Andres

@K3can So you’re running the systemd services as root, and letting systemd change them to their relevant users? Or are you running the systemd services as a non-privileged user, and using container subuid/subgids?

@K3can @silver How do you handle running as other users? I like to run services as their own user, so currently I create a new user and (as them) run podman compose.

@irmadlad Also, I would think that companies offering long warranties on refurbished drives are playing the odds in a way that makes them money. It probably wouldn’t be profitable if they sold drives w/ bad/reallocated sectors and the majority of them died within the warranty period.

My assumption is that all drives will die (or suffer corruption) at the worst possible time, so do proper backup/scrubbing. Then look for deals where I can.

@irmadlad I can’t tell you averages (I’m not running massive storage servers with hundreds of drives here), but I ordered this particular one in Oct 2025. It’s still going strong. There’s another one that I bought back in 2019 or 2020 that I used for a few years before replacing it due to needing more space. Meanwhile, I’ve used plenty of consumer drives over the years that were a lot less reliable, so I have different rules for consumer drives (toss 'em at the first error) vs enterprise drives.

@irmadlad @moonpiedumplings Enterprise drives w/ bad sectors and a 5yr warranty? Me (raises hand)!

With snapraid and backups and the warranty, I’m perfectly happy to use enterprise drives _where the drive errors aren’t increasing_. Worst case, I lose some of those linux distributions and have to re-download them. I wouldn’t use one without a warranty though (and I certainly wouldn’t waste my time on a 500gb drive, the last hdd I bought w/ sector errors was 14TB for $140).

@KneeTitts @Jason2357 Recently there are a lot of zero-day kernel exploits (local privilege escalation), so I would make sure “up to date” includes regular reboots into new kernels. As opposed to just relying on something like unattended-upgrades.

For the past few weeks we’ve been averaging one LPE per week, and it’s probably going to continue like that for a bit.

@Flamekebab @non_burglar Sounds like snapraid might be a better fit for your needs. Since it runs over top of the filesystem, if you lose a disk you can still access files from the other disk(s). It’s better than rsync, in that it would provide regular data validation (‘snapraid scrub’ once per week or so). It is more designed to work in raid5 rather than mirroring (raid1) setup, however.

@empireOfLove2 @tintedundercollar12 Yeah, that absolutely looks like a hardware issue. Memtest is a good idea, but also reseat the nvme and keep an eye out for overheating (eg, ssh’ing in and keeping the following running in a terminal:
while (sleep 5); do sudo smartctl -a /dev/nvme0|grep ‘Temperature:’; done
). Components on the drive could be failing early when temperatures get high, but not high enough to trigger warning thresholds.

@kiol Syncthing? Restic? All packaged nicely in Debian, no need for containers. I do use Ansible (rather than backups) for ensuring if a drive dies, I can reproduce the configuration. That’s still very much a work-in-progress though, as there’s stuff I set up before I started using Ansible…

@kiol And then there’s the stuff that’s not packaged in Debian, like navidrome. I use a container for that for simplicity, and because if it breaks it’s not a big deal - temporary downtime of email is bad, temporary downtime of my streaming flac server means I just re-listen to the stuff that my subsonic clients have cached locally.

@kiol On the other hand, for doing builds (debian packages and random other stuff), I’ll use podman containers. I’ve got a self-built build environment that I trust (debootstrap’d), and it’s pretty simple to create a new build env container for some package, and wipe it when it gets too messy over time and create a new one. And for building larger packages I’ve got ccache, which doesn’t get wiped by each different build; I’ve got multiple chromium build containers w/ ccache, llvm build env, etc

@kiol I mean, I use both. If something has a Debian package and is well-maintained, I’ll happily use that. For example, prosody is packaged nicely, there’s no need for a container there. I also don’t want to upgrade to the latest version all the time. Or Dovecot, which just had a nasty cache bug in the latest version that allows people to view other peoples’ mailboxes. Since I’m still on Debian 12 on my mail server, I remain unaffected and I can let the bugs be shaken out before I upgrade.

@MimicJar @moseschrute *touches finger to earpiece*

…hang on, I’m getting word that the most recent edition of this book will crash your nvram’s firmware

@Dust0741 Check out jmp.chat (i can provide a referral code if you’d like a free trial). Your number would be ported there, and then SMS would go over XMPP/jabber to any device with a client running. Your phone can stay home, and you’d get SMS messages on your laptop or whatever device you’ve taken with you.

@iii @KarnaSubarna Looks like syncthing-fork already updated to 2.0: https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android/releases

It’s not in f-droid yet, though.

@Passerby6497 np! Any usb-powered PC fan will do, btw. I also have some Arctic fans that I like even better, but for the minipc I’m using an AC Infinity because that’s what I had handy.

@Passerby6497 @curbstickle I have a Minisforum hm90 that tried to cook the nvme (it triggered a smart error before actually frying, thankfully). Since the m2 slot is on the bottom near some vents, I just put the minipc on top of an AC Infinity usb fan (I forget if P12 or P14 - use whatever fits your minipc best) that blows up into the case and over the nvme.

@a @selfhosted @selfhostedchat Unfortunately no, as we don’t have any apple devices in the house.

@a @selfhosted @selfhostedchat Prosody (xmpp). The kids use Dino on their linux laptops, and Conversations on their android phones. The biggest problem we have is that the kids want to invite non-family members into the family chat, and I’m just not set up for that.

@tripflag @disobey2623 Your statement is correct; the way seafile stores files is in blocks (for de-duplication, apparently).

They offer a fuse extension that allows you to view stuff like a normal filesystem, though I’ve never tried it: https://manual.seafile.com/latest/extension/fuse/