Yes and no. There are many things that are much easier with Kubernetes, once you figure Kubernetes out.

High availability is the most notable example — yes, it’s doable in docker, via something like swarm, but it’s more difficult. In comparison, the ideas of clustering and working with more than one server are central to the architecture of Kubernetes.

Another thing is that long term deployments with Kubernetes can be more maintainable, since everything is just yaml files and version is just a number. If you store your config in code, then it’s easier to replicate it to another server, either internally, or if you share it for other people to use (Helm is somewhat like this).

This helm chart is not just matrix/synapse, but also element (web ui), and “matrix authentication service”, which adds SSO/OIDC support to a normal synapse instance, which is pretty neat. I haven’t seen any helm charts that include the full matrix stack, just separate synapse or element helm charts. And helm definitely makes deploying services to Kubernetes easier than other ways of deploying applications.

The other reason why I like an official helm chart, is because I have seen unofficial one’s be stopped being maintained by the community member(s) maintaining them. With an official one, it will (probably) be maintained indefinitely.

Docs:

https://www.psycopg.org/psycopg3/docs/basic/params.html#danger-sql-injection

Licenses like SSPLv1

The SSPL requires that all software used to deploy SSPL software is open sourced. If I deploy my software on Windows, do I have to provide the source code for Windows? What about the proprietary hardware drivers, or Intel Management Engine?

The SSPL is not the next generation of licenses, it is effectively unusable. And both Redis and Mongo, dual licensed their software as the SSPL, and a proprietary license — effectively making their entire software proprietary.

make money without risk of a cloud vendor snapping up their software (think Redis, MongoDB, etc) need a place at the table.

Except Redis, and Mongo were making money. They had well valued, well earning SAAS offerings — it’s just that the offerings integrated into existing cloud vendors would be more popular (because vendor lock in). They just wanted more money, and were hoping that by going proprietary, they could force customers away from the cloud offers to themselves, and massively increase their revenue… They did not get that.

Another thing is that it’s not “stealing” Mongo/Redis’ when cloud vendors offer SAAS’s of Mongo/Redis. Mongo/Redis, and their SAAS offerings, are only possible because the same cloud vendors put more money than Mongo/Redis make yearly into Linux and other software that powers the SAAS offerings of Mongo/Redis, like Kubernetes. Without that software, Mongo/Redis wouldn’t have a SAAS offering at all.

I definitely think that it’s bad when a piece of software doesn’t get any funding it needs to develop, especially when it powers much more modern software, like XZ. But Mongo/Redis weren’t suffering from a lack of funding at all. They’re just mad they had to share their toys, and tried to take them away. But it didn’t even matter in the end.

I switched to fennec and it’s basically instant. Fennec also gets ublock origin, a much better adblocker. But I’ve been too lazy to switch before this.

Anubis takes around 5 minutes on cromite browser.

It doesn’t work at all for users without javascript. The creator of anubis is investigating an alternative

It’s a lot more complex than “enable everywhere immediately”.

I thought you were going to link to this.

I don’t think so, now. You’ll have to do those yourself.

Which means my distro-morphing idea should work in theory with OpenStack

I also don’t recommend doing a manual install though, as it’s extremely complex compared to automated deployment solutions like kolla-ansible (openstack in docker containers), openstack-ansible (host os/lxc containers), or openstack-helm/genestack/atmosphere (openstack on kubernetes). They make the install much more simpler and less time consuming, while still being intensely configurable.

Personally, I think Proxmox is somewhat unsecure too.

Proxmox is unique from other projects, in it’s much more hacky, and much of the stack is custom rather than standards. Like for example: For networking, they maintain a fork of the Linux’s older networking stack, called ifupdown2, whereas similar projects, like openstack, or Incus, use either the standard Linux kernel networking, or a project called openvswitch.

I think Proxmox is definitely secure enough, but I don’t know if I would really trust it for higher value usecases due to some of their stack being custom, rather than standard and mantained by the wider community.

If I end up wanting to run Proxmox, I’ll install Debian, distro-morph it to Kicksecure

If you’re interested in deploying a hypervisor on top of an existing operating system, I recommend looking into Incus or Openstack. They have packages/deployments than can be done on Debian or Red Hat distros, and I would argue that they are designed in a more secure manner (since they include multi tenancy) than Proxmox. In addition to that, they also use standard tooling for networking, like both can use Linux Bridge (in-kernel networking) for networking operations.

I would trust Openstack the most when it comes to security, because it is designed to be used as a public cloud, like having your own AWS, and it is deployed with components publicly accessible in the real world.

Again, this is distracting from the original argument to make some kind of tertiary argument unrelated to the original one: Is ssh secure to expose to the internet?

You said no. That is the argument being contested.

This is moving the goal posts. You went from “ssh is not fine to expose” to “VPN’s add security”. While the second is true, it’s not what was being argued.

Never expose your SSH port on the public web,

Linux was designed as a multi user system. My college, Cal State Northridge, has an ssh server you can connect to, and put your site up. Many colleges continue to have a similar setup, and by putting stuff in your homedir you can have a website at no cost.

There are plenty of usecases which involve exposing ssh to the public internet.

And when it comes to raw vulnerabilities, ssh has had vastly less than stuff like apache httpd, which powers wordpress sites everywhere but has had so many path traversal and RCE vulns over the years.

Firstly, Xen is considered by secure by Qubes — but that’s mainly the security of the hypervisor and virtualization system itself. They make a very compelling argument that escaping a Xen based virtual machine is going to be more difficult than a KVM virtual machine.

