hendrik

Well, it’s a mass-produced, embedded device, designed to do one specific task. I guess lots of the video related stuff is assisted by hardware and they usually strip down the embedded Linux to the minimum needed. Because every Megabyte of storage costs extra and they need to hit some 99,- or 89,- price point. Furthermore, they don’t want it to boot for 20 seconds, so these devices generally don’t contain any extras. Similar things happen on wifi routers, the ones below $100 usually contain similar amounts of memory (or less). At least the last time I bought one.

Google the product name and Linux. If nothing turns up, you need to find the name of the SoC / processor and google that. Find out if it’s supported by Linux and what other people did to install Linux. You might need additional hardware though, like a serial or JTAG adapter and a soldering iron. Plus the required expertise. And I must warn you, that thing has 1 GB of RAM and 256MB(!) of flash storage. You won’t be able to do much with those specs. Like a slow FTP server or one small website or a few other tiny services which don’t use a lot of resources.

I think Baikal or Radicale would be the usual contenders for that

SATA is more reliable than USB. And SSDs are faster, but more expensive than a harddrive. In the end all of this is possible. You need to see how much space you need and what you can afford. Unless you need it to be quiet/silent or super fast, a regular harddrive might do.

I think as written, I’d say these words are more FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt)

And I’ve been running servers for quite some time as well. SearXNG seems rock solid. And it’s tested. And when I had security issues in general, it was because we didn’t do timely updates. I haven’t really ever been affected by zero days in my hobby linux endeavours. Okay, we had a few nasty things in some more fundamental building blocks and sometimes people using slower distributions had been fine… But I don’t think it applies here. With these kinds of things, the latest stable release is your best bet. Not a previous version with bugs in it, which have been fixed since. And especially not an unmaintained project.

They’re likely referring to the sentences outlining the differences between searx and SearXNG in searX README (archived Github repo). I think it was about some feature to report bugs to the project. And NG having a faster pace of development.

I’d say if it’s as power hungry as people say, it’d maybe make a good on-demand backup solution. Install some NAS distribution and power it on once a month, make backups of your *arred collection and your laptop/workstation and shut it off again.

I’m with netcup.com and I’ve been happy. But some people complained their support isn’t the best and they sometimes don’t answer. I’m not sure about the details as I’ve never needed support. Maybe you want to ask someone else. And make sure to choose the correct server location as most of their servers are located in Europe and you don’t want that latency if you’re living in the USA.

I mean you can host anything. It’s just not reachable from the outside. And Fediverse or anything that gets data pushed in, won’t work. The common method to handle all of this is to use some tunnelling solution.

I pay 6.84€ a month for a VPS plus 4.65€ a year for the domain. That gets me a VPS with 4 cores and 8GB of RAM so in addition to Matrix, I can also fit a few Fediverse services, Nextcloud, a homepage, …

I don’t think the internet gave particularly good advice here. Sure, there are use-cases for both, and that’s why we have both approaches available. But you can’t say VMs are better than containers. They’re a different thing. They might even be worse in your case. But I mean in the end, all “simple thruths” are wrong.

Thanks, and I happen to already be aware of it. It doesn’t have any of that. And it’s more complicated to hook it into other things, since the good old postfix is the default case and well-trodden path. I think I’ll try Stalwart anyways. It’s a bit of a risk, though. Since it’s a small project with few developers and the future isn’t 100% certain. And I have to learn all the glue in between the mailserver stuff, since there aren’t any tutorials out there. But both the frontend, and the configuration and setup seem to make sense.

I’ve always been looking for an all-in-one mailserver with a few added features like mailing lists and something like AnonAddy (anonymous mail forwarding). Sadly there doesn’t seem anything like that out there. So I have to configure postfix and dovecot myself. Or make ends meet with a bit more basic features.

Most backup software allow you to configure backup retention. I think I went with some pretty standard once per day for a week. After that they get deleted, and it keeps just one per week of the older ones, for one or two months. And after that it’s down to monthly snapshots. I think that aligns well with what I need. Sometimes I find out something broke the day before yesterday. But I don’t think I ever needed a backup from exactly the 12th of December or something like that. So I’m fine if they get more sparse after some time. And I don’t need full backups more than necessary. An incremental backup will do unless there’s some technical reason to do full ones.

But it entirely depends on the use-case. Maybe for a server or stuff you work on, you don’t want to lose more than a day. While it can be perfectly alright to back up a laptop once a week. Especially if you save your documents in the cloud anyway. Or you’re busy during the week and just mess with your server configuration on weekends. In that case you might be alright with taking a snapshot on fridays. Idk.

(And there are incremental backups, full backups, filesystem snapshots. On a desktop you could just use something like time machine… You can do different filesystems at different intervals…)

Seems it means all together. (5600MT/s / 1000) x 2 sticks simultaneously x 64bit / 8bits/Byte = 89.6 GB/s

or 2933/1000 x 4 x 64bit / 8 = 93.9 GB/s

so they calculated with double the DDR bus width in the one example, and 4 times the bus width in the other one. That means dual or quad channel is already factored in in those numbers. And yes, the old one seems to be slightly better than the new one. At least regarding memory throughput. I suppose everything else has been improved on. And you need to put in 4 correct RAM sticks to make use of it in the first place.

Well, the numbers I find on google are: a Nvidia 4090 can transfer 1008 GB/s. And a i9 does something like 90 GB/s. So you’d expect the CPU to be roughly 11 times slower than that GPU at fetching an enormous amount of numbers from memory.

I think if you double the amount of DDR channels for your CPU, and if that also meant your transfer rate would double to 180 GB/s, you’d just be roughly 6 times slower than the 4090. I’m not sure if it works exactly like that. But I’d guess so. And there doesn’t seem to be a recent i9 with quad channel. So you’re stuck with a small fraction of the speed of a GPU if you’re set on an i9. That’s why I mentioned AMD Epyc or Apple processors. Those have a way higher memory throughput.

And a larger model also means more numbers to transfer. So if you now also use your larger memory to use a 70B parameter model instead of an 12B parameter model (or whatever fits on a GPU), your tokens will now come in at a 65th of the speed in the end. Or phrased differently: you don’t wait 6 seconds, but 6 and a half minutes.

AI inference is memory-bound. So, memory bus width is the main bottleneck. I also do AI on an (old) CPU, but the CPU itself is mainly idle and waiting for the memory. I’d say it’ll likely be very slow, like waiting 10 minutes for a longer answer. I believe all the AI people use Apple silicon because of the unified memory and it’s bus width. Or some CPU with multiple memory channels. The CPU speed doesn’t really matter, you could choose a way slower one, because the actual multiplications aren’t what slows it down. But you seem to be doing the opposite, get a very fast processor with just 2 memory channels.

I’d say this is the correct answer. If you’re actually using that much RAM, you probably want it connected to the processor with a wide (fast) bus. I rarely see people do it with desktop or gaming processors. It might be useful for some edge-cases, but usually you want an Epyc processor or something like that, or it’s way too much RAM that isn’t connected fast enough.

In my experience, idle power consumption mainly depends on the mainboard used. The processors all(?) clock down to some more or less energy-efficient level. But the specific design of the mainboard and the components on it could double or half energy consumption.

In my experience, all the 3 big ones work just fine. Caddy, Traefik, Nginx. I use Nginx.