khorak

khorak, 7 days ago

Cheap panels are tanking European competitors, but it’s probably too late to intervene at this point. Can’t compete with work camps and cheap slave labor.

khorak, 2 months ago

One word of advice. Document the steps you do to deploy things. If your hardware fails or you make a simple mistake, it will cost you weeks of work to recover. This is a bit extreme, but I take my time when setting things up and automate as good as possible using ansible. You don’t have to do this, but the ability to just scrap things and redeploy gives great peace of mind.

And right now you are reluctant to do this because it’s gonna cost you too much time. This should not be the case. I mean, just imagine things going wrong in a year or two and you can’t remember most things you know now. Document your setup and write a few scripts. It’s a good start.

khorak, 2 months ago

I know what you mean. Most people mean well, some are a bit too aggressive, but probably also mean well. I honestly sometimes roll my eyes when I start reading about tailscale, cloudflare tunnels etc. The main thing is not to expose anything you don’t absolutely need to expose.

For access from the outside the most you should need is a random high port forwarded for ssh into a dedicated host (can be a VM / container if you don’t have a spare RaspberryPi). And Wireguard on a host which updates the server package regularly. So probably not on your router, unless the vendor is on top of things.

Regarding ansible and documenting, I totally get your point. Ten years ago I was an absolute Linux noob and my flatmate had to set up an IRC bouncer on my RPi. It ran like that for a few years and I dared not touch anything. Then the SD card died and took down the bouncer, dynDNS and a few other things running on it.

It takes me a lot of time to write and test my ansible playbooks and custom roles, but every now and then I have to move services between hosts. And this is an absolute life saver. Whenever I’m really low on time and need to get something up and running, I write down things in a readme in my infra repository and occasionally I would go through my backlog when I have nothing better to do.

khorak, 2 months ago

And remember, friends don’t let friends use latest. Pin the versions in your manifests and version control everything.

khorak, 2 months ago

Same. I buy all my domains there. And in case someone needs a proper API and support for the dns challenge, host your DNS at DeSEC.

khorak, 2 months ago

Same, I have a bunch of “inbox” folders and drop files into my server or desktop from my phone with 3 clicks.

khorak, 2 months ago

I’m using FF tab groups and Sideberry, other than the occasional link getting opened in the wrong group I haven’t had issues. I really need to test Chrome and it’s profiles to see what the fuss is all about :D

khorak, 2 months ago

LDAC is lossy.

khorak, 2 months ago

Do you happen to have some resources or links re sshfs? Once I found an app which supports mounting over sshfs but it is barely documented and iirc required passwordless ssh keys to work :(

khorak, 2 months ago

I am seeding 70 torrents on a private tracker, most of it some niche stuff. It’s getting downloaded, but I have 0.00 seeded across all 70 torrents. I have no port forwarding. 1 + 1 = you need proton / airvpn.

khorak, 3 months ago

The problem is, the libraries and SDK used to build the app will have had vulnerabilities for sure. Same for the underlying image (unless scratch / distroless). We run extensive vulnerability scanning in our pipelines, and Go libs occasionally pop up. The Go SDK also had multiple security fixes in the last year.

khorak, 3 months ago

Look for 5W idle consumption boards + CPU combos which go down to package C6+ state. HardwareLuxx has a spreadsheet with various builds focusing on low power. Sell half your disks, go mirror or Raidz1. Invest the difference in off-site vps and or backup. Storage on any SBC is a big pain and you will hit the sata connector / IO limits very soon.

The small NUC form factors are also fine, but if your problem is power you can go very low with a good approach and the right parts. And you’ll make up for any new investments within the first year.

khorak, 3 months ago

Oh okay that’s a lot of power. For reference, I just set up an old Haswell PC as a NAS, idling at 25W (can’t get to low Package C states) and usually at 28-30 running light workloads on an SSD pool. My plan was to add a 5 disk cage and at least 3 HDDs, with Raidz2 and 5 disks being the mid term goal. Absolutely unnecessary and a huge waste. I settled on less but larger disks, and in mirror I can get 12-18 TB usable space for under 500€. Less noise and power draw too.

khorak, 3 months ago

For the physical hosts / bare metal I use fluentbit, with Loki as the backend. Grafana for visualization and alerts. This gives me utilization metrics and uptime monitoring. The app containers themselves I do not monitor.

khorak, 3 months ago

I wish this was an option for Europe. Once you slap VAT and shipping, you end up paying more than for new disks. :(

khorak, 3 months ago

How does this work, some loophole or a business customer? You can drop some info in a private message if you don’t f feel like posting in public. Re server part deals, I am not sure if this is always the case, but the current selection of disks is 90% helium (Exos etc) HDDs, a few IronWolfs which are too large (20TB) and basically that’s it. My DIY NAS is unfortunately in the apartment and I’m reluctant to try He disks due to the intensive sound profile.

khorak, 3 months ago

Wifi pretty much excludes k*s and I assume that swarm and Nomad would be impacted by blips in the wireless connectivity. You can try how things work out with a load balancer / reverse proxy on a wired connection, which then checks the downstream services and routes the request to available instances.

