I am back playing since a few weeks after bring absent for 5 years. Got myself Odyssey finally and do exobiology and you can build your own Colonies now!

There was a brief, very sad time when Jon left Opera and it started to go down the drain. His Opera Browser was the first and only Browser I was happy to pay money for. I was super excited when he started Vivaldi and use it since day one. It is fantastic and I hope they manage to keep out the toxic Google changes to Chromium, although I do not have high hopes, because Browser engines nowadays seem to be super complex and difficult to maintain. We`ll see… I will stick to Vivaldi as long as possible.

Thanks for pointing out Simplex Chat, I did not know that it exists. It looks very interesting, but reading more about it, they will have to implement some kind of business model in the future. My fear is, that even when self-hosting, some features will be behind a paywall in the future, so it is not a solution I would switch to… switching to a new messenger is a long-term endeavour. It is hard to convince friends to move over too, let alone switching to a new one every few years. That’s near impossible. But the technology of Simplex looks really interesting and reading through the Docs it makes the impression that it is very polished.

Thank you very much for the technical insight. It makes clear why it is how it is and it is good to see that you can host Activitypub services on Subdomains… so the issue I thought that exists is not that big of an issue anymore. Also I love the discussion under your post, very interesting!

Thanks also to everyone else who replied!

Yarr matey! Us fossers and selfhosters gotta stay togetharrr :-) (Thanks for your replay, made my day, Haha!) :-)

Back on my PC and a few more words about https://davideshay.github.io/groceries/ (Specifically Clementines).

Why do we use it and why do we think it is the best?

• You have list groups under which you have your stores that fit to your list groups (like food, gardening…). Items you create belong to a list group and can be shown in various lists (shops) under this group. Did not get your favourite Cheese in Shop A? Item will stay on the list for Shop B. Found it in Shop A already? The item is gone on the list for Shop B.
• For each list, you can create aisles and sort them like they are in that particular shop. This makes it possible to run through the shop in one line and get everything I need in the quickest time possible. No distractions or backtracking.
• It has real-time sync. We both go shopping in 2 shops for the same lists? Items get ticked off in real-time. Partner puts something on the list? I see it immediately.
• It has offline functionality. No cell reception in the shop? You shop offline. Cell reception back? It syncs automatically.
• It has a native Android app and a responsive Web UI, whatever fits to you. And both support offline usage.
• You can add pictures to items. Partner wants THAT particular cheese and then you stand in front of the 1km long cheese shelf and have no idea how that thing looks? Just add a picture to an item, problem fixed.
• You ticked off an item by accident from the list and you have no idea what it was? Ticked off items stay on the list ticked off and you can bring them easily back. You are done with shopping? You can then fully clear the list of all ticked off items if you want to clean it up.

The only downside is: It is a bit difficult to set up, but this is true for all services that use CouchDB as a database I ever set up. But it is worth it. This solution is super stable and the live sync was super usefull so many times.

We use it for more than just shopping now. It also works great for a packing list when you go on vacation for example or basically everything else you need to “tick off a list”.

I think I tried all of them. My partner and me are using Specifically Clementines and never looked back. It is like someone found out what we want and made a solution. Can weite more when I am on my PC later.

Thank you very much. I spent another two hours yesterday reading up on that and creating other VMs and Templates, but I was not able yet to attach the Boot disk to a SCSI controller and make it boot. I would really liked to see if this change would bring it on-par with Proxmox (I wonder now what the defaults for Proxmox are), but even then, it would still be much slower than with Hyper-V or XCP-ng. If I find time, I will look into this again.

I am neither working professionally in that field. To answer your question: Of course I would use whatever gives me the best performance. Why it is set like this is beyond my knowledge. What you basically do in Apache Cloudstack when you do not have a Template yet is: You upload an ISO and in this process you have to tell ACS what it is (Windows Server 2022, Ubuntu 24 etc.). From my understanding, those pre-defined OS you can select and “attach” to an ISO seem to include the specifics for when you create a new Instance (VM) in ACS. And it seems to set the Controller to SATA. Why? I do not know. I tried to pick another OS (I think it was called Windows SCSI), but in the end it ended up still being a VM with the disks bound to the SATA controller, despite the VM having an additional SCSI controller that was not attached to anything.

This can probably be fixed on the commandline, but I was not able to figure this out yesterday when I had a bit spare time to tinker with it again. I would like to see if this makes a big difference in that specific workload.