But threat model matters a lot. Qubes aims to be the most secure OS ever, for use cases like high profile journalists or other people who absolutely need security, because they will literally get killed without it.

Amazon moved to KVM because, despite the security trade off’s, it’s “good enough” for their usecase, and KVM is easier to manage because it’s in the Linux kernel itself, meaning you get it if you install Linux on a machine.

In addition to that, security is about more than just the hypervisor. You noted that Promox is Debian, and XCP-NG is Centos or a RHEL rebuild similar to Rocky/Alma, I think. I’ll get to this later.

Xen (and by extension XCP-NG) was better known for security whilst KVM (and thus Proxmox)

I did some research on this, and was planning to make a blogpost and never got around to making it. But I still have the draft saved.

The short version is: it depends, and they can fluctuate slightly on certain tasks, but they are mostly the same in performance.

default PROXMOX and XCP-NG installations.

What do you mean by hardening? If you are talking about hardening the management operating system (Proxmox’s Debian or XCP’s RHEL-like), or the hypervisor itself?

I agree with the other poster about CIS hardening and generally hardening the base operating system used. But I will note that XCP-NG is more designed to be an “appliance” and you’re not really supposed to touch it. I wouldn’t be suprised if it’s immutable nowadays.

For the hypervisor itself, it depends on how secure you want things, but I’ve heard that at Microsoft Azure datacenters, they disable hyperthreading because it becomes a security risk. In fact, Spectre/Meltdown can be mitigated by disabling hyper threading. Of course, their are other ways to mitigate those two vulnerabilities, but by disabling hyper threading, you can eliminate that entire class of vulnerabilities — at the cost of performance.

Now, I don’t write code. So I can’t really tell you if this is the truth or not — but:

I’ve heard from software developers on the internet that OpenCL is much more difficult and less accessible to write than CUDA code. CUDA is easier to write, and thus gets picked up and used by more developers.

In addition to that, someone in this thread mentions CUDA “sometimes” having better performance, but I don’t think it’s only sometimes. I think that due to the existence of the tensor cores (which are really good at neural nets and matrix multiplication), CUDA has vastly better performance when taking advantage of those hardware features.

Tensor cores are not Nvidia specific, but they are the “most ahead”. They have the most in their GPU’s, and probably most importantly: CUDA only supports Nvidia, and therefore by extension, their tensor cores.

There are alternative projects, like how leela chess zero mentions tensorflow for google’s Tensor Processing Units, but those aren’t anywhere near as popular due to performance and software support.

AFIK it’s only NVIDIA that allows containers shared access to a GPU on the host.

This cannot be right. I’m pretty sure that it is possible to run OpenCL applications in containers that are sharing a GPU.

I should test this if I have time. My plan was to use a distrobox container since that shares the GPU by default and run something like lc0 to see if opencl acceleration works.

Now where is my remindme bot? (I won’t have time).

It’s worked fine for me with no configuration. If you ask for help, we can troubleshoot and get it working.

I despise the way Canonical pretends discourse forum posts by their team members* are documentation.

I’ve noticed they have been a bit better lately, and have migrated much of the posts to their documentation, but it seems they are doing it again.

As this is developed, we will update this post to link to the new documentation and feature release notes.

Pro tip: You could have just made the documentation directly, with the content of this post. Or maybe a blog post. But please stop with the forum posts. They are very confusing for people not used to these… unique locations.

*Not that people are easily able to find this out when they don’t give any indication that the forum post is something other than just another post by a rando. Actually, I’m just guessing here, based on the quoted reply, for all I know this could be a post by someone unrelated to Canonical. The account is 3 months, and the post itself is identical to a regular forum post from a regular forum member…

It actually is a language issue.

Although rust can dynamically link with C/C++ libraries, it cannot dynamically link with other Rust libraries. Instead, they are statically compiled into the binary itself.

But the GPL interacts differently with static linking than with dynamic. If you make a static binary with a GPL library or GPL code, your program must be GPL. If you dynamically link a GPL library, you’re program doesn’t have to be GPL. It’s partially because of this, that the vast majority of Rust programs and libraries are permissively licensed — to make a GPL licensed rust library would mean it would see much less use than a GPL licensed C library, because corporations wouldn’t be able to extend proprietary code off of it — not that I care about that, but the library makers often do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Libraries — it’s complicated.

EDIT: Nvm I’m wrong. Rust does allow dynamic linking

Hmmmm. But it seems that people really like to compile static rust binaries, however, due to their portability across Linux distros.

EDIT2: Upon further research it seems that Rust’s dynamic linking implementation lacks a “stable ABI” as compared to other languages such as Swift or C. So I guess we are back to “it is a language issue”. Well thankfully this seems easier to fix than “Yeah Rust doesn’t support dynamic linking at all.”

Edit3: Nvm, I’m very, very wrong. The GPL does require programs using GPL libraries, even dynamically linked, be GPL. It’s the LGPL that doesn’t.

Openstack cluster!

[moonpie@osiris ~]$ du -h $(which filelight)
316K    /usr/bin/filelight

K = kilobytes.

[moonpie@osiris ~]$ pacman -Ql filelight | awk '{print $2}' | xargs du | awk '{print $1}' | paste -sd+ | bc
45347740

45347740 bytes is 43.247 megabytes. That is to say, the entire install of filelight is only 43 megabytes.

KDE packages have many dependencies, which cause the packages themselves to be extremely tiny. By sharing a ton of code via libraries, they save a lot of space.