communism

I've only ever used desktop Linux and don't have server admin experience (unless you count hosting Minecraft servers on my personal machine lol). Currently using Artix and Void for my desktop computers as I've grown fond of runit.

I'm going to get a VPS for some personal projects and am at the point of deciding what distro I want to use. While I imagine that systemd is generally the best for servers due to the far more widespread support (therefore it's better for the stability needs of a server), I have a somewhat high threat model compared to most people so I was wondering if maybe I should use something like runit instead which is much smaller and less vulnerable. Security needs are also the reason why I'm leaning away from using something like Debian, because how outdated the packages are would likely leave me open to vulnerabilities. Correct me if I'm misunderstanding any of that though.

Other than that I'm not sure what considerations there are to make for my server distro. Maybe a more mainstream distro would be more likely to have the software in its repos that I need to host my various projects. On the other hand, I don't have any experience with, say, Fedora, and it'd probably be a lot easier for me to stick to something I know.

In terms of what I want to do with the VPS, it'll be more general-purpose and hosting a few different projects. Currently thinking of hosting a Matrix instance, a Mastodon instance, a NextCloud instance, an SMTP server, and a light website, but I'm sure I'll want to stick more miscellaneous stuff on there too.

So what distro do you use for your server hosting? What things should I consider when picking a distro?

They haven't particularly made a comment on the situation so much as acknowledged it's happening. They seem to be going with the story that they had nothing to do with it and this is news to them. Hope to hear more from them soon so we can find out more about the situation, how and why this happened, etc.

(The sceptical tone isn't because of disbelief of Collin, it's because we don't know enough about the situation to be able to say Collin is or isn't telling the truth here.)

I have a Ryzen 3 1300X at the moment and it's always had this soft lock freezing bug on Linux. I used to dual-boot Windows on this machine and Windows never had the same problem, so I think it is an issue with the Linux kernel (I've also replaced nearly every bit of hardware that I originally built the PC with, except for the CPU and motherboard, so it probably is an issue the kernel has with my CPU, or possibly the motherboard firmware).

I've changed the kernel parameters as suggested by the Arch Wiki. The bug is pretty inconsistent about happening so only time will tell if this solves the issue. But if it doesn't solve the issue, I'd honestly consider just getting a new CPU that doesn't have this issue, as completely freezing up, unable to get to a tty or anything, and only being able to power off by physically holding down the power button, is a pretty major issue, even if it only happens sometimes.

So if I do get a new CPU, or maybe just for when I'm next buying a CPU for reasons unrelated to this bug (been considering an upgrade to something that's better for compiling anyway), are there any good options out there? Intel is investing $25 billion into Israel and the BNC has called for "divestment and exclusion" from it (it's not officially on the BDS consumer boycott list, but I'm still very much not comfortable buying from Intel). But the Arch Wiki article seems to suggest this bug is applicable to Ryzen CPUs in general, or at least it never specifies a particular model or range of models. So maybe I'm limited to non-Ryzen AMD CPUs?

I'm guessing this is one of the situations where two companies have a complete duopoly over the market and there isn't an all-round good solution, but thought I'd ask in case anyone had some useful input.

[Image description:
Screenshot of terminal output:

~ ❯ lsblk
NAME           MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINTS
sda              8:0    1  62.5M  0 disk  
└─topLuks      254:2    0  60.5M  0 crypt 
  └─bottomLuks 254:3    0  44.5M  0 crypt

/end image description]

I had no idea!

If anyone else is curious, it's pretty much what you would expect:

cryptsetup -y -v luksFormat /dev/sda
cryptsetup open /dev/sda topLuks
cryptsetup -y -v luksFormat /dev/mapper/topLuks
cryptsetup open /dev/mapper/topLuks bottomLuks
lsblk

Then you can make a filesystem and mount it:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/bottomLuks
mount /dev/mapper/bottomLuks ~/mnt/embeddedLuksTest

I've tested putting files on it and then unmounting & re-encrypting it, and the files are indeed still there upon decrypting and re-mounting.

Again, sorry if this is not news to anyone else, but I didn't realise this was possible before, and thought it was very cool when I found it out. Sharing in case other people didn't know and also find it cool :)