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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Absolutely. A lot of the time the biggest difficulty with researching something is not even knowing the right terms to search for. Asking a few questions can give you a starting point to know where and how to look.

    And the thing is, I personally hate asking questions on forums and the like. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve done it. I’m very good at digging up answers by myself, and I generally do work better with essays than I do with conversations. But my experience should not be seen as the default, and people shouldn’t be shit on for trying to learn through community rather than through textbooks.


  • So, when you create a virtual machine in KVM, you have the ability to attach a Spice or VNC display to the VM.

    Unlike running VNC inside the virtual machine, what this does it is runs VNC on the host, at a port that you designate (or a randomly assigned port if you don’t designate) and then you can view that by connecting to the host through VNC. For Spice its exactly the same, except you use something like the Remote Viewer application to connect to it.

    As others have mentioned, the easiest way of handling all of this is with Virtual Machine Manager, which integrates its own Spice console and makes everything happen automagically. You can also install Cockpit with the Cockpit-Machines plugin on the host, which gives you a web interface for controlling virtual machines, just like vmware esxi. The display manager on cockpit is pretty rough at the moment though.

    KVM is a very “build it yourself” virtualization solution. I use it extensively, and I love it, but you’ll need to be prepared for a lot of “Oh, KVM doesn’t do that, that’s handled by this program/library/whatever”. It’s definitely not a user friendly toolkit. If you’re looking for a Workstation Player alternative, you may be better off with something like Virtbox (although do try out Virtual Machine Manager first, it’s really slick and for your use case probably solves all the problems I’ve mentioned). If you’re looking for an esxi alternative, maybe look into Proxmox.


  • I’ve been looking for documentation on this but Google search is now so bad that technical documents are completely hidden behind marketing blurbs or LLM generated rubbish.

    Its honestly tragic that people feel the need to put these disclaimers. “Just google it” was always a shitty response to people asking legitimate questions (some people learn better from conversational interaction rather than just reading an essay), but with the slow death of search engines we’re now experiencing, at this point anyone who yells “Just google it” needs to be ejected into the fucking sun.









  • Yeah, try to avoid using USB hard drives.

    A refurbished business PC is an excellent choice (or, better yet, make friends with someone who works in an IT department and grab a few machines when they’re being thrown out; you’d be amazed how often companies dump perfectly good hardware). Don’t worry about the windows license, you’re not actually paying for it by the time you get to refurb prices.

    You should easily be able to pick up something decent for under $200 (hopefully that fits your budget). If you go with a small form factor (not ultra small) you can probably get an SSD and two 3.5" drives in there (watch out for the small form factor Lenovos though, they only have one 3.5" slot). Alternatively, look for a larger desktop tower style that could have 3 or 4 drive bays if you want to do something like a RAID5.

    Don’t sweat too much about buying older hardware. What’s old and busted for Windows is lightning fast when we’re talking about self-hosting a file server or a Pihole.







  • Get to grips with Docker. OCI containers are the standard method of self hosting basically everything now, so once you’re comfortable with Docker and compose files, literally anything you could want to host is available as a drop in component for your system.

    An excellent way of playing around with Docker is to install Dockge. It’s a web UI with some really helpful features. First, it can convert Docker Run commands into compose files for you (once you start to play around with this it’ll be clear why that matters), and second, its very good at pointing out where and how you’ve made errors in your compose files. But most importantly, unlike Portainer (the most popular Docker UI) it works with the Docker command line rather than trying to replace it. With Dockge you know exactly where all of your files are and if any part of your setup breaks you can repair it very easily. It also doesn’t have Portainer’s problem of flashing error messages on the screen for 0.3 seconds then whisking them away. It exposes the entire Docker terminal output so your debugging process is much, much easier.

    You’ll also want to learn about reverse proxies (I reccomend Caddy for its unbelievably simple config file; an entire site is three lines). These are really important for serving multiple different services from one source.

    For anything that you can’t run in Docker, VMs are an acceptable solution, and LXC containers are a better solution, but one that requires a little more work to get to grips with (fun fact, LXC has its own web UI, which is fantastic, but almost nobody seems to even know it exists). Since you’re already familiar with Linux, you may want to ignore the suggestion to use Proxmox and just set up a server with your preferred flavour and go from there. All of this can be done with any modern Linux distro, so you might as well work in an environment you’re comfortable in.


  • You are correct, left hand is a fork bomb. Specifically, it creates and then runs a function named “:”. What this function does is pipe its output into itself while running in a background process, which instantly spawns infinite copies of itself. Technically I believe the : character could be any character as its just a name. The creator just picked a colon for aesthetics.