irotsoma

Yeah, companies have abused that to release buggy, incomplete products faster and only make the software stable and feature complete if they make a good profit.

I alias traditional stuff to better, usually drop-in versions of that thing on computers that have the better thing. I often forget which systems have the better thing, so this helps me get the better experience if I was able to install it at some point. For example I alias cat to bat, or top to htop, or dig to drill, etc.

Battery circuits come on enough to be a load that needs to be considered and will show up if you measure load on the device vs load consumed by the components connected to the power supply. In terms of low power devices, it is significant, though not the primary concern. But compared to the pi PSU, the charger not to mention the battery and internal PSU of a laptop, consume way more power and produce way more heat.

All of the rest assumes needing always on, heavy load processing which isn’t what the post I replied to was talking about. I was specifically replying to idle power load. And in my case, even with a bunch of self hosted applications, most of the time my servers are idling. If I was running a virtualization farm or something that was always under heavy load, then yes, as I mentioned, a single board server isn’t ideal.

As for disks, I don’t use SSDs on my pis except one that actually does a lot of local data processing. Everything else runs in memory and stores persistent data on my NAS, including logging. Virtual memory/swap is disabled on all and things that need temporary storage/cache of small amounts of data is cached on RAM disks where applications can’t be configured to not use disk caching. The only need for the SD card is for boot and some minimal IO needed for local OS operation. I have a Raspberry Pi 3 B i got about 8 or 9 years or so ago with the same SD card in it.

They aren’t what I use as a database server, obviously, but they are extremely low power compared to what an old laptop would need and work great for things like pihole, and other network applications as well as being a part if my home kubernetes cluster and run the majority of the cluster’s processes on demand.

Only if you’re running it at full load all the time and comparing that to a comparable number of raspberry pis it would take to do the same amount of work. Also, only if you live in a cold climate and the heat generated is not a concern and power is supplied by a renewable source so power isn’t a concern.

Not quite. Unless the system has pretty advanced power management and is using very recent technology with high density, it’s unlikely that an x64 chipset will use less power than a comparably powered arm64 chipset. Not just the processor, but the smaller board is actually a power saver and allows it to generate less heat meaning both less power wasted and dissipated as heat as well as less power needed for fans to properly dissipate the heat. I’ve never seen a laptop use 3W at idle when considering the whole device, maybe just the CPU, but not if you include the rest of the components like RAM and disks and power supply. And especially true in a laptop that is old enough that it’s being recycled. Heck, the power supply and charger alone might be using 3W at idle with full battery.

With a raspberry pi 4, the typical power usage for the 2GB RAM model is 5W under load for the whole device and about half that for idle. Add a couple of watts for the extra memory and wider bus on the 8GB model and other things can add to that, but that’s mostly accurate. The pi 5 is a little more and the 3 is a little less. Of course, the efficiency of the laptop at full load might end up being better than a comparable number of raspberry pis it would take to do the same amount if work, but comparing a single pi or any other reputable arm-based, single board computer to a single laptop at idle is always going to be that way.

Yeah, and it was a one off restore, so others who are mentioning self hosting will still be taken down as long as that policy remains.

Yeah one thing I find these kinds of tools good for is warranty tracking I’d something breaks and insurance claims if there’s a fire or robbery or something.

Personally, I find Traefik much simpler than Nginx, especially with Kubernetes, but even with pure docker, but it’s definitely not as performant. That’s balanced by the fact that it does a lot of automatic detection and has dynamic config loading so I don’t have to break other services when changing configurations.

Yeah, video streaming is not a good thing to put on a limited bandwidth server either directly or as a VPN or proxy passing data.

Best bet would be if you can set up a reverse proxy on your router and have that accept all inbound requests and direct to the correct internal server and port.

Yeah, that kind of defeats the purpose of using a “stable” distro though. As you mentioned, other better distros are available.

Problem with Manjaro is they have their own opinionated repository that is not always in sync with Arch because they try to introduce more “stability”. I found this actually caused the opposite in most cases as there are a lot of dependencies that end up being behind and so you can’t install more stable versions of a lot of software. With the complexity of modern software dependencies, it has become a big problem. Also, they have in the past caused lots of problems with AUR and have let their SSL certs expire multiple times. Overall, they just haven’t been reliable IMHO, so I moved to Fedora a while back.

Mobilizon works well for me. I only wish more organizers used it so I could get events from local communities without having to enter it myself.

