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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • It’s significantly immediate-er with induction - particularly going from cool to hot. Boil water in 2 minutes and handles don’t get hot in the process. And since nothing is heating except the metal of the base of the pan there is no residual heat from the cooktop parts or the sides of the pan when you turn it off. The temperature drops much faster.

    I went back to gas after 5 years cooking on induction and miss it a lot. Cooking something like pasta that requires boiling a sizeable quantity of water takes 2x or 3x longer on gas, even with a very powerful burner.


  • Does this media server need to be accessible when you are away from home? Will you store personal data on it?

    Out of band management: this is a server feature that lets you access and manage the server even if the OS is down. That’s important if you may be away from home and need to fix a boot problem.

    You can simulate some of this with PiKVM (remote console access) and PDU solutions (remote power control).

    Redundant power: servers often have redundant power supplies, so that if one fails it can still function.

    You can simulate this, with short downtime, by having a replacement ready. Mini PCs make this easy by using relatively inexpensive laptop style external power bricks. But also think about the power circuit - is the server on the same breaker/fuse with something that could potentially take the circuit down while you are away?

    ECC RAM: this is about data integrity. If there is a failure in non-ECC then a bit flip could cause data corruption.

    You can’t really get this without ECC. Using a file system that has anti-corruption features can help reduce some of the risk. You probably trust your data to consumer PC hardware, so this would be no different really. It’s about risk mitigation.

    And that’s the main thing here, deciding on the use cases and prioritizing/budgeting how you mitigate risks to each.



  • It’s probably still IPv6 related. If you use something like Network Analyzer on your phone while only connected to the mobile network you may find that it only shows an IPv6 address and DNS server, no IPv4 config. That could explain the difference. Particularly if you were using the maximum typically permissible MTU. Your provider might also be doing some 6to4 tunneling somewhere that adds overhead and causes size problems.





  • Btw: does anybody know what bad things actually happen if there is no metal cage that blocks all the radio?

    Noise happens. Could be no problem, or it could hurt your wifi or mobile data connections, or maybe raise a neighbor’s ham radio noise floor. I saw this recently when setting up a pi to run BirdNet-Pi. The USB3 connection to an SSD caused enough noise in the 2.4GHz band that the onboard wifi radio could only connect on the 5GHz band.


  • To start - moving services from bare metal to rootless Podman containers running via quadlets. It’s something I have had in mind for a while but keep second guessing the distro choice. Long-ish release cadence, systemd-networkd and a recent Podman version in the native repos, well supported, and not Ubuntu.

    So far openSUSE Leap seems like the winner. A testing machine is up to install everything, write some deployment scripts, and decide on a storage layout and partitioning scheme.

    If anyone has another distro to recommend that checks these boxes let me know!

    I like rolling release for the desktop, but only want critical patches in any given month for this server, and a major upgrade no more than every 3-4 years. Or an immutable server distro. But it doesn’t seem like networkd is an option for the ones I’ve looked at (Fedora CoreOS, openSUSE MicroOS), and I am not sure if I want to figure out Ignition/Combustion right now.

    Next project - VLANs on Mikrotik.

    OP - Navepoint makes good racks for reasonable money. I have a Pro series 9u from them and it went together without any problems. It’s on the wall with a pretty big ups in it.


  • If you want to keep using networkd, you might want to consider if multiple interfaces are causing the wait. NM doesn’t care, but networkd gives more granular options for dependencies. If you have wired and wireless and only one in use the systemd-networkd-wait-online.service waits for a timeout period. You can find lots of info on it related to boot delays with that service.

    Try the --any switch on the systemd-networkd-wait-online.service launch configuration. This will tell the wait-online service that any single routable interface is enough, you don’t need them all.

    Run:

    sudo systemctl edit systemd-networkd-wait-online.service

    That adds the override.conf for the service. Add these lines:

    [Service]
    ExecStart=
    ExecStart=/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-networkd-wait-online --any
    

    The other possibility is if you have virtual .netdev devices configured (VPN, bridging, etc) and some of them are not essential for the machine to be online, you can set RequiredForOnline=no on the ones that aren’t essential.







  • Here’s my messy-cabled 9u rack.

    Image

    It has:

    • Fiber gateway out of view on top of the rack.
    • Switch, which also powers 2 Ruckus APs and 2 other switches.
    • Mikrotik RB5009 router.
    • Raspberry Pi x3 all running Debian Bookworm. I have too many pis right now, running Home Assistant, LibreNMS, Log collection, and a read-only NUT server that orchestrates shutdowns and startups on power loss. I need to consolidate these.
    • 1L PCs. One is on Debian serving media and files. The other is a test server where I’m trying out Immich on openSUSE. I’m considering moving to that and rootless podman for services. To that end I have another of these 1L boxes on my desk trying other options (MicroOS, Fedora IoT, maybe others).
    • HDs. These are backup drives for the 1L server. I keep them powered off except when needed.
    • UPS and a managed, switched PDU.

    Everything is set up for low energy consumption (~90w), remote admin, and recovery from power loss.



  • If you’re buying new cameras they’ll be 802.3af PoE. Passive is becoming much less common. So that model router I linked would work great.

    I think if you’re a moderately technically inclined person you would be happy with that solution. If you are intimidated at the idea of writing or adapting some scripts, I would probably recommend a router on one of the other platforms plus a PoE switch.