Calculator Manipulator

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Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: April 16th, 2019

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  • dire problems, including those that accumulate over time

    That’s not a thing. You create problems over time by experimening in what is, effectively, production load. If all you ever did was install any distro and kept it up to date - not much can break. Granted - shit happens, but it’s incredibly rare.

    As an example - I’ve set up my mail server in May 2019. Chose archlinux, because I never wanted to go through a big upgrade. The only exta software installed there is mail-server related. Direct from the repos. I’ve become confident enough that now there’s a nightly cronjob to update the system with a hook to reboot if kernel or init gets updated.

    In all those 5 a bit years I’ve had one issue where I hqd to revert a kernel update.

    Another example is tang on an ubuntu server. This was at a previous workplace, but essentially it’s a piece of software from the repos. Originally installed on 16.04, has gone without reprovisioning all the way to 22.04. I’ve now left the company, but I hear it’s still running.

    Upgrading an ubuntu desktop fleet with a myriad of custom software, on the other hand… let’s just not talk about it.


  • I’m not the best person to query about backups, but in your situation I would do the following, assuming both server and desktop run on BTRFS:

    Have a script on the desktop that starts btrfs-receive and then notifies the server that it should start btrfs-send.

    You can also do rsync if BTRFS is not a thing you use, but It would either be expensive storage wise, or you would only ever have 1 backup - latest.




  • If you can dedicate some time to constant keep up - pick a rolling distro. Doing major version upgrades has never not had problems for me. Every major distro has one.

    My choice is Gentoo, but I’m weird like that. Having said that - my email server has been running happily on Arch for just over 5 years now.

    The lemmy instance I host is on Debian testing - Gentoo was not available on DO - no issues so far.

    Even when it’s mostly containers - why waste time every n years doing the big upgrade? Small change is always safer.









  • NFS comes to mind, naturally.

    I remember some years ago scp had a big issue, can’t recall what, though. But that made me have a look at rsync, and I’ve been using that ever since. Flags are a bit atteocious, but I’ve aliases rsync -avz status=progress to copy and it’s been happy days. One other benefit - incremental copy. Helps in cases where a copy procedure had been stopped for whatever reason.