I would like to invite you all to test the project that a friend and me has been working on for a few months.
We aim to offer a fair, cheap and trusty alternative to proprietary services that perform data mining and sells information about you to other companies/entities.

Our goal is that users can (if they want) remain anonymous against us - because we are not interested in knowing who you are and what you do, like or want.
We also aim to offer a unique payment system that is fair, good and guarantees your intergrity by offer the ability to pay for the previous month not for the next month, by doing that you do not have to pay for a service that you does not really like.

Please note that this is still Free Beta, and we need your valuable experience about the service and how we can improve it. We have no ETA when we will launch the full service, but with your help we can make that process faster.

With this service, we do want to offer the following for now:
Nextcloud with 50 GB storage, yes you can mount it as a drive in Linux :)
Calendar
Email Client that you can connect to your email service (
SearX Instance
Talk ( voice and video chat )
Mirror for various linux distros

We are using free software for our environment - KVM + CEPH on our own hardware in our own facility. That means that we have complete control over the hosting and combined with one of the best ISP in the world - Bahnhof - we believe that we can offer something unique and/or be a compliment to your current services if you want to have more control over your data.

Register at:
https://operationtulip.com

Feel free to user our mirror:
https://mirror.operationtulip.com

Please send your feedback to:
feedback@operationtulip.com

I already wrote a rant about this yesterday, but since I'm a sysadmin trying to convert to dev.. I dunno, maybe it's not a bad idea to muddy the waters a bit and talk about why not to be a sysadmin.

Personally I think it's that the perceived barrier to entry is just too high, while it isn't. You don't need a huge Ceph cluster and massive servers when you're just starting out. Why overbuild an appliance like that if it's gonna start out at maybe 5 requests a minute?

Let's take an example - DNS servers! So there's been this guy on the bind-users mailing list asking how to set up a DNS server on 2 public servers, along with a website. Nothing special I guess - you can read the thread here: https://0x0.st/ZY-d. Aside from the question being quite confusing, there was advice to read RFC's, get a book, read the BIND ARM, etc etc. And the person to deny this? No one less than Stephane Bortzmeyer, one of the people who works for nic.fr (so he maintains the .fr TLD) and wrote some of those RFC's as part of the DNSOP working group in the IETF. As for valid reasons to set up a DNS server? Could just be to learn how the DNS works, or hell even for fun. As far as professional DNS servers go.. this (https://0x0.st/ZYo9) is the nugget that powers the K root server, one of the 13 root servers that power the root zone of the internet, aka the zone apex. 2 RJ45 connections, and a console connection. The reason why this is possible is the massive recursor networks that ISP's, Google DNS, Cloudflare DNS, Quad9, etc etc provide. Point is, you don't need huge infrastructure to run a server!

Or maybe your business needs email. How many thousands of emails per second are you gonna need to build your mail server against? How many millions will you need to store? If your business has 10 employees and all of those manage about 10k emails total.. well that's easy, 100k emails total. Per second? Hundreds of emails per second per employee? Haha, of course not. Maybe you'll see an email a minute at most. That is not to say that all email services are like this - it is true that ISP's who offer email to their customers, and especially providers like Microsoft and Google do need massive mail servers that can handle thousands of emails per second. But you are not Microsoft or Google. So yeah, focus on the parts of email that are actually hard.. and there is plenty.

Among sysadmins you have this distinction between "professional" sysadmins and homelabbers. I don't mind the distinction itself but I think both augment each other. If you've started out by jumping into a heap of legacy at an established company, you will have plenty of resources, immediately high complexity, and probably a clusterfuck right away. But you will have massive amounts of resources. If you start out with a homelab, you will have not many resources, small workloads, and something completely new for you to build and learn with. And when running a server like that, you'll probably find that the resources required are quite small, to provide you with your new services. My DHCP servers take 12MB memory each. My DNS servers hover around the 40MB mark. The mail server.. to be fair that one consumes around 150. But if you'd hear the people saying that you need huge servers.. omg you need at least a TB of RAM on your server and 72 cores, massive disks and Ceph!1!

No you don't. All that does is scaring people away and creating a toxic environment for everyone. Stop it.

Maybe I should automate downloading these google spreadsheets... neat there's an api for it, lemme just check the npm (https://npmjs.com/package/...).

Unpacked Size
49.2 MB

Total Files
900

Uhhh... fuck no? How about no fucking way? The nerve of these guys! Can you imagine being so up your own ass!? That's like 2kb of shit I care about, and the rest is bloat. Might even have some spyware hidden in there for how much NSA pays them.

FUUUCK TYPESCRIPT

It can't handle this function: `(arg) => arg` without kicking around a bunch of generics.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions...

This is ridiculous. The generics system on Typescript is complete trash, the amount of things it's unable to handle are unbelievable, and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I'm supposed to just accept that they couldn't possibly have done better.

Seriously, if I was one of the developers and I saw an issue like this, I wouldn't defend it; I'd be embarrassed.

For me that would be Proxmox. I know, people like it - but for no apparent reason it decided to nuke half my ZFS datasets in a pool, with no logic behind it whatsoever. All disks were tested, all came out good. Within the same pool there were datasets that were lost and some that remained.

I really don't get it. Looking at Proxmox' source code, it's more or less the command line tools and then there's the web interface (e.g. https://github.com/proxmox/...). Oh and they have the audacity to use their own file extension. Why not I guess?

Anyway, half my data was gone. I couldn't tell how or why or what the fuck even happened there. But Proxmox runs Debian underneath and I've been rather pissed about Proxmox' idea of "don't touch the host system aaa" for a while at that point. So I figured, fuck it I'll just take pure Debian then and write my own slightly better garbage on top of that. And as such the distribution project was born. I've been working on it for a little over a year now. And I've never had such issues again.

I somewhat get the idea of "don't touch the host" now, but still not quite. Yes, the more you do in the containers, the better. And the less you do on the host in terms of reconfiguration, the longer it will stay alive for. That goes for any system - more reconfiguration means usually means less stability and harder to replace. But sometimes you just have to work from the host. Like say migrating a container between hosts, which my code can do. You can't do that from a container, at all. There are good reasons to work with the host. Proxmox isn't telling that. Do they expect their users to be idiots? Only enterprise sysadmins amirite?

So yeah, that project - while I do take inspiration from it in mine - I don't like it. It's enterprise, it has the ZFS and the Ceph and the LXC and the VM's - woohoo! Not like anyone could implement that on a base Debian system. But they have the configuration database (pmxcfs), the distributed configuration database of a couple MB large and capped there, woah!

Ok sure it isn't Microsoft or IBM or Oracle or whatever, and those are definitely worse. But those are usually vendor lock-ins.. I avoid those on that premise alone :)