I am sure there are Linux users that don’t ever use ssh and would look at you quizzically if you asked them about bash.

Pretty sure these users are few and far between. I haven’t found any of them.

Now it is possible that where you live, there is an abundance of Windows/Powershell experts and novice Linux users who only use Facebook. I’ll accept if that is your reality. All I can observe is that curious/enthusiast types tend to use Linux whereas others use Windows. People who want to better their situations tend to switch to Linux.

You should criticize Windows,

That never went well for me. Criticizing Windows is like talking them down for buying a car or calling their baby ugly. If you criticize Windows, Windows users will defend it.

What does work is to just stay silent and let Linux be better at getting my job done. Curious ones will observe and switch to Linux on their own. Others will continue using Windows.

Pretending that it doesn’t have excellent built in tooling doesn’t help your case.

Tooling can be installed. It is not a big enough factor in choosing an operating system.

And pretending that Windows doesn’t have built in tooling totally helps my case. Windows users have different expectations from their operating system. Windows is expected to be GUI based, so why will it have an SSH client? (except that it does) And why will it have a decent scripting language? (except that it does) And all software is installed by double-clicking on an .exe (except that Windows has a package manager)

My case is about people, not operating systems.

For me, Windows hasn’t fixed its myriad of reliability, performance and trust issues in over a decade, no amount of built-in tooling will make me return to Windows. Windows users on the other hand will tolerate the issues, or at most make it only as severe as previous Windows version. You see how difference between the users is playing out, right? The enthusiast types observe that a better experience is possible with Linux and become Linux users, and remaining users stay with Windows, mostly tolerating whatever Microsoft adds to Windows updates. Over time, Linux users and Windows users drift apart and become very different.

I bet very few people know that there’s an openssh client already installed in Windows.

Same with Powershell, I have heard it is quite capable but in practice Windows users tend to not know powershelI. I haven’t found anybody IRL who knows Powershell.

My goal wasn’t to criticize Windows, I wanted to show how much our experience is different from Windows users. It is not about windows vs Linux, but about how windows users usually do things vs how Linux users usually do things. Relatability is a powerful social force that I hadn’t accounted for, and now it just bites me.

I miss the human connection with those around me who use windows. After years of using Linux almost exclusively, I now miss being able to relate to them. Sometimes I feel lonely because of it.

Colleagues get to resonate with all the windows slowness and reliability issues, and I can only stay silent.

“Hey, how can I do this obscure thing?” “Oh yes that’s easy… err… no, I don’t know.” So many methods that are easy on Linux are basically impractical on windows. E.g. many text file processing tasks are doable swiftly with simple shell scripts or even bash one-liners; what will a windows user do? Telling them to automate something means suggesting them to create a new Java project. Opening an SSH session means using Mobaxterm which limits the number of sessions you can create.

For me the value of podman is how easily it works without root. Just install and run, no need for sudo or adding myself to docker group.

I use it for testing and dev work, not for running any services.

Technically, containers always run in Linux. (Even on windows/OS X; on those platforms docker runs a lightweight Linux VM that then runs your containers.)

And I wasn’t even using Docker.

How I lost a Postgres database:

1. Installed Postgres container without configuring a volume
2. Made a mental note that I need to configure a volume
3. After a few days of usage, restarted the container to configure the volume
4. …
5. Acceptance

You are not alone.

Just did some basic testing on broadcast addresses using socat, broadcast is not working at all with /32 addresses. With /24 addresses, broadcast only reaches nodes that share a subnet. Nodes that don’t share the subnet aren’t reachable by broadcast even when they’re reachable via unicast.

Edit1: Did more testing, it seems like broadcast traffic ignores routing tables.

On 192.168.0.2, I am running socat -u udp-recv:8000,reuseaddr - to print UDP messages.

Case 1: add 192.168.0.1/24

# ip addr add 192.168.0.1/24 dev eth0
# # Testing unicast
# socat - udp-sendto:192.168.0.2:8000 <<< "Message"
# # Worked
# socat - udp-sendto:192.168.0.255:8000,broadcast <<< "Message"
# # Worked

Case 2: Same as above but delete 192.168.0.0/24 route

# ip addr add 192.168.0.1/24 dev eth0
# ip route del 192.168.0.0/24 dev eth0
# # Testing unicast
# socat - udp-sendto:192.168.0.2:8000 <<< "Message"
2024/02/13 22:00:23 socat[90844] E sendto(5, 0x5d3cdaa2b000, 8, 0, AF=2 192.168.0.2:8000, 16): Network is unreachable
# # Testing broadcast
# socat - udp-sendto:192.168.0.255:8000,broadcast <<< "Message"
# # Worked

Here is a trick that has been tried and tested over the years: Install another distro, and use that to install Arch. This way, you can rely on an already working linux distro till your Arch install works the way you want.

1 a : to propel oneself in water by natural means (such as movements of the limbs, fins, or tail) b : to play in the water (as at a beach or swimming pool) 2 : to move with a motion like that of swimming : glide a cloud swam slowly across the moon 3 a : to float on a liquid : not sink b : to surmount difficulties : not go under sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish— Daniel Webster 4 : to become immersed in or flooded with or as if with a liquid potatoes swimming in gravy 5 : to have a floating or reeling appearance or sensation

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/swim

Apparently, swimming inherently requires a liquid.

It is for a challenge, the goal is to build a cloud with workload decoupled from servers decoupled from users who’d deploy the workload, with redundant network and storage, no single choke point for network traffic, and I am trying to achieve this with a small budget.

The level1 video shows thunderbolt networking though. It is an interesting concept, but it requires nodes with at-least 2 thunderbolt ports in order to have more than 2 nodes.

If redundant everything is important then you need to change your planning toward proper rack servers and switches

I ain’t got that budget man.

Yes, the entire network is supposed to be redundant and load-balanced, except for some clients that can only connect to one switch (but if a switch fails it should be trivial to just move them to another switch.)

I am choosing dell optiplex boxes because it is the smallest x86 nodes I can get my hands on. There is no pcie slot in it other than m.2 SSD slot which will be used for SSD.

I plan to have 2 switches.

Of course, if a switch fails, client devices connected to the switch would drop out, but any computer connected to both switches should have link redundancy.

There would be some quality-of-life improvements like being able to replace a switch without pulling down entire cluster, but it is mostly for a challenge.

I don’t like the mess some software makes when it install in my system

I gave up bothering about this a decade ago and I just store my files elsewhere while software treat the home directory as ‘application data’.

sleep 120 #TODO: actually solve a problem
echo "Sorry, we could not solve this problem."

Features necessary for most btrfs use cases are all stable, plus btrfs is readily available in Linux kernel whereas for zfs you need additional kernel module. The availability advantage of btrfs is a big plus in case of a disaster. i.e. no additional work is required to recover your files.

(All the above only applies if your primary OS is Linux, if you use Solaris then zfs might be better.)

Go: Why is your every second sentence a caution?