mosiacmango

That’s Steve from gamers nexus. They do consumer/prosumer computer hardware reviews, but also deep dives into industry practices, often exposing shady or illegal behavior.

He is lovingly referred to as gamer jesus due his scruffy look, generally affable nature, and habit of trying to right wrongs in the industry.

Bikeshedding is when instead of making important, compex decisions that have consequences for being wrong, someone focuses on the simple, low impact, minimally important part of a project that has no consequences if its fucked up.

I think the term comes from construction projects where instead of finalizing the design of a complex building, the execs spend the entire time talking about bike parking on site. What color to have the roof, how many bikes it should hold, etc.

Bikeshedding is about offloading responsibility while still feigning involvement. You, the owner, avoid the whole part of your job youre paid for, i.e “making the hard decisions” and through misdirection and inaction, make someone else do it. That way you can blame them later if things go wrong, or take credit for their work if they go right.

Wazuh is popular. It’s in use by name brand companies, FOSS and relatively turnkey.

Graylog is also a popular option.

Look into podman quadlets. Its containers as systemd services, and its excellent. They run as root by default, but can be run at a user level pretty easily. Ive had no permissions issues as long as you define the user/group in the config and ensure they habe the correct rights to the required folders.

It does take translation from docker compose files, but it’s entirely doable. Most of the environmental variables translate straight across.

FastApi is is a python web framework. I read this as he did, i.e “5 years in fastapi AND python” as you would need python experience to use fastapi.

Honestly glad to help. We all start somewhere.

You should be able to access idrac, if it’s licensed, by pointing your browser at the ip address that its dedicated nic has. Find that address from your router or whatever else you have that is handing out dhcp. It is a management portal, yes. You can control power, fans, get info about the servers state, set up logs and monitoring, and even use its “virtual screen” to see what you would if you hooked a monitor up to the server. The above is a great way to remotely add an OS or troubleshoot a server.

Idrac will either have a default password you can google or the server will have a little plastic pull out tab with a unique password you can reset on login.

If your server doesn’t have it, as you generally have to pay a fee to have it on, it’s okay. A monitor is a good stand in for one server. Less convenient and feature packed, but that’s homelabbing sometimes.

Well, the first step is realizing it’s okay not to use it. My homelab is a mix of salvaged mini PCs and prosumer networking gear. It has nothing to do with the 6/7 figure gear I use at work, and I prefer it that way. Its simpler and lower stakes, is quieter, and uses way less power.

That all said, it’s a great server. if you do want to use it, there are many ways to start. First, you don’t need to plug both power supplies in, but you can. The server can run entirely on one of them. It has two in case one fails it can keep running, not because it needs 2x the power. For the monitor, yes you will likely need VGA. Servers rarely have modern video ports, because vga just works, costs nothing to add to a server, and is almost never used. Most of your physical interaction with a server should be though “out of band,” which dell calls “idrac.” This is a seperate networking port labeled on the server that lets you connect to a local website, put in a password, and then fully control the server. That includes powering it on, reboots, loading disc image iso files, on and on. The idrac will stay powered even when the server is off.

You may or may not have qn idrac license for that server. If you dont and your boss can’t give you one, you can use something like jetkvm instead when it’s released.

As to what to do either it, i would recommend installing different hypervisors or kubernetes suites and playing around. Proxmox, xcp-ng, k3s, harvestor, on and on. Once you find one you like, figure out how to use automation software to setup VMs and containers, like cloudinit, terraform, ansible, or nixOS.

Good luck, and enjoy. Getting started from scratch can be a lot, but it can also be a lot of fun. Go into it expecting to fail, fail a lot and try to learn what you like. That’s the best thing a homelab can do for you.

Amen to the weird network quirks. I was trying to use the Tailscale docker sidecar examples, but could not work put how to use them in quadlets.

I expect i need to make a .pod or .network file and comingle the quadlets that way, but just setting up a dedicated tailscale subnet router VM with /32 allowed addresses was about 10x easier.

I disagree, as kodi syncs jellyfin DB without issue for me and I much prefer its UX.

The nice part of jellyfin is that they support both kodi and a “jellyfin on kodi” experience natively. Plex has neither, with both being 3rd party apps where the support is hit or miss. I used “plexkodiconnect” for years and was glad for it, but it was a journey to keep working at times.

Here’s a pretty good list to get started with:

Awesome Jellyfin

Plex was bought out by venture capital and has been enshittifing for years. “Free” media stream sources added riddled with ads that you have to opt out of, opt out “everyone can see what everyone is watching” features, nebulous “we need to upload hashes of your media to skip credits” privacy issues, abandoning apps for various platforms like kodi, on and on.

I have a lifetime pass, but no longer consider plex a viable platform. The issues are not baseless, but rather based on what plex has decided to do to make money.

Meanwhile, jellyfin is FOSS with no profit motive, no privacy issues, skips intros and credits with no issue, pulls subtitles down and indexes media flawlessly, and has native kodi clients with Database sync support so a show paused in one room can be resumed at the same point in another room.

Hard to beat “slick, private and free.”

The addons are great too. The intro/outro skip is slick and nearly flawless, background subtitle download is seamless, on and on.

No problem mate. The thread is a mess, but if you read the comments below the top pinned one, you’ll see most of the salient points that pissed people off. The “color” i mentioned above came from all over that thread, with some of it deleted. I know he edited/deleted the “triggered” comment when he was called out, but he never expanded on why he claimed the GOP was the “party of the little guy” and why all the “corporate dems needed to be thrown out” to get anything done. He also opted not to respond at all to people asking why he thought the party of tech billionaires was suddenly going to crack down on tech billionaires besides saying he really liked J.D Vance, a tech millionaire whose political run was funded by, get this, tech billionaire Peter theil.

Dude fawned very publicly over tech billionaire maga, who will do clearly do nothing for privacy and monopoly busting, while pretending that the real issue is chuck shumers and establishment dems.

The bias is clear and prominent.

Here is a general write up about the CEO showing their maga colors.

More happened in the reddit thread though that added some more elements, like the ceo opting for a new user name with “88” in it (a common right wing reference), his unprompted use of the phrase “didnt mean to trigger you,” him evasively refusing to clarify what his stance actually was because “that would be more politics,” on and on. You can read through that thread here, although proton corporate are mods, so i have no idea what they may have deleted at this point.

The thread was full of “mask on” behavior that is pretty transparent to anyone experienced with the alt right on the internet.

Most test animals have a great deal of similarities to humans, white mice specifically.

Should working code even be part of an interview? Seems like a situation rife with abuse.

Need free contractors? Just put your code issues up as a 4hr take home interview test.

Cool. That gives people context about what this FOSS app does for them.

Thanks for adding that info.

Its no longer actively supported. It likely still works, but redhat is moving away from it in favor of quadlets.

Quadlets use systemd files to manage containers, which is excellent, its just a departure from compose.

This changes a bit when you start using podman quadlets instead of docker compose, but most compose commands have an analog in the quadlet syntax.

Ive yet to run into any compose files that I couldn’t translate, but some functions took a bit. The quadlet docs from redhat really help there.