smiletolerantly

joined 1 year ago

Yes, completely agree. It seems that the matrix foundation could easily take a different path to allow the community to flourish and third-party servers to have a much easier time. Since I'm not federated, I wouldn't even mind if whatever fork I'll end up on eventually says "fuck this, we're not following synapse specs any more".

But yeah, I am sure selling premium accounts on matrix.org is what will save the matrix ecosystem... ๐Ÿคฆ๐Ÿผโ€โ™€๏ธ

[โ€“] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Hm, fair enough, I actually have very little experience with XMPP. (Only through prosody, which I personally am on a war footing with.) From a cursory glance, I also couldn't find an Android lient I'd really want to use, but of course that is subjective.

In any case: I have a matrix server up and running, and it has been a pain to get friends and family on there; I do not want to do all of that again with a new protocol/clients. As long as it's sustainable, I want to stay with the same server installation, and that means choosing a conduwuit for me.

There's nothing technically wrong with it, it's just a glacial development speed. I tried contributing there myself when I wanted a specific feature (which had been requested years prior by someone else and was deemed a good idea), it took months before I even got a single comment back.

In the meantime, I had switched to conduwuit because it was a much, MUCH more active project. However, conduwuit has diverged substantially from conduit, including irreconcilable database changes, so it is not possible to migrate back, that would require starting from a fresh slate and loosing all user data.

[โ€“] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 2 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Understandable. Funny thing is, I'm not even federated; I think that keeps me away from a lot of drama.

But yeah. The drama sucks, and so does the Matrix Foundation. So many dumb decisions, so many years old issues that could easily boost acceptance and usability, but... Nah. No better alternatives around though if you want to own your data, have proper multi-client support, and at least the option to federate.

Nice, how's it been going?

Roger, will do.

Yeah, community driven sounds like unless there's new drama. But yeah, currently tending towards continuwuity. Purely vibes based from snooping around both repos.

 

If you've been selfhosting conduit or conduwuit, you probabl are aware that the conduwuit project was discontinued a couple months back.

I've been holding out on updating my matrix homeserver until it becomes clear which fork(s) will survive long term.

I feel like I can't put off updating for much longer now, plus the tuwunel nixpkg and -module were merged yesterday, so now the two most promising forks are both options for me.

Still, I'm unsure what route to take. Here's my thoughts:

  • not going through another round of this in a couple of months from now would be great, so stability and long-term maintenance promises would be great
  • I assume incompatibility between the forks, if not now then very soon; this is a "pick an option, then stick with it and pray" situation
  • tuwunel apparently has a full-time paid dev working on it now, which is great; at the same time, that means features will follow the priorities of the (as of now unknown) sponsor of the project
  • it is, however, the officially endorsed successor
  • it also seems like few other people are actively involved, putting in question development practices, reviews, and what happens should the lead dev throw in the towel
  • lastly, while there's been a lot of apparently rapid progress (with releases 1.0.0, 1.1.0, and 1.2.0 at quite a fast pace), the repo itself seems... empty? Few issues, few PRs, commentlessly-deleted issues
  • on the other hand, continuwuity seems more active by commit/contributors count, but is seemingly 100% volunteer work
  • they do seem to backport tuwunel changes and features, which is great!
  • they are not officially endorsed

In short: I fucking hate community drama. What fork did you go with? Is there anything else to consider? I just want an up-to-date matrix homeserver, and not to have to tell my users "sorry, starting from scratch because we picked the wrong fork..."

[โ€“] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

We have NixOS, Proxmox and TrueNAS in use.

  • TrueNAS on a dedicated NAS host. It's great for that, and has been super stable. The snapshotting works great, and all the little tasks associated with a NAS are taken care of without needing to spare a thought.
  • Proxmox as VMS host. You haven't mentioned it above, so I'll leave it at this: also works really well for its purpose.
  • NixOS: acouple dozen NixOS VMs runnign on the Proxmox hosts. I like the separation (i.e.: one VM <-> one task/service), but it's not necessary, esp. if you plan on using a stable branch. I absolutely love NixOS, and would never run server applications on anything else ever again. The documentation thing is trueish. There's not even close to the same documentation as with e.g. Arch and the Arch Wiki, but that makes sense when you think about it: instead of hundreds of lines of documentation, you hide that complexity behind an option, e.g. graphics.nvidia.enable = true; which then becomes pretty self-explanatory, at least if you are somewhat familiar with the ecosystem already. The way I'd recommend going about documentation with nix is this:
    • go to search.nixos.org/options, search for the service you would like to host. 90% of the time, the options and descriptions shown are all you need.
    • if an option is unclear, click on its "declared in" link. You'll be taken to the module source in nixpkgs. Look at what they are doing there/the comments explaining why. Often, this resolves any ambiguity, or helps you out with your goal.
    • if that did not help, check the NixOS wiki; often, common pitfalls are documented there, together with the nix expression to fix them.
    • another great way is to search GitHub for language:nix <thing you need to do>. As a random example: I recently wasn't sure how to configuring scaling in hyprland on NixOS, but searching for an appropriate term will quickly show you how other people have solved the same problem. It's not really documentation, but the declarative nature of nix means it's easy to find TONS of working examples via a github search.
    • all else failing, ask on discourse.nixos.org. Youล„ll usually get useful help very quickly there.

