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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 12th, 2023

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  • Used Ubuntu for ~15 years, switched to NixOS a couple months ago and haven’t looked back.

    I’ve made a habit of clean installing all of the desktops/laptops/servers in my life on the first point release of each LTS (i.e. 22.04.1). That would mean there was time for the dust to settle and for me to tweak my install/customization scripts from the previous LTS.

    So since I knew I was gonna have to modify my Ubuntu install scripts to work with 24.04 anyways, I fiigured it was a decent time to try and see if I could get the install scripts converted to a nix config instead, and it ended up working a treat.




  • Must have an android client,support mtls,support attachments and card layout.

    ps: pls don’t suggest to save to local storage and sync that.

    pls don’t suggest this app that cant do that but its great.

    Anyways anyone aware of any app that can do that?

    Nope, you seem to be well aware of the options available to you and there isn’t any one single app that meets all of your requirements, so unfortunately we can’t recommend anything at all to you, per your specific request.

    You’ll have to build it yourself either from scratch or by taking one of the existing open-source tools and adding the missing functionality.

    Looking forward to your pull requests!



  • DigitalOcean and Vultr are options that “just work” and have reasonable options available in $5-6/month category.

    DO is more established and I’ve used them for nearly 10 years now for a $6/mo VPS and for managing DNS for my domains. Vultr has some much closer datacenter options if you happen to be in the southeast US, rather than basically just covering California and NYC like DO does.


  • People recommend backblaze B2 as a restic/rclone/borg backend because it works extremely well and is an excellent value compared to other available options at a near-flat $6/TB*month rate.

    The reason they ‘force linux users to use their b2 product’ is very specifically done, on purpose, to avoid the exact kind of abuse you want to do, which is upload 18TB of near-incompressible data for them to store for $9/month or less.

    Buy a 20TB harddrive and keep it in a fireproof filebox, and maybe another to keep at a friends house. You don’t need cloud backups for media you can reaquire relatively easily, save that for the stuff you can’t trivially replace.



  • I ran RAID-Z2 across 4x14TB and a (4+8)TB LVM LV for close to a year before finally swapping the (4+8)TB LV for a 5th 14TB drive for via zpool replace without issue. I did, however, make sure to use RAID-Z2 rather than Z1 to account for said shenanigans out of an abundance of caution and I would highly recommend doing the same. That is to say, the extra 2x2TB would be good additional parity, but I would only consider it as additional parity, not the only parity.

    Based on fairly unscientific testing from before and after, it did not appear to meaningfully affect performance.


  • 125W (Less than $15/month) or so for

    • Ryzen 9 3900X
    • 64GB RAM
    • 2x4TB NVMe (ZFS Mirror)
    • 5x14TB HDD (ZFS RAID-Z2)
    • 2.5GBe Network Card
    • 5-port 2.5GBe Network Switch
    • 5-port 1GBe POE Network Switch w/ one Reolink Camera attached

    I generally leave powerManagement.cpuFreqGovernor = "powersave" in my Nix config as well, which saves about 40W ($4/mo or so) for my typical load as best as I can tell, and I disable it if I’m doing bulk data processing on a time crunch.


  • My partner and I use a git repository on our self-hosted gitea instance for household management.

    Issue tracker and kanban boards for task management, wiki for documentation, and some infrastructure components are version controlled in the repo itself. You could almost certainly get away with just the issue tracker.

    Home Assistant (also self-hosted) provides the ability to easily and automatically create issues based on schedules and sensor data, like creating a git issue when when weather conditions tomorrow may necessitate checking this afternoon that nothing gets left out in the rain.

    Matrix (also self-hosted) lets Gitea and Home Assistant bully us into remembering to do things we might have forgotten. (Send a second notification if the washer finished 15 minutes ago, but the dryer never started)

    It’s been fantastic being able to create git issues for honey-dos as well as having the automations for creating issues for recurring tasks. “Hey we need to take X to the vet for Y sometime next week” “Oh yeah, can you go ahead and put in a ticket?” And vice versa.


  • what does industry do when they need to automate provisioning of thousands of devices for POS, retail, barcode scanning, delivery drivers, etc.

    MDM doesn’t help with the kind of stuff OP is trying to automate, but it does usually cover most business use cases and if you need more than that, you generally either have a contract to get the manufacturer to do it for you or just put what you need into the org-specific superapp you already have to have.



  • I’ve read many many discussions about why manufacturers would list such a pessimistic number on their datasheets over the years and haven’t really come any closer to understanding why it would be listed that way, when you can trivially prove how pessimistic it is by repeatedly running badblocks on a dozen of large (20TB+) enterprise drives that will nearly all dutifully accept hundreds of TBs written to and read from with no issues when the URE rate suggests that would result in a dozen UREs on average.

    I conjecture, without any specific evidence, that it might be an accurate value with respect to some inherent physical property of the platters themselves that manufactures can and do measure that hasn’t improved considerably, but has long been abstracted away by increaed redundancy and error correction at the sector level that result in much more reliable effective performance, but the raw quantity is still used for some internal historical/comparative reason rather than being replaced by the effective value that matters more directly to users.



  • I think it’s worth pointing out that this article is 11 years old, so that 1TB rule-of-thumb probably probably needs to be adjusted for modern disks.

    If you have 2 full backups (18TB drives being more than sufficient) of the array, especially if one of those is offsite, then I’d say you’re really not at a high enough risk of losing data during a rebuild to justify proactively rebuilding the array until you have at least 2 or more disks to add.


  • Still a few Ubuntu Server stragglers here and there, but it works quite well as long as you keep your base config fairly lean and push the complexity into the containers.

    Documentation tends to be either good or nonexistent depending on what you’re doing, so for anything beyond standard configuration but it can usually be pieced together from ArchWiki and the systemd docs.

    All in all, powerful and repeatable (and a lot less tedious than Ansible, etc), but perhaps not super beginner-friendly once you start getting into the weeds. Ubuntu Server is just better documented and supported if you need something super quick and easy.