Please look into Wifi-specific issues related to the various orchestration platforms before deciding to try one out. Hypervisor is usually a win win, until you try to do failover.

khorak, 4 months ago

If you want to try setting it up in high availability with failover, give me a poke. And until then - go to Teleporter in the settings, and download the backup. You can restore from there.

One thing worth saying is this - you can grab a cheap refurbished ssd (the smaller - the better), check it’s SMART data for any red flags, and attach it to the pi as OS disk. It will be much more reliable than SD, but overkill if you only run pi on the box. Alternatively look into log2ram, it keeps your SD card alive for longer :D but backup first!

khorak, 4 months ago

I wasn’t intending on doing this, instead opting to install Pi-hole, Log2Ram, UFW, and the… other… softwares directly to the OS for simplicity. Why would one set up a Pi-hole et al in a containers instead of directly?

So there are many reasons, and this is something I nowadays almost always do. But keep in mind that some of us have used Docker for our applications at work for over half a decade now. Some of these points might be relevant to you, others might seem or be unimportant.

• The first and most important thing you gain is a declarative way to describe the environment (OS, dependencies, environment variables, configuration).
• Then there is the packaging format. Containers are a way to package an application with its dependencies, and distribute it easily through the docker hub (or other registries). Redeploying is a matter of running a script and specifying the image and the tag (never use latest) of the image. You will never ask yourself again “What did I need to do to install this again? Run some random install.sh script off a github URL?”.
• Networking with docker is a bit hit and miss, but the big thing about it is that you can have whatever software running on any port inside the container, and expose it on another port on the host. Eg two apps run on port :8080 natively, and one of them will fail to start due to the port being taken. You can keep them running on their preferred ports, but expose one on 18080 and another on 19080 instead.
• You keep your host simple and empty of installed software and packages. Less of a problem with apps that come packaged as native executables, but there are languages out there which will require you to install a runtime to be able to start the app. Think .NET, Java but there is also Python out there which requires you to install it on the host and have the versions be compatible (there are virtual environments for that but im going into too much detail already).

Basically I have a very simple host setup with only a few packages installed. Then I would remotely configure and start up my containers, expose ports etc. And I can cleanly define where my configuration is, back up only that particular folder for example and keep the rest of the setup easy to redeploy.

khorak, 4 months ago

I personally stepped away from compose. You mentioned that you want a more declarative setup. Give Ansible a try. It is primarily for config management, but you can easily deploy containerized apps and correlate configs, hosts etc.

I usually write roles for some more specialized setups like my HTTP reverse proxy, the arrs etc. Then I keep everything in my inventory and var files. I’m really happy and I really can tear things down and rebuild quickly. One thing to point out is that the compose module for Ansible is basically unusable. I use the docker container module instead. Works well so far and it keeps my containers running without restarting them unnecessarily.

khorak, 4 months ago

Can you elaborate on “the right kind”, do you mean the NAS grade ssd’s?

khorak, 4 months ago

I have 3 Intel S3700’s, one for the OS and two 400GB ones for a mirror pool (might do a raidz1 as well). But getting anything in a serious capacity (8-12 TB of usable storage) with datacenter SSDs is really expensive. :(

khorak, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

I’m wondering, now that you’ve seen the app, do you have some practical advice on how to measure the difference without having to spend a few hours researching and refreshing on high school physics? It seems that my only option is to run the “Acceleration without g” experiment and work on the csv export.

A probably naive approach would be to filter out values below a certain threshold (a ‘low pass filter’ of sorts to deal with a noisy sensor) and then try to meaningfully sum the acceleration by time period. But just as I wrote this I realized that I can’t simply sum a few values from several rows and call it a day.

The article you linked explained the idea behind the pseudo velocity well, I’m wondering if I can… “sum the area” (assuming interpolated data) under the various measurement points. Without completely nerding out and investing too much time :D My sensor seems to have a rate of 200Hz, so it should be good for measuring vibrations up to 100Hz.

Edit, it’s integrals, right? This is actually exciting, haven’t touched math since university. Also here’s an example of how the acceleration graph looks like when the phone is on the heating / radiator (more or less worst case): Screenshot from phyphox with acceleration sensor data

khorak, 4 months ago

I’ve been a bit busy so I haven’t had the time to figure out what and how much I need to compensate so the sensor data is more useful. One of the sensors seems to be detecting something reminiscent of a sine curve, so this will involve some extra high school math to find a function to cancel it out. Busy dad etc, maybe next week. In the mean time I started putting together the case and ordered the springy subwoofer legs. Here is how a simple plot of the raw acceleration looks like.

It’s obvious which one is the before and after. The second one even includes two trains arriving back to back.

Now I need to figure out a few things:

1. repeatable experiment (hammer? dropping something heavy from the same height?)
2. make the Z-axis reading more useful and compare velocities
3. add some foam/plywood and rubber feet on the disks

the after-graph shows barely any noticeable vibrations