There’s a plugin for compose, but podman itself does have some differences here and there. I’m starting to migrate my own stuff as Docker is getting more money hungry. Womder if they’ll try to IPO in a few years. Seems like that’s what these kinds of companies do after they start to decline from alienating users. Just wish that portainer and docker hadn’t killed all the GUIs for docker and swarm was better supported.

The company i work for has also required us to migrate from Docker as the hub and desktop app are no longer totally free. I expect more and more limitations will show up on the free versions as usually is the case with companies like this.

Sounds like they’re basically abandoning it but at least giving the code out so the community can still use and keep it up until it becomes incompatible with Windows. It is one of the few ways I’m able to get my Windiws 11 work computer to do what I need with all the security and tracking junk my company installs on our laptops, even for developers, so I hope it sticks around for a while.

If the meter is plugged into the UPS, then the UPS has nothing to do with the power flowing into the meter. Power is “pulled” not “pushed” to devices in that a device supplying power can limit the amount of power provided, but can’t increase it beyond what the devices request.

Just like with plumbing. The water company can’t force your faucets to open and use more water. Now they could increase pressure and break pipes, similarly the UPS could provide the wrong voltage and short or burn out wires or devices causing them to draw more, but that is unlikely to be the issue here. As long as voltage is constant, amperage (the other component in wattage) is pulled, not pushed.

What you’re seeing in the input load, if it matches what is flowing out of the meter, is some device requesting more power and thus more power flowing into the UPS to be passed to those devices, not the UPS forcing something to use power which isn’t possible as explained above, or the UPS itself using power because the meter has no connection to what power is being used by the UPS, only things plugged into the meter.

So, there must be something else using the power. Likely the devices, even if they aren’t really doing anything you consider significant, are doing something. Probably maintenance, checking for updates, the monitoring proceses requesting information from the devices since the TrueNAS server is on that end, etc. You’d need to put a meter on each device to determine what is drawing the power specifically.

Also, does the power meter only display power used by devices plugged into it, or does it also display it’s own power usage? Could be that the plug itself is using WiFi or something to communicate with external services to log that data. But that would be quick bursts.

Also, without putting a meter on each device, this is probably cumulative. For example, if the NAS is requesing info for monitoring the network, that would spin up the processors on the RPi an cause the switch to draw more power as it transmits that information across the network. Again, this should only be small bursts, but it’s also possible the devices are not sleeping properly after whatever process wakes them so they continue to run their processors at higher amperage for some time. Tweaking power profiles can help with something like tuned on Linux or similar to make things sleep more agressively. With the drawback that they take some amount of time to spin back up when needed.

It you’re talking about TOTP exclusively, that only needs the secret and the correct time on the device. The secret is cached along with the passwords on the device.

LLMs are perfectly fine, and cool tech. Problem is they’re billed as being actual intelligence or things that can replace humans. Sure they mimic humans well enough, but it would take a lot more than just absorbing content to be good enough at it to replace a human, rather than just aiding them. Either the content needs to be manually processed to add social context, or new tech needs to be made that includes models for how to interpret content in every culture represented by every piece of content, including dead cultures who’s work is available to the model. Otherwise, “hallucinations” (e.g. misinterpretation and thus miscategorization of data) will make them totally unreliable without human filtering.

That being said, there many more targeted uses of the tech that are quite good, but always with the need for a human to verify.

There’s not a need to have vaultwarden up all of the time unless you use new devices often or create and modify entries really often. The data is cached on the device and kept encrypted by the app locally. So a little downtime shouldn’t be a big issue in the large majority of cases.

A desktop environment is a waste of resources on a system where you’ll only use it to install and occasionally upgrade a few server applications. The RAM, CPU power, and electricity used to run the desktop environment could be instead powering another couple of small applications.

Selfhosting is already inefficient with computing resources just like everyone building their own separate infrastructure in a city is less efficient. Problem is infrastructure is shared ownership whereas most online services are not owned by the users so selfhosting makes sense, but requires extra efficiencies.

I have a separate boot partition so the rest can be encrypted with luks. That’s all that’s needed in a large majority of scenarios. Most other setups end up needing to resize something at some point which in many cases is a total pain.

On my primary PC I do have a second hard drive for documents and other long term storage files that I want to access more often than on the NAS. This way it’s nearly impossible to lose those files of I reinstall something and it can act as a temporary backup storage for settings files when I do reinstall stuff rather than having a partition that wastes space or runs out of space.