Over the last few weeks I’ve been making the horrifying leap from PHP5 to PHP8. I knew it was going to be a lot of work to upgrade all my various scripts and web pages but I’m nearing the end, just have some random CLI scripts still failing that I have to work through.

I’ve been making a big push this year to get all my servers caught up to supported operating system levels. Debian will truly run forever even when it really shouldn’t. I was happy to finally get my mail servers modernized last month. The old code I had relied on for managing spam scanning and such had been abandoned but I finally discovered rspamd which replaced everything plus does so much more. The first couple weeks saw an awful lot of server emails being marked as spam while I trained the new system, seems to be settling in nicely now though, and I created some new spam-trap mailboxes and sprinkled the addresses around several web pages. Nice to see their activity picking up again.

You might try ordering from ebay. I find a lot of vendors sell there, and at least you know you’re actually getting the product from the person you ordered from, rather than a box randomly stuffed with “similar” products from all sellers.

How does this compare with other self-hosted packages like Ollama? Does Odysseus have any unique features that others might not offer?

In my case, the server has four gigabit network ports. And I do in fact create bridges on them because nearly all of my services run on VMs (I run two identical servers for redundancy of the services, and run load balancing off the firewall). Honestly this isn’t really a matter of the exact interface names, but rather why the ability to give them the desired names was intentionally broken starting with Debian 11. And as a sidebar, also trying to understand why the newer system refuses to assign the predictable names, because if it did that then I would be free to simply rename them as ethX with the systemd link files the way udev used to. On the firewall with eight network ports, yeah having to give all new names to everything was a really big deal tied to a lot of different software packages. On these servers, though, there’s not much running except kvm and I only had to readdress the bridges to the new interface names and everything worked.

It’s just the principle of it that REALLY bugs me…

I’ve considered Devuan, but haven’t taken the plunge into it. The problem here is, at least to my understanding, that predictable naming is supposed to be a core part of the newer linux kernel, and since I can find no sign in dmesg that those names are even being attempted, it worries me that something very basic has been broken that I can’t go back to. I Just don’t know enough about it to risk taking down a live server to try rebuilding in a different distro without at least first understanding why exactly this particular thing is broken in Debian. “The devil you know” and all that…

Thanks for trying though, it could still easily be something I missed. And there’s the chance that somehow the BIOS is blocking systemd from setting the names but that really seems like an overreach of what the BIOS should be doing.

I mean it’s kind of cool how systemd multitasks starting up services, so like I can already ssh in before half the other things are running. And it’s certainly nice to have a lot more information now about running processes. But when it screws something up, it REALLY screws something up.

In this case, it’s just easier to remember eth0 for each of the servers, rather than having to look up the name each time I work on a different machine. There’s no software reason for it, it’s just for my own convenience. I can accept naming the interface to dmz0, it just really bugs me that debian no longer gives me an option to name things the way I want when I could easily make those changes on older versions.

BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-5.10.0-42-amd64 root=UUID=1a99d775-a924-43e4-9ffa-d170827cc8df ro consoleblank=600 quiet

It definitely help for re-world modeling, getting things figured out in advance. In the Spring of 2024 I decided to finally build a utility trailer I’ve been thinking about for years, and I modeled the whole thing in OpenScad down to the wiring and generating material lists (and yes, we got it built and have been using it through this past Summer). The fact that you can’t incrementally update variables makes some tasks stupidly difficult requiring a lot of needless redundancy, but I do like being able to write stuff out as code.

Maybe some day I’ll try Build123 or something else, but most of my projects are things where I just need to whip out a quick model, so I don’t want to deal with learning a whole new system at the same time. Case in point – yesterday I picked up a keyboard fro the thrift store but realized it was missing one of the folding feet (this one has two different sized stacked feet that fold out from each other). Half an hour later I’m making my first print, and another 15 minutes I’m ready to test the second foot piece. And I could have done it faster if I didn’t spend so much time capturing the details of the original feet. Point is, it’s hard to change when most of your needs are quickly covered with the existing software.

I’ve been using openscad to create a dual-filament direct drive print head for my Ender 3. Got the whole thing printed but I have to run a couple more wires up the cable harness to control the new servo and read the filament runout sensor.

Honestly, are there any HDDs that can really reach 6gb/s speeds? I haven’t seen any that could reach 3gb/s. My current array is all running on SATA-2 backplanes, but with 8 drives in the raid it clocks out at 460MB/s sustained (bytes, not bits). Considering my previous NAS could barely reach 70MB/s on a 6-disk array, I was quite pleased with the new setup.

Your server needs to have a static IP address. Once you have that, and have your DNS service set up, then you should be able to update your domain(s) to point to the new DNS. This new server doesn’t have to be your primary DNS entry for the domain(s), but it should be one of the first two entries. And that’s pretty much all you need to get started.

One other consideration is setting up the master/slave status of your DNS servers so you only have to make updates in one spot (helpful to ensure everything stays in sync). This isn’t a requirement, it just makes your life easier.

Nope, programming is like a black hole – once you’ve entered the event horizon it’s too late and you’ll never escape.

What do you mean by “traditional cad designers” and why is that important? I’m not really sure why that is something that should matter to me?

Aww man, I knew it was only a matter of time before someone was going to “force” me to learn python. Thanks for the link, I’ll take a look at this after dinner.

Another consideration… If you are a programmer type then OpenSCAD is a language-based program. I’ve been using it heavily for the past week designing a dual-filament extruder for my Ender 3, and last year I designed and built a utility trailer. As with anything it has its quirks, but I’m much more comfortable writing code and I always found the other GUI-oriented programs to be unintuitive.

I think my suggestion would be to use the PC as a dedicated firewall, but you will need at least two ethernet ports for that (one to connect to the ISP router, and the second for internal network). This lets you learn network security and control the traffic that can actually get to your other computers. You could also set up KVM to start running virtual machines here. The idea with a VM is to keep services separate and isolated, so like one VM to manage security cameras, another VM to host a game server, another one to host sonarr/radarr/jellyfin… etc.

When you are able to expand, your second physical machine should be your NAS. Get your storage space started, share it over NFS or samba, and move your backup/security camera/sonarr VMs over to this machine for direct access to the larger storage space. Pay attention to system usage and move your VMs to balance the cpu/memory resources. Eventually you may want to get a third machine dedicated more for hosting the game servers, maybe a web server to view the security camera feeds, or whatever.

You mentioned backing up Wikipedia… Have a look at the Kiwix project, you can already get access to regular backups for a lot of information sites.

Why does everyone think the term came from Star Wars? I know it was used in steampunk before then, and google suggests it goes back to a 1958 article about robots. Sorry, not trying to be pedantic, just feels like a lot of people give Star Wars unjust credit for things they didn’t actually create.

Don’t forget that managers think the same thing – if it’s free then it is somehow an inferior product but if you pay for something then that automatically makes it better. This applies forward as well… the more they pay for something, the “better” it must be.

For example… Cybertruck.

From my perspective, open-source products are greatly superior because you have the entire community of users and engineers working on a known issue, rather than a few paid engineers who may not even use the product. Even more importantly, the community will solve problems that a corporation has decided aren’t worth the effort or are “obsolete”.