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The Internet of Unprofitable Things

strugglers.net

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Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things

#81

Post by Wowfunhappy »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #63
toomuchtodo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logged in just to upvote your comments. This is a place of intellectual curiosity, and I don’t understand those who expect knowledge to be spoon fed to them. If you don’t know a term, search engine it and work your way down the stack. You might find yourself pleasantly surprised you’re providing an NTP server in the NTP global DNS pool.

> search engine it... That is, go to google.com or DuckDuckGo.com and search for it... I mean, open the browser, click on location bar (on the top) and write... That is, if you are on Windows, click Start menu (which is now 4 rectangles),... Nevermind... /s

I use Safari on macOS.

When I need to google a term, I highlight it, and then press ⌘C, ⌘T, ⌘V, enter. (Copy the search term, open a new tab, paste into url/search bar, search term)

I've gotten quite fast at the keyboard sequence; it takes maybe one second total. I imagine I could make this process even faster with a plugin, But I see no need.

I would like to think that most Windows machines would let you be similarly performant by default. But if not, that's further evidence in my book that Windows just sucks...

I will note that some acronyms can be annoyingly un-googlable, as the same one stands for a wide variety of different terms. This problem does not apply to ntp, however, which comes up right away.

Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things

#82

Post by zestyping »

alexandros wrote: post #38

Device fleets are incredibly hard to get right, and if you have no updateability, you have to nail them the first time. For someone coming from a cloud background, it's a jungle out there, where all sorts of "easy" or "solved" problems are nothing of the sort. As a sort of PSA, I want to plug the work that we have done at balena.io (formerly known as resin.io) to solve problems like these for everyone deploying Linux…

This looks really cool. I may be deploying a fleet of Raspberry Pi or similar servers in the near future and this might save us a ton of headaches.

The target context is a medical facility in a remote location without Internet (or extremely limited Internet), though. Is there a way to distribute updates by USB stick?

What's the best place to read stories of people who have tried deploying with Balena on RasPi-type servers and/or contexts without Internet access, and learn about their successes and difficulties?

Thanks!

Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things

#83

Post by Game_Ender »

alexandros wrote: post #38

Device fleets are incredibly hard to get right, and if you have no updateability, you have to nail them the first time. For someone coming from a cloud background, it's a jungle out there, where all sorts of "easy" or "solved" problems are nothing of the sort. As a sort of PSA, I want to plug the work that we have done at balena.io (formerly known as resin.io) to solve problems like these for everyone deploying Linux…

I have looked at your stack and it’s very cool. One thing I was most curious about is the long term plan for your docker fork. Are you going to upstream changes or APIs so you don’t have to maintain the fork?

The other question I have is about the stability of docker itself at scale. I worry about the reliability of essentially developer/server tooling in an embedded space where there is no ops team to help it along. Have you had any issues?

Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things

#84

Post by walrus01 »

zestyping wrote: post #82
alexandros wrote: post #38

Device fleets are incredibly hard to get right, and if you have no updateability, you have to nail them the first time. For someone coming from a cloud background, it's a jungle out there, where all sorts of "easy" or "solved" problems are nothing of the sort. As a sort of PSA, I want to plug the work that we have done at balena.io (formerly known as resin.io) to solve problems like these for everyone deploying Linux…

This looks really cool. I may be deploying a fleet of Raspberry Pi or similar servers in the near future and this might save us a ton of headaches. The target context is a medical facility in a remote location without Internet (or extremely limited Internet), though. Is there a way to distribute updates by USB stick? What's the best place to read stories of people who have tried deploying with Balena on RasPi-type se…

please do yourself a favor and don't remotely deploy rpi or anything that uses microsd cards for OS image and boot. The write lifetime of those, even using "industrial" cards, will mean a huge failure rate even with very light usage. Only use some sort of real sata3 or nvme bus SSD.

Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things

#85

Post by solarkraft »

alexandros wrote: post #38

Device fleets are incredibly hard to get right, and if you have no updateability, you have to nail them the first time. For someone coming from a cloud background, it's a jungle out there, where all sorts of "easy" or "solved" problems are nothing of the sort. As a sort of PSA, I want to plug the work that we have done at balena.io (formerly known as resin.io) to solve problems like these for everyone deploying Linux…

> If you have no updateability, you have to nail them the first time

I would go a bit more radical: I'd say you'd have a problem.

Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things

#86

Post by alexandros »

Game_Ender wrote: post #83
alexandros wrote: post #38

Device fleets are incredibly hard to get right, and if you have no updateability, you have to nail them the first time. For someone coming from a cloud background, it's a jungle out there, where all sorts of "easy" or "solved" problems are nothing of the sort. As a sort of PSA, I want to plug the work that we have done at balena.io (formerly known as resin.io) to solve problems like these for everyone deploying Linux…

I have looked at your stack and it’s very cool. One thing I was most curious about is the long term plan for your docker fork. Are you going to upstream changes or APIs so you don’t have to maintain the fork? The other question I have is about the stability of docker itself at scale. I worry about the reliability of essentially developer/server tooling in an embedded space where there is no ops team to help it along.…

Hey there -- so this is a bit of a terminological thing, but we don't consider balenaEngine to be a docker fork -- it's a sibling project descending from the Moby Project, just like Docker, and of course highly copmpatible with Docker. The things we've done in balenaEngine aren't things that Docker would do. Shrinking the size to a quarter, removing Swarm, adding container deltas, changing the tradeoffs around durability -- most of the changes we have made relate to the embedded use case. As such, we intend to keep evolving balenaEngine alongside Docker, also because it's important for us to control the size of the binary. It goes into our root partition, and if Docker keeps adding things to their engine, we can't have that variable affect our ability to update devices.

We've done a lot of things to make sure balenaEngine is rock solid in an embedded environment, and our fleetOps team is pretty hardcore in helping customers get out of hard situations (which help us further evolve the OS and the engine to avoid those by default).

Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things

#87

Post by alexandros »

zestyping wrote: post #82
alexandros wrote: post #38

Device fleets are incredibly hard to get right, and if you have no updateability, you have to nail them the first time. For someone coming from a cloud background, it's a jungle out there, where all sorts of "easy" or "solved" problems are nothing of the sort. As a sort of PSA, I want to plug the work that we have done at balena.io (formerly known as resin.io) to solve problems like these for everyone deploying Linux…

This looks really cool. I may be deploying a fleet of Raspberry Pi or similar servers in the near future and this might save us a ton of headaches. The target context is a medical facility in a remote location without Internet (or extremely limited Internet), though. Is there a way to distribute updates by USB stick? What's the best place to read stories of people who have tried deploying with Balena on RasPi-type se…

Hey there -- we have a bunch of case studies on our blog, click the "case study" links on this page -- https://www.balena.io/customers/

And if you're interested in a board that is as easy to program as the Pi but more robust, you can check out -- https://www.balena.io/blog/introducing-project-fin-a-board-f...

Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things

#89

Post by blfr »

jsjohnst wrote: post #58
alaties wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have your own dedicated IP range and you are advertising routes correctly, then you're as close to ownership of your IP addresses as Google or Facebook are of theirs. ARIN and RIPE control allocations, but do not control routing to allocated ranges.

I think the point GP was making is that you don’t “own” IP addresses, you effectively “lease” them. If you don’t pay your ARIN (or others) dues, you’ll lose them.

Sure but that is also true of a domain name.

Re: The Internet of Unprofitable Things

#90

Post by jiveturkey »

all too common. this happens for the simple reason that such devices are created by people that have never deployed anything to the field, and never worked under anyone who has. that and of course the pressure to get something to market quickly.
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