The default tier of AWS glacier uses tape, which is why data retrieval takes a few hours from when you submit the request to when you can actually download the data, and costs a lot.

AFAIK Glacier is unlikely to be tape based. A bunch of offline drives is more realistic scenario. But generally it’s not public knowledge unless you found some trustworthy source for the tape theory?

FWIW restic repository format already has two independent implementations. Restic (in Go) and Rustic (Rust), so the chances of both going unmaintained is hopefully pretty low.

Let me be more clear: devs are not required to release binaries at all. Bit they should, if they want their work to be widely used.

Yeah, but that’s not there reality of the situation. Docker images is what drives wide adoption. Docker is also great development tool if one needs to test stuff quickly, so the Dockerfile is there from the very beginning and thus providing image is almost for free.

Binaries are more involved because suddenly you have multiple OSes, libc, musl,… it’s not always easy to build statically linked binary (and it’s also often bad idea) So it’s much less likely to happen. If you tried just running statically linked binary on NixOS, you probably know it’s not as simple as chmod a+x.

I also fully agree with you that curl+pipe+bash random stuff should be banned as awful practice and that is much worse than containers in general. But posting instructions on forums and websites is not per se dangerous or a bad practice. Following them blindly is, but there is still people not wearing seatbelts in cars or helmets on bikes, so…

Exactly what I’m saying. People will do stupid stuff and containers have nothing to do with it.

Chmod 777 should be banned in any case, but that steams from containers usage (due to wrongly built images) more than anything else, so I guess you are biting your own cookie here.

Most of the time it’s not necessary at all. People just have “allow everything, because I have no idea where the problem could be”. Containers frequently run as root, so I’d say the chmod is not necessary.

In a world where containers are the only proposed solution, I believe something will be taken from us all.

I think you mean images not containers? I don’t think anything will be taken, image is just easy to provide, if there is no binary provided, there would likely be no binary even without docker.

In fact IIRC this practice of providing binaries is relatively new trend. (Popularized by Go I think) Back in the days you got source code and perhaps Makefile. If you were lucky a debian/src directory with code to build your package. And there was no lack of freedom.

On one hand you complain about docker images making people dumb on another you complain about absence of pre-compiled binary instead of learning how to build stuff you run. A bit of a double standard.

I don’t agree with the premise of your comment about containers. I think most of the downsides you listed are misplaced.

First of all they make the user dumber. Instead of learning something new, you blindly “compose pull & up” your way. Easy, but it’s dumbifier and that’s not a good thing.

I’d argue, that actually using containers properly requires very solid Linux skills. If someone indeed blindly “compose pull & up” their stuff, this is no different than blind curl | sudo bash which is still very common. People are going to muddle through the installation copy pasting stuff no matter what. I don’t see why containers and compose files would be any different than pipe to bash or random reddit comment with “step by step instructions”. Look at any forum where end users aren’t technically strong and you’ll see the same (emulation forums, raspberry pi based stuff, home automation,…) - random shell scripts, rm -rf this ; chmod 777 that

Containers are just another piece of software that someone can and will run blindly. But I don’t see why you’d single them out here.

Second, there is a dangerous trend where projects only release containers, and that’s bad for freedom of choice

As a developer I can’t agree here. The docker images (not “containers” to be precise) are not there replacing deb packages. They are there because it’s easy to provide image. It’s much harder to release a set of debs, rpms and whatnot for distribution the developer isn’t even using. The other options wouldn’t even be there in the first place, because there’s only so many hours in a day and my open source work is not paying my bills most of the time. (patches and continued maintenance is of course welcome) So the alternative would be just the source code, which you still get. No one is limiting your options there. If anything the Dockerfile at least shows exactly how you can build the software yourself even without using docker. It’s just bash script with extra isolation.

I am aware that you can download an image and extract the files inside, that’s more an hack than a solution.

Yeah please don’t do that. It’s probably not a good idea. Just build the binary or whatever you’re trying to use yourself. The binaries in image often depend on libraries inside said image which can be different from your system.

Third, with containers you are forced to use whatever deployment the devs have chosen for you. Maybe I don’t want 10 postgres instances one for each service, or maybe I already have my nginx reverse proxy or so.

It might be easier (effort-wise) but you’re certainly not forced. At the very least you can clone the repo and just edit the Dockerfile to your liking. With compose file it’s the same story, just edit the thing. Or don’t use it at all. I frequently use compose file just for reference/documentation and run software as a set of systemd units in Nix. You do you. You don’t have to follow a path that someone paved if you don’t like the destination. Remember that it’s often someone’s free time that paid for this path, they are not obliged to provide perfect solution for you. They are not taking anything away from you by providing solution that someone else can use.

I’m huge fan of Nix, but for someone wondering if they should “learn docker” Nix is absolutely brutal.

Also IMO while there’s some overlap, one is not a complete replacement for the other. I use both in combination frequently.

I’m curious. How would you identify who’s guest and who’s not in this case?

With multiple networks it’s pretty easy as they are on a different network.

I have a bunch of these myself and that is my experience, but don’t have any screenshots now.

However there’s great comparison of these thin clients if you don’t mind Polish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLRplLPdd3Q

Just the relevant screens to save you some time:

Power usage:

Cinebench multi core:

The power usage in idle is within 2W from Pi 4 and the performance is about double compared to overclocked Pi 4. It’s really quite viable alternative unless you need really small device. The only alternative size-wise is slightly bigger WYSE 3040, but that one has x5-z8350 CPU, which sits somewhere between Pi3B+ and Pi4 performance-wise. It is also very low power though and if you don’t need that much CPU it is also very viable replacement. (these can be easily bought for about €60 on eBay, or cheaper if you shop around)

Also each W of extra idle power is about 9kWh extra consumed. Even if you paid 50c/kWh (which would be more than I’ve ever seen) that’s €5 per year extra. So I wouldn’t lose my sleep over 2W more or less. Prices here are high, 9kWh/y is rounding error.

