I have a laptop I’ve been running various Linux distributions on for the past 3 years. Currently on Fedora39 but I’ve had this issue on every distro I’ve run....
Run a full memtest on your RAM. Very likely you may have developed a few bad areas. Take pics if it finds bad zones, you can use the addresses to tell the kernel to avoid them.
Don’t buy used drives if you don’t know how to check them, can’t afford to waste the money and/or aren’t buying from somewhere with excellent return policy.
There’s nothing wrong with a single HDD in an old desktop except for the risk of failure.
I would start by getting one hdd that’s the same size or larger than the one you have and using it as backup. If the old HDD is very old and small you can probably find a larger one cheap, don’t go out of your way to find another small and old one.
Something like Borg Backup will be perfect if you use a Linux filesystem because Borg is incremental, has deduplication and compression built-in. There is a very simple graphical app for it called Pika Backup (for Linux).
There are other solutions if you use Windows but even a simple copy of your important files is better than nothing. Get a HDD and copy files to it right away.
Another backup solution is to buy a DVD or BluRay burner (can be USB or internal) and backup super important files to optical disks. This may or may not be cheaper than a HDD.
Do NOT rush into RAID, Unraid, TrueNAS and other fancy stuff like that. Your priority right now should be backup not RAID. RAID is a convenience for keeping a system running when a HDD fails but it is NOT a replacement for a good incremental backup.
After you have a backup in place and use it regularly you can consider whether RAID and availability is something you want/need.
Hello there lemmings! Finally I have taken up the courage to buy a low power mini PC to be my first homeserver (Ryzen 5500U, 16GB RAM, 512 SSD, already have 6TB external HDD tho). I have basically no tangible experience with Debian or Fedora-based system, since my daily drivers are Arch-based (although I’m planning to switch...
Make sure you use a docker image that tracks the stable version of Jellyfin. The official image jellyfin/jellyfin tracks unstable. Not all plugins work with unstable and switching to stable later is difficult. This trips lots of people and locks them into unstable because by the time they figure it out they’ve customized their collection a lot.
The linuxserver/jellyfin image carries stable versions but you have to go into the “Tags” tab and filter for 10. to find them (10.8.13 pushed 16 days ago is the latest right now).
To use that version you say “image: linuxserver/jellyfin:10.8.13” in your docker compose instead of “linuxserver/jellyfin:latest”.
This approach has the added benefit of letting you control when you want to update Jellyfin, as opposed to :latest which will get updated whenever the container (re)starts if there’s a newer image available.
While upgrading your images constantly sounds good in theory, eventually you will see that sometimes the new versions will break (especially if they’re tracking unstable versions). When that happens you will want to go back to a known good version.
What I do is go look for tags every once in a while and if there’s a newer version I comment-out the previous “image:” line and add one with the new version, then destroy and recreate the container (the data will survive because you configure it to live on a mounted volume, not inside the container), then recreate with the new version. If there’s any problem I can destroy it, switch back to the old version, and raise it again.
It’s more like “latest” tracks unstable, because unstable evolves much faster and it puts out versions more often. Unfortunately there’s a practice going around that makes people just the :latest tag for everything and they don’t always stop to consider the implications (which may be different for each project).
Debian stable is a very solid choice for a server OS.
It depends on how you’re going to host your services though. Are you going to use containers (what kind), VMs, a mix of the two, install directly on the host system (and if so where do you plan to source the packages)?
I’ve kept my Debian system very basic, installed latest Docker from the official apt repo, and I’ve installed almost every service in a docker container. Only things installed directly on host are docker, ssh, nfs and avahi.
I have a unique name, think John Doe, and I’m hoping to create a unique and “professional” looking email account like johndoe@gmail.com or john@doe.com. Since my name is common, all reasonable permutations are taken. I was considering purchasing a domain with something unique, then making personal family email accounts for...
