171–180 of 241 posts
Slightly off topic: What's currently the free Linux distribution with the longest support cycle? For a while I used CentOS 7 on all of those small VMs, because it got security updates for a really long time. With minimal risk of breaking things on updates. PS: after a bit of research Alma/Rocky Linux are probably the best choices for now. 10 years of support. But are they maintained well?
I recently switched from Debian based servers to OpenBSD and I have never been happier. I wish I would have done it much, much earlier.
Can you detail the transition? What were the pain points? I feel like you lose a lot of the selling point of OpenBSD as soon as you start pulling from ports, but how could you do anything productive without it
But I personally don't really use OpenBSD for security. Sure, good security is important, but for a simple person, I think any updated OS, with good passwords/pubkey auth, good config, being careful etc etc... Is good enough.
OpenBSD is a coherent OS. It's simple (for geeks), and you can use it, by just using the documentation. There's no need for looking up tutorials really, because you don't have to read a 500 page book to understand certain tools, just basic man pages and some computer science knowledge.
With OpenBSD, you go back to a simpler time. Without all the hectic bullshit and an ever-faster pace of constant changes that makes our lives worse, rather than better. The only useful thing it can't do is gaming - with some exceptions, for that I use Windows.
Talking about ports again: OpenBSD comes with batteries included. Not everything though, but you don't really need the ports that much for just a server, if you aren't doing anything complex.
I also use it on desktop/laptop systems, booting it up (yes, it's relatively slow...) always gets me to a state of tranquility. The good ol' days. Maybe that's just my type of brain, but life needs to become simpler again.
Really, what post-2010 information technology has really improved our well-being? Can't think of much.
OpenBSD may have to many rough edges for a desktop system though, even for most geeks. But for those, there is FreeBSD (have it on one laptop). Just get a well-supported machine for that.
Slightly off topic: What's currently the free Linux distribution with the longest support cycle? For a while I used CentOS 7 on all of those small VMs, because it got security updates for a really long time. With minimal risk of breaking things on updates. PS: after a bit of research Alma/Rocky Linux are probably the best choices for now. 10 years of support. But are they maintained well?
I don't have data, but my guess would be Debian or Slackware
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is something like live patching. One reason mainframes and micros are still around us, is that you can change almost everything between hardware and software without downtime. It is also available in commercial surviving UNIXes, and as paid for feature in some Linux distros, although not to the extent that those grandparent systems are capable of.
> One reason mainframes and micros are still around us, is that you can change almost everything between hardware and software without downtime. We have some Sun V880s at work and I'm fairly sure the only part you cannot change with the power on and system running is the motherboard itself. And I would not be surprised if some ex-Sun Gandalf Beard "well akshully"s this comment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is something like live patching. One reason mainframes and micros are still around us, is that you can change almost everything between hardware and software without downtime. It is also available in commercial surviving UNIXes, and as paid for feature in some Linux distros, although not to the extent that those grandparent systems are capable of.
The problem with live patching is twofold. First, you might not reload everything in memory, so it will be patched on disk but not in process. Second, you have not tested that the system can boot to a functional system. Say you have done live patching for 5 years and never rebooted, and then you have a power loss or hardware failure/upgrade that takes the system down. When you try to bring it back up, it doesn't work…
All this "we must reboot to test" is bullshit excuses by unqualified workers
The biggest mistake I made was high uptime. arjie.com was up for 10 years plus on a Hetzner VPS so that by the time they wanted to sunset the machine underlying I had no idea what my teenage self had set up. I have the backups but the site hasn’t been up in a decade… Nowadays I build things so that they move and I have moved things about a bit so I know they work.
Indeed, for a VM, high uptime makes little sense, because a reboot takes a few seconds, and an upgrade requires no downtime, just switching the DNS to a new instance. For a physical machine which you can't easily copy, it's a different story.
Slightly off topic: What's currently the free Linux distribution with the longest support cycle? For a while I used CentOS 7 on all of those small VMs, because it got security updates for a really long time. With minimal risk of breaking things on updates. PS: after a bit of research Alma/Rocky Linux are probably the best choices for now. 10 years of support. But are they maintained well?
I see no reason not to go with a rolling release distro for personal servers. Run all the services in containers and have the base OS auto-update itself as often as it needs. Went with openSUSE MicroOS myself, it updates and reboots almost daily so I can be pretty confident my server is healthy and it's atomic so if something does break and I don't feel like dealing with it, I can just click rollback button from cock…
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Thanks! I don't care much about being fully RHEL compatible, or no ABI changes at all. I just want a system that gets security fixes quickly with as little chances of breaking things as possible.
How about a lightweight immutable distro, like say Fedora CoreOS or openSUSE MicroOS? Fedora CoreOS in particular has had a good track record delivering patches quickly. Like for CopyFail was pushed to the stable channel in about a day, IIRC, but the patch was already available within a few hours of disclosure in the "next" / testing channel. Talos and Flatcar are also worth considering if you want an even smaller at…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The biggest mistake I made was high uptime" Quite. I'm old enough to remember machine uptime being a badge of honour. However, being older and not really wiser, I look for service uptime these days. Yes we did have similar back in the day, that's why MX and the like DNS records exist. Old school clusters were pretty esoteric but the lessons were learned (split brain n that) and that's why we still argue the toss wit…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain_(computing) The more you know! >a Proxmox cluster with two nodes is fucked and why we recommend an additional "witness". Reminds me of the three Magi from Evangelion: https://magi.kinta.ma/
need a third one to confirm which of the 2 is accurate