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Cake day: July 28th, 2023

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  • Anafroj@sh.itjust.workstoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldCost-cutting tips?
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    1 year ago

    That’s the same thing. :) If you reduce computing load, you reduce the need for costly hardware and you reduce the need for energy, thus you reduce the amount of money needed to build and run your setup. There’s a saying in (software) engineering : “reducing energy consumption and increasing performances requires the same optimizations”. Make your code faster (by itself, not by buffing up hardware) and it consumes less energy. Make your application simpler, and it will run faster, and it will consume less energy. It’s not an absolute truth (it sometimes happen that you make your code faster and it consumes more energy), but it’s true most of the time.


  • Anafroj@sh.itjust.workstoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldCost-cutting tips?
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    1 year ago

    Basically, yes. You can configure most cron programs to mail task output to you (it’s usually done by setting the MAILTO variable in the crontab, provided sendmail is available on your system).

    I use that to do things like:

    0 9 11 10 * echo 'lunch with John Doe at 12:20'
    

    It sends me a mail, and I can see the upcoming events with crontab -l. If it’s not a recurring event, I then delete the rule.


  • Anafroj@sh.itjust.workstoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldCost-cutting tips?
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    1 year ago

    My favorite cost cutting tip is to avoid big webapps running on docker, and instead do with small UNIX utilities (cron instead of a calendar, text files instead of note taking app, rsync instead of a filehosting dropbox-like app, simple static webserver for file sharing, etc). This allows me to run my server on a simple Raspberry Pi, with less than 500mb of used RAM in average, and mininal energy consumption. So, total cost of the setup:

    • Raspberry Pi : 77€ x 2 = 144€ (I bought two to have a backup if the first one fails)
    • MicroSD 64gb : 13€ x 2 = 26€ (main and backup)
    • average energy consumption : 0.41€ (2kWh) per month

    With that, I run all services I need on a single machine, and I have a backup plan for recovery of both hardware and software.

    Getting used to a UNIX shell and to UNIX philosophy can take some time, but it’s very rewarding in making everything more simple (thus more efficient).


  • I’m using a pi4 8gb as my server, with a pi4 2gb as backup in case the first one dies. It’s a very classic server, running postfix/courier-imap for mails, lighttpd for web, bind9 for dns, ergo for irc, sqlite3 for databases. I also use fail2ban for IDS and cron to run tons of various task. All of that is hosted on a Gentoo linux OS.

    The one thing I don’t want to use is docker. I love docker for development or for deploying the main app at work, but it makes managing updates a nightmare for handling multiple services on my server (most your containers probably contain vulnerable software due to lack of system updates), and it eats resources needlessly. Then again, it’s made possible because I avoid the big webapps that usually need it.



  • “Git hosting” would be more appropriate. Unless that by frontend, you mean specifically web frontend, but that would be weird, because forges also provide the web backend part.

    Sourceforge was the biggest FOSS host in the 2000s, before GitHub (mainly because there was not much centralization to begin with). That train is long gone. :) Sure, the name and website Sourceforge still exist. Myspace, Digg and Yahoo do too. They are basically web ghosts, only an echo of what they once were.


  • Actually, I do use git bare repos for CD too. :) The ROOT/hooks/post-update executable can be anything, which allows to go wild : on my laptop, a push to a bare repos triggers deploy to all the machines needing it (on local or remote networks), by pushing through ssh to other bare repos hosted there, which builds and installs locally, given they all have their own post-update scripts ; all of that thanks to a git push and scripts at the proper paths. I don’t think any forge could do it more conveniently.

    For me the main interest of forges is to publish my code and get it discovered (before GitHub, getting people to find your repos hosted on your blog’s server was a nightmare). Even for the collaboration, I could do with emails. That being said, most people aren’t on top of their inbox, in which mails from family are mixed with work mails and commercial spam in one giant pile of unread items, so it’s a good thing for them we have those issue trackers.







  • They do maintain the simplicity of the line oriented protocol, so I’m fine with that. :)

    That’s the strongest point of IRC, IMO, and why it’s kept so simple : every instruction is a plain text line, period. It makes it incredibly simple to build on top of it. You don’t need to introduce a dependency to a project that probably will be abandonned in a few years, at which point you’ll have to rewrite your codebase to use an other dependency, for a few years. You just open a TCP connection, you read lines from the socket and write lines to it, each line is its own instruction structured in well known fields, and that’s it. It’s so simple!

    As long as IRCv3 sticks to that, they have my blessing. :)



  • Take back the control on your data, that’s the whole point… :) Where are you regularly saving data? Those are the prime candidates. Look at self-hosted alternatives for those services. I know big webapps hosted in docker containers managed by kubernetes is all the rage around here, but you can often find Unix style equivalent for such services, the main advantage of putting it on a server being to be able to access it from multiple devices. But you do you, if you prefer hosting big webapps, that’s fine too. :)


  • I organize my crontab by having group of tasks (the programs, the holidays, the housecleaning, etc). And of those groups, the events (the non recurring tasks) come last. So I just list the crontab (crontab -l) and the list of things to come print to the screen, that block being at the end of the file. It’s hard to do better than a text file to list things. :)

    I don’t know if there is a program that lists like “what is coming this month” if you really want to filter out the rest, but it should be easy enough to write, given the format of cron rules:

    crontab -l | grep '*' | awk '{print $4 "," $3 "," $2 "," $1 " " $0 }' | sort -n | grep -E "^$(date '+%-m')"
    
    • crontab -l : list the crontab
    • grep '*' : keeps only rules (removing blank lines and comments)
    • awk […] : print the whole line ($0), prepend by the 4th field (the month), the 3rd (the day), the 2nd (the hour) and the 1st (the minutes)
    • sort -n : sort everything numerically, so that all tasks are now in their execution date order (I made awk seperate the fields with a , character so it keeps sorting numerically past the first number)
    • date '+%-m : prints the current month, not zero padded (thanks to the ‘-’)
    • grep -E '^date' : keep only lines which starts with the current month number

    You put that in a script (like ~/bin/upcoming_events) and you’re done. And then, you can call it from cron every monday get what’s coming next mailed to you. :)

    This could but refined further to display dates in a more friendly format. But as usual, Unix is your friend. :)


  • I’m going to pass for the crazy person around, but so be it : cron.

    Cron can be easily configured to send mails (MAILTO variable when using standard cron), provided sendmail is available on the system. If a command called by cron outputs anything, it will send a mail with the content, which is useful by itself to warn when something goes wrong with a cron task, but also allows to do things like this:

    0 9 28 9 * echo birthday John
    

    It’s really easy to get used to the syntax, it’s just going from more precise to less precise, so it’s “minute, hour, day, month, *”. The last one can usually be ignored (it’s the day of the week, I must have used it twice in my life). So here, “0 9 28 9”, you read it backward and it gives : September, 28th, 9:00. Piece of cake when you get a bit of practice. And cron is everywhere, so no need to install anything. Although, since I run it on my laptop, I use fcron, which has a nice feature to run ASAP tasks which should have ran if the computer was not shut down. This way, I never miss an alert.

    I use it for recurring notes (like birthday, paperwork, house cleaning tasks, holidays, etc), but also as reminders of specific dates when I expect a delivery, have a meeting, etc. For the most important messages, I make it use a script that will make a destkop notification (with notify-send) and have a voice read the message (with mimic). And of course, I also use it to actually launch programs. :)