I just can’t figure out how to create a VM in ACS with SCSI controllers. I am able to add a SCSI controller to the VM, but the Boot Disk is always connected to the SATA controller. I tried to follow this thread (https://lists.apache.org/thread/op2fvgpcfcbd5r434g16f5rw8y83ng8k) and create a Template, and I am sure I am doing something wrong, but I just cannot figure it out :-(

I had a rough start with XCP-ng too. One issue I had was the NIC in my OptiPlex, which worked… but was super slow. So the initial installation of the XO VM (to manage XCP-ng) took over an hour. After using a USB NIC with another Realtek Chip, Networking was no issue anymore.

For management, Xen-Orchestra can be self-built and it is quite easy and works mostly without any additional knowledge / work if you know the right tools. Tom Lawrence posted a Video I followed and building my own XO is now quite easy and quick (sorry for being a YT link): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuS7tSOxcSo

Sure, ESXi would have been interesting. I thought about that, but I did not test it because it is not interesting to me anymore from a business perspective. And I am not keen of using it in my Homelab, so I left that out and use that time to do something relaxing. It’s my holiday right now :-)

That’s a very good question. The testsystem is running Apache Cloudstack with KVM at the moment and I have yet to figure out how to see which Disk / Controller mode the VM is using. I will dig a bit to see if I can find out. Would be interesting if it is not SCSI to re-run the tests.

Edit: I did a ‘virsh dumpxml <vmname>’ and the Disk Part looks like this:

  <devices>
    <emulator>/usr/bin/qemu-system-x86_64</emulator>
    <disk type='file' device='disk'>
      <driver name='qemu' type='qcow2' cache='none'/>
      <source file='/mnt/0b89f7ac-67a7-3790-9f49-ad66af4319c5/8d68ee83-940d-4b68-8b28-3cc952b45cb6' index='2'/>
      <backingStore/>
      <target dev='sda' bus='sata'/>
      <serial>8d68ee83940d4b688b28</serial>
      <alias name='sata0-0-0'/>
      <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='0' target='0' unit='0'/>
    </disk>

It is SATA… now I need to figure out how to change that configuration ;-)

It would be cool to see how linux centric workloads behave on those Hypervisors. Juuust in case you plan to invest some time into that ;-)

Yes, it is Windows centric because that is where the workload is based on I need to run. It would be cool to see a similar comparison with a workload under Linux that puts strain on CPU, Memory and Disk.

Oooh, that explains it! I wondered what is going on. Thank you very much. And thank you for working on XCP-ng, it is a fantastic platform :-)

A few releases ago they made massive improvements in Speed. I use NC since the Split from OwnCloud and that performance Upgrade recently was truly impressive.

I spent half a day trying to get acme-dns + Cert Warden up and running and failed miserably. And I think I will give up on it. That does not happen usually, but during my debugging sessions I have seen that the acme-dns project is not maintained regularly since quite a while. The current maintainer just has not enough time, but tries to prepare the project for a move to a new GitHub organization, so more people can help with the project. Until then, Issues and PRs accumulate, so I am not sure anymore if I should stick to acme-dns or just do it differently.

Why did I pick this scenario? Because of Let’s Encrypt certificates and my DNS provider does not allow fine-grained API Keys for DNS management. This means, that currently the processes that request certificates in my Network need the API Key for the dns-challenge for Let’s Encrypt.

Ways around that are by either using Let’s Encrypt alternate (I think it is called DNS alias mode) method where you can request Certificates for your main domain, but put the TXT records for the DNS challenge on another Domain. One way is to just use a 2nd Domain for that if you have one.

I tried to do it with a Subdomain of my Main Domain that I delegate to acme-dns. The whole acme-dns, Domain delegation stuff etc. works fine, but I am not able to get this hooked up to Cert Warden properly and end up with error messages that make no sense to me and since I do not find any further information in the logs, as I said, I just gave up yesterday evening… for now ;-)

Another thing I am struggling sometimes is my Pi-Hole + Unbound setup where Unbound for no reason just returns a NXDOMAIN for some queries and I can not figure out why, under which circumstances and when that happens. It just seems to be random and a restart / cache clearing etc. does not fix it.

PostgreSQL Updates AFAIK require manual Backup / Restore of the Database. But better look that up. I think the last one I did was:

1. Stop the Application Containers (here the Immich ones, so only PostgreSQL runs)
2. Backup the Database
3. Stop the PostgreSQL Container
4. Change to the new PostgreSQL Version
5. Start the PostgreSQL Container
6. Restore the Database
7. Start the Application Containers

As I said, better look it up first, this is just how I remember the process (but not the backup / restore commands).

Sounds like a good Chili aftermath.