lot of their community was left in the Freenode channel. Other projects would’ve decided to have a split community, with both the Libera and the Freenode channels as their “official” channels. A lot of projects was in a “wait and see” mode where they would basically decide to stick with Freenode at least for a while and see how it turned out; if nothing happened for a while, those would’ve stayed as well.
In the end, Lee would’ve ended up in charge of one of the biggest IRC networks. He could then have started monetizing the users, or felt good about being the king of IRC or whatever he’s LARPing as. But instead he decided to burn it all down. Why? Is he just a sad narcissist who went mad from the idea that people weren’t worshiping him? Or is it some scheme to make money? Is there a way to “bet against” the continued existence of Freenode and make money off of everyone who thought it wouldn’t go down in flames? Or does he actually have no idea how IRC works and genuinely thought that forcibly taking control over channels and preventing people from mentioning Libera in their topic was the best way to keep projects at Freenode?
It’s fascinating, and it’s why I’m obsessively following this drama for pure entertainment purposes.
I think Lee is not as practiced a businessman as he’s making himself out to be. Such a person would dispassionately have surveyed the situation, and realized that time and inertia was on their side. The mass of users would be on Freenode, and they could advocate, passively or otherwise, for staying where they were. Libera could presumably flare up, sputter, and then fade away.
Instead Lee reacted as an IRC op. He saw the loss of channels and users as a personal affront and as an immediate threat, and moved to stop it. (I honestly believe that the mass-takeover of 700+ channels was a mistake - but it’s a mistake that’s easy to make under stress). Coupled with an obvious internalization of the current culture war outlook, he could easily convince himself that the other side was the enemy, employing all sorts of dirty tricks, and feel that his reaction was justified.
Like I mentioned, the small channel I was part of was not interested in moving, even if I knew most of the members were personally against the kind of network Lee was creating, and the ops he was inviting. But having our access forcibly removed sure made the decision easier for everyone.
Considering the reported attempts to bribe existing staff with the ability to k-line their “enemies”, I think Lee just has very poor understanding of people who are unlike himself, nor any ability to read them or empathise with them. If you read the chat logs, it’s evident that he thought they would all jump at the chance – in fact exactly zero of them did, as evident by the unanimity of the staff’s mass resignation.
a big migration that’s almost touching all our infra, won’t be finished this week but we’ll start
debugging why ArgoCD won’t update on an OKD install, it does on a test cluster I’ve spun up so no clue
Home:
Taking some more walks this week, I’ve been far too lazy since last month and need to step up my game
I did a clean install of my laptop a couple of weeks ago but haven’t done anything else with it. I’m thinking of doing another install with NixOS and give it a go again
Start working on a website, I’m doing some backend development for a couple of friends that do frontend stuff. I did the same a couple of years ago and they liked it and have the opportunity to do it again so why not.
I want to do a small me-project, but I’m really not sure what. Probably won’t happen, but it’s been on my mind for a couple of weeks now.
My main home machine is still Windows, but I’ve recently bought a laptop for Linux that I’m using for somewhat “distraction free” development work (i.e. purposefully avoiding youtube, email, etc. on it). I installed NixOS on that one, and I’m quite happy with that for a secondary machine. Notably I dove into Nix Flakes recently, and I’m loving them - they reinvigorated my interest in Nix, they seem to fix more than one of the main issues I personally had with Nix before. Also they seem surprisingly stable for an “experimental” feature for me; the single only issue I had with them as of yet was home-manager being incompatible with flakes; but all it took was temporarily switching nixUnstable back to nix in my /etc/nixos/configuration.nix, and home-manager switch worked just fine. I read about some people using Flakes for their NixOS config but I haven’t explored that at all yet. That said, working with Nix and esp. NixOS is still “the hacker’s way”, i.e. a lot of yak shaving, and far from even Ubuntu-style user-friendliness and ease of use, not to mention Windows. But esp. home-manager is now a no-brainer for me on any Linux or Mac machine.
I’m a couple of pages into “Monitoring with prometheus” from James Turnbull for a second time now. I’ve read it before but it was quite some time ago and I feel I need a refresher as I completely forgot some things since I wasn’t using the knowledge I picked up last time. I remember liking the book, though, and found it was written in a clear and easy to understand way.
The second book I was going to start reading is “The Mist” from Stephen King. I came across it and remember reading it at least 15 years ago now. This one is more of an emotional thing to read again, as I still remember what I was doing at the time and I wasn’t feeling too great. I always like how King is able to vividly project the atmosphere of the subjects in my mind, and no idea why but this one stuck me the most.
