To any comrade who has requested an account on TankieTube: Sorry for ignoring you! I plan to accept all your applications (anyone from Hexbear or Lemmygrad is welcome), but I need to do some things first.

I’m working as fast as I can to configure the server to allow more users and videos but my brain is the size of a walnut and my paws can barely reach the keyboard so technology is difficult for me. kitty-cri I unveiled the PeerTube instance last Friday (a little prematurely) in an attempt to help comrade @[email protected] with movie night.

Edit 1: Technical details:

  • According to comrade @[email protected], our CyTube instance needs an update before it’s compatible with PeerTube for movie nights. Something about RC 3.9 (I’m assuming that’s the version number but maybe it’s a dependency idk)? Done!

  • The server’s storage is currently limited to the 50 GiB lenin-dont-laugh partition on which it runs. This is the main problem. I’m trying to configure S3 object storage for proper scalability but it’s something I’ve never done before.

  • Email notifications aren’t working yet. That means you won’t get an email when I’ve approved your account, so just watch this space or try to log in in a couple days from now. That also means it can’t yet do automated password resets. Apparently PeerTube wants me to use something called Sendmail but I’d rather send the emails from the server’s localhost because I don’t want to pay money for some stupid app and because emails are already working for the GNU CLI mail utilities so it should also work With PeerTube—why isn’t it working with PeerTube!? I’m dumb. Sorry for slandering sendmail. Smarter comrades are currently walking me through this stuff stalin-approval

  • I got a tremendous deal a-little-trolling on a VPS in the Netherlands with a 10 gigabit connection for about $15/mo.

  • Although the network speed is great, the CPU power is limited, so expect post-upload video transcoding to take quite a bit more time than it does for Vimeo or YouTube. I’m trying to improve this by tweaking parameters but currently it takes longer than the video’s runtime to be processed

  • It’s running on Arch (btw) libretion

  • TankieTanuki [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
    13·
    9 months ago

    I have a borderline ASD-like obsession with Arch. I realize I’m bucking the conventional wisdom by using it as a webserver, but I’m part of a bold new clique that believes the distribution is not just for breakfast anymore. I’ve been using it exclusively on every device except my smartphone for the past nine years and I wrote a whole library of scripts to work in it. I’m also obsessed with ssh and iptables hardening for the reason you specified. I have been burned by updates a few times, but every one of those issues has been something related to video drivers. I’ve never had a problem with any of the more “core” packages that are used by a webserver. I also take a btrfs snapshot before every system upgrade so I can quickly restore the filesystem in the event of a borked update.

    • YearOfTheCommieDesktop [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      ironic, I use arch exclusively on my smartphone

      I do like it, seems like it would mostly just work for servers if kept well patched, though it is true that debian stable will probably be more secure against novel attacks. I don’t love it for my laptop I don’t think though, I’m a little baby who doesn’t want to do a bunch of configuration and theming, and (tbf quite a while ago) the last time I ran arch on a laptop the default WM settings for whatever WM I tried was very sparse

      • TankieTanuki [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
        3·
        9 months ago

        Wow, I thought Linux on smartphones was infeasible! Can it be installed on a rooted android? How is the battery management?

        Waitaminute… I thought Arch was for x86 architecture only… don’t smarthpones use ARM?

        • YearOfTheCommieDesktop [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          4·
          9 months ago

          Arch are in fact being dicks about supporting arm officially (which is silly, with aarch64 servers being so widespread now, plus things like rpi, though I get that its not a nice consistent platform like x86, its more liable to vary wildly from device to device). Officially, what I’m using is Danctnix, which is an offshoot run by like one or two people, of arch linux ARM, which is not a part of Arch proper, per-se. https://archlinuxarm.org/

          I’ll be honest it is a mess in a lot of ways, but I am daily driving it, for like 6 months now. I run it on a pinephone pro, so dedicated hardware, but I got it used cheap, and a select few android phones can run a similar stack I believe (linux + wayland + phosh or sxmo). last I heard the OP6 was one of the best supported android devices (postmarketOS wiki is a good resource for device compatibility, though not perfectly up to date. pmOS is another mobile-focused distro based on Alpine iirc): https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/OnePlus_6_(oneplus-enchilada)

          • ProletarianDictator [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
            2·
            9 months ago

            I need to cop me one of these devices. How is the PinePhone Pro?

            First time hearing of Danctnix, looks interesting.

            Probably a good base for security, but I see an Alpine-based distro being cumbersome. Does postmarketOS support flatpak, distrobox, or nix? Those might negate my issues with Alpine.

