moonpiedumplings @ moonpiedumplings @programming.dev

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18

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433

Joined

2 yr. ago

Straying away from utilities, games are always fun to host. I got started with self hosting by hosting a minecraft server, but there are plenty of options.

So instead you decided to go with Canonical's snap and it's proprietary backend, a non standard deployment tool that was forced on the community.

Do you avoid all containers because they weren't the standard way of deploying software for "decades" as well? (I know people that actually do do that though). And many of my issues about developers and vendoring, which I have mentioned in the other thread I linked earlier, apply to containers as well.

In fact, they also apply to snap as well, or even custom packages distributed by the developer. Arch packages are little more than shell scripts, Deb packages have pre/post hooks which run arbitrary bash or python code, rpm is similar. These "hooks" are almost always used for things like installing. It's hypocritical to be against curl | bash but be for solutions like any form of packages distributed by the developers themselves, because all of the issues and problems with curl | bash apply to any form of non-distro distributed packages — including snaps.

You are are willing to criticize bash for not immediately knowing what it does to your machine, and I recognize those problems, but guess what snap is doing under the hood to install software: A bash script. Did you read that bash script before installing the microk8s snap? Did you read the 10s of others in the repo's used for doing tertiary tasks that the snap installer also calls?

# Try to symlink /var/lib/calico so that the Calico CNI plugin picks up the mtu configuration.

The bash script used for installation doesn't seem to be sandboxed, either, and it runs as root. I struggle to see any difference between this and a generic bash script used to install software.

Although, almost all package managers have commonly used pre/during/post install hooks, except for Nix/Guix, so it's not really a valid criticism to put say, Deb on a pedestal, while dogging on other package managers for using arbitrary bash (also python gets used) hooks.

But back on topic, in addition to this, you can't even verify that the bash script in the repo is the one you're getting. Because the snap backend is proprietary. Snap is literally a bash installer, but worse in every way.

Except k3s does not provide a deb, a flatpak, or a rpm.

In my opinion, you are starting too big. It's better to start smaller. Many locations have a "Linux User Group" or "hackerspace" or a "Computing Club". (Those are exact keywords you can try searching for).

And often times, those organizations host their own small set of services for their members. For example, when I was searching for help on how to set up something with Kubernetes, I came across this blog, where the blog author hosts services for their "Chaos Computing Club", like proxmox, nextcloud (has a calendar app), matrix, and forgejo.

Instead of trying to spin up a set of services for the whole "FOSS Community" start smaller and just host for your local groups. Maybe your local hackerspace already hosts these services.

To find local meetups, I checked out https://meetup.com/, which has a lot.

As for me personally, I am trying to put together services for my Cybersecurity club at my school, right now I have centralized identity, and virtual machine hosting for members to access and play with, but I want to also host extra services like the stuff you mentioned, because the reasons why you want them are good.

On my blog, I discuss my plans and steps: https://moonpiedumplings.github.io/projects/build-server-6/

I think creating a "FOSS hub" overall is a really really big challenge because all of these groups that make up the FOSS world have a heterogeneous set of overall interests, and an even more heterogeneous set of users.

A simple example is the language barrier. Fun fact: There exist alternatives to apps that primarily have English as their first language, but in other languages first, centering around the communities those languages are used in. For example, the opendesk docs are in German first. Of course, there are English docs for things like engagement, but the problem is that —

For something like a FOSS hub, user engagement is critical, and one of the best ways to have engaged users is dogfooding, where users contribute back to this software they use. But with software that treats one language or another as a first class citizen, there is becomes a bump, when users want to dogfood.

The other problem is that the users themselves have different needs and wants. One user or set of users hates email and never wants to touch it. Another wants to exclusively use plain email for everything, including as an alternative to code forges, discussion platforms, and scheduling systems. One set of users prefers discord, the others prefer irc. They meet in the middle on matrix, but this other set of users hates matrix due to being VC funded and it's just a clusterfuck.

You cannot make both groups of users happy. When you try to please everybody, you end up pleasing nobody.

What you can do, however, is catch the needs of your local groups and slowly expand from there. I think a FOSS Hub is possible, but I think trying to start it as a foss hub is bound for failure because the scope is too large.

I think the closest thing right now is disroot, which hosts a lot of services, but again Disroot uses XMPP whereas some people may prefer Matrix for this usecase, and plenty of other nitpicks.

Canonical's snap use a proprietary backend, and comes at a risk of vendor lock in to their ecosystem.

The bash installer is fully open source.

You can make the bad decision of locking yourself into a closed ecosystem, but many sensible people recognize that snap is "of the devil" for a good reason.

I've tried snap, juju, and Canonical's suite. They were uniquely frustrating and I'm not interested in interacting with them again.

The future of installing system components like k3s on generic distros is probably systemd sysexts, which are extension images that can be overlayed onto a base system. It's designed for immutable distros, but it can be used on any standard enough distro.

There is a k3s sysext, but it's still in the "bakery". Plus sysext isn't in stable release distros anyways.

Until it's out and stable, I'll stick to the one time bash script to install Suse k3s.

I find this comparison unfair becuase k3s is a much more batteries included distro than the others, coming with an ingress controller (traefik) and a few other services not in talos or k0s.

But I do think Talos will end up the lighest overall because Talos is not just a k8s distro, but also a extremely stripped down linux distro. They don’t use systemd to start k8s, they have their own tiny init system.

It should be noted that Sidero Labs is the creator of Talos Linux, which another commenter pointed out.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_is_the_best

I think that distributing general software via curl | sh is pretty bad for all the reasons that curl sh is bad and frustrating.