Thin clients based on J5005 or J4105 generally idle under 5W. (Futro S740, Wyse 5070,…) They consume a bit more when 100% loaded (11W vs 8W), but they also provide about 2x performance of Pi4.

(That article you shared is measuring power consumption on the USB port, which does not take into account overhead of USB adapter itself)

If you search ebay for Intel based thin clients, many are more powerful than RPi while being passively cooled and having very similar power consumption.

Same with Adguard Home here sitting at 38MB.

In Tailscale you can set up an exit node which lets you access the entire internet via its internet connection.

You could set up an exit node that would let you access the internet via some (anonymizing) VPN providers like Mullvad or any other.

This sounds like Tailscale is simply setting up this exit node for Mullvad on their side and providing it as a service. So it’s not like using another VPN anonymizers is impossible, it’s just convenient to use Mullvad.

RAID is not backup. RAID is used for increased capacity, throughput or uptime. (Depending on configuration)

Multiple volumes would likely get corrupted just as much with faulty RAM as RAID would. Besides RAM there’s controller, CPU, power supply and possibly more single points of failure in that NAS, that would destroy both RAID and multiple volumes.

So assuming you have external backup, I’d go with RAID for better uptime as opposed to some custom multi volume pseudo-RAID for the same.

If it’s really early 2000s, you might want to put it on eBay. There are retro gamers out there that could use it as good Windows 9x era gaming PC. You could give that HW a new life in someone’s retro setup.

It’s great HW for occasional gaming, but it’s very inefficient for 24/7 operation. You want to be somewhere after 2015-ish for something that is supposed to run constantly.

Moving off from port 22 is effectively just security by obscurity. It will save you some logs but the bandwidth and CPU time saving is negligible - especially with fail2ban.

That comment is just spreading FUD. One of the links is just link to someone’s message saying they hate systemd. The other is just link to random (resolved) bug.

People aren’t disliking the comment, it’s actually terrible comment with no value.

Cries in TBW endurance, but also yes please!

Oh wow, thanks. I’ve read about bcachefs long time ago. I didn’t realize it go that far since. That’s definitely something I’m very curious to try.

The author is upset that btrfs RAID arrays don’t function as he anticipated. However, btrfs isn’t ZFS or mdadm; it’s its own system and should be understood as such.

I’d say it’s quite reasonable critique, because RAID1 is kind of industry standard. I can’t think of any other RAID (HW or SW) that would do RAID1 in this way. If btrfs decided to call their implementation raid1 while it really isn’t raid1 in some major way, it was very bad idea. I don’t agree it’s documentation issue, it’s really bad name choice. ZFS has raidz that does something similar to btrfs raid1 and the name does not lead to confusion. RAID1 system should never lead to decreased reliability with increasing number of drives.

The author points out that btrfs won’t auto-mount an array if a drive fails, while ZFS will. This is actually a protective measure. By not auto-mounting, it minimizes the risk of further drive failures, prioritizing data preservation.

RAID is uptime preserving mechanism. If anyone uses RAID for data preservation purposes, they are setting themselves for a nasty surprise. RAID system that does not mount in reduced redundancy situation is very bad design. It effectively sacrifices usability of RAID to serve other purpose that RAID system does not really need nor should be used for.

He attempts ZFS recovery methods on btrfs and is surprised when they don’t work.

I felt that way as well, but I think they raised one important point - there was no indication that the array was still in reduced redundancy state after their “attempt at recovery”. ZFS is very clear about the state of array at every step. Same for other RAID systems including some HW based ones. Every single one I’ve used were very clear about the fact that array isn’t fully redundant.

In summary, the article’s author seems primarily upset that btrfs isn’t a ZFS clone.

FWIW I didn’t have that impression. I have experience with multiple RAID controllers and multiple SW RAID systems and his points would be valid with any of those.

Anyways thank you for your reply. It’s not the answer I was hoping for and I don’t agree with your views on some of these issues. But it gives me pretty good idea of the current state of the filesystem.

Out of curiosity in your experience, are issues mentioned in this article actually fixed now? They mention the write hole, so that was fixed. What about the rest?

I’d say it’s more about elasticity. Scaling is just very narrow aspect of elasticity.

To give you some specific example, there’s a company (that I won’t name) that by law has to have all data on premises. They have local cloud in their own datacentre. Part of that cloud is a set of powerful servers with ton of GPUs. Daytime they spin up VMs that employees can log into and have remote desktop for graphically intensive tasks.

Now you might be thinking “wait a second, they can’t easily add GPUs in the morning as employees log in, there is no scaling and thus no cloud!” And by that definition you’d be right. But what they do with their cloud is that as the demand for VDI drops in the evening, they will start allocating the GPU and CPU resources to completely different kind of VMs that do overnight data crunching. (think geospatial data) It’s completely different OS, the servers are in server subnet, not VDI network, etc… So they are using the elasticity, but it’s not just scaling.

Another counterexample is pretty frequent issue on AWS, where they momentarily run out of specific instance type in specific region. AWS support “will do their best” but you’re often looking at hours of wait time before you get your instance. Now depending where you live you could go buy a server and deploy it in your own DC faster than that. Has AWS stopped being cloud provider? No, you can use the elasticity and either spawn different instance type (if your workload allows that) or in different region/AZ. You might have been just trying to replace one instance with another, not even trying to scale up, it’s just the capacity for replacement wasn’t there.