            • YearOfTheCommieDesktop [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              2·
              9 months ago

              I mean its flawed, like seemingly every pine64 product is in some way, but its really not too bad. The worst things are probably:

              • the cameras (poor software support though it’s been improving.) personally at this point I just use a nice pocketable digital camera which takes good photos and great video rather than rely on the phone
              • the battery life. The pro is using a (admittedly customized and cut down a bit to work better for the application) chromebook SoC, the rk3399, so under any serious usage you can cruise through the 3000mAh battery pretty fast. The battery life while the phone is asleep is way better though, and it will wake up for calls and texts (no push), and I believe the ones shipping now come with the right bootloader to make suspend work out of the box (otherwise you can install it), but under usage you don’t get a ton. But you can just swap batteries freely which helps or use the keyboard case which I’ll mention below.
              • The durability could be better. It can be hard to get a screen protector or case that has good coverage (iphone 11 max or smth like that fits well but isn’t edge to edge, doesn’t cover the bezels).

              This doesn’t really cover it all, I’ve been playing with the pinephone for years and now the pro for about 1 year, half of which is daily use, and sometimes I still get lost or frustrated with some issue lmao. Dailying it has changed my smartphone usage habits significantly, and I’ve had to come up with some little workarounds and such, and the battery life doesn’t allow me to spend all day on it. I still browse this site on it regularly though.

              If you don’t have interest in running heavier apps like heavy webapps, etc. the original pinephone is easier on batteries (a little), and some of the hardware support (cameras esp.) is more mature, but its even slower esp if you run phosh not a terminal or sxmo or whatever. Make sure you aren’t getting the 2G ram model and its probably usable.

              pmOS supports flatpak yep! I haven’t actually used it but I see lots of good stuff about it. I use flatpak quite a bit on Arch, its how I get my signal client (which is just the desktop app, it scales decently enough really) I’ve seen some people mention nix with regards to the pinephone but idk much about it.

              There’s also mobian, which seems decent/polished, if you like debian, and I think new pinephone pros are now shipping with the partly nonfree sailfishOS (sucks that its not foss but their integration for running android apps looks really interesting.)

              Anyhow don’t set your expectations too high, but IMO they’re still one of the better devices for mobile linux. I haven’t tried a OP6 or anything though I guess.

              Also the keyboard case is cool (6000mAh battery in it too!), but the implementation of the pogo pins it connects through is mechanically quite poor and has historically had a ton of issues. I have two of them, frankensteined into one working one that isn’t tooo beat up, but I’m still not using it rn because the charging got intermittent so I’d wake up to a full kb battery and a dead phone. Too busy to troubleshoot it rn.

          • oscardejarjayes [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            2·
            9 months ago

            dualbooting postmarketOS and divestos with my fajita has been great! I also run Arch on my pinephone, but it’s hardware is a weakness. I really like the hardware switches though, I wish more phones had them.

            • YearOfTheCommieDesktop [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              2·
              9 months ago

              yeah it sucks how proprietary and up its own ass the arm soc market is because I would love a pinephone with a more modern SoC than 2016…

              never seen divestos, sounds neat. I like the mobile linux stack i just wish a few things were more solid/stable/widely supported across hw. do you run phosh or ?

    • ProletarianDictator [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      4·
      9 months ago

      Arch is undoubtedly a great OS. I used to have a similar BTRFS setup on Arxh that ran snapshots whenever packages were upgraded or /etc files changed.

      but I’m part of a bold new clique that believes the distribution is not just for breakfast anymore.

      There’s gonna be a bold new clique of fascists and feds eating our lunch and building lists of comrades and their IP addresses if you don’t reconsider.

      Arch has a number of issues with regards to security: (just off the top of my head)

      • slow security patching (yes, it gets feature releases quickly, but it is substantially lagging when it comes to backports and bug fixes)
      • long term configuration drift causing instability
      • bleeding edge packages having bugs or vulnerabilities that get patched in minor revisions
      • no immutability

      I wouldn’t even consider hosting anything comrade-adjacent without using an immutable OS and/or containers…preferably and.

      Remember, you are going to be responsible for the security of your users, users who are highly desirable targets for natsec ghouls and fash looking to do us harm. Don’t let your personal preferences jeopardize your users by ignoring widely-recognized best practices for security. There are many reasons why industry and conventional wisdom don’t argue for Arch in the server space.

      I strongly urge you to reconsider, comrade.