GoDaddy is notorious for terrible service and NameCheap has started doing some shady stuff too lately. Luckily there are other decent registrars out there. I can recommend Netim.com or INWX.de in the EU – they also provide EU-specific TLDs which American registrars don’t.
If you need more than one mailbox you can’t beat the offers from providers like PurelyMail/MXRoute/Migadu, where you pay for the storage instead of per-mailbox. I’m using Migadu because, again, they work under EU/Swiss privacy laws.
You do not need to spin up your own mail service and should not. Email and DNS hosting are the most abuse-prone and easy to mess up services; always go to an established provider for these.
Are there concerns tying my accounts to a service that might go under or are some “too big to fail”?
Look into their history. Generally speaking a provider that’s been around for a decade or more probably won’t dissapear overnight; they probably have a sustainable income model and have been around the block.
That being said nothing saves even long-established providers from being acquired. This happened for example to a French service (Gandi) with over 20 years of history.
The only answer to that is to pick providers that don’t lock you into proprietary technologies and offer standard services like IMAP, and also to keep your domain+DNS and your email providers separate. This way if the email service starts hiking prices or does anything funny you can copy your email, switch your domain(s), and be with another provider the very next day.
Ths might be a silly question, but asking those is how i learn sometimes. I’m trying to install my first Linux distro to set up a Plex server and one of the few things I know is you need a wired internet connection. My intended server location is across the house from my router, and there isnt much room there to set up...
I recently got a couple of POS pc’s (Point of sale) you know the ones that are all in one with a base to sit on a counter. The thing is they’re very old non branded devices, even the label says 2GB DDR2 while it’s actually 4GB DDR3....
Don’t you have any other requirements for a POS? Like connecting a card reader, special software etc. Those will probably be your main problem, not the OS.
They can’t make it closed source retroactively (well, technically you can design a license like that but that’s a different discussion and the most widely used open source licenses aren’t made like that). They can relicense at some point going forward, but all the code up to that point would still be available under the old license and contributors could fork and continue without batting an eye.
It depends on what license the project is using. Some licenses are very permissive, meaning there’s lots of ways they can be abused. For example with MIT/BSD licenses there’s no provision to share the code with the final product so they could drag their feet releasing parts of the code or hide them altogether. They could also resort to tivoization, NDAs, commercial plugins and all kinds of shenanigans.
Look for example to the Plex and Emby projects which were originally open and went commercial later. The way they did it is why there’s a lot of bad blood in the community to this day.
I’ve also personally been involved with other projects where someone tried to take them commercial in a less than graceful way, shall we say. It’s never pretty.
I’m on 545 and I have no issues. But I’m also not using Ubuntu…
Maybe it’s the distro that’s the problem not the backup. I mean I’d rather have a distro with smooth updates than one that makes me need snapshots.
What’s even the point with such a distro, ok so I restore previous working state, then what, I can’t do updates anymore? Living in fear of official updates sounds terrible.
I want to run a command and see all of its output on the left hand side, while simultaneously searching/grepping for particular lines on the right hand side. In other words, I want a temporary vertically split screen in my CLI, ideally with scrollback on each side of the split, but where I expect the left hand side to be...
Run rsync, pipe to tee, and redirect the output to a named pipe (mkfifo). Open a second terminal and direct the named pipe into a grep command. Arrange the terminals in whatever way you want.
I have a few Linux servers at home that I regularly remote into in order to manage, usually logged into KDE Plasma as root. Usually they just have several command line windows and a file manager open (I personally just find it more convenient to use the command line from a remote desktop instead of directly SSH-ing into the...
You seriously need to stop what you’re doing. Log in with ssh only. If you need multiple terminals use multiple ssh sessions, or screen/tmux. If you need to search something do it on your desktop system.
The server should not have Firefox installed, or KDE, or anything related to desktop apps. There’s no point and nothing good can come of it.
Got me thinking, cuz I’ve done my own solutions (not the popular ones, like OMV and the likes) and they work just fine, I really have no trouble managing them through the terminal, but I thought about other people (maybe people that like more managing things though a web UI) and I was like “is there something like this...