I went for yet another option and decided to colo my older intel i3 nuc with 16gb of memory and 128gb + 1tb of storage. I pay 70euro per 6months and get 2 ipv4 addresses and the standard /64 for ipv6. Transfer volume included is so high I don’t think I even managed to get to 5%.
This was to be honest the cheapest solution I could find, and I can always request my hardware back, I think the fee for that is 20euro. I can also pay a one time fee of 25euro to get an access card to go visit my nuc myself and swap hardware/reboot it. The cost of the server is highly tied to the amount electricity my hardware is using, so I could lower the cost/gain more by upgrading the hardware to something more powerful that’s using the same amount of energy.
You’d be surprised to see how many companies let you colo small devices like nuc’s or even a raspberry pi for very low cost. It’s a route not many people take, but to be honest it works great for me and might be worth to have a look.
I was talking to colleagues about 1.5year ago and complained about the lack of good quality vps providers for a low price. One of them said something like “it’s a shame you can’t put your nuc in a datacenter” and I remembered some people exactly do that. I looked for colo providers; mailed 2 that offered NAS hosting because it matched most, and both replied they had no issue with putting a nuc in and gave me a price.
I could drop the nuc off personally, or send it to them via registered & insured mail. I choose the latter, and 2 days later it was installed and up and running. Went extremely well, and I had a 3minute downtime during the 1.5 years due to a planned maintenance when they upgraded the DDoS protection service.
I think transfer volume included is something like 5tb a month. Like I said that’s more than enough for me.
I just did a search for colo providers and picked a couple that also offered NAS hosting. Since my nuc and a synology NAS are about the same volume (physically) I mailed them and both said it’s no problem and gave me the price. I picked the more expensive one actually, because they offered extra’s as the option to go and look at my hardware myself.
I cross-transfer between my home nuc and my colo nuc via syncthing. It’s probably not the best or most glorious solution, but it works like a charm for me. I don’t generate a lot of data, to be honest, so I wasn’t looking for an advanced solution.
I’m on call this weekend, so there is not much I can do outside the house.
I’ve been playing with k3s and ArgoCD for a couple of days now. I’m used to working with OpenShift and not plain kubernetes, and I must admit the Red Hat people did add some nice things I’m missing with plain kubernetes. I don’t have an immediate plan for my setup, I think I’ll write some small php8 app and deploy it on there just to see how it works.
I’m also thinking I want to learn some Romanian next year, making it my new years resolution. This year was not drinking alcohol (except on my birthday) and I passed that one so far. Last year was about reading a book a month and that was also fine. I guess I have some time left to think about it.
Eating basically half a portion, nothing after dinner and no alcohol for a year: doesn’t seem like much, but I lost >35kg now and feel much better. Also my bloodwork now vs a year ago is like night and day. Still have ~15kg to go before I’m in the ‘normal’ bracket.
Don’t watch the news, read online news maybe twice a week: coupled with the weight loss I feel a lot less stressed out and am in a far better mood in general. I had some anxiety issues but they seem to have faded since.
I recently started the journey of eating smaller portions and only eating when I’m hungry. Limiting soda/caloric drinks to once a week, and otherwise sparkling water or water.
One thing I’ve found helpful is drinking a full glass of water before eating and then one afterwards. Slowing down and enjoying food as well seems to help. It’s amazing how “less” hungry I feel.
Last weekend of my holidays, I’m not doing much programming or computer stuff in general. I’m going to do some Pokémon go raids, we have a (little) raid group in my town and they’re all nice people that understand and follow the social distancing guidelines so that’s perfect.
I’m going to start thinking about the next steps for my weight loss. I lost 25kg since oktober 2019, still have 25 more to go, but progress has been slower lately (as expected).
The weather has cleared up a bit and I started taking long walks again (between 10k and 15k). I’m probably going to do a longer one today after lunch.
I had an idea for integrating monitoring and infrastructure as code a bit more, I might work on that but I’m not 100% sure yet. Holidays are practically knocking on the front door, and I seem to have used up most of my productive-computer time so there’s a good chance I’ll just make some notes and start working on it later.
My new keyboard finally arrived so I’ve got some configuring/learning to do!
My dwm experiment was quite successful in a way, I had some fun but will be going back to herbstluftwm. I’ll probably do a clean install too.
$work:
I’m going to deploy a Prometheus setup monitoring a number of machines (> 500, < 1k for now). I’m thinking about deploying Prometheus in the cloud, but it will be an interesting journey network wise as the servers are all located in small clusters of a couple of nodes in different vlans. I’ll use thanos to make the setup more robust.
