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Curious about the homelab/homeserver community. Are there any sites with further information?

by pm 6y ago

hosh 6y ago
If you reddit, r/selfhosted and r/homelab are a great place to start. I really like the sandstorm.io platform, though it is not currently supported on an rpi. It has the potential as a platform that “grandma” can use. There is a project called HomelabOS. It reminds me a bit of Homebrew.
- pm 6y ago
  Cheers. I remember hearing SandStorm (the company) went under a couple years ago, and was curious but hadn't explored it in depth. I've been paying attention to CollapseOS as well, though it's a little more apocalyptic in nature. The eventual aim is to be able to provision a set of servers from a thumb drive without Internet (if that's even possible), but I haven't had much time to get far.
  - hosh 6y ago
    I'll check out CollapseOS! The sandstorm community is still going. The app developers are interested, but the platform itself has not received much love. For my own goals, (1) getting ARM support (which includes customizing seccomp for the ARM; patching the sandstorm app package format; and getting a good developer story), and (2) enabling IPFS. A kind of practical user-facing goal for integrating IPFS would be to decentralize the sandstorm app store. What I am finding is that the design goals for sandstorm looks like it was originally intended to be deployed in the cloud, whereas I'd like to see individuals and communities empowered to run sandstorm for their local community.
    - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
      Honestly, the biggest pain point around adding ARM support is that it'll be a pain to create ARM-compatible packages for all the apps. I definitely think the largest unanswered question in ARM support for Sandstorm.io is "how do we make it convenient for app developers to release packages for multiple architectures?" That being said, I'd be super excited at the possible expansion of the community ARM support would bring. By the way, regarding seccomp and the platform receiving love, there's actually a new experimental seccomp filter which operates as a whitelist instead of a blacklist: https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/pull/3502 https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/pull/3502
      - hosh 6y ago
        I'm not a security engineer, so the seccomp stuff isn't something I know a lot about. Given that limited experience. whitelist sounds more sensible than blacklist, and I presume that it would be more portable on different architectures. I have a lot more confidence when it comes to tooling, packaging, testing, developer environments, CI/CD systems etc. since that is the kind of thing I do at work. Within that old Github thread: - A suggestion that there is a metadata field that can be purposed for architecture - There was a suggestion for using QEMU with the vagrant tool I'm a bit weirded out by a packaging tool that tries to automatically look for all the files related to it -- though I think there might be a good reason for it. You do lose the ability to have reproducible builds and any kind of continuous integration or delivery. I kinda wonder if just switching to something like Nix would work better. Reproducible builds would make it easier for the app ecosystem to be rebuilt on a different arch. ARM and RPI is great, but I expect RISC-V to be gaining traction over the next couple years. As far as my personal goal of helping develop resilient infrastructure, being able to quickly adopt new architectures would help a lot. I have not floated this in the sandstorm-dev mailing list yet, but I'll get some conversation started over there.
        ocdtrekkie 6y ago
        Yeah, my understanding is when ARM support is added, we'll add a field to the pkgdef file that you can specify architecture. Any apps missing that field can be assumed to be x64. spk and vagrant-spk definitely take the "grab what the app needs" approach, but Ian is in agreement with you in wanting something more reproducible and well-defined. (vagrant-spk is mostly reproducible because VMs made with it should be roughly the same, spk is not remotely reproducible). docker-spk is a tool he wrote that creates Sandstorm app packages from specially-crafted Docker images (you still have to be writing a Sandstorm package here, it won't convert a traditional Dockerfile to work on Sandstorm, for instance). He has also repeatedly expressed interest in building a nix-spk tool that uses Nix packages. ;)
    - pm 6y ago
      There are multiple HN stories on CollapseOS; it was worth reading for the comments.

Curious about the homelab/homeserver community. Are there any sites with further information?

by pm 6y ago

Curious about the homelab/homeserver community. Are there any sites with further information?

hosh 6y ago

If you reddit, r/selfhosted and r/homelab are a great place to start. I really like the sandstorm.io platform, though it is not currently supported on an rpi. It has the potential as a platform that “grandma” can use. There is a project called HomelabOS. It reminds me a bit of Homebrew.

pm 6y ago
Cheers. I remember hearing SandStorm (the company) went under a couple years ago, and was curious but hadn't explored it in depth. I've been paying attention to CollapseOS as well, though it's a little more apocalyptic in nature. The eventual aim is to be able to provision a set of servers from a thumb drive without Internet (if that's even possible), but I haven't had much time to get far.
- hosh 6y ago
  I'll check out CollapseOS! The sandstorm community is still going. The app developers are interested, but the platform itself has not received much love. For my own goals, (1) getting ARM support (which includes customizing seccomp for the ARM; patching the sandstorm app package format; and getting a good developer story), and (2) enabling IPFS. A kind of practical user-facing goal for integrating IPFS would be to decentralize the sandstorm app store. What I am finding is that the design goals for sandstorm looks like it was originally intended to be deployed in the cloud, whereas I'd like to see individuals and communities empowered to run sandstorm for their local community.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    Honestly, the biggest pain point around adding ARM support is that it'll be a pain to create ARM-compatible packages for all the apps. I definitely think the largest unanswered question in ARM support for Sandstorm.io is "how do we make it convenient for app developers to release packages for multiple architectures?" That being said, I'd be super excited at the possible expansion of the community ARM support would bring. By the way, regarding seccomp and the platform receiving love, there's actually a new experimental seccomp filter which operates as a whitelist instead of a blacklist: https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/pull/3502 https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/pull/3502
    - hosh 6y ago
      I'm not a security engineer, so the seccomp stuff isn't something I know a lot about. Given that limited experience. whitelist sounds more sensible than blacklist, and I presume that it would be more portable on different architectures. I have a lot more confidence when it comes to tooling, packaging, testing, developer environments, CI/CD systems etc. since that is the kind of thing I do at work. Within that old Github thread: - A suggestion that there is a metadata field that can be purposed for architecture - There was a suggestion for using QEMU with the vagrant tool I'm a bit weirded out by a packaging tool that tries to automatically look for all the files related to it -- though I think there might be a good reason for it. You do lose the ability to have reproducible builds and any kind of continuous integration or delivery. I kinda wonder if just switching to something like Nix would work better. Reproducible builds would make it easier for the app ecosystem to be rebuilt on a different arch. ARM and RPI is great, but I expect RISC-V to be gaining traction over the next couple years. As far as my personal goal of helping develop resilient infrastructure, being able to quickly adopt new architectures would help a lot. I have not floated this in the sandstorm-dev mailing list yet, but I'll get some conversation started over there.
      - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
        Yeah, my understanding is when ARM support is added, we'll add a field to the pkgdef file that you can specify architecture. Any apps missing that field can be assumed to be x64. spk and vagrant-spk definitely take the "grab what the app needs" approach, but Ian is in agreement with you in wanting something more reproducible and well-defined. (vagrant-spk is mostly reproducible because VMs made with it should be roughly the same, spk is not remotely reproducible). docker-spk is a tool he wrote that creates Sandstorm app packages from specially-crafted Docker images (you still have to be writing a Sandstorm package here, it won't convert a traditional Dockerfile to work on Sandstorm, for instance). He has also repeatedly expressed interest in building a nix-spk tool that uses Nix packages. ;)
  - pm 6y ago
    There are multiple HN stories on CollapseOS; it was worth reading for the comments.