• 0 Posts
  • 45 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
cake
Cake day: July 22nd, 2024

help-circle

  • I think you don’t distinguish enough between professionals and capables.

    All your points are either “sysadmin” or “complete buffoon” and nothing in between. That’s not how reality works.

    You absolutely are expected to be able to check your oil and just a few years ago, you were expected to be able to change your tires. That doesn’t make you a car mechanic, but a capable user.

    I’m absolutely not a car guy, but I know how to change a tire. Why? Because it’s necessary knowledge. I also know how to file my taxes, even though I’m not an accountant or tax consultant. Again, because it’s necessary.


  • The sentiment should rather be, that the system maintains itself. And that’s actually something I would get behind.

    Tinkering around is cool, but I’m in my 30s and when my girlfriend’s build pipeline finishes, I’ll be a father, I can’t spend 4h every week fixing stuff, I need a reliable platform to work on. Currently that is indeed a mix of Debian and Nix for me.

    At least the normal update process should work completely transparently for the user.


  • Not a sysadmin, but a capable user.

    People shouldn’t just accept technology as magic. They should understand at least the basic principles of the technology around them. Corporations want us to be dumb and incapable. Look at cars, you seriously can’t expect a normal person to fix anything on them. But that’s not because of inherent complexity, but because corporations want us to just buy new parts when they think it’s time.

    Sapere aude was true in the 19th century and it’s true today as well.









  • None of your arguments are really an answer to anything.

    Every app, telegram, simplex, ICQ are single points of failure - by design - whereas services like xmpp/jabber or even the self hosted variants of signal, simplex or matrix don’t have these problems. But they don’t do that. At least nothing that I heard of.

    I think the reality is much more that most of the Nazis are inherently not constructive. They don’t create anything, they have no real vision, just hate for whatever group they think is worst right now.

    They are literal leeches, they take over what they can get. Telegram, Twitter, now SimpleX. Volk ohne Messenger, if you want. There is exactly one platform that was created by them, truth social, and that’s a grift by Trump and his team, not something growing from within the community.



  • Oh come on, are you really that boneheaded not to understand that you’re not the norm?

    I literally had not a single power surge in my entire life. The only power outages I had were for a few minutes maybe three times in the last 15 years.

    The larping refers to you. Either you are truly an outlier who actually runs a small DC, or you just like the feeling you can get pretending to do so.

    Your attitude is roughly the “only gold plated cables made from solid silver” equivalent in audiophiles. Technically maybe correct, practically a self-important waste of money.


  • But not for us.

    That’s what I meant by larping. The vast vast majority of us here would probably not even notice if their systems went down for an hour. Yes, battery backup has its purpose. In a datacenter.

    I mean, what’s on the line here in the worst case? 15min without jellyfin and home assistant? Does that warrant taking risks with old batteries or investing in new ones?

    That equation might change if you’re in a place with truly unreliable electricity, but I guess those places have solutions in place already.






  • I’ve done the horrible deed of updating Debian, for example.

    Distros like Arch get a pass, but Debian screwed me over several times. For example a few years ago, some driver decided to make itself clinge onto old kernel versions. So the boot partition got full and left me in a weird start where I had to manually remove old kernels and track down the driver at fault.

    Recoverable, but annoying, and on a system I use for work it would be really really expensive.

    Fedora used to nuke itself sometimes if you upgraded an install from version n to n+1, n+2, … Like a config not being migrated properly, a package conflict because of renamed packages and versions, yada yada yada.

    If you didn’t experience that, you either were very lucky, only used enterprise distros, or simply reinstalled often enough for it not to be an issue.