A colleague wrote a big chunk of terraform code to deploy an OKD cluster and I’ll be testing it this week by setting up an environment using only his code and documentation. He’s consistently able to deploy one, but we like to test stuff with a blind test.
Doing a failover with hot standby redundancy solution for a distributed industrial system. Things that need redundancy are the control system (managing hundreds of networked nodes) and PTP grandmaster clock.
So far thinking along these lines:
Control system C1 is designated primary, C2 secondary, with a heartbeat connection between
When C2 misses C1, it offers takeover to the networked nodes it can reach
Each node affirms takeover to C2 if it also finds C1 unreachable
C2 tallies the replies and over a certain threshold of total amount of nodes commits to takeover
Upon C1 re-availability, it cedes control
The clocks I hope could just be configured with different priority weights.
Not sure if your setup allows it, but why not make it active/active? It would be far easier to scale up in the future, you’re sure the failover node will always work as it’s doing part of the job all the time and dr tests become more boring as it’s just a matter of shutting down one node.
Please note I have no experience whatsoever with industrial systems, only (very high-available) appservers and webservers. Just think the problem you’re having is probably more interesting then a webserver.
It’s a fire detection and evacuation assistance system, where all nodes have to work in sync (hence the clock) and with coordinated actuation. So it’s hard to do with more than one authority at any time.
I’m going to write some tools in order to be able to sync the current environment back to ‘something’. Something can be a cmdb or yaml files in this case. This is the first step in working the other way around, so this has a lot of potential!
Meetings and helping colleagues. Lately it’s getting harder and harder to get a decent amount of work done. People seem to think not being able to see one-another face to face must be ‘fixed’ by holding meetings or sending IM’s every 10minutes. It’s pretty tiresome to be honest.
Personal:
I did some work on trying dwm, but it’s more work than I anticipated. Remembering the shortcuts is also kind of hard after using other ones for so long, so I’m going to invest some more time in it
Hopefully do some more walks, if the weather allows it. There are a lot of thunderstorms predicted, but I hope not all of them will happen.
Waiting for my new keyboard to arrive, it should be here this week so probably spending some time working with a 60% for the first time ever.
I compared a lot of models, including the ones suggested and made a spreadsheet of my hard requirements, nice to have’s and don’t want. I compared 6 keyboards and tried to find the best price for them and in the end the RK61 was actually the only one checking most boxes and at a reasonable price. And it’s shipped from inside the EU so I won’t have to pay extra tax, once I took that into account prices went up really hard for the others…
Wow, I really like the position of the arrow keys on that keyboard. I have a Poker 3, and the arrow key locations are.. awkward at best. I don’t use them often (even before this keyboard), but it’s one of the only things I dislike about this keyboard.
RK61 is nice, probably the best when it comes to price/quality. Only think I dislike is that the arrows mode is on by default and hitting “/” triggers up arrow.
Yeah, I’m probably going to rebind some other combination to the arrow keys with xkb or whatever today’s tool for rebinding is. Since I’m using Linux and there is always a tmux session open I’ll need the /.
I’m on-call till Monday morning and if it’s quiet I’m going to try out dwm, just for fun. I’m actually a very happy herbstluftwm user, but I often see dwm receiving praise so I’m going to try it out.
I was also looking at a cheap, entry level mechanical keyboard with Bluetooth. I found some clones on amazon and probably I’m going to do some window shopping before ordering one.
I’m also planning to build a telegram bot in golang, just for fun. I currently have some hack-y bash script and some php code that’s sending me alerts and I was thinking of rewriting it for some time now
You should check out the keyboards from https://keychron.com/ as well, I recently ordered a couple from there. My first venture into mechanical keyboards, but I’m loving them so far.
I tried it for a couple of weeks and actually went to herbstluftwm because I wasn’t too fond of i3. Not sure why, but it never clicked. The only thing I did like is tabbed support but I kinda got over it not being there in herbstluftwm.
I just want to have a look at dwm to have the experience. Plus I like trying out new things, so…
Personally I’ve tried i3 (and sway) and have since gone back to dwm. I much prefer how dwm does tags on different monitors: you have tags 1-9 on each monitor, rather than a shared namespace of tags across all monitors like you do in i3. And all the extra functionality of i3 (tabs etc.) is wasted on me, I always just want full screen or a 50:50 vertical split.
