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Show HN: I've built a nice home server OS

lightwhale.asklandd.dk

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Re: Show HN: I've built a nice home server OS

#71

Post by Zta77 »

tamimio wrote: post #24

I believe for anything home server (or even production), proxmox got you covered, it’s mature, stable, has strong community, and at the end of the day it’s still debian so you can mod it however you like. You can have containers, vms, firewalls, hdd zfs pools, backups, and more. And you can even use something like community scripts for easier installation, although always read the script before you install anything.…

Proxmox is great. I use it for experimenting with Lightwhale swarm clusters locally; I'm currently running 8 Lightwhale worker nodes with 512MB RAM each and no disk, and it's super fast and fits in my pocket.

I don't consider Lightwhale as an alternative to Proxmox. In fact, how do you even run a Docker container in Proxmox? Without booting Lightwhale in a VM first, I mean? ;)

Re: Show HN: I've built a nice home server OS

#72

Post by Zta77 »

tclancy wrote: post #33
coreyburnsdev wrote: post #13

can't imagine a world in which I'd download a little known distro to put on my home network and use as a server. also, doesn't fedora already have something like this already?

Game’s truly gone. I remember when all we did was try to find the most obscure indie band of a Linux distro, form emotional attachments and then argue their merits.

...and then proceed and do the same again, only with a window manager =)

Re: Show HN: I've built a nice home server OS

#73

Post by Zta77 »

wrxd wrote: post #26

Is the installation only imperative via the docker cli tool or do you support something more declarative like Docker compose?

Lightwhale comes with docker compose too! And docker buildx and git for good measure. This means you can clone your git repo, and docker compose up your stack immediately.

Re: Show HN: I've built a nice home server OS

#74

Post by cassianoleal »

nikolay wrote: post #65
chanux wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBF I went in expecting a novel OS.

Me, too! I first thought it was just clickbait, but then I realized it was the author's genuine thought, which is sad. I wonder why the popular Linux distro ranking site DistroWatch [0] is not called "OSWatch"! Well, I don't. The "OS" is CentOS, and NixOS is just branding. NixOS is a huge mod, yet it's still a distro! This is what Wikipedia says about NixOS: > NixOS is a Linux distribution built around the Nix packag…

By your definitions, are there any Linux-based operating systems?

Re: Show HN: I've built a nice home server OS

#75

Post by Zta77 »

ggm wrote: post #36

If this was built using zfs, it would have zvols and metadata in the fs for persistence. And the states would be perhaps more portable at a cost of .. zfs. Not a huge criticism, life is about choices.

Hello!

I went with Btrfs for persistence, and automated some things around that. For example, if you give Lightwhale two magic disks, it will automatically create a Btrfs RAID1. During persistence setup it will also create a few default subvolumes to fully support snapshots and rollback of the entire data filesystem. (Remember, the rootfs of the OS is still immutable, and is never part of the data filesystem). Besides snapshots and RAID, Btrfs has checksums which I think is a must.

I've heard lots of nice things about zfs, and I know it does snapshots and checksum too. But also that it eats huge amounts of memory for breakfast. I may not be updated on this, but I faintly remember some licensing issues, that potentially could cause problem if zfs was baked into an ISO like Lightwhale. Those are the main reasons why I'm reluctant to zfs and chose Btrfs.

But you're absolutely right, I have taken some radical choices with this dist. But most are deliberate and by design =)

Re: Show HN: I've built a nice home server OS

#76

Post by Zta77 »

hrimfaxi wrote: post #21

I noticed the code for the upgrade does not appear to be available. https://bitbucket.org/asklandd/lightwhale/src/master/

Thanks for letting me know. I really should delete the master branch because I don't use it. This is where the good stuff is: https://bitbucket.org/asklandd/lightwhale/src/3.0.0/

Re: Show HN: I've built a nice home server OS

#78

Post by nikolay »

cassianoleal wrote: post #74
nikolay wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me, too! I first thought it was just clickbait, but then I realized it was the author's genuine thought, which is sad. I wonder why the popular Linux distro ranking site DistroWatch [0] is not called "OSWatch"! Well, I don't. The "OS" is CentOS, and NixOS is just branding. NixOS is a huge mod, yet it's still a distro! This is what Wikipedia says about NixOS: > NixOS is a Linux distribution built around the Nix packag…

By your definitions, are there any Linux-based operating systems?

Yes - GNU/Linux [0] as Linux is just the kernel.

[0]: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html

Re: Show HN: I've built a nice home server OS

#79

Post by cassianoleal »

nikolay wrote: post #78
cassianoleal wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By your definitions, are there any Linux-based operating systems?

Yes - GNU/Linux [0] as Linux is just the kernel. [0]: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html

Where can I get one? Also, what about Busybox-based distros?

Re: Show HN: I've built a nice home server OS

#80

Post by Zta77 »

imrozim wrote: post #60
abrookewood wrote: post #38

Congrats on launching something (more than most of us will ever manage), but I am struggling to see why I would use this over something with more backing. There are a number of similar projects that have a very similar goal, but have the support of a large community and/or commercial sponsor: - Flatcar Container Linux: An open-source, immutable OS designed for automatic updates and large-scale container deployments.…

All those tools needed hours to setup this just boots and works.

Exactly!
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