cyclohexane

Ever had a question about Linux but felt too afraid to ask? Well now's your chance, ask any question about Linux, no matter how noob or repeated it is, and I and others will help answer them.

Previous noob question thread: https://lemmy.ml/post/14261893

I'm looking into hosting one of these for the first time. From my limited research, XMPP seems to win in every way, which makes me think I must be missing something. Matrix is almost always mentioned as the de-facto standard, but I rarely saw arguments why it is better than XMPP?

Xmpp seems way easier to host, requiring less resources, has many more options for clients, and is simpler and thus easier to manage and reason about when something goes wrong.

So what's the deal?

Whether you're really passionate about RPC, MQTT, Matrix or wayland, tell us more about the protocols or open standards you have strong opinions on!

I thought I'll make this thread for all of you out there who have questions but are afraid to ask them. This is your chance!

I'll try my best to answer any questions here, but I hope others in the community will contribute too!

Curious to know the coolest things you achieved by configuring your kernel. I know kernel config can be boring, but I'm hoping someone will have an impressive answer.

For me I have a very lightweight kernel that runs wayland on nvidia without any issues to date.

I'll start with mine. yes part of this was to brag about my somewhat but not too unusual setup. But I also wanna learn from your setups!

Anyways: I primarily use Gentoo Linux.

I have two headless servers: a Raspberry Pi 4B and a Oracle cloud VM (free tier). Both running OpenRC, and both were running mainline kernel with custom config (I recently switched the Pi to PiFoundation kernel due to some issues). The raspberry pi boots from SSD and has no sd card inserted.

Both servers were running musl libc instead of glibc for a while. This gave me a couple of random issues, but eventually I got tired and switched back to glibc.

I have a desktop running gentoo and a laptop running arch, but hoping to switch the laptop to gentoo soon.

Both are daily driving wayland (the desktop had nvidia card and used for gaming). The desktop is running a kernel with a minimal config that compiles in 2-3 minutes.

What's your unusual setup like?

Tiling window manager users: how exactly do you use yours?

Do you have advanced keybindings for bringing up frequently used programs?

Are there less common layouts you use frequently?

Do you use any advanced or fancy features?

Context

I want to host public-facing applications on a server in my home, without compromising security. I realize containers might be one way to do this, and want to explore that route further.

Requirements

I want to run applications within containers such that they

• Must not be able to interfere with applications running on host
• Must not be able to interfere with other containers or applications inside them
• Must have no access or influence on other devices in the local network, or otherwise compromise the security of the network, but still accessible by devices via ssh.

Note: all of this within reason. I understand that sometimes there may be occasional vulnerabilities, like in kernel for example, that would eventually get fixed. Risks like this within reason I am willing to accept.

What I found so far

• Running containers in rootless mode: in other words, running the container daemon with an unprivileged host user
• Running applications in container under unprivileged users: the container user under which the container is ran should be unprivileged
• Networking: The container's networking must be restricted. I am still not sure how to do this and shall explore it more, but would appreciate any resources.

Alternative solution

I have seen bubblewrap presented as an alternative, but it seems like it is not intended to be used directly in this manner, and information about using it for this is scarce.

Image Alt Text: "After downloading a 2.5GB movie

Me: Presses play Movie unsupported file" A person is shown with eyes on her laptop punching the wall beside her, causing it to crack.

EDIT: I enabled CONFIG_MSDOS_PARTITION and that caused it to work. It had nothing to do with the device itself but the partition type on the sd card.

Thank you do much rattking for the help!

Original post:

Hi all, I am using a custom configured linux kernel (Gentoo), with very few things enabled. It has done me very well so far and taught me a bunch, but there's one small issue I have been having lately that is annoying. My SD-card reader (a USB device) is not working, but it works perfectly fine on my arch linux laptop without any kernel configurations.

Is it possible to tell which drivers or kernel configurations I need by looking at the laptop that is working?

More context about the issue

On the machine where it is not working, after plugging the device in, I see this in lsblk output:

NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda           8:0    1  59.5G  0 disk 
nvme0n1     259:0    0 400G  0 disk 
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1    0     1G  0 part /boot
└─nvme0n1p2 259:2    0 400G  0 part /

The device does show sda but no sda/sda1. This is opposite to the laptop, where I do see a sda1 below the sda device, which I can mount using mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/point

What I tried

I tried enabling the following kernel configurations: MMC MMC_BLOCK MMC_SDHCI MMC_SDHCI_PCI MMC_RICOH_MMC MMC_SDHCI_ACPI

Still, this did not change the result.

I tried looking into the logs, but could not find anything interesting. I am using the sysklogd system logger instead of systemd's journalctl

The reader I bought

I bought this a long time ago from amazon: https://algopix.com/products/B08N4N7Q7J-zhoubin-usb-30-sd-card-reader-for-sdxc-sdhc-sd-mmc-rsmmc-micro-sdxc-micro-sd

Yes I know I cheaped out. But it worked for me until I tried it on this one computer, so I wish to make it work.

Final Question

How can I make this work?

I am wanting to self host a fediverse instance. I don't hope to make it big. Hoping for 200 users at most, and I won't advertise it heavily so it'll probably be a while before it gets there.

Is it a bad idea to host something like this on local hardware at home? I have a lot of local-only self hosted services, and I wouldn't want those to be compromised.

But my biggest fear is overloading my network. I already don't get the fastest signal in some parts of my house, and I am worried the extra traffic might put more pressure on the network.

What are your thoughts on hosting local? Should I just avoid the headache and host on public instance?