Probably an odd way, but I simply don’t fill in my timesheets on friday evening, I do it on Monday morning.
Monday morning I start inputting them in the application we are required to use, one line at a time. When I’m at Friday, I did the whole week and am pretty much where I left off and know where to continue. Do note we’re required to use quite a lot of different work codes and a description for every entry is required, this helps the memory. I can’t simply slap 8 hours on a Monday and consider it done…
I’m a bit injured, I did too much heavy lifting, bending over and picking things up the last couple of weeks. I’m going to need some physical therapy to help me recover so unfortunately garden work is out. Luckily the company I work for bought a bunch of Pluralsight subscriptions and I got one. I’m 1.5 hour into the Golang course, I guess I’ll do some more of that.
I’m also looking at a new screen again, budget is ~500euro max and I’d like a ‘regular’ 4K or a widescreen that’s more than 2x1080p. Unfortunately there are still quite some options so picking one takes time. I hope to have narrowed the list a bit after this weekend.
I love blogposts like this about NixOS, it’s always an incentive to pick it up again. I also didn’t know Nix could create lxc containers. I don’t really see an explanation on how this works, unfortunately. I’d like it if I could run a lxc container on my existing ubuntu install. Now whenever I want to experiment with it, I use a Virtualbox machine but it’s just not very handy. If I could create lxc containers and provision them, that would make things a lot easier.
I feel that I’m finger-pointing, but it seems that the submitter of the first one has actually mostly posted those over the last few days: https://lobste.rs/newest/mraza007
imho, getting rid of (public?) karma would go a long way to avoid these “ask” posts. I usually hide these threads anyway because, they tend to be of very little interest (low signal/noise), but ymmv.
I have a user style to hide karma, which I think is beneficial to me, but to have it hidden globally for everyone I agree would be a good step. It seems that cargo-culting still takes place here, albeit to a lesser extent, even with downvote justifications.
Oh, I use stylus (I don’t use my mobile for the web). I’m not sure what else is available, but if you really want to overengineer it might Greasemonkey be available?
Yeah, I’ve had an eye on @mraza007, submitting “ask” stories nearly exclusively is unusual. But they’ve all been topical and well-received, so I haven’t seen a reason to step in, besides removing a dupe for blog themes.
I’m curious to see where this discussion goes. It’s already gotten a lot more upvotes than I expected. If folks want to see a rule, we can create one, but preferably one that’s not mods acting on gut feelings that a post is low-effort.
Sorry man I guess i have been submitting unusual ask stories for more than once but i got to learn a lot from them. I was surprised to see how so many things I didn’t knew. I can limit my self from posting ask stories
Thanks for responding. We’re glad to have you here, don’t worry! It’s a good thing when people help each other learn. I also don’t personally think it’s bad to have questions that start people talking to each other. Icebreakers are important for community-building.
It’s clear though that people do have feelings about it when the questions are stuff that doesn’t need much thought to answer. As others are saying, it’s not really obvious where the blame lies for that, and it’s clear that your stuff is in good faith. I don’t think you necessarily have to stop entirely, just try to be mindful about whether it makes an interesting thread for others to read through. Also, if your angle is more about wanting to learn from what others do, consider making that explicit.
Thank you for this. I realized i was posting too often honestly i have discovered a lot from these threads. Next time I will be try to post once every week not too often so people don’t consider it as a spam. Honestly this community has taught me a lot and i really appreciate and on the other hand I’m really happy due to these posts people were able to talk to each other or maybe learn/discover something new from this.
I really appreciate your reply !!
I hope the implication from your ‘It’s already gotten a lot more upvotes than I expected.’ comment isn’t that we should just downvote if we don’t agree.
To be honest I think this latest post from him is pushing it too, but I don’t believe in silence by downvote if he’s doing nothing against the rules. I’m a big fan of most ‘ask’ topics; when I’m not the hide button is in reach.
No, I was saying it’s gotten significantly more attention, and positive attention than I guessed. There is no story downvoting, and people flagging stories they want to punish just clogs up the mod dashboard.
I don’t think it is. I’ll note that many of those threads have more upvotes than any comment here complaining about them at this point.
On top of it, I’ve gotten more useful information… like software to try out… out of a few OP is complaining about than anything this thread has. I’m not saying that to cut down any comment in this thread. I’m just illustrating we have a thread whose contents don’t help people out (that I’m aware) asking to remove many that did or block future threads that do. Something about that seems wrong.
