Just another Swedish programming sysadmin person.
Coffee is always the answer.

And beware my spaghet.

  • 28 Posts
  • 54 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • You’re lucky to not have to deal with some of this hardware then, because it really feels like there are manufacturers who are determined to rediscover as many solved problems as they possibly can.

    Got to spend way too much time last year with a certain piece of HPC hardware that can sometimes finish booting, and then sit idle at the login prompt for almost half a minute before the onboard NIC finally decides to appear on the PCI bus.
    The most ‘amusing’ part is that it does have the onboard NIC functional during boot, since it’s a netbooted system. It just seems to go into some kind of hard reset when handing over to the OS.

    Of course, that’s really nothing compared to a couple of multi-socket storage servers we have, which sometime drop half the PCI bus on the floor when under certain kinds of load, requiring them to be unplugged from power entirely before the bus can be used again.


  • The predictable interface naming has solved a few issues at work, mainly in regards to when we have to work with expensive piece-of-shit (enterprise) systems, since they sometimes explode if your server changes interface names.
    Normally wouldn’t be an issue, but a bunch of our hardware - multiple vendors and all - initialize the onboard NIC pretty late, which causes them to switch position almost every other boot.

    I’ve personally stopped caring about interface names nowadays though, I just use automation to shove NetworkManager onto the machine and use it to get a properly managed connection instead, so it can deal with all the stupid things that the hardware does.





  • We’re mirroring the images internally, not just because their mirrors suck and would almost double the total install time when using them, but also because they only host the images for the very latest patch version - and they’ve multiple times made major version changes which have broken the installer between patches in 22.04 alone.


  • What is truly bloated is their network-install images, starting with a 14MB kernel and 65MB initrd, which then proceeds to pull a 2.5GB image which they unpack into RAM to run the install.

    This is especially egregious when running thin VMs for lots of things, since you now require them to have at least 4GB of RAM simply to be able to launch the installer at all.

    Compare this to regular Debian, which uses an 8MB kernel and a 40MB initrd for the entire installer.
    Or some larger like AlmaLinux, which has a 13MB kernel and a 98MB initrd, and which also pulls a 900MB image for the installer. (Which does mean a 2GB RAM minimum, but is still almost a third of the size of Ubuntu)



  • I’ve been looking at the rewrite of Owncloud, but unfortunately I really do need either SMB or SFTP for one of the most critical storage mounts in my setup.
    I don’t particularly feel like giving Owncloud a win either, they’ve not been behaving in a particularly friendly manner for the community, and their track record with open core isn’t particularly good, so I really don’t want to end up with a decent product that then steadily mutilates itself to try and squeeze money out of me.

    The Owncloud team actually had a stand at FOSDEM a couple of years back, right across from the Nextcloud team, and they really didn’t give me much confidence in the project after chatting with them. I’ve since heard that they’re apparently not going to be allowed to return again either, due to how poorly they handled it.


  • I’ve been hoping to find a non-PHP alternative to Nextcloud for a while, but unfortunately I’ve yet to find one which supports my base requirements for the file storage.

    Due to some quirks with my setup, my backing storage consists of a mix of local folders, S3 buckets, SMB/SFTP mounts (with user credential login), and even an external WebDav server.
    Nextcloud does manage such a thing phenomenally, while all the alternatives I’ve tested (including a Radicale backed by rclone mounts) tend to fall completely to pieces as soon as more than one storage backend ends up getting involved, especially when some of said backends need to be accessed with user-specific credentials.