Well first day back in the office done and dusted and I am still sane and smiling and came back here to tell you all about how I survived :)

650+ emails to sort out, one meeting today, had a burger for lunch, didn't get out of the office at all for a walk (not good) but it was cold outside and others in my office didn't exactly sell it as a fun thing to do :)

Came home, helped with dinner, my wife not feeling to well, negative covid test from her, phew... and now some BBS admin, more of that to do tomorrow night.

Been working on setting up a Rpi 4 (8 gig ram) with a 256gig SSD. Mostly sorted now, plan to do some fun BBS related stuff with it over the coming months.

Hot drink time now. :)

Kerr Avon [Blake's 7] 'I'm not expendable, I'm not stupid and I'm not going' avon[at]bbs.nz | bbs.nz | fsxnet.nz

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

Re: Worky work
By: Avon to All on Wed Jan 17 2024 08:38 pm

Howdy,

Been working on setting up a Rpi 4 (8 gig ram) with a 256gig SSD. Mostly sorted now, plan to do some fun BBS related stuff with it over the coming months.

In the past we talked about ESXi, and if that Pi doesnt have anything on it yet, one thing you can play with is ESXi on it. (If you wanted to that is.)

It works well, mine is around here somewhere.

The plus is you get a web console, and can spin up VMs on it. The downside, is those VMs can only be 64 bit VMs - ESXi on the Pi cannot run 32 bit guests (but 64bit guests can run 32 bit apps). Its probably not a big downside these days - it was only an issue for me running synchronet which doesnt compile on 64bit ARM (but the 32 bit version ran fine from memory).



...лоеп
--- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
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On 17 Jan 2024 at 08:21p, deon pondered and said...

In the past we talked about ESXi, and if that Pi doesnt have anything on it yet, one thing you can play with is ESXi on it. (If you wanted to
that is.)

My people will talk to your people very soon :)

Kerr Avon [Blake's 7] 'I'm not expendable, I'm not stupid and I'm not going' avon[at]bbs.nz | bbs.nz | fsxnet.nz

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

Avon wrote to All <=-

Been working on setting up a Rpi 4 (8 gig ram) with a 256gig SSD.
Mostly sorted now, plan to do some fun BBS related stuff with it over
the coming months.

I replaced my Rpi 4 media server with an old desktop running Windows 10
- the pi couldn't deal well with streaming video to a 4k screen.

Now I have a Pi 4 and a Pi 3 sitting idle, looking for a project and a
rack case for them. :)




... What were you really thinking about just now?
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deon wrote to Avon <=-

In the past we talked about ESXi, and if that Pi doesnt have anything
on it yet, one thing you can play with is ESXi on it. (If you wanted to that is.)

I'd just heard that broadcom is getting rid of the "hobbyist" perpetual
ESXi license - which is a huge mistake IMO.

Although having a path for people to learn ESXi at home and to have a
sandbox to play with doesn't fit into Broadcom's master plan of large
enterprise customers and enterprise training/certification.

I use ESXi at work, but wanted something with a more liberal hardware
compatibility list than what VMWare offered - I had 4 year old servers
fall off the compatibility list with vSphere!

Proxmox does run well on Pis, and you can get a couple of small VMs
running on a Pi 4 with 8 GB nicely.



... You can only make one dot at a time
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I'd just heard that broadcom is getting rid of the "hobbyist" perpetual
ESXi license - which is a huge mistake IMO.

This is exactly why I moved over to Proxmox for home use... Plus this gives me a direction in the future to down size my servers to small units like the Intel NUC's or whatever the replacement will be at that time. Less power...

Although having a path for people to learn ESXi at home and to have a
sandbox to play with doesn't fit into Broadcom's master plan of large
enterprise customers and enterprise training/certification.

All about the money.

Proxmox does run well on Pis, and you can get a couple of small VMs
running on a Pi 4 with 8 GB nicely.

Does it really? I wouldn't think it could... Are we talking about linux VM's?

... Some people have no idea what they're doing, and are really good at it!

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2023/04/30 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Clutch BBS * telnet://clutchbbs.com (21:1/199)

Now I have a Pi 4 and a Pi 3 sitting idle, looking for a project and a
rack case for them. :)

Do you like handheld gaming? I have an older pi 3 in a PiBoy DMG and it's a lot of fun.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2023/02/26 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

Re: Re: Worky work
By: poindexter FORTRAN to deon on Thu Jan 18 2024 06:50 am

Howdy,

I'd just heard that broadcom is getting rid of the "hobbyist" perpetual
ESXi license - which is a huge mistake IMO.