I fell sick Monday afternoon so I’ve been resting mostly, but I also spent some time trying out sr.ht and eventually used it to build and deploy a simple static site blog with hugo. I have been wanting to blog a bit for a while now, not being able to do productive things and having to stay in bed was the perfect excuse.
$work: it’s a rather busy week with lots of various things. We just received word a potential new hire has been offered a contract so that’s some good news. In the meantime it’s just taking out small fires left and right, sadly.
!$work: I’m going to create a dating profile this week, and I promised myself to not get disappointed when absolutely nothing comes out of it. I’m actually not really looking forward to it but my psychologist and friends told me to go for it as I’m feeling ready but not confident I’m going to have matches.
There’s always someone on the other side who thinks the same :)
I’m looking for a new place to live as divorce plans are now very concrete and I will be leaving the house at the end of January. So besides coping with the divorce, finding a new place to live is becoming very urgent.
I’m wondering where the gain is. Surely a move like this was bound to be a bad idea and scare people away. So after a takeover, the new operator started scaring people away almost immediately. This will end with everyone going away, and then what? What’s the use of operating an irc network that’s empty?
I’ve been wondering about this too. I would honestly have expected Freenode staff to lay low for a while, let the dust settle, present more of their bullshit about how it’s actually the fault of the old Freenode staff who were bad, and let their sheer size carry them through it. They would be left with a network that’s smaller than the old Freenode, but with quite a lot of concurrent users. I bet some of the projects who decided to leave would’ve come back, seeing as a lot of their community was left in the Freenode channel. Other projects would’ve decided to have a split community, with both the Libera and the Freenode channels as their “official” channels. A lot of projects was in a “wait and see” mode where they would basically decide to stick with Freenode at least for a while and see how it turned out; if nothing happened for a while, those would’ve stayed as well.
In the end, Lee would’ve ended up in charge of one of the biggest IRC networks. He could then have started monetizing the users, or felt good about being the king of IRC or whatever he’s LARPing as. But instead he decided to burn it all down. Why? Is he just a sad narcissist who went mad from the idea that people weren’t worshiping him? Or is it some scheme to make money? Is there a way to “bet against” the continued existence of Freenode and make money off of everyone who thought it wouldn’t go down in flames? Or does he actually have no idea how IRC works and genuinely thought that forcibly taking control over channels and preventing people from mentioning Libera in their topic was the best way to keep projects at Freenode?
It’s fascinating, and it’s why I’m obsessively following this drama for pure entertainment purposes.
I think Lee is not as practiced a businessman as he’s making himself out to be. Such a person would dispassionately have surveyed the situation, and realized that time and inertia was on their side. The mass of users would be on Freenode, and they could advocate, passively or otherwise, for staying where they were. Libera could presumably flare up, sputter, and then fade away.
Instead Lee reacted as an IRC op. He saw the loss of channels and users as a personal affront and as an immediate threat, and moved to stop it. (I honestly believe that the mass-takeover of 700+ channels was a mistake - but it’s a mistake that’s easy to make under stress). Coupled with an obvious internalization of the current culture war outlook, he could easily convince himself that the other side was the enemy, employing all sorts of dirty tricks, and feel that his reaction was justified.
Like I mentioned, the small channel I was part of was not interested in moving, even if I knew most of the members were personally against the kind of network Lee was creating, and the ops he was inviting. But having our access forcibly removed sure made the decision easier for everyone.
Considering the reported attempts to bribe existing staff with the ability to k-line their “enemies”, I think Lee just has very poor understanding of people who are unlike himself, nor any ability to read them or empathise with them. If you read the chat logs, it’s evident that he thought they would all jump at the chance – in fact exactly zero of them did, as evident by the unanimity of the staff’s mass resignation.
$work:
Home:
My main home machine is still Windows, but I’ve recently bought a laptop for Linux that I’m using for somewhat “distraction free” development work (i.e. purposefully avoiding youtube, email, etc. on it). I installed NixOS on that one, and I’m quite happy with that for a secondary machine. Notably I dove into Nix Flakes recently, and I’m loving them - they reinvigorated my interest in Nix, they seem to fix more than one of the main issues I personally had with Nix before. Also they seem surprisingly stable for an “experimental” feature for me; the single only issue I had with them as of yet was home-manager being incompatible with flakes; but all it took was temporarily switching
nixUnstableback tonixin my/etc/nixos/configuration.nix, andhome-manager switchworked just fine. I read about some people using Flakes for their NixOS config but I haven’t explored that at all yet. That said, working with Nix and esp. NixOS is still “the hacker’s way”, i.e. a lot of yak shaving, and far from even Ubuntu-style user-friendliness and ease of use, not to mention Windows. But esp.home-manageris now a no-brainer for me on any Linux or Mac machine.I’m a couple of pages into “Monitoring with prometheus” from James Turnbull for a second time now. I’ve read it before but it was quite some time ago and I feel I need a refresher as I completely forgot some things since I wasn’t using the knowledge I picked up last time. I remember liking the book, though, and found it was written in a clear and easy to understand way.
