Just another Swedish programming sysadmin person.
Coffee is always the answer.

And beware my spaghet.

  • 0 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle






  • I’ve been looking at the rewrite of Owncloud, but unfortunately I really do need either SMB or SFTP for one of the most critical storage mounts in my setup.
    I don’t particularly feel like giving Owncloud a win either, they’ve not been behaving in a particularly friendly manner for the community, and their track record with open core isn’t particularly good, so I really don’t want to end up with a decent product that then steadily mutilates itself to try and squeeze money out of me.

    The Owncloud team actually had a stand at FOSDEM a couple of years back, right across from the Nextcloud team, and they really didn’t give me much confidence in the project after chatting with them. I’ve since heard that they’re apparently not going to be allowed to return again either, due to how poorly they handled it.


  • I’ve been hoping to find a non-PHP alternative to Nextcloud for a while, but unfortunately I’ve yet to find one which supports my base requirements for the file storage.

    Due to some quirks with my setup, my backing storage consists of a mix of local folders, S3 buckets, SMB/SFTP mounts (with user credential login), and even an external WebDav server.
    Nextcloud does manage such a thing phenomenally, while all the alternatives I’ve tested (including a Radicale backed by rclone mounts) tend to fall completely to pieces as soon as more than one storage backend ends up getting involved, especially when some of said backends need to be accessed with user-specific credentials.




  • This looks really odd in relation to other fediverse software; Why /magic and required to be on the root of the domain? Why hard-require routing the domain part of the user ID when .well-known/webfinger exists? Why is there a X-Open-Web-Auth header which the spec only describes as “its purpose is unclear from the code”?
    So many questions.

    I definitely like the idea of distributed sign-in, Solid did a decent work of that many years ago after all. This particular proposal just looks rather odd.



  • You could also just run IMAP/JMAP/SMTP as separate components, I can’t see any place in the Stalwart documentation - or in the Docker image itself - where monolith is the only option.

    I haven’t tested the setup myself yet, but me and another root are planning on testing a setup of Stalwart to replace a semi-broken IMAP/JMAP setup for a computer club, keeping the SMTP as is.




  • We’ve recently kicked out our entire Cisco networking core due to it actively refusing to interoperate with other pieces of necessary hardware for us, which was causing us to have to run an almost entire second redundant core network. Switching it out with ALE has been really nice in that regard, SPB scales like a dream even between locations and cities, we even get working L2 routes all the way over to some of our locations almost half a country away.

    For us, Dell has been the far better of the two (HPE/Dell) big server-providing beasts in terms of just being able to use the hardware they provide, but they’re very close to getting a complete block from future procurement due to how they’ve been treating us.

    Honestly, Fujitsu is probably our best current provider; their hardware is reasonably solid, their rack-kits aren’t insane, their BMC doesn’t do a bunch of stupid things, they don’t do arbitrary vendor locking on expansion cards, etc. Unfortunately their EFI/BIOS is a complete mess, especially in regards to boot ordering and network boot, and they’ve so far not been able to provide us Linux-based firmware upgrade packages - despite using a RHEL image in their BMC-orchestrated offline firmware upgrade process.


  • Got a pair of old HPE gen8 1U servers that are chewing through fan packages like nobody’s business, replaced at least five burnt-out fans on them in a similar amount of years.

    We’re running a mix of HPE, Dell, and Fujitsu servers and they all absolutely suck in their individual ways - HP(E) adds a bunch of arbitrary hardware limitations which we have to work around, Dell intentionally degrades our multi-system setups with firmware updates, and Fujitsu’s boot firmware goes absolutely pants-on-head retarded if you’re doing netboot first.

    We’ve gotten some Supermicro systems now as well, and they’ve been a real treat in comparison, though their software UX feels like it’s about two decades behind.


  • It’s great to hear that they’re not just giving up. And it’s also definitely good to hear that they’re not sticking with PHP either, that language is a true bane to modern hosting - and especially Kubernetes.

    I’ll remain cautiously optimistic that they’ll be able to stay relevant, and not go hard in again on cutting away core functionality in the name of enterprise offerings - what caused the NextCloud split in the first place.


  • Has anything actually happened in ownClouds development?

    The last I saw of them was FOSDEM a few years back, where NextCloud were handing out whitepapers and showing off their new Hub, chat, VoIP stack, group sharing system, and more. And ownCloud were sat somewhat opposite with two people and a screen showing a screenshot of a default ownCloud install, along with a big sign hanging from the ceiling saying “Join the winning team.”