Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
I already wrote a rant about this yesterday, but since I'm a sysadmin trying to convert to dev.. I dunno, maybe it's not a bad idea to muddy the waters a bit and talk about why not to be a sysadmin.
Personally I think it's that the perceived barrier to entry is just too high, while it isn't. You don't need a huge Ceph cluster and massive servers when you're just starting out. Why overbuild an appliance like that if it's gonna start out at maybe 5 requests a minute?
Let's take an example - DNS servers! So there's been this guy on the bind-users mailing list asking how to set up a DNS server on 2 public servers, along with a website. Nothing special I guess - you can read the thread here: https://0x0.st/ZY-d. Aside from the question being quite confusing, there was advice to read RFC's, get a book, read the BIND ARM, etc etc. And the person to deny this? No one less than Stephane Bortzmeyer, one of the people who works for nic.fr (so he maintains the .fr TLD) and wrote some of those RFC's as part of the DNSOP working group in the IETF. As for valid reasons to set up a DNS server? Could just be to learn how the DNS works, or hell even for fun. As far as professional DNS servers go.. this (https://0x0.st/ZYo9) is the nugget that powers the K root server, one of the 13 root servers that power the root zone of the internet, aka the zone apex. 2 RJ45 connections, and a console connection. The reason why this is possible is the massive recursor networks that ISP's, Google DNS, Cloudflare DNS, Quad9, etc etc provide. Point is, you don't need huge infrastructure to run a server!
Or maybe your business needs email. How many thousands of emails per second are you gonna need to build your mail server against? How many millions will you need to store? If your business has 10 employees and all of those manage about 10k emails total.. well that's easy, 100k emails total. Per second? Hundreds of emails per second per employee? Haha, of course not. Maybe you'll see an email a minute at most. That is not to say that all email services are like this - it is true that ISP's who offer email to their customers, and especially providers like Microsoft and Google do need massive mail servers that can handle thousands of emails per second. But you are not Microsoft or Google. So yeah, focus on the parts of email that are actually hard.. and there is plenty.
Among sysadmins you have this distinction between "professional" sysadmins and homelabbers. I don't mind the distinction itself but I think both augment each other. If you've started out by jumping into a heap of legacy at an established company, you will have plenty of resources, immediately high complexity, and probably a clusterfuck right away. But you will have massive amounts of resources. If you start out with a homelab, you will have not many resources, small workloads, and something completely new for you to build and learn with. And when running a server like that, you'll probably find that the resources required are quite small, to provide you with your new services. My DHCP servers take 12MB memory each. My DNS servers hover around the 40MB mark. The mail server.. to be fair that one consumes around 150. But if you'd hear the people saying that you need huge servers.. omg you need at least a TB of RAM on your server and 72 cores, massive disks and Ceph!1!
No you don't. All that does is scaring people away and creating a toxic environment for everyone. Stop it.1 -
Hello devRant!
Man its been a while, i havent logged in here in like 4 years.
Recently ive been getting into home-labbing, and i thought to myself
"all of these people on youtube/reddit run Plex on pre-built NASs that have awful celerons and whatnot, we can do much better!"
And by "much better" i meant a bare metal k8s cluster.
My hybris knows no bounds apparently.
Turns out this shit is quite hard.
Really gives u an appreciation of just how much stuff cloud providers magically abstract away....
My final goal is to run stableDiffusion on this thing, even know i know full-well the moment i try Nvidia will fuck me raw with some hidden enterprise subscrition :) -
Not a rant but i got my first homelab server this week :D
Looking forward to playing with it. Already installed esxi,and openvpn.
:dell poweredge t130 with 16 gb ram i found for a reasonable price. -
I start a new job Monday, it feels so great to be out of my old place.
But it also is kinda weird, cause my old job helped get me to where I am now. I along with my brothers and dad were evicted before I started my old job as an intern.
But 6 months into working there and staying with my grandparents, and I got hired full time making $5 more than my dad makes. Me and my dad built up enough savings to own a place. My credit score was higher, and I was working for a title company so my boss gave me a BIG employee discount (this was early into things before I realized how 2-faced she is) if it was my name going onto the mortgage so that's what we did. His savings my credit score and the discount allowed us to get a place 1 bedroom bigger than the old house meaning no more sharing a room with my brother for the first time in my life.