The second book I was going to start reading is “The Mist” from Stephen King. I came across it and remember reading it at least 15 years ago now. This one is more of an emotional thing to read again, as I still remember what I was doing at the time and I wasn’t feeling too great. I always like how King is able to vividly project the atmosphere of the subjects in my mind, and no idea why but this one stuck me the most.
I went for yet another option and decided to colo my older intel i3 nuc with 16gb of memory and 128gb + 1tb of storage. I pay 70euro per 6months and get 2 ipv4 addresses and the standard /64 for ipv6. Transfer volume included is so high I don’t think I even managed to get to 5%.
This was to be honest the cheapest solution I could find, and I can always request my hardware back, I think the fee for that is 20euro. I can also pay a one time fee of 25euro to get an access card to go visit my nuc myself and swap hardware/reboot it. The cost of the server is highly tied to the amount electricity my hardware is using, so I could lower the cost/gain more by upgrading the hardware to something more powerful that’s using the same amount of energy.
You’d be surprised to see how many companies let you colo small devices like nuc’s or even a raspberry pi for very low cost. It’s a route not many people take, but to be honest it works great for me and might be worth to have a look.
How did you find out about the collocation?
I was talking to colleagues about 1.5year ago and complained about the lack of good quality vps providers for a low price. One of them said something like “it’s a shame you can’t put your nuc in a datacenter” and I remembered some people exactly do that. I looked for colo providers; mailed 2 that offered NAS hosting because it matched most, and both replied they had no issue with putting a nuc in and gave me a price.
I could drop the nuc off personally, or send it to them via registered & insured mail. I choose the latter, and 2 days later it was installed and up and running. Went extremely well, and I had a 3minute downtime during the 1.5 years due to a planned maintenance when they upgraded the DDoS protection service.
What’s the volume and where do you find them?
I think transfer volume included is something like 5tb a month. Like I said that’s more than enough for me.
I just did a search for colo providers and picked a couple that also offered NAS hosting. Since my nuc and a synology NAS are about the same volume (physically) I mailed them and both said it’s no problem and gave me the price. I picked the more expensive one actually, because they offered extra’s as the option to go and look at my hardware myself.
How do you handle data backups?
I cross-transfer between my home nuc and my colo nuc via syncthing. It’s probably not the best or most glorious solution, but it works like a charm for me. I don’t generate a lot of data, to be honest, so I wasn’t looking for an advanced solution.
Probably not the things people expect, but:
This is extremely important. I am learning to do this too.
I’m on call this weekend, so there is not much I can do outside the house.
I’ve been playing with k3s and ArgoCD for a couple of days now. I’m used to working with OpenShift and not plain kubernetes, and I must admit the Red Hat people did add some nice things I’m missing with plain kubernetes. I don’t have an immediate plan for my setup, I think I’ll write some small php8 app and deploy it on there just to see how it works.
I’m also thinking I want to learn some Romanian next year, making it my new years resolution. This year was not drinking alcohol (except on my birthday) and I passed that one so far. Last year was about reading a book a month and that was also fine. I guess I have some time left to think about it.
Eating basically half a portion, nothing after dinner and no alcohol for a year: doesn’t seem like much, but I lost >35kg now and feel much better. Also my bloodwork now vs a year ago is like night and day. Still have ~15kg to go before I’m in the ‘normal’ bracket.
Don’t watch the news, read online news maybe twice a week: coupled with the weight loss I feel a lot less stressed out and am in a far better mood in general. I had some anxiety issues but they seem to have faded since.
I recently started the journey of eating smaller portions and only eating when I’m hungry. Limiting soda/caloric drinks to once a week, and otherwise sparkling water or water.
One thing I’ve found helpful is drinking a full glass of water before eating and then one afterwards. Slowing down and enjoying food as well seems to help. It’s amazing how “less” hungry I feel.
Last weekend of my holidays, I’m not doing much programming or computer stuff in general. I’m going to do some Pokémon go raids, we have a (little) raid group in my town and they’re all nice people that understand and follow the social distancing guidelines so that’s perfect.
