Yeah an appliance distro would be a different consideration. For me Ubuntu is really flexible and a great docker host. I feel it’s safer to tinker with since you get those extra layers of containment and sandboxing.

If I was to build an appliance I might also start with Debian, but so far I have used FreeBSD. Works great on my NAS, where I use XigmaNAS. You can transfer a surprisingly lot of skills. Learning what was common to FreeBSD and Linux really helped me with cli.

I’m curious to try making stuff with Ubuntu Core. I think it has potential, but that’s a future deep dive and project. lol

I discovered Tresorit and I like it so far. $150 usd a year for 1 TB. Owned by the Swiss Post of all things. I prefer state owned or non profit companies where possible as service providers.

I also wanted something GDPR compliant and outside the scope of the Cloud Act. I didn’t want my data accessible by a hostile nation.

I like their cli tools, though they are setup a bit weirdly on linux. It’s more like running binaries and scripts than installing a package. Nevertheless, it gets the job done. Upload speed isn’t amazing, but it is overseas. Took nearly 24 hours to send 100gb or something. My server handles it, so its not a concern.

I’m not sure I could recommend it as a replacement for a Google Drive since I don’t use it that way. I just turn the sync on once a week and it’ll diff what’s on my backups.

I might setup a different folder to use as a more daily cloud storage and see how that goes. There’s desktop and mobile apps.

I think that’s more of a Ubuntu Desktop concern. My thinkpad has a 4th gen i5 and launches Firefox maybe half a second slower on a fresh reboot and afterwards its normal.

Its really not relevant to a server who has all the time in the world to boot and stays up. Once the snap is launched, its launched, works fine afterwards. It’s all cached in the RAM or temp data or whatever afterwards.

Ideally your server install would be on an SSD and your data on HDDs. Performance will be good with that setup.

I wonder how viable it would be to do the opposite of quantum. If we remove every at risk feature and strip it down to the basics: no scripts, no multi-user, no public sharing etc…

Project could be pretty easy to maintain indefinitely?

I remember reading earlier this year that the project was essentially “complete” and would only get security updates.

But like he says: “people keep making PRs for new features. Features that I do really think would benefit the project.”

I really struggle with folks’ sense of gratitude sometimes. Like there’s so many people making cool things for us… for free… When they could be doing the same work for money.

But yeah, sucks nobody could really keep the project up and secure. I’m not looking for a fork that will add anything to the project.

I’ll read some of the bug tickets to see what the current state is like. Figured this thing could just work indefinitely without much maintenance… its so simple?

You get free healthcare, but you now have to speak french. Deal? :p

Yeah… I pay money for 2 cores and 4gb RAM. I’d read the fine print on those free services.

I’m not comfortable with free services anymore. Nor am I comfortable dealing with a company subject to the Cloud Act.

Ubuntu’s “reputation” is nonsense. It’s a great distro for servers. Security updates are really fast and using snaps in a server environment is really great. I recommend running things like Docker or Tailscale off snap. They will revert to a previous image if an update fails. Extra stability for a server as you run automatic updates. If you run everything that is not in the base install off a snap, you have an extra layer of sandboxing against any supply chain attack for dependencies.

Ubuntu will have more recent packages, that doesnt really matter in a server environment. Debian is otherwise fine, I just dislike it’s installer and prefer Ubuntu’s. I found it easier to sync third party drivers on Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Pro gets you livepatches for kernal issues, which may be worthwhile. Also done without rebooting.

Ubuntu also gives you better apparmour default profiles on more things, whereas on debian, its up to you to set them up.

Debian will be exactly the same, its just more conservative and has less of those extras I mentioned. May be marginally lighter on resources for that. Either are fine.

Oh, Simplefin does that. Really solid.

It’ll be down to your bank’s rules. My main bank and brokerage work flawlessly, sync everyday. My secondary bank and Amex need to be reauthenticated every week or two. So I just update those once a month. Just go on simplefin and run the 2FA plus some waiting.

It doesn’t sync non-bank stuff, so there’s some RRSP providers I just enter manually.

For $20 cad a year its fine. I wouldn’t use it to track daily expenses unless you know everything will work. I do all my finances once a month so its fine for me.

I didn’t expect to even need a NAS, but I can no longer live without two now. Having all my data in one place, automated backups on my secondary NAS. I found a cloud storage provider I like. Just the whole stack is wonderful and I’m never going back.

GoCardless or Enable Banking don’t work? I see both on the Actual Budget website. One doesnt take new customers? Weird

I was using Wealthica before they started charging and Actual Budget + Simplefin is so much better. I’m really happy all my financial info is just mine and not exposed to any other company. The expense for Simplefin is worth it and minimal.

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Any plans to support FreeBSD in the future? Or mainly focusing on a docker solution?

So far the only real vulnerabilities that Ai have spun up seem to be really obscure edge case privilege escalation bugs that have been around for ages but nobody discovered. They then get patched in days if not less. I would expect them to run out of low hanging fruit pretty soon.

Most of them can even be mitigated by preventing local access to a system.

There’s tools to audit your network and systems. You can setup a SIEM like Wazuh. It’ll tell you the same kind of stuff that have been good practice for a while and mitigate most of the ai assisted vulnerabilities.

Prevent password logins where ever possible too, especially SSH. Use ed25519 keys. Perform server actions with least privilege users, prevent root logins. Immutable systems and containers are a helpful tool too.

I also just host my public facing stuff on a VPS. DDOS protection and just otherwise isolated. 2FA on the VPS too.

I have a directory in my home folder for all my different docker containers. I back that up like my other critical files on my NAS, Backup NAS, cloud storage and external drive. Its all scripted to happen periodically.

The docker compose files I also upload to my local Git so I can version them. Make the git ignore skip everything that isn’t a .yml

If you would want to spin them up again, yeah you could just copy them in a new place, make sure the docker-compose.yml is at the top and docker-compose pull the image, then docker-compose up. If your yml specifies that your configs are ./ , it’ll know to look for them in the same folder as your yml and begin its file paths there. Anything outside your ./ in theory should be read only or be some kind of data off a NAS that is independent from the service. Its just not best practice in my eyes for your docker application to write outside of the folders beneath its docker-compose.yml location.

Just organize your volumes correctly and you can move the docker container anywhere you want with a copy paste and a docker-compose up. Imo docker-compose is WAY easier and faster than any GUI instance of Docker.

Distros are tools for a job. I stick with the ones that have the most helpful communities and/or the best documentation. I avoid communities that tell you off for asking help or documentation that is obtuse.

Still successfully troubleshooting stuff through 10 year old Ubuntu forum threads. Meanwhile learning the most through the FreeBSD handbook and it’s not even Linux. lol

Hell yeah! I was using Ubuntu 10-14 in college and now back on the train with 24, 25 and 26. Everything just works every time and all the professional apps I need are first class citizens and well supported.

Ubuntu Server, FreeBSD and OpenBSD are my server distros of choice as well. FreeBSD for a NAS. Gotta pick the right tools for the job!