Hello, a question for the Gentoo users (all 4 or 5 of you?):
Where should portage be mirrored from?
We have a Portage mirror:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Local_software_mirrors
It started off being mirrored from
rsync://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/gentoo-portage. That started refusing
connections in January so we switched to getting it from
rsync://rsync.uk.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage. That also started
refusing connections as of 9 March.
So where should this actually be mirrored from?
If no one knows / answers then I'll assume no one is using it and
probably just shut it down. There have been no connections to it in
the last week, except for our own monitoring.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Looks like my trusty old HP Microserver has come out in sympathy for Andy’s :) Unfortunately, it’s running my personal Mastodon instance.
I’m thinking of hosting it with BitFolk instead of at home. I’m the only user at the moment and I don’t envisage having more than another 2 or 3 users. I’m not connected to any relays as I can’t cope with massive timelines and things are going quite nicely as it is.
Does 2GiB RAM sound reasonable as a start? My HP has 8GB and is running other things as well but I rarely see memory usage go above 1.5GB. I’m using AWS (S3 plus Cloudfront) for the media cache (just for fun and because it’s less than £1 a month) so probably OK with 10-15GiB storage.
Anybody already doing this, either here or with another provider? I did spin up an Amazon Lightsail instance just to see what life is like elsewhere and wasn’t that impressed - it uses Cloud-Config which I find a pain in the backside.
Cheers,
Mike
I have officially had it with WordPress.
I loathe the Gutenberg editor WP devs have spent so much time on rather
than fix all the security holes, but the Disable Gutenberg plugin allows
me to mostly forget it exists.
The last straw was having had issues with doing my first new WordPress
install in a while. The latest version of PHP WP does officially support
is out of support as far as the PHP devs are concerned, and I had to
edit a core file to get it to install with the PHP 8.1 (released over a
year ago) that comes with Ubuntu 22.04 (released ten months ago). Once
it is installed, it would work without that patch, but argh, enough!
There are a bunch of worthwhile static site generators out there, but
some of the sites I want to port want to allow comments, so I either
need to pay a third party to host those (no budget) or have another free
self-hosted CMS that does dynamic sites.
Which one(s) do people recommend?
ClassicPress exists to be 'WordPress without Gutenberg' and supports PHP
8.0, but if there's something better, I would love to know. I would
greatly prefer something reasonably light, so Drupal and Joomla! are out.
Ian
Hi,
Someone asked for Kali Linux today.
https://www.kali.org/
It was new to me, but seems to be Debian based so fairly familiar
ground. I was able to massage their "Generic Cloud Image" into
working via the Rescue VM:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Installing_Kali_Linux
It seems to have a PXE boot installer which might work like the
Debian one, or maybe even their net installer works like Debian too.
If so then we can probably make a nicer install process like we have
for Debian.
In the mean time if any of you are familiar with Kali and spot
issues with what I've done there please do edit the article or raise
a query. If you are particularly keen I can give you a VM to test
with and service credit for improvements…
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hi,
There was a blip of alerts relating to c.authns.bitfolk.com just now
for a few minutes as it was upgraded.
The work is now complete and there's not expected to be any further
alerts.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hi,
I want to set up a nightly backup on to the 2GB archive storage that comes with my VPS.
Is there a beginner's guide of how to configure/access it?
Ta,
Hugh
Hi,
Continued use of Twitter has become untenable so I will move
"bitfolk" on Twitter to a Fediverse ("Mastodon") instance. The
question is which one?
The current Twitter account doesn't see much use but it's probably
of most use for posting about current incidents and maintenance
work. Therefore it needs to work even if BitFolk is not working. So
it should not run on an instance that's inside BitFolk
infrastructure.
I can run an instance outside of BitFolk infrastructure but I don't
think the cost will be worth it vs the limited use.
Perhaps it is best to just put it on an instance that is already in
mainstream use?
If you are currently active on the Fediverse, could you let me know
which instance you use? Feel free to let me know your full address if
you'd like me/others to follow you. 😀
My personal account is grifferz(a)social.bitfolk.com. ¹
Assuming I get some replies to this, I'll probably put a bitfolk one
on some instance that you already use. I'll let you know once that
happens. They have RSS feeds so even those who don't use the
Fediverse would be able to keep track of posts there.
