talkingpumpkin

talkingpumpkin, 17 days ago

I last used it a good while ago (like, 10yrs?), so you’ll have to verify how what I am about to say applies to current versions (it probably does).

Jasper is an old-school, enterprisey tool similar to Crystal Reports that attempts to give you a WYSIWYG editor for building your reports.

All in all, I’d say that it might be good if you have a reporting department full of people that only do reports and you don’t want to train as programmers. If the ones doing the reports are gonna be actual programmers, they’ll be much better off generating html/latex/whatever and converting that to pdf.

talkingpumpkin, 21 days ago

I’d say a good middle ground could be making that stuff only visible from your mom’s user (or even setting up a completely separate server)?

It depends on what YOU want to do, really… personally, I would be ok hosting religious nonsense if asked, as long as it’s not generally available in kids’ accounts and stuff (also, porn), but I would come clean and outright refuse if it was neonazi,racist and/or conspiracy stuff. It depends on where you decide to draw the line.

BTW: there’s also the passive/aggressive, cowardly option of sayng “I’ll rip them when I have time” and then sequester all the DVDs and only ever find the time to rip the ones you don’t mind

talkingpumpkin, 26 days ago

man this is getting real popular (kinda like “why not both?” a while ago)

talkingpumpkin, 28 days ago

IMHO Ansible isn’t much different than a bash script… it has the advantage of being “declarative” (in quotes because it’s not actually declarative at all: it just has higher-level abstractions that aggregate common sysadmin CLI operations/patterns in “declarative-sounding” tasks), but it also has the disadvantage of becoming extremely convoluted the moment you need any custom logic whatsoever (yes, you can write a python extension, but you can do the same starting with a bash script too).

Also, you basically can’t use ansible unless your target system has python (technically you can, but in practice all the useful stuff needs python), meaning that if you use a distro that doesn’t come with python per default (eg. alpine) you’ll have to manually install it or write some sort of pythonless prelude to your ansible script that does that for you, and that if your target can’t run python (eg. openwrt on your very much resource-constrained wifi APs) ansible is out of the question (technically you can use it, but it’s much more complex than not using it).

My two cents about configuration management for the homelab:

• whatever you use, make sure it’s something you re-read often: it will become complex and you will forget everything about it
• keep in mind that you’ll have to re-test/update your scripts at least everytime your distro version changes (eg. if you upgrade from ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04) and ideally every time one of your configured services changes (because the format of their config files may in theory change too)
• if you can cope with a rolling-style distro, take a look at nix instead of “traditional” configuration management: nixos configuration is declarative and (in theory) guarantees that you won’t ever need to recheck or update your config when updating (in reality, you’ll occasionally have to edit your config, but the OS will tell you so it’s not like you can unknowingly break stuff).

BTW, nixos is also not beginner-friendly in the least and all in all badly documented (documentation is extensive but unfriendly and somewhat disorganized)… good luck with that :)

talkingpumpkin, 2 months ago

With the very limited number of drives one may use at home, just get the cheapest ones (*), use RAID and assume some drive may fail.

(*) whose performances meet your needs and from reputable enough sources

You can look at the backblaze stats if you like stats, but if you have ten drives 3% failure rate is exactly the same as 1% or .5% (they all just mean “use RAID and assume some drive may fail”).

Also, IDK how good a reliabiliy predictor the manufacturer would be (as in every sector, reliabiliy varies from model to model), plus you would basically go by price even if you need a quantity of drives so great that stats make sense on them (wouldn’t backblaze use 100% one manufacturer otherwise?)

talkingpumpkin, 6 months ago

IIUC you can flash LineageOS on the shield (if you try, let us know how it goes)

talkingpumpkin, 7 months ago

awesome-selfhosted.net/…/personal-dashboards.html :)

talkingpumpkin, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

One of the most exciting additions to the Raspberry Pi 5 feature set is the single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface.

IIUC PCIe2.0x1 means 0.5GB/s, which is slower than USB 2 (I’m talking USB 2 specs - no idea how USB actually performs in PIs). I can’t wait for people to buy that NVME hat and mount WD Blacks on that :) READ BELOW

talkingpumpkin, 8 months ago

One thing you can try doing before throwing away the router (which is probably the exact same one your neighbor use) is checking the channel situation in your condo with an app like WiFiAnalyzer and also try moving the router around (some spots are better than others - and hi up is usually better)

That said, ISP routers are often terrible.

talkingpumpkin, 8 months ago

In your shoes, I’d put the money in a proper case (eg. fractal node 304/804) rather than an USB enclosure (no, you don’t need hot-swap for a home server): besides the performance issues of USB (which may or may not be an actual issue depending on what you plan to do with the NAS), having a single box makes everything simpler.

For components to fill up the case, you can look at second-hand computers on ebay.

As for the OS, if you are not familiar with linux you may want to look at truenas scale (which is linux).

If you never built a PC, you’ll have to do a lot of research not to buy incompatible components… otherwise you could rely on a friend/shop or stick to sinology and similar.

talkingpumpkin, 11 months ago

I use mailbox.org - they recently changed the pricing and now you'll have to pay a minimum of €3/month to have your custom domain.

IIUC apple has an email offer at $1/month that allows a (or many? idk) custom domain and wildcard mailbox.

Honestly, I am considering doing the opposite and starting to self host my email... I loathe comparing the differences between various plans/tiers of the various providers and with commercial email one is bound to do that once in a while (plus €3/month is kinda steep... I mean... not that it's a very high price per se, but I pay some €6/year for a certified email mailbox and it's kinda strange to pay much more for a "normal" one)

talkingpumpkin, 11 months ago

I got an eaton 5e…

Same here and no complains, except I shouldn't have bought the big one with the fan: when it turns on it's really noisy and for some reason it needs to blow air for a long time after the tiniest irregularity in the grid.