I’m going to start thinking about the next steps for my weight loss. I lost 25kg since oktober 2019, still have 25 more to go, but progress has been slower lately (as expected).
The weather has cleared up a bit and I started taking long walks again (between 10k and 15k). I’m probably going to do a longer one today after lunch.
I had an idea for integrating monitoring and infrastructure as code a bit more, I might work on that but I’m not 100% sure yet. Holidays are practically knocking on the front door, and I seem to have used up most of my productive-computer time so there’s a good chance I’ll just make some notes and start working on it later.
$home:
$work:
Doing a failover with hot standby redundancy solution for a distributed industrial system. Things that need redundancy are the control system (managing hundreds of networked nodes) and PTP grandmaster clock.
So far thinking along these lines:
The clocks I hope could just be configured with different priority weights.
Not sure if your setup allows it, but why not make it active/active? It would be far easier to scale up in the future, you’re sure the failover node will always work as it’s doing part of the job all the time and dr tests become more boring as it’s just a matter of shutting down one node.
Please note I have no experience whatsoever with industrial systems, only (very high-available) appservers and webservers. Just think the problem you’re having is probably more interesting then a webserver.
It’s a fire detection and evacuation assistance system, where all nodes have to work in sync (hence the clock) and with coordinated actuation. So it’s hard to do with more than one authority at any time.
$work:
Personal:
Which keyboard did you get?
I compared a lot of models, including the ones suggested and made a spreadsheet of my hard requirements, nice to have’s and don’t want. I compared 6 keyboards and tried to find the best price for them and in the end the RK61 was actually the only one checking most boxes and at a reasonable price. And it’s shipped from inside the EU so I won’t have to pay extra tax, once I took that into account prices went up really hard for the others…
Wow, I really like the position of the arrow keys on that keyboard. I have a Poker 3, and the arrow key locations are.. awkward at best. I don’t use them often (even before this keyboard), but it’s one of the only things I dislike about this keyboard.
RK61 is nice, probably the best when it comes to price/quality. Only think I dislike is that the arrows mode is on by default and hitting “/” triggers up arrow.
Yeah, I’m probably going to rebind some other combination to the arrow keys with xkb or whatever today’s tool for rebinding is. Since I’m using Linux and there is always a tmux session open I’ll need the /.
This is probably the most altered part of my dwm config. I even swap mod1 and mod4 in my config to stick with my previous muscle memory.
I’m on-call till Monday morning and if it’s quiet I’m going to try out dwm, just for fun. I’m actually a very happy herbstluftwm user, but I often see dwm receiving praise so I’m going to try it out.
I was also looking at a cheap, entry level mechanical keyboard with Bluetooth. I found some clones on amazon and probably I’m going to do some window shopping before ordering one.
I’m also planning to build a telegram bot in golang, just for fun. I currently have some hack-y bash script and some php code that’s sending me alerts and I was thinking of rewriting it for some time now
You should check out the keyboards from https://keychron.com/ as well, I recently ordered a couple from there. My first venture into mechanical keyboards, but I’m loving them so far.
You may really like i3. It’s like dwm on steroids.
I tried it for a couple of weeks and actually went to herbstluftwm because I wasn’t too fond of i3. Not sure why, but it never clicked. The only thing I did like is tabbed support but I kinda got over it not being there in herbstluftwm.
I just want to have a look at dwm to have the experience. Plus I like trying out new things, so…
Personally I’ve tried i3 (and sway) and have since gone back to dwm. I much prefer how dwm does tags on different monitors: you have tags 1-9 on each monitor, rather than a shared namespace of tags across all monitors like you do in i3. And all the extra functionality of i3 (tabs etc.) is wasted on me, I always just want full screen or a 50:50 vertical split.
Probably an odd way, but I simply don’t fill in my timesheets on friday evening, I do it on Monday morning.
Monday morning I start inputting them in the application we are required to use, one line at a time. When I’m at Friday, I did the whole week and am pretty much where I left off and know where to continue. Do note we’re required to use quite a lot of different work codes and a description for every entry is required, this helps the memory. I can’t simply slap 8 hours on a Monday and consider it done…
I’m a bit injured, I did too much heavy lifting, bending over and picking things up the last couple of weeks. I’m going to need some physical therapy to help me recover so unfortunately garden work is out. Luckily the company I work for bought a bunch of Pluralsight subscriptions and I got one. I’m 1.5 hour into the Golang course, I guess I’ll do some more of that.
