Admiral Patrick

I’m surprisingly level-headed for being a walking knot of anxiety.

Ask me anything.

Special skills include: Knowing all the “na na na nah nah nah na” parts of the Three’s Company theme.

I also develop Tesseract UI for Lemmy/Sublinks

Avatar by @SatyrSack@feddit.org

  • 15 Posts
  • 226 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 6th, 2023

help-circle
  • I use the web version rather than the app, but I want to say the app can store the library on the SD card if you have one of sufficient size lying around and if the Redmi has the slot for one. But as someone else said, there are smaller versions you can download if you can’t fit the full one.

    Not trying to push Kiwix on you, but I just can’t emphasize enough how handy it is to have offline Wikipedia always on hand.


    • Termux has lots of possibilities
    • Pair it with a Meshtastic node and make it a dedicated communicator
    • I run HomeAssistant and Emby and have several old smartphones to work with, so one lives in each room and act as remotes for those
    • Setup Asterisk and make a VoIP system using old smartphones and SIP clients as handsets
    • Check if PostmarketOS supports it. I haven’t used it, but it basically turns your phone into a Linux machine if I understand correctly
    • Use it as your “ugh, I have to use an app for [THIS]?!” phone. Basically things that require an app for setup or one-off apps you can’t avoid using.
    • Make your own little portable Library of Alexandria. Install Kiwix and download a bunch of ZIMs from their library. If you’ve got at least 130 GB to work with, you can even fit the entire Wikipedia dump with images and have that locally.










  • I’m now running 9 of the Dell equivalents to those, and they’re doing well. Average 15-20 watts at normal load and usually no more than 30-35 watts running full tilt. 5 of them are unprovisioned but I got a good deal on them for $25/each so I couldn’t pass them up :shrug:.

    Attempting to cable-manage the power bricks for more than 1 of these is the worst part of using them. The only life pro tip I can offer is to ditch the power bricks and buy a 65W USB-C power delivery adapter that’s in the “wall wart” style and also one of the USB-C to Lenovo power adapter cords. Those make cable management so much better.

    Wall Wart

    Adapter Cable (these are for my Dells but they make them for most brands/styles)





  • I downgraded from used enterprise gear to those ultra small form factor PCs. They sip power well enough on their own that I haven’t really bothered tuning anything. I suppose I could cap the frequency with cpufrequtils and set the governor to conservative rather than on-demand (I do this with my battery-powered RasPi projects) but I’m not sure how much difference that’ll make for my servers.

    In the past, I had Docker Swarm setup and automation to collapse the swarm down to a single machine (powering the other ones down and back on with WoL) but that was more trouble than it was worth. On average load, the USFF PCs run at about 15 watts and don’t usually peak above 30 unless they’re rebooting or doing something very heavy. Even transcoding doesn’t break 20 watts since I’m using hardware acceleration.

    The biggest power savings I found that was worth the effort was to just get rid of the enterprise gear, switch from VMs to Docker containers where possible, and get rid of stuff I’m not using (or only run it on-demand).

    The only remaining enterprise power suck I have left is my managed switch. It’s a 2005-era dinosaur that’s loud and power hungry, but it’s been a workhorse I’m having a hard time parting with.



  • Like you’re thinking: put HAProxy on your OpenWRT router.

    That’s what I do. The HAProxy setup is kind of “dumb” L7 only (rather than HTTP/S) since I wanted all of my logic in the Nginx services. The main thing HAProxy does is, like you’re looking for, put the SPOF alongside the other unavoidable SPOF (router) and also wraps the requests in Proxy Protocol so the downstream Nginx services will have the correct client IP.

    Flow is basically:

    LAN/WAN/VPN -> HAProxy -> Two Nginx Instances -> Apps
    

    With HAProxy in the router, it also lets me set internal DNS records for my apps to my router’s LAN IP.