Notes

Event: Community Over Code. Venue: Grand Hyatt Denver, Denver, Colorado. See slides here Abstract: Managing Machine Learning environments is hard: “Where do I install package X from? If I install Y, will it break my current environment or change the package closure in any way? How do I share my code and the corresponding environment with a colleague in a reproducible way? If my code runs locally, how do I ensure it runs as-is in the cloud? How do I safely and easily upgrade the environment at a cadence I want?” ...

I was preparing a technical talk but later discarded it because I decided it wouldn’t have enough depth. Following are my notes from that. Title: Over-engineer your blog with Nix flakes, IaC (i.e. infrastructure as code) and CI/CD Description: Imagine you have a simple system that works with a handful of CLI commands and a few clicks on a cloud provider’s console. What happens if you tinker a little too much? Well, you could transform it into a declaratively defined and fully reproducible system that employs CI/CD. ...

Couple of times, I had an orphan Directory in Proxmox. The solution is simply to remove the corresponding file in /etc/systemd/system. See this. Apparently, this also works for orphan Datastores in Proxmox Backup Server.

It’s fairly easy to limit ZFS’s overall memory usage on Proxmox. Add the following to /etc/modprobe.d/zfs.conf to allocate maximum 16 GB. (Here, 16 * 2^30 = 17179869184.) options zfs zfs_arc_max=17179869184 See this.

ZFS makes it so easy to convert striping to mirroring or vice versa: # Assume "foo" already existed and "bar" is new zpool attach spinning-rust /dev/disk/by-id/foo /dev/disk/by-id/bar zpool detach spinning-rust /dev/disk/by-id/bar No need to initialize the drives or anything - just pass the raw disks.

I was recently contemplating on getting a used enterprise server. And, unlike my previous attempts, I made more progress this time in narrowing down what kind of hardware to buy. So, here are some notes from that: Minimum 2U to keep noise down (and even then it’ll likely be noisy enough to keep in an office). 4Us can be expensive. I may need a closed (but ventilated?) rack to keep the noise down. I can buy it after getting the server and running it for a few days. As of today, Dell’s 13th generation line is ~10 years old and 14th is ~5. However, the power usage of the two should be similar unless I put a lot of load onto the machine. 3.5 vs 2.5 inch drive bays. (The former would be better for me.) Each bay will require a caddy, if I were to put a hard drive in it, or a blank. I should be able to use both SATA and SAS hard drives and I think the former would be cheaper. Reach out to eBay sellers directly and ask for quotes/discounts. For now, I am deciding to continue with my existing consumer-grade PC. Maybe the enterprise server will come later.

I wanted to decrease the size of an LXC’s root disk and it seemed complicated for a long time. Eventually, the solution turned out be fairly simple: zfs set refquota=64G fast-zfs-pool/subvol-100-disk-0 # For LXC: pct rescan # Or for VM: qm rescan See: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/shrinking-zfs-filesystem-for-lxc-ct.40876/ This only works when the disk is stored on ZFS, but that’s already the case for my use case. (ZFS is awesome!)

I wanted to showcase some of our personal photos on an always-on-ish Android tablet at home. Some thoughts from that project: Hardware: ”Digital photo frames“ seem like a good idea but only for less tech-savvy people. Tablet seems most extensible as we can later use it for other purposes too. Apps: Fotoo is a nice app for Android tablets. Samba, local and cloud libraries. Maybe find a way to sync photos to the tablet. “Public” album on Immich. Though, no way to get random images from such an album. Can show slideshow from their app but I’ll need to create a new guest user plus manually start it every time on the tablet. https://www.fully-kiosk.com/, plus it integrates with Home Assistant. Can make the tablet sluggish. Immich public albums don’t have slideshow feature. Wall panel - add on in HA. https://smarthomescene.com/guides/wallpanel-home-assistant-screensaver-for-your-wall-mounted-control-panel/ https://github.com/j-a-n/lovelace-wallpanel There is no get random image from shared album API. Huge benefit is that this is infinitely customizable through HA. For e.g., adding a music control. https://github.com/outadoc/immich-home-assistant

Here are some interesting thoughts I found in the Atomic Habits book. Identity-oriented > action-oriented > goal-based approaches to form habits. Time and location to be part of a new habit: I’ll do X at time Y in location Z. Habit stacking. Design your environment so that good cues are more visible than bad ones. (There were more good ideas but I didn’t note them down.) Good habits that I’d like to create: ...

I used static-auth-secret to setup my Coturn instance. So, as per this, I can run the following to generate credentials: secret=staticAuthSecretHere u=$((`date +%s` + 3600)):test p=$(echo -n $u | openssl dgst -hmac $secret -sha1 -binary | base64) echo -e "username: $u\npassword: $p" Then, test here: icetest. There is also this, but I found the previous better: Trickle ICE: URI format: stun:turn.ketanvijayvargiya.com:5349. A Done at the end means the test succeeded.