As is tradition when I take my holidays, I spend quite sometime configuring the machines around the apartment. Usually this is followed up with some homelab experiments I give up on in a few days. I thought I’d write some things about this process here and some changes I’ve made:

Apologies in advance for the Cosmere names

The Media Server (oathgate)

This is a NUC from 2015 that I’ve increased the RAM, the SSD and the HDD over the years. It sites behind the TV and serves Jellyfin and Navidrome internally. It has run Ubuntu Server since around 2020 when I decided that it should never be plugged into any monitor (except for debugging purposes). This time, I’ve decided to go vanilla Debian because, well, I don’t trust Ubuntu any longer, and to be fair the “please pay” warnings in Ubuntu Server have been giving me the shits for about a year.

I’ve also decided to replace Navidrome with LMS almost entirely out of virtue that it’s not sloppy. The added MusicNN stuff will be interesting (if it ever finishes processing).

In an ideal world this would be connected to some network-attached-storage. Alas, the media now sits on an external HDD. This is not ideal, but I can live with it for now. It’s not as if NASs and drives are going to get cheaper any time soon…

The Homelab (coppermind)

This is a lower-end gaming laptop from 2019. Last time I went through this dance I used proxmox and started up various VMs to do stuff. This became annoying and complicated to the point that I just gave up on it. This time we’re using Alma Linux because I quite like it for servers. I was thinking about a *BSD but decided that I wanted to put k3s on it, which ruled all of those out.

In my office I am yet to finalise where it will live. Currently it sits on a bookshelf behind me sitting precariously on a document storage tray from Ikea. This is part of a much large discussion/plan/expedition.

The curse of having a k3s set up very quickly is that my plan for what I’m going to put on there is getting quite large, and the pod sprawl might become quite an issue. I also will attempt, for the 4th time, to use FluxCD instead of ArgoCD because a) it’s lighter, b) pushing instead of pulling suits a low interaction system, and c) I get enough ArgoCD at work.

More on all of this later

The Devtop (trha)

gotcha, this is not Cosmerical, just music

I’ve already spoken about this here but it’s Chimera Linux for reasons. This laptop is however still having problems, but according to 9 years of forum posts it could be caused by X of 7 problems. Joy.

The Main (scadrial)

Continuing the thoughts from April my main machine should be changing. But as much as I like the allure of Gentoo, this machine I would kinda like to be stable, since it’s where the gaming happens (when it does). I was thinking either restarting with EndeavourOS or moving to CachyOS but they both suffer from slop and CachyOS is sponsored by a brand that I very much disagree with. I could just go vanilla Debian but Niri has some issues there. This is the hard one to figure out unfortunately. Gentoo is my number one choice here still, but this will keep eating at me. Alas, had I stuck to my plan where that dev laptop was going to be Gentoo while I learned it than this may be less of an issue. I guess now at least if Gentoo dies on this machine I can always use the devtop.

Too Many Things

Ok, so I have 4 different distros for 4 different machines. For posterity I guess I also have 2 Macs, but they are less for fun. And the Steam Deck, but I kinda wanna factory reset it since I did some dodgy shit when I first got it.

I have too many computers. The VPS that I’ll be setting up doesn’t count, but that’s Debian at least.