But I do make an exception for "platforms" and package managers. The question I ask myself is: "Does this software enable me to install more software from a variety of programming languages?"

If the answer to that question is yes, which is is for k3s, then I think it's an acceptable exception. curl | sh is okay for bootstrapping things like Nix on non Nix systems, because then you get a package manager to install various versions of tools that would normally try to get you to install themselves with curl | bash but then you can use Nix instead.

K3s is pretty similar, because Kubernetes is a whole platform, with it's own package manager (helm), and applications you can install. It's especially difficult to get the latest versions of Kubernetes on stable release distros, as they don't package it at all, so getting it from the developers is kinda the only way to get it installed.

Relevant discussion on another thread: https://programming.dev/post/33626778/18025432

One of my frustrations that I express in the linked discussion is that it's "developers" who are making bash scripts to install. But k3s is not just developers, it's made by Suse who has their own distro, OpenSuse, using OpenSuse tooling. It's "packagers" making k3s and it's install script, and that's another reason why I find it more acceptable.

that all those CD tools were specifically tailored to run as workers in a deployment pipeline

That's CI 🙃

Confusing terms, but yeah. With ArgoCD and FluxCD, they just read from a git repo and apply it to the cluster. In my linked git repo, flux is used to install "helmreleases" but argo has something similar.

garden seems similar to GitOps solutions like ArgoCD or FluxCD for deploying helm charts.

Here is an example of authentik deployed using helm and fluxcd.

Firstly, I want to say that I started with podman (alternative to docker) and ansible, but I quickly ran into issues. The last issue I encountered, and the last straw, was that creating a container, I was frustrated because Ansible would not actually change the container unless I used ansible to destroy and recreate it.

Without quadlets, podman manages it’s own state, which has issues, and was the entire reason I was looking into alternatives to podman for managing state.

More research: https://github.com/linux-system-roles/podman: I found an ansible role to generate podman quadlets, but I don’t really want to include ansible roles in my existing ansible roles. Also, it intakes kubernetes yaml, which is very complex for what I am trying to do. At that point, why not just use a single node kubernetes cluster and let kubernetes manage state?

So I switched to Kubernetes.

To answer some of your questions:

Am I really supposed to have a collection of small yaml files for everything, that I use with kubectl apply -f ?? It feels wrong and way too “by hand”! Is there a more scripted way to do it? Should I stay with everything in Ansible ??

So what I (and the industry) uses is called "GitOps". It's essentially you have a git repo, and the software automatically pulls the git repo and applies the configs.

Here is my gitops repo: https://github.com/moonpiedumplings/flux-config. I use FluxCD for GitOps, but there are other options like Rancher's Fleet or the most popular ArgoCD.

As a tip, you can search github for pieces of code to reuse. I usually do path:*.y*ml keywords keywords to search for appropriate pieces of yaml.

I see little to no example on how to deploy the service containers I want (pihole, navidrome, etc.) to a cluster, unlike docker-compose examples that can be found everywhere. Am I looking for the wrong thing?

So the first issue is that Kubernetes doesn't really have "containers". Instead, the smallest controllable unit in Kubernetes is a "pod", which is a collection of containers that share a network device. Of course, pods for selfhosted services like the type this community is interested in will rarely have more than one container in them.

There are ways to convert a docker-compose to a kubernetes pod.

But in general, Kubernetes doesn't use compose files for premade services, but instead helm charts. If you are having issues installing specific helm charts, you should ask for help here so we can iron them out. Helm charts are pretty reliable in my experience, but they do seem to be more involved to set up than docker-compose.

Even official doc seems broken. Am I really supposed to run many helm commands (some of them how just fails) and try and get ssl certs just to have Rancher and its dashboard

So what you're supposed to do is deploy an "ingress", (k3s comes with traefik by default), and then use cert-manager to automatically apply get letsencrypt certs for ingress "objects".

Actually, traefik comes with it's own way to get SSL certs (in addition to ingresses and cert manager), so you can look into that as well, but I decided to use the standardized ingress + cert-manager method because it was also compatible with other ingress software.

Although it seems complex, I've come to really, really love Kubernetes because of features mentioned here. Especially the declarative part, where all my services can be code in a git repo.

Try https://lnav.org/

Cause it’s just translating to x and back to Wayland

You have a citation for this claim? I can't find anything that backs it up.

Why is waypipe not the answer?

No, because it has a "termination clause", where if Watcom is suing you you can't use the software anymore while you are

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase_Open_Watcom_Public_License

See the first bit, and the linked discussion by Debian developers.

I actually tried this right after I made this post, and it was not where near as smooth as I wanted. KDE would put the window that I had assigned to all desktops on top, whenever I would switch virtual desktops.

I found a solution though, it looks like mpv has support.

Yes, it's worth using. It's fairly easy to install, as it's almost always packaged, and that makes it easy to use.

But it's not really enough. For example, tools like Lynis usually miss containers.

A modern version of this stuff, I would probably recommend scanning all running containers with something like trivy, and then deploying wazuh on the machines. Wazuh can scan the system for misconfigurations in a similar manner to Lynis, but it is also capable of acting as a central logging server and a few other things.

Maybe nginx proxy manager can do this.

https://nginxproxymanager.com/

I took a look through the twitter, which someone mentioned in another thread.

Given the 4chan like aestetic of your twitter post, I decided to take a look through the boards and it only took me less than a minute to find the n word being used.

Oh, and all the accounts are truly anonymous, rather than pseudoanonymous, which must make moderation a nightmare. Moderation being technically possible doesn't make it easy or practical to do.

I don't want an unmoderated experience by default, either.

No, I'm good. I think I'll stay far away from plebbit.