I have a bicycle crate in my rear rack (40L from memory). I can just throw my backpack and/or shopping in there and be on my way. No issues transporting when empty. I avoid riding in the rain but I guess a waterproof bag would help for that. It’s durable, the main concern is the rear rack. I had to replace the cheaper rack that I bought last year after the welding snapped in a few places over time (I had it held together with duct tape for a while). My new rack should be much more sturdy this time around.

I have access to borrow a car which I do every few weeks so I don’t need to over engineer my bike setup too much.

Yeah it is a bit of a pain. I currently only have a few users. Tooling-wise there are ways to tail the journals (if you’re using journalctl) and collate them but I haven’t gotten around to doing this myself yet.

That’s probably a fair point. I can’t say too much as I haven’t touched Windows desktop or server too much.

Could be apples vs oranges here though as we’re talking about getting started versus well established setup, but my current employer is looking at adopting Ansible + Packer for imaging and partially Ansible-managing Windows servers where it makes sense because of limitations in SCCM and GPO. As far as I can see across the divide Windows Server isn’t all smooth sailing.

I can’t say I’ve managed Linux desktops at scale (so technically I should leave it there) but I do manage several hundred Linux VMs with Ansible, and I manage all of my PCs with Ansible. Desktops are a different ballgame to servers, dealing with end users and all, but I still don’t think it would be that hard once it’s been set up.

That sucks :( I’m pretty much in the same boat. I get to use a Linux desktop at work on the proviso that I don’t raise support requests. We use Microsoft for nearly everything so naturally it’s an uphill battle. The web UI is quite buggy and “not recommended” by my org. Teams doesn’t support Firefox so I have to run a separate browser especially for it.

But aside from interfacing with Microsoft everything just works, and really nicely.

That’s awesome - great to hear about Linux desktops bring used by non-techies especially in a company.

How was it received out of interest?

At work we use separate clusters for various things. We built an Ansible collection to manage the lot so it’s not too much overhead.

For home use I skipped K8s and went to rootless Quadlet manifests. Each quadlet is in a separate non-root user with lingering enabled to reduce exposure from a container breakout.

It’s called Microsoft Clarity, and yes, Teams does it https://clarity.microsoft.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_replay

Securing proprietary hardware against peeps installing alt OSes

Technically XFS is also a CoW filesystem, but it doesn’t have the vast array of features that ZFS does like volume management, snapshots, send/recv etc. It does have reflink support which I guess is a kind of snapshot for a file.

OpenZFS is under a completely FOSS license but it’s incompatible with the GPL and can’t really ever be merged into the Linux kernel. The workaroundids to provide it as source code which gets compiled as a module every time there’s a new kernel via dkms.

More controversially, Canonical ship OpenZFS pre-compiled in Ubuntu which some lawyers believe to be infringing on ZFS’ codebase.

Honestly the OpenZFS situation on Linux is probably the biggest single reason for the growing interest in btrfs and bcachefs, the former slowly becoming default on more Linux distros over time and lots of investment from SUSE and Facebook AFAIK.

ext3 had journaling, but not ext2. Also ext3 doesn’t really exist anymore as it was merged into the ext4 driver which can read the old format.

It is fast. It’s the recommended filesystem for MinIO and default for RHEL 7 and above. XFS and ext4 are often recommended for databases if no other filesystem-level features (like snapshots) are needed. XFS has slightly more features than ext4 like CoW and reflink support.

The company behind GitLab is seeking buyout offers, so make of that what you will.

My employer uses GitLab CE and it’s pretty good, and it is FOSS. The EE version is “open core” so not really FOSS.

If I were starting from scratch I’d be looking into Gitea/Forgejo as well.

You could use HAProxy on the client side to load balance apps in multiple locations, but it really depends on the application.

I like to manage my software with Ansible but Docker stack files might make it simple enough for you.

Yeah, sorry it was a long time ago (like 10+ years) but I checked and it would’ve been the --overwrite arg.

The manpage for the older ntfsclone command has it:

Clone NTFS on /dev/hda1 to /dev/hdc1: ntfsclone --overwrite /dev/hdc1 /dev/hda1

Moral of the story was to RTFM 😂

ntfsclone /dev/sdc /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb was a blank filesystem and /dev/sdc was my Windows filesystem.

ntfsclone man page

It ran for less than a second and didn’t take me long to figure out what happened. That’s the story of how I stopped using Windows.

Yeah, too frequent and too buggy. It got annoying having to do upgrades every six months and have to deal with all the new bugs that came with it.

Basically give me Debian-style biannual releases or Arch-style rolling releases.

There’s also dotnet (.NET Core) available on most distros which is an open source subset of .NET by Microsoft

See https://fiodar.substack.com/p/differences-between-mono-and-net-core

I use Debian at home on my homeserver and a mix of Debian and Arch for my workstations. Most of my stuff is managed with Ansible to make rebuilding easier and most workloads in podman containers.

Personally I don’t overthink the distro thing. I recently started using Arch and quite like it. I’ve noticed packages that are available in Debian but not Arch and vice-versa. Debian Stable is nice because it’s just, well, stable.

Fedora has an annoying release cadence IMO. I have experienced desktop bugs in the early GA releases before which put me off. If I wanted instability I would sooner go with Arch (and I am yet to have many issues with Arch yet).

If I were to go with a BSD for a home server it would probably be OpenBSD or FreeBSD. OpenBSD has vmm and a bunch of tooling around it, and FreeBSD has bhyve and jails. I haven’t taken the plunge because Linux works and it’s what I know.

These days I hear about people using proxmox on their homeserver with LXC containers and/or VMs.