ReversalHatchery

ReversalHatchery, 10 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Immich is a selfhosted photo management server with a user interface that’s similar to google photos. Also has mobile apps.
Their motto is “privacy should not be a luxury”.

I was planning for long to try it out because it looks very promising, but I was waiting for… I don’t know what? Fuck it I’m installing it today.

ReversalHatchery, 10 months ago

ext4 certainly has its place, it’s a fine default file system, there’s really no problems with it.

But others, like ZFS and BTRFS, have features that you may want to use, but ext4 doesn’t do: fs snapshots, data compression, built in encryption (to a degree, usually only happening for data and some of the metadata, so LUKS is often better IMHO), checking for bitrot and restoring it when possible (whether it is depends on your config), quotas per user group or project, spanning multiple disks like with RAID but safer (to a degree), and others.

ReversalHatchery, 10 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

In case of ZFS and bcachefs, you also have native encryption, making LUKS obsolete.

I don’t think that it makes LUKS obsolete. LUKS encrypts the entire partition, but ZFS (and BTRFS too as I know) only encrypt the data and some of the metadata, the rest is kept as it is.

openzfs.github.io/…/zfs-load-key.8.html#Encryptio…

Data that is not encrypted can be modified from the outside (the checksums have to be updated of course), which can mean from a virus on a dual booted OS to an intruder/thief/whatever.
If you have read recently about the logofail attack, the same could happen with modifying the technical data of a filesystem, but it may be bad enough if they just swap the names of 2 of your snapshots if they just want to cause trouble.

But otherwise this is a good summary.

ReversalHatchery, 10 months ago

are there applications where zfs/btrfs is more or less appropriate than ext4 or even FAT?

Neither of them likes to deal with very low amounts of free space, so don’t use it on places where that is often a scarcity. ZFS gets really slow when free space is almost none, and nowadays I don’t know about BTRFS but a few years ago filling the partition caused data corruption there.

ReversalHatchery, 10 months ago

It’s not about someone, it’s about something. A lot of us aren’t (only) using Linux as a server OS, but for desktop too, and desktop usage involves running much more different kinds of software that you simply just can’t afford to audit, and at times there are programs that you can’t choose to not use, because it’s not on you but on someone on whom you depend.

Then it’s not even only that. It’s not only random shit or a game you got that can edit your bashrc and such, but if let’s say there’s a critical vulnerability in a complex software you use, like a web browser, an attacker could make use of that to take over your account with the use of a bashrc alias.