So, what's my advice?

If you are unfamiliar with NixOS, it's probably a bit of a headache getting a NAS to run satisfactory. Truenas works so well, there isn't really a need for nix. But running your services in nix is great, totally recommend!

Not sure, but they also support Borg, which definitely does.

Btw, nice read OP. Always great to see more Nix "in the wild".

[โ€“] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Yeah, but no dark magic involved.

  • build image
  • copy to proxmox ISO store
  • import, resize disk
  • start, wait to come online
  • read ssh pubkey, save it
  • rekey secrets
  • rebuild VM

The only "magic" parts are two nix modules for handling proper networking and hardware setup, and exposing required attributes to the script.

Works really well, zero manual config (beyond the services you want to run...) required on nix or proxmox side.

Nothing. People fearmonger

 

Five years ago, I bought a Supernote A5. It was (and mostly still is) a great device for reading and writing on an eInk display, and it runs plain old linux.

The deciding reason I went for this device instead of the competition is that I was "under the impression" that they were about to enable full SSH access to the device! Awesome!

"Why were you under that impression?", I hear the skeptics ask. Well, their spokesperson has stated that they would do so. Via mail, and on reddit, publicly, multiple times. I was still torn, so sent them a DM, asking if this was ineed factual. "Yes", they said, "the next quarterly update will enable SSH access!".

Great!

Well, it's been 5 years. They did not follow through. A couple updates were published, none contained the promised functionality, the spokesperson stopped answering questions about SSH. The last software update I received is from 2.5yrs ago. Mentions of the original Supernote A5 have largely been scrubbed from their website.

Let me be clear, the device still functions perfectly. But it is in danger of becoming e-waste because it is so needlessly complicated to get stuff on the device. I'm currently in need of an ebook reader with (ideally) OPDS capability, and I am pretty confident I'd be able to get something like koreader running on this, or at least just run a script to sync files over SSH. Also, I frankly feel wounded in my pride having a Linux device in my possession which refuses to do my bidding (I'm joking of course, but also I am 100% serious).

Here's all I know:

  • plugging it in via USB, the device reads as an MTP device, with access only to the documents/books/... stored on it
  • you can place an update.zip file (obtained from the SN website) into the root of that MTP directory, and upon reboot, the device will update. To me, this appears to be the most promising route of gaining access.
  • unfortunately, the zip file is encrypted. The decryption key clearly has to be known to the device, but since I have no access to it,...

I'm a software engineer, but I have zero knowledge of the "dark arts", so to speak. If anyone could help me (or point me into the right direction!), I would really be grateful. I don't want this (generally nice) product to turn into a paperweight instead of a paper replacement :(

 

Basically, the title. After years of inactivty, I'll be taking music (cello) lessons again, with my teacher of yesteryear, from whom I've moved half a country away.

She has suggested Zoom but is open to alternatives. I don't particularly like Zoom, plus I have a feeling better quality can be had through a custom solution - but I'm at a bit of a loss as to what exactly would be a good fit for this project.

Maybe Jitsi? Does someone here have experience with it and could tell me if it's possible to set something like a "target" audio quality?

For hardware, I basically have two options. Both are already in use, for different things, and have sufficient processing capabilities - albeit no GPU:

  • host everything at home. Plus: lowest possible latency from me to the server. Not sure how much that is worth though.
  • root server in the Hetzner cloud: much faster network speed. Again though, not sure how beneficial that is, the ultimate bottleneck will always be my upload speed (40Mbit)

OK, I realize that this post is a but of a random assortment of thoughts. I'd be really happy about suggestions and / or hearing about other's experiences with similar use-cases!

 

Hi,

not sure where else to post this. For a while now, I've unsuccessfully been trying to get WireGuard to work with Crunchyroll.

Setup is as follows:

  • dedicated server hosts a wg-quick instance in [neighboring country]
  • OPNSense acts as peer on a single IP
  • I have a rule for routing the entire traffic of some source device via that IP

This works just fine. Handshake successful, traffic is routed via the server. traceroute shows the server as the hop immediately after my device's local gateway. The connection is stable, and fast.

...except for Crunchyroll. The site / app itself is fine, but I can not, for the life of me, get a video to play. It just keeps loading forever.

I don't think this is an issue with CR recognizing that I'm not where I say I am - looking online, it seems pretty easy to use CR with a VPN. I've also tried from multiple other devices, all with the same symptom.

If anyone has suggestions, I'd love to hear them ๐Ÿ˜…

EDIT: ~~It was MTU. Had to manually set it to 1500 on both devices.~~

Nope, still the same issues. I was using the fallback interface there briefly.

EDIT: It WAS MTU related, I had to enable MSS clamping on the OPNSense.

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