In the past few days I’ve seen talk about RAM prices shooting up due to demand from big datacenters. Today I read that a historic brand like Crucial - I own plenty of their hardware, including SSDs - is dropping consumer products to focus on gear for those same datacenters. The result (or maybe the intention?) is to push people away from self hosting, undermine the OwnYourData idea and make everyone depend on huge datacenters for life. So much for owning your data. So much for decentralisation. Because taking down one giant datacenter is far easier than taking down thousands or millions of individual nodes. Friends and colleagues, don’t trade your freedom for a bit of convenience. Once you give it away, getting it back is very hard. Always Own Your Data. #OwnYourData #SelfHosting

Bologna, two years ago today #Photography #Italy #Photo #Italia #Bologna #EmiliaRomagna #PhotoMonday #FotoMontag

Happy yellow Silent Sunday! #SilentSunday #Photography #Photo #Autumn #Leaves #Fall

As expected, on some well known news sites my latest blog post also drew some interesting comments, offering a few things to think about. On average, the readers who replied see "Linux" as the opposite of macOS or Windows, basically an anti something. Not because of its strengths, but because of the flaws they associate with its "competitors". They also focus entirely on the desktop world, which I can understand. Many of them also confuse popularity with quality. The fact that other operating systems such as the BSDs or illumos are less widespread leads them to assume they are less "interesting". That is an ideological contradiction, because by the same logic Windows and macOS would be far superior to everything else simply because they dominate an enormous share of desktop systems. #ITNotes #OS #IT

Why I (still) love Linux I usually publish articles about how much I love the BSDs or illumos distributions, but today I want to talk about Linux (or, better, GNU/Linux) and why, despite everything, it still holds a place in my heart.

Why I (still) love Linux - IT Notes

#Linux #OwnYourData #Server #SysAdmin #Workstation #OpenSource #ITNotes

Happy #SilentSunday ! #Photography #Photo #Picture #NaturePhotography

"The contrast with Docker is striking: while the Docker container required 100% CPU to reach peak for the HTTP and HTTPS throughput, the FreeBSD jail delivered the same speed with ~60% of the CPU sitting idle. In terms of performance cost per request, Jails are drastically cheaper."

Static Web Hosting on the Intel N150: FreeBSD, SmartOS, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux Compared - IT Notes

#ITNotes #Linux #Docker #Containers #FreeBSD #RunBSD #IT #SysAdmin

I clearly wrote that the tests I performed in the latest blog post are 'with a default configuration, without optimizations'. In many places where the link is circulating: 'You should have enabled XYZ and ZYX!'

Another data corruption, fortunately not fatal, with btrfs. Two mirrored disks that have little activity. On the same server, Proxmox 9, there is also a ZFS pool (mirrored, more active). Same type of disks. An employee mistakenly connected an electric heater to a socket protected by the UPS, and the server rebooted brutally. Upon reboot, one of the two btrfs disks reported: [ 167.015266] BTRFS error (device sdd): parent transid verify failed on 873906176 wanted 998679 found 998677 [ 167.017007] BTRFS error (device sdd): parent transid verify failed on 873906176 wanted 998679 found 998677 [ 167.052517] BTRFS error (device sdd): open_ctree failed mount: /btrfs: can't read superblock on /dev/sdd. Result: unable to mount, even in degraded mode. The only way was to disconnect sdd and mount the other disk in degraded mode. No issues with the ZFS pool. Needless to say, I'm now copying the data to ZFS, and before tomorrow, these two disks will be a new ZFS pool. #RunZFS #OpenZFS #btrfs #Linux #Proxmox

Cloudflare's problems today confirmed what I have known for a long time: if a customer is down for half an hour due to some kind of server issue (disk replacement, etc.), they immediately start saying a way must be found to avoid it. When it's Cloudflare that goes down for hours, they accept it with resignation. #IT #SysAdmin