I’m also looking at a new screen again, budget is ~500euro max and I’d like a ‘regular’ 4K or a widescreen that’s more than 2x1080p. Unfortunately there are still quite some options so picking one takes time. I hope to have narrowed the list a bit after this weekend.
You may have seen it, but there was this thread not too long ago about 4K screens in particular.
https://lobste.rs/s/gtmla9/4k_display_for_remote_work_from_home
Oh, wow, I missed that one. Thanks for giving me a heads up!
I love blogposts like this about NixOS, it’s always an incentive to pick it up again. I also didn’t know Nix could create lxc containers. I don’t really see an explanation on how this works, unfortunately. I’d like it if I could run a lxc container on my existing ubuntu install. Now whenever I want to experiment with it, I use a Virtualbox machine but it’s just not very handy. If I could create lxc containers and provision them, that would make things a lot easier.
Maybe I’ll give it another go next weekend…
Take a look at https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators, it’s how I make simple isos and other virtual machine images.
Thanks, that’s very helpful. It’s definitely on the list now!
I feel that I’m finger-pointing, but it seems that the submitter of the first one has actually mostly posted those over the last few days: https://lobste.rs/newest/mraza007
imho, getting rid of (public?) karma would go a long way to avoid these “ask” posts. I usually hide these threads anyway because, they tend to be of very little interest (low signal/noise), but ymmv.
I have a user style to hide karma, which I think is beneficial to me, but to have it hidden globally for everyone I agree would be a good step. It seems that cargo-culting still takes place here, albeit to a lesser extent, even with downvote justifications.
Could you share it?
I’m not using userstyles but I could start to make lobste.rs better for myself :)
Sure, although it’s about as simple as you’d imagine:
It works fine for me without
!importantbut if you get into user styles it’s worth remembering that a lot of them don’t. Enjoy :)What do you use for userstyles?
I am on Firefox mobile and stylus isn’t available here.
Oh, I use stylus (I don’t use my mobile for the web). I’m not sure what else is available, but if you really want to overengineer it might Greasemonkey be available?
That’s pretty damning. @pushcx or @alynpost, see that?
Yeah, I’ve had an eye on @mraza007, submitting “ask” stories nearly exclusively is unusual. But they’ve all been topical and well-received, so I haven’t seen a reason to step in, besides removing a dupe for blog themes.
I’m curious to see where this discussion goes. It’s already gotten a lot more upvotes than I expected. If folks want to see a rule, we can create one, but preferably one that’s not mods acting on gut feelings that a post is low-effort.
Sorry man I guess i have been submitting unusual ask stories for more than once but i got to learn a lot from them. I was surprised to see how so many things I didn’t knew. I can limit my self from posting ask stories
Thanks for responding. We’re glad to have you here, don’t worry! It’s a good thing when people help each other learn. I also don’t personally think it’s bad to have questions that start people talking to each other. Icebreakers are important for community-building.
It’s clear though that people do have feelings about it when the questions are stuff that doesn’t need much thought to answer. As others are saying, it’s not really obvious where the blame lies for that, and it’s clear that your stuff is in good faith. I don’t think you necessarily have to stop entirely, just try to be mindful about whether it makes an interesting thread for others to read through. Also, if your angle is more about wanting to learn from what others do, consider making that explicit.
Thank you for this. I realized i was posting too often honestly i have discovered a lot from these threads. Next time I will be try to post once every week not too often so people don’t consider it as a spam. Honestly this community has taught me a lot and i really appreciate and on the other hand I’m really happy due to these posts people were able to talk to each other or maybe learn/discover something new from this. I really appreciate your reply !!
I hope the implication from your ‘It’s already gotten a lot more upvotes than I expected.’ comment isn’t that we should just downvote if we don’t agree.
To be honest I think this latest post from him is pushing it too, but I don’t believe in silence by downvote if he’s doing nothing against the rules. I’m a big fan of most ‘ask’ topics; when I’m not the hide button is in reach.
No, I was saying it’s gotten significantly more attention, and positive attention than I guessed. There is no story downvoting, and people flagging stories they want to punish just clogs up the mod dashboard.
I don’t think it is. I’ll note that many of those threads have more upvotes than any comment here complaining about them at this point.
On top of it, I’ve gotten more useful information… like software to try out… out of a few OP is complaining about than anything this thread has. I’m not saying that to cut down any comment in this thread. I’m just illustrating we have a thread whose contents don’t help people out (that I’m aware) asking to remove many that did or block future threads that do. Something about that seems wrong.
That’s pretty weird.