There’s things like Unraid and Synology that have their own UI. But they have some limitations, for example Synology requires one of their devices, doesn’t run on generic ones.
I think it should be fairly trivial to do with Python and a calendar library, you’d just have to go through the input entries, keep the ones with the properties you like and dump those to the output.
I’m not well versed in Python either but I had a specific calendar problem once — had to clear a calendar storage that went back years and the provider’s UI didn’t let you delete the base calendar — and after looking it up it was a few lines of Python.
That’s probably why you don’t find established tools because every person who runs into this stuff has a super specific need.
Built a nice little PiKVM and deployed it in my NAS. The NAS is heavy and placed in a dark half-height place under the stairs so it’s awkward when things go wrong and you need hardware access....
I remember reading through that thread when it came out and those are extremely worrying points. Wayland has extremely deep core issues. #2 there alone is horrible.
There are and were alarm bells ringing all around btw with Wayland. From a software developing perspective the approach is terrible. You cannot solve super complex problems by throwing away 30 years worth of code and redoing everything from scratch. You’ll just run into the exact same issues again. Which no, haven’t gone away as the technology advanced as many people would like to believe, we’re still using displays and networking and keyboards and mice.
There is a lot of legacy in X but there’s also a lot of accumulated experience and battle-hardened code. The obvious path would have been to keep the good and remove the bad.
Wayland will eventually since those issues but it will take just as long as it took X, because that’s what happens when you start everything from scratch again.
This is filling me with deja vu because it’s exactly what some of us went through with X, trying to piece together a working desktop out of dozens of pieces. But when you point that out you get “ha ha grandpa that’s old stuff, this new stuff won’t have that problem because [insert magic here]!”
Keep in mind that when Wayland started it was supposed to be a mini-server, to be used for the login screen only. Then the idea came to make it usable for stable, controlled and simple devices where there isn’t a lot of user configuration or hardware variation.
How it got from there to “let’s use it for everything on the Linux desktop and ditch X” I’ll never understand.
I have been having such a difficult time getting a 2018 Dell Latitude 7930 to run any Linux distro stably. Maybe there is something obvious I am missing or maybe it really is dying hardware that’s the root cause of the issue....
Hi, everybody Recently, a guy noticed that I was using it and asked why? For me it because in Linux many things are done through the terminal because Linux has many different desktop environments...
Fractal Design, definitely. The model I’m using is no longer made but they have very good ones today too. Look into the Define and Meshify lines. They have models that can utilize the full height of the case for HDD/SSD slots with openings on both sides for maximum ease of cable routing.
The Define 7 or Meshify 2 is most likely what you want. They only come with 6 HDD brackets included but you can buy more and they have slots for up to 11.
The R5 is another good choice, I like those brackets more, but it’s not so flexible as the others I mentioned, and the 5.25" bays will most likely go unused and just take up space.
Don’t get the Node 804, it’s much larger than it seems (check out yt videos) and is cramped and hard to work in.
I recently made a post discussing my move to Linux on Fedora, and it’s been going great. But today I think I have now become truly part of this community. I ran a command that borked my bootloader and had to do a fresh install. Learned my lesson with modifying the bootloader without first doing thorough investigation lol....
If you keep around a bootable rescue stick like System Rescue it has a boot menu entry that will boot the Linux installed on your machine. Once you do that you can run a command or two to reinstall the bootloader. You can search the net or whatever at leisure since it will work fully.
Alternatively, if your system Linux is borked harder, you can boot the rescue Linux and use more advanced methods, depending on what’s wrong. The rescue Linux also has a graphical environment with browser if you need it.
At the very least sometimes you can figure out what went wrong. It may not be much comfort if you lost your system but at least you learn what not to do in the future. Too many people just say “oh, it just broke” and leave it at that.
Browser and flatpaks randomly crashing
I have a laptop I’ve been running various Linux distributions on for the past 3 years. Currently on Fedora39 but I’ve had this issue on every distro I’ve run....
