marcin-lis.pl

I've begun crafting my own scripts to facilitate the easy deployment of LXC containers with the desired software. While solutions like Proxmox helper scripts and Community Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts exist, I prefer understanding the intricacies of the scripts I use—how they function and why. It's been a considerable time since I last engaged with bash, so it seems like a good opportunity to refresh my skills.

In any case, I've developed an MVP, which is accessible in my proxmox_scripts repo. Currently, it's a basic version, but operational. My aim is to enhance its foolproof nature by adding answer validation, implementing a selection list to eliminate the need for copy-pasting values, and introducing default values to enable quick confirmations with a few keystrokes. Eventually, I might develop a UI, but that's at the end of my to-do list.

Decisions

I was thinking about that from some time, but in last week I decided to go with this topic. I had a feeling like I'm not using wordpress as I can. It was too much for my needs - simple blog, that's all.

So after consideration, I decided to move from wordpress into flat-file based CMS system. I didn't wanted to move into another big CMS like Drupal, Joomla, etc. I wanted something small, simple, lightweight and fast P:

Bludit

I checked my options, and after some test (thank you Oracle for your free tier in Oracle Cloud) I chose Bludit CMS as my CMS of choice.

What is Bludit? In short:

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Back to proxmox

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m using proxmox (again). But, in the same time, I wanted to migrate my services without long disruption, so I decided to move whole docker stack, as it is. But I prefer to use LXC containers than VMs. Why? Because LXC containers are faster and they are using less resources.

LXC are better than VMs because are:

• Lightweight – than means LXC containers have a smaller footprint and require fewer system resources compared to VMs.
• LXC containers share the host system’s kernel, reducing the overhead of running multiple operating systems.
• Faster – LXC containers have quicker startup times.
• Efficient resource handling – LXC containers efficiently manage system resources, optimizing performance and reducing waste. Mostly because LXC is not blocking resources like VM. So even if you declare 16GB of memory for LXC container, it will use only us much as needed, instead of block 16GB like VMs do.

Virtual Machines are better than LXC containers because they are:

• Not connected to host kernel – that means you can virtualize any OS, not only Linux based. So if you want to use Windows, MacOS, FreeBSD, etc you cannot use LXC, but VM
• They are isolated from host OS – that means they are safer by default. Because they’re isolated, security issues in one VM won’t spill over to others—crucial for maintaining system integrity and uptime. From the same reason, any kernel panic error will crash only VM, not whole host with all containers.
• May emulate different hardware – Proxmox VMs emulate a complete set of hardware, creating an entirely isolated environment for each operating system.

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Changes… again

I know I made changes in my home server configuration few months ago (you may read about that here), but I really like the idea of High Availability cluster based on Proxmox. In the same time, I’m in love with Archbang, and right now this is my distribution of choice (even, if I was in love with Debian for almost twenty years). In my career I worked with different distros, some Debian-based, mostly red-hat based (company standard after all). I worked with SUSE, Gentoo and many other too, but for years Debian was my preferred system. And right now I may say – Archbang is my preferred Linux distro at this moment of my life 🙂

Going back to the topic – I bought few new toys.

NAS – nothing fancy, but still working:

The Netgear ReadyNAS 314 (RN314) Small / Medium business NAS released in 2013. It is powered by Intel Atom D2701 dual-core @ 2.1 GHz CPU and 2 GB RAM. It has 1 x USB 2.0, 2 x USB 3.0 port(s) that can be used to connect printers and external drives. The ReadyNAS 314 device has 4 x 3.5″ SATA III bay(s) and 2 x Gigabit Ethernet LAN interfaces. And what is really nice, it may host some apps (except latest software version, 6.10.10, which removed this option). So I downgrade software to 6.10.9 and (after some tweaks) I have docker on it (just in case).

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A little of history

For a really long time I was using Contabo VPS as my main server. I was really happy with it. Good thing was, I bought it long time ago, before changes in packages, so I had few cores more then you may have right now for the same price. Similar story was with system memory. Ok, disk storage was lower then you will get now, but it wasn’t important for me. In my case, most of the space is used by images, and all of them are offloaded into S3 bucket anyway.

S3 and Ccloudflare

Because I’m using S3 bucket as a storage for offloaded images, I don’t need a lot of space and transfer. But… if I will serve images directly from S3, it will not look nice from the url point of view. So I mixed S3 (as storage) and Cloudflare with custom sub-domain (as CDN – Content Delivery Network).

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a system of distributed servers that deliver web content and pages to a user based on the geographic locations of the user, the origin of the webpage, and a content delivery server. This service is effective in speeding up the delivery of content on websites with high traffic and websites that have global reach. The closer the CDN server is to the user geographically, the faster the content will be delivered.

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Yes, it’s possible!

Some time ago, my friends from the telegram group asked if we may have a solution which will make a podcast from youtube videos. You may ask why, but answer is really simple:

Podcast applications have a rich functionality for content delivery – automatic download of new episodes, remembering last played position, sync between devices and offline listening. This functionality is not available on YouTube. But still – how to do it?

Podsync

Podsync is a free, open-source service, which allows you to listen your favorite user/playlist/channel videos from youtube and vimeo.

Features:

• Works with YouTube and Vimeo.
• Supports feeds configuration: video/audio, high/low quality, max video height, etc.
• mp3 encoding
• Update scheduler supports cron expressions
• Episodes filtering (match by title, duration).
• Feeds customizations (custom artwork, category, language, etc).
• OPML export.
• Supports episodes cleanup (keep last X episodes).
• One-click deployment for AWS.
• Runs on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and Docker.
• Supports ARM.
• Automatic youtube-dl self update.
• Supports API keys rotation.

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