Cheers,
Andy
¹ This is a Mastodon instance running at bitfolk but I don't have
any intention of opening this to other users, as I don't think I'm
prepared for the workload of managing such a user community.
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
On fediverse/mastodon etc.
As a person who studiously avoids social media in most of it's forms
other than closed family groups and/or very special interest groups etc
My experience of the fediverse and mastodon is very limited (Other
clients and instances apply,,,,, apparently).
I think social media should be there though for those that want it.
I did look briefly into Mastodon on behalf of a Hackspace or two I was
involved in, but as with such groups achieving any form of consensus on
moving to something when the end of the social world was not nigh was a
bit of a struggle, so it flopped. (Cat herding)
Mastodon/fediverse all felt a bit nebulous or vapour like, and clarity
on what was where and what the support and keeping needed to be was a
bit of a struggle too. There is certainly a lot of fediverse evangelism
though.
Email can be complex, very complex, especially for larger org's but is
at least a well defined and documented target free from the sort of
evangelism that hides (even if accidentally) what is going on really.
Its established nature also makes it a touch boring but dependable.
Perhaps why I like email as a mailing list/discussion forum.
On the discussion around this.
It feels like the federative protocols etc are a useful and desirable
thing. But that the requirement for a unique id tied to a single
instance that can not be cloned and fed from multiple instances is an issue.
It feels like you are constrained to take a punt on a.n.other provider
or run your own instance. So perhaps a +1 for making it look distributed
but a -1 for distributed content resilience. Surely a postings content
should be as valuable as say who posted it or whether they followed or not.
Hemingway observed the only way to find out if you can trust someone is
to trust them and see how it turns out. So if you are not going to run
your own home instance, flip a coin and go with it. Any decision without
full knowledge (perfect strategy) is to some degree or other a coin flip.
If you are not running your own instance then you run pretty similar
risks of becoming the product at some random future date as you do
sticking with twitter. See previous note about not being an advocate to
something I would never use anyway, except under duress.
I don't think anyone is about to fall victim to supposing that twitter
users in any way endorse the views of anyone else on twitter, and those
that run it are no different than any other user.
There are other social media platforms though where this could be argued
were not the case, Truth Social springs to mind as a potential case in
point. Your view point may vary though.
Which brings you back to the option of stay as is and wait to see what
happens with twitter, or run your own instance of the fediverse as a
closed membership for bitfolk, but able to converse with all else on the
fediverse. At least this reduces your exposure to becoming someone elses
product and means you can backup your own content in a way that you can
recover from failures.
Should bitfolk run it's own instance and then fail I think we would all
have more pressing concerns than preserving the content or list of
followers.
Maybe I value the content more than a list of followers though. But that
is not really saying much.
There is the counter argument that loosing the content at regular
intervals is a very good thing. It reduces the weaponisation of quoting
past content during flame wars.
The decision then when looking into a unique home instance, is
intrinsically the same one as why run your own mailing list compared to
say using a google group instance etc.
Just some thoughts for what they are worth
Cheers
Andy Kirby
--
andy(a)kirbyand.co.uk
www.kirbyand.co.uk
Good morning folks,
My VPS is on Ubuntu 18.04 and it's plainly time to upgrade. And as I have some time off between Christmas and New Year, I figured I should do it then.
I see that there's a few possible gotchas to do with PV/PVH mode and supported kernel compression methods... so I thought I'd ask if anyone's done an upgrade from 18.04 to 20.04, and what tips they have.
I was thinking of starting the upgrade, then switching virtmode in the Xen shell before the first reboot. Will that work? Or does it need to be a clean VM boot rather than just a restart for it to work?
Or is it better to try to get 18.04 working with PVH (using the HWE kernel) and then do the upgrade?
Any other gotchas that folks have encountered? The VPS just runs email (exim4/dovecot) and apache, I don't expect any issues with them, and I'm familiar enough with them that I can fix any oddities that do crop up. It's just the kernel/Xen changes that have me being cautious...
Thanks,
Phil
