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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I strongly recommend ZFS as a filesystem for this as it can handle your sync, backup, and quota needs very well. It also has data integrity guarantees that should frankly be table stakes in this application. Truenas is an easy way to accomplish this, and it can run docker containers and VMs if you like.

    Tailscale is a great way to connect them all, and connect to your nas when you aren’t home. You can share devices between tailnets, so you don’t all have to be on the same Tailscale account.

    I’ll caution against nextcloud, it has a zillion features but in my experience it isn’t actually that good at syncing files. It’s complicated to set up, complicated to maintain, and there are frequent bugs. Consider just using SMB file sharing (built into truenas), or an application that only syncs files without trying to be an entire office suite as well.

    For your drive layouts, I’d go with big drives in a mirror. This keeps your power and physical space requirements low. If you want, ZFS can also transparently put metadata and small files on SSDs for better latency and less drive thrashing. (These should also be mirrored.) Do not add an L2ARC drive, it is rarely helpful.

    The boxes are kinda up to you. Avoid USB enclosures if at all possible. Truenas can be installed on most prebuilt NAS boxes other than synology, presuming it meets the requirements. You can also build your own. Hot swap is nice, and a must-have if you need normies to work on it. Label the drive serial number on the outside so you can tell them apart. Don’t go for less than 4 bays, and more is better even if you don’t need them yet. You want as much RAM as feasibly possible; ZFS uses it for caching, and it gives you room to run containers and VMs.










  • The desktop environment is all the stuff like the taskbar, the settings menus, the application launcher, the login screen, that kind of thing. It’s the system level user interface.

    You choose which one by which distro you download. Linux mint uses cinnamon, Ubuntu and fedora use gnome. There are “flavors” of Ubuntu and fedora that use KDE. That’s why I suggested ventoy: you can download a few different ones and boot into them without making a new thumb drive.

    If you don’t feel like bothering with any of that, just use Linux mint. It’s good.


    • before you switch, sort out your apps. Look at what you use on windows, see if it runs on Linux. If not, find a replacement that does and test it out.
    • Most Linux distros can boot into a desktop from a thumb drive. You can play and test without touching your windows installation.
    • in that vein, ventoy is neat. You can make a bootable drive and drop ISOs in a folder to boot from. No messing with etcher or whatever it’s called
    • desktop environment matters as much as the distro. Check out gnome, KDE, and cinnamon.






  • People want them to conveniently power their house during an outage. Plug one end into a generator, the other into a random socket, and poof! You have power (so long as your house isn’t drawing more than whatever breaker you’re plugged into)

    Problem is unless you turned off the whole-house-breaker, you are now feeding electricity back upstream into the grid. This is very bad. The friendly linemen who are working to get your power back on can’t de-energize the lines they’re trying to fix and will have a hell of a time working out which house is causing the problem.



  • Dudebro, I write software and run servers for a living. Admittedly I don’t work with python, but I have developed web applications that run both on bare metal and in docker containers and I’m telling you that the amount of fuckery required to spin up anything on bare metal will 99% of the time be more than what’s needed to spin up the same application in a container. The end result will be more brittle and more likely to conflict with other software on the same machine.

    Also, sure it’s not hard to install HASS in a pyenv now, because the dev team specifically ensured it. Maybe that requires tradeoffs that they don’t want to make anymore?

    Seriously quit being a dick to people in niche software communities, it’s pathetic