I hadnt seen that yet - yeah agree, big mistake. I'm thinking that the concerpt of OS virtualisation is declining as well, so be interesting to see what they do to keep it alive. (Keeping it alive via home admins would have been a smart move - for little cost I would have thought.)

I use ESXi at work, but wanted something with a more liberal hardware
compatibility list than what VMWare offered - I had 4 year old servers
fall off the compatibility list with vSphere!

I'm running some old stuff at home. I'm a fan of ESXi, since everything I play with is headless - and ESXi gives me that web interface. Its pretty reliable - I've been running stuff this year for 20+ years...

Proxmox does run well on Pis, and you can get a couple of small VMs
running on a Pi 4 with 8 GB nicely.

I've never played with Proxmox (never needed to as I always found a way to get ESXi installed) - but maybe I should...


...лоеп
--- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
* Origin: I'm playing with ANSI+videotex - wanna play too? (21:2/116)

I've never played with Proxmox (never needed to as I always found a way
to get ESXi installed) - but maybe I should...

I'm a former ESXi user of 10-15 years. Moving to Proxmox, I was worried about reliability. I can tell you this, it appears to be as reliable as esxi was for home use.

... Everyone is entitled to my opinion!

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2023/04/30 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Clutch BBS * telnet://clutchbbs.com (21:1/199)

poindexter FORTRAN wrote to Avon <=-

I replaced my Rpi 4 media server with an old desktop running Windows
- the pi couldn't deal well with streaming video to a 4k screen.

I did that a while back myself. Same reason.

Now I have a Pi 4 and a Pi 3 sitting idle, looking for a project and a
rack case for them. :)

I have 3 pi 3's sitting in a box doing nothing. I can't think of a project
for them at all.

Shawn

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On Wed, 17 Jan 2024 20:38:42 +1300
"Avon" (21:1/101) <Avon@f101.n1.z21.fidonet> wrote:

Been working on setting up a Rpi 4 (8 gig ram) with a 256gig SSD.
Mostly sorted now, plan to do some fun BBS related stuff with it over
the coming months.

I have a howto for getting Synchronet working on a Rpi including DOSEMU
for running DOS games.You should give it a try. It's somewhere on the Synchronet wiki.
--
End Of The Line BBS - Plano, TX
telnet endofthelinebbs.com 23
--- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
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On 18 Jan 2024 at 06:46a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...

I replaced my Rpi 4 media server with an old desktop running Windows 10
- the pi couldn't deal well with streaming video to a 4k screen.

Now I have a Pi 4 and a Pi 3 sitting idle, looking for a project and a
rack case for them. :)

I'm thinking can I shift my NET 1 HUB across to it (in some fashion or form) to cut down on power. I'm also curious to know if I could run my NNTP server from it too which is running on yet another chunk of metal. The answer I suspect is yes (not sure yet) but in time I hope to find out.

Kerr Avon [Blake's 7] 'I'm not expendable, I'm not stupid and I'm not going' avon[at]bbs.nz | bbs.nz | fsxnet.nz

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

On 18 Jan 2024 at 06:50a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...

I use ESXi at work, but wanted something with a more liberal hardware
compatibility list than what VMWare offered - I had 4 year old servers
fall off the compatibility list with vSphere!

Proxmox does run well on Pis, and you can get a couple of small VMs
running on a Pi 4 with 8 GB nicely.

None of this I know but all of it I should..

Kerr Avon [Blake's 7] 'I'm not expendable, I'm not stupid and I'm not going' avon[at]bbs.nz | bbs.nz | fsxnet.nz

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

On 19 Jan 2024 at 06:36p, Nigel Reed pondered and said...

I have a howto for getting Synchronet working on a Rpi including DOSEMU for running DOS games.You should give it a try. It's somewhere on the Synchronet wiki.

thanks Nigel :) I'll try and make some time to have a look at this.

Kerr Avon [Blake's 7] 'I'm not expendable, I'm not stupid and I'm not going' avon[at]bbs.nz | bbs.nz | fsxnet.nz

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

Proxmox does run well on Pis, and you can get a couple of small

VMs

running on a Pi 4 with 8 GB nicely.

