Thursday, May 14

Geek

Daily News Stuff 13 May 2020

The Goats Are Loose Edition

Tech News

  • So the standard commands for managing disk space on LXD (which are overcomplicated but that's an issue for another day) actually do work to update the size of the virtual disk for virtual machines just as they do for containers BUT the virtual machine has a real (virtual) block device with real (virtual) partitions and a real (real) filesystem and the process isn't entirely automated even if you use lxc init and update the settings before first boot.

    It should just take a growpart followed by a resize2fs within the VM, once you've set your disk size the way you want it.  Update: Should and in fact does.

    The Ubuntu 20.04 image uses an ext4 root filesystem, and allocates only 2GB to the filesystem by default (within a 10GB default volume) so you might want to grow that to a reasonable size, then expand the volume itself and allocate the rest to ZFS.

    I'm fine with sticking to ext4 for root and boot volumes for now, but ZFS has so many advantages for everything else that I would never go back.

    Anyway, this means I have Ubuntu 20.04 running in an LXD container under Ubuntu 20.04 in an LXD virtual machine under Ubuntu 20.04.

    Nesting VMs didn't work, but I don't really want to do that anyway.  Containers inside VMs gives me everything I need.

    So, Kurumi is a female character in Ranma (in the OAV story Akane and Her Sisters) and a colour in Japanese and the lead character of another anime series (Steel Angel Kurumi) so that's the name of my first VM and maybe I should relax my naming conventions slightly or I'll have to start naming nested containers after characters from Dragon Pink and Kimikiss Pure Rouge.


  • A look at the dual Epyc motherboard.  (AnandTech)

    Well, not the only dual Epyc motherboard, but the only one available at retail as a separate item in a standard form factor.  All the others are vendor-specific and sold as a bundle with a server chassis.

    If you need to squeeze two huge CPUs, 32 memory slots, and up to seven PCIe x16 slots onto a board, standard board sizes aren't going to cut it.  This one only has 16 memory slots.


  • No place for old servers.  (Wandering Thoughts)

    If everything requires HTTPS then old web servers will, at best, keep going offline when their SSL certificates expire.

    That blog also has some interesting notes on ZFS and Ubuntu 20.04.


  • Dell has launched their new XPS 15 and XPS 17 lineup with Intel 10th generation CPUs.  (ZDNet)

    Meanwhile the far superior Ryzen 4000 has been relegated to their cheaper (and also uglier) G3 and G5 ranges.


  • Caddy 2.0 is out.  (GitHub)

    Only problem is that it isn't quite compatible with Caddy 1.0 config files.  I installed it on one of the new servers at work and couldn't get it to behave in the time I had available, so I whacked it and installed 1.0 instead.

    I will return - I really, really want that API for managing live updates.


  • Can AI become conscious?  Yes.  (ACM)

    This question was answered decades ago, and this article doesn't advance the debate one iota.  While not terrible, it probably regresses it very slightly.


Disclaimer: The second cheapest department at any university is mathematics - all they need is paper, pencils, and wastepaper baskets.

The cheapest department is philosophy. They don't need the wastepaper baskets.

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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