Advice for buulding a cheep NAS
Hey guys ive been self hosting things for a while now mostly just off a bunch if old computers in a k8s cluster....
What's your experiences with Debian and Rocky as a homeserver OS? (external-content.duckduckgo.com)
Hello there lemmings! Finally I have taken up the courage to buy a low power mini PC to be my first homeserver (Ryzen 5500U, 16GB RAM, 512 SSD, already have 6TB external HDD tho). I have basically no tangible experience with Debian or Fedora-based system, since my daily drivers are Arch-based (although I’m planning to switch...
Self-hosted or personal email solutions?
I have a unique name, think John Doe, and I’m hoping to create a unique and “professional” looking email account like johndoe@gmail.com or john@doe.com. Since my name is common, all reasonable permutations are taken. I was considering purchasing a domain with something unique, then making personal family email accounts for...
Your favorite linux projects for weekend
I got a minimal setup with pihole and nextcloud. I was wondering what else I could do. Share your ideas🙂
Can I pre-install Ubuntu on an SSD?
Ths might be a silly question, but asking those is how i learn sometimes. I’m trying to install my first Linux distro to set up a Plex server and one of the few things I know is you need a wired internet connection. My intended server location is across the house from my router, and there isnt much room there to set up...
Distro for POS
I recently got a couple of POS pc’s (Point of sale) you know the ones that are all in one with a base to sit on a counter. The thing is they’re very old non branded devices, even the label says 2GB DDR2 while it’s actually 4GB DDR3....
How do I make contributors to my project transfer copyright to me?
Is there a pull request template that does this?...
Friendly reminder
This is your annual reminder to do a snapshot (timeshift or whatever you prefer) before doing relatively minor changes to your system....
Is there such a thing as split-screen grep?
I want to run a command and see all of its output on the left hand side, while simultaneously searching/grepping for particular lines on the right hand side. In other words, I want a temporary vertically split screen in my CLI, ideally with scrollback on each side of the split, but where I expect the left hand side to be...
Is it actually dangerous to run Firefox as root?
I have a few Linux servers at home that I regularly remote into in order to manage, usually logged into KDE Plasma as root. Usually they just have several command line windows and a file manager open (I personally just find it more convenient to use the command line from a remote desktop instead of directly SSH-ing into the...
Is there a "universal" web UI for custom Linux NASes?
Got me thinking, cuz I’ve done my own solutions (not the popular ones, like OMV and the likes) and they work just fine, I really have no trouble managing them through the terminal, but I thought about other people (maybe people that like more managing things though a web UI) and I was like “is there something like this...
A tool to filter and reorganise iCalendar (ICS) files?
Hi,...
PiKVM Build and Deploy (feddit.nu)
Built a nice little PiKVM and deployed it in my NAS. The NAS is heavy and placed in a dark half-height place under the stairs so it’s awkward when things go wrong and you need hardware access....
How to use a portable SSD for a travel OS with Linux?
Hello! The TL;DR is:...
Thoughts on this? (futurology.today)
Dell Latitude Frustration
I have been having such a difficult time getting a 2018 Dell Latitude 7930 to run any Linux distro stably. Maybe there is something obvious I am missing or maybe it really is dying hardware that’s the root cause of the issue....
Why do you use the terminal?
Hi, everybody Recently, a guy noticed that I was using it and asked why? For me it because in Linux many things are done through the terminal because Linux has many different desktop environments...
Those who are self hosting at home, what case are you using? (Looking for recommendations)
TLDR: If you were building a NAS for 8 HDDs and 1 SSD today, what case would you use?...
Just moved to Linux: a follow up
I recently made a post discussing my move to Linux on Fedora, and it’s been going great. But today I think I have now become truly part of this community. I ran a command that borked my bootloader and had to do a fresh install. Learned my lesson with modifying the bootloader without first doing thorough investigation lol....