With Proxmox on a Pi, can you run non-ARM OSes in those VMs? I read that
you really can't if you are using something like Virtualbox to host it --
i.e. you cannot run an OS that expects intel hardware too well -- but am curious about Proxmox.



--- Talisman v0.51-dev (Linux/armv7l)
* Origin: possumso.fsxnet.nz * telnet:2123/ssh:2122/ftelnet:80 (21:4/134)

niter3 wrote to deon <=-

I'm a former ESXi user of 10-15 years. Moving to Proxmox, I was worried about reliability. I can tell you this, it appears to be as reliable as esxi was for home use.

I like the fact that under the hood, it's just Debian Linux, kvm and
qemu - all pretty stable. I'm not doing zfs, ceph or HA, but it seems
like that would make it even more reliable than my 2-node cluster with
separate storage and shared NFS for backups, images, &tc.

I feel like Nutanix and VMWare make their CLIs different just to be
different. Being able to drop into a plain ol' bash shell with the same utilities I'm familiar with is refreshing.

... Is the style right?
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Blue White wrote to Poindexter Fortran <=-

With Proxmox on a Pi, can you run non-ARM OSes in those VMs? I read
that you really can't if you are using something like Virtualbox to
host it -- i.e. you cannot run an OS that expects intel hardware too
well -- but am curious about Proxmox.

I think you are limited to ARM OSes. There's an ARM port of Windows
10/11, not sure about software support for it - and a bunch of Linux
distros that run as a guest under Proxmox.


... Find a safe part and use it as an anchor
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On 22 Jan 2024 at 07:01a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...

Blue White wrote to Poindexter Fortran <=-

With Proxmox on a Pi, can you run non-ARM OSes in those VMs? I read that you really can't if you are using something like Virtualbox to host it -- i.e. you cannot run an OS that expects intel hardware too well -- but am curious about Proxmox.

I think you are limited to ARM OSes. There's an ARM port of Windows
10/11, not sure about software support for it - and a bunch of Linux distros that run as a guest under Proxmox.

Correct. Proxmox is not an emulator, it's not even exactly
a hypervisor (though it says that it is...). The hypervisor
is actually QEMU+KVM; proxmox just wraps it all up in a nice
package.

So what is a hypervisor? It's a thing that lets you run
_virtual machines_. What, then is a "virtual machine"? It
is a mode of execution that allows one to run system software
on a computer in a way that the software thinks that it is
running directly on hardware, but is in fact, being mediated
by other software. What is systems software? Think an
operating system or firmware. So in a sense, virtual machines
are to machines what virtual memory is to memory.

Hypervisors these days are usually divided into two components:
the VMM, which runs on the bare metal (or can be nested under
another VM!) and drives the hardware, and the "hypervisor" (yes,
it's ambiguous) that runs in userspace and does things like
emulate hardware devices, etc, and talks to the VMM. In many
Linux setups, the VMM is KVM and the userspace hypervisor is
QEMU or something similar.

Virtual machines are actually quite old; they were built on
a lot of early mainframe systems. IBM has been providing
virtual machines on the mainframe since the late 1960s; Multics
had an execution environments that could run programs for
the DTSS system; TOPS-20 had an adapter that could run TOPS-10
programs.

VMs were studied formally in the 1970s, and computer scientists
Gerald Popek and Robert Goldberg put forth definitions that
distinguish virtual machines from emulations/simulations. The
central distinction is that the _bulk_ of instructions executed
by the virtual machine are executed directly by hardware; P&G
specified that an architecture is virtualizable if the _privileged_ instructions in the architecture could be trapped and emulated (but
of course, things like `add` just ... run).

Emulators and simulators, on the other hand, tend to have software
that interprets all instructions, with nothing running on the bare
metal.

So for something running on an ARM processor to execute an operating
system compiled for x86, it would necessarily not be a virtual
machine, but rather an emulator.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
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Re: Worky work
By: Joacim Melin to deon on Sat Jan 20 2024 11:52 am

Howdy,

Proxmox actually runs fine on the RPi 4. I hade four RPi 4 with 8GB RAM each in a Proxmox cluster for almost a year. It worked really well actually since I ran all VM:s over the network from a NAS and NFS.

I should bite the bullet and try out proxmox. I havent only because I havent put together the time to learn something new - too many other things keep