Modern tech, retro tech, 80s/90s music & nostalgia. I live in northern England so most things I post about have a UK slant.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Linux doesn’t really know about drives, it knows about partitions and mount points.

    Obviously this is a simplification, but in general it’s close enough. It also could well be your problem - timeshift doesn’t know or care that /boot is on the same physical drive as the rest of your system: if it’s a different partition, it’s separate.


  • It’s a little more than 100€

    It’s half as much again! If your budget is that flexible you really should have mentioned it in the original post so that people could give you a wider range of options.

    Translate it up by a couple of orders of magnitude and you get “I want to buy a car, I have €10,000 to spend” … “I found one for €15,000, it’s a little bit more but …”



  • Not really a viable solution for many scenarios though. What if your PDF has half a dozen pages, your answer becomes really tedious. And in a lot of cases a PDF with forms is expected to be sent back to the person or company that created it once the fields have been filled in. They’re not likely to want to receive a bunch of JPEG screenshots instead.




  • I’m still struggling to understand what advantage Docker brings to the set-up.

    Maybe the application doesn’t need to write anything to disk at all (which seems unlikely) but if so, then you’re not saving any disk-write cycles by using docker.

    Or maybe you want it only to write to filesystems mounted from longer-life storage e.g. magnetic disk and mark the SD card filesystems as --read-only. In which case you could mount those filesystems directly in the host OS (indeed you have to do this to make them visible to docker) and configure the app to use those directly, no need for docker.

    Docker has many great features, but at the end of the day it’s just software - it can’t magic away some of the foundational limitiations of system architecture.


  • I’m not sure why Docker would be a particularly good (or particularly bad) fit for the scenario you’re referring to.

    If you’re suggesting that Docker could make it easy to transfer a system onto a new SD card if one fails, then yes that’s true … to a degree. You’d still need to have taken a backup of the system BEFORE the card failed, and if you’re making regular backups then to be honest it will make little difference if you’ve containerised the system or not, you’ll still need to restore it onto a new SD card / clean OS. That might be a simpler process with a Docker app but it very much depends on which app and how it’s been set up.



  • DigitalOcean’s guides in general are pretty good for all sorts of things, whether it’s a generic discussion of a concept like the ones you’ve posted, or a step-by-step guide for installing and configuring specific systems or software. Even if you’re not using DO as a host, much of what they suggest is still very useful.



  • While true, I think most people’s concern is that their laptop is stolen and along with it all the access details for their email, online banking and so on.

    If you’re doing things that mean you’re going to be the target of people with the knowledge, time, and technology to freeze the RAM and attempt to recover the data, you’re presumably already well aware of those (and other) dangers anyway.


  • systemd [is] a niche

    Maybe in the wider world of all the operating systems installed on all the computers, but for Linux-based computing it is, like it or not, near ubiquitous these days. And in particular for server systems (and this is, after all, /m/selfhosted), good luck finding something that isn’t systemd-based unless you’re deliberately choosing a BSD or aiming for a system which has ever-decreasing amounts of support available.






  • How is that any different from what we have now?

    Threads has launched, but has federation disabled. So right now Threads is a standalone system, and it and the Fediverse cannot intercommunicate.

    If Threads later adds in federation but all the of the Fediverse blocks them, we’re in exactly the situation that exists right this minute. And that doesn’t seem to be hurting the Fediverse at all.


  • I can’t help with Lemmy, but I’ve been running a single-user Mastodon instance for almost a year now.

    Like you, I found that the media very quickly used up much more disk space than I anticipated. There are a few things you can do.

    You can tune how long media is stored for: some of this is done in the admin interface, but really you need to set up cron jobs to regularly run various tootctl commands. This is the crontab I use:

    SHELL=/bin/bash
    PATH=/home/mastodon/.rbenv/shims:/home/mastodon/.rbenv/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
    
    RAILS_ENV=production
    # Remove media attachments older than 8 days
    11  19  *   *   *     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl media remove --days 8
    # Remove link previews older than 28 days
    22  5   *   *   *     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl preview_cards remove --days 28
    # Remove files not linked to any post
     3  23  *   *   0     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl media remove-orphans
    # Prune remote accounts that never interacted with a local user
    44  1   *   *   *     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl accounts prune
    
    

    You can of course choose even stricter settings but I found that no matter what I did, given that I am following approx 1,000 other Fediverse accounts it still used up more disk space than I was comfortable with.

    So I offloaded most of the media storage onto an S3-compatible service. It’s breaking the self-hosting ethos somewhat, but with Backblaze B2 I can happily store and serve several hundred GB of media files for just a couple of dollars a month. To me, that was a no-brainer.