And because of that discount after all was said and done we still had enough in savings to cover rent for a good bit and not have to stress like we did in the last months before we were evicted.
That allowed us to build up savings, start putting more into the mortgage and start paying it down slightly faster, (50 extra a month isn't a lot but it's also not nothing to sneeze at).
I got into the stock market and about a little under a year later i have $150 in unrealized gains gains with a market value of $365 in my stocks.
I also bought a server with the leeway I got from this job and the stability of the new home environment and started toying around with that teaching me I have a major interest in homelab and self hosting which is a part of what helped me get the new job.
This seems like a lot of ramble sorry but it's just weird, 1 job changed my life, and even due to that I couldn't wait to leave it and now that I am I feel kinda regretful at how happy I am to be leaving after how much this job did for me.
But yeah, I couldn't stay another day with my boss. Glad to leave, but also really grateful for everything the job did for me.3 -
Just a quick follow up. I told you guys after rebooting my server by accident, I'll color in the terminals for my ssh connections.
Normal terminal in white. With the code to do it. Just a shell script with the name ssh earlier in the path than the actual ssh. That was the only solution that didn't fuck my auto-completion. compdef was somehow useless. But it is simple.
For some reason I had to hardcode the return color to white. Alacritty was not happy with just a no-color code. But whatever. Super useful. I won't accidentally restart non-host computers now.
Planning on extending this to have different colors according to the host. Like my homelab could be green. Live servers would be red. Dev servers blue. But that's for the future.
Just wanted to share my little improvement that will make my computing saver.
8 -
Where can i get good second hand servers, am planning to homelab cluster. Will appreciate any pointers ...8
-
What are some good tiny/mini/micro computers for a homelab?
My requirements would be
- x86_64
- 8GB RAM or upgradable to such
- upgradable ssd
- can install linux distros on it15 -
While i do have a homelab, I decided to use my raspi for PiHole and Ubiquiti Cloudkey. Last week I started not being able to access either WebUI, or ssh into it. So today I figured i'd look into it.
Plugged in the hdmi cable, and lo and behold... kernel panic.... Well, guess it time to spin up docker containers on my homelab instead -
finally got my server up and running with a configuration I'm happy with! running Proxmox VE on the host, and each application in an LXD Linux container within Proxmox, and a reverse proxy server on the host to route subdomains to internal container IP addresses. check out what I've got running! https://mjones.pizza2
-
My DNS provider does not have an API. They do have one... That is wrong... But on the description page, they say we have to open a ticket to be given access. No requirements. Nothing...
And then I am told "they do no longer offer dns for private hosting". I don't even host with them, I only have a domain with them.
But the magical word is no longer. That means they did offer it. In the description of the API it still says "and for everyone who feels comfortable interacting with a REST API." Oh, and they asked anyone who works on it to be so nice and share any SDK's they might have coded up. Would have shared my SDK. Would have... If no Rust SDK was available yet.
So, what the fuck...
The problem with that is that I need a wildcard certificate for my homelab with DNS validation. So, I need to dynamically set a txt record. Now I wonder... Was this done on purpose? They are selling wild card certificates. Letsencrypt are giving them out for free. I bet they deactivated it, so they can sell more...
Anyway. Solution time.
Short term: I make my own API with black jack and hookers... And selenium.
Long term: I need to fucking move my domains to a different provider.
But what the fuck... What the fuck?7 -
Since I have some equipment, time, and energy, I want to flesh out stuff in my homelab/homenet. What should I put into a VM to secure my home network, since it runs my website as well? My dad worries about his data being compromised.
-
The external SSD or it's adapter, of my homelab, shat itself.
FUUUUCK!!!!
I only set it up 2 weeks ago.1 -
Homelab is starting to get big enough to justify a dns server. Time to start anthropomorphizing my servers.7
-
I had this dell server lying around and finally got to make a virtualisation server out of it.
It is now running xcp-ng as its hypervisor, with a CoreOS VM in it, containing a docker container serving xen-orchestra for managing the server.
Enterprise grade hardware really is a thing of its own. Also sysadmin type of stuff is quite fun. I look forward to be playing with it some more. :)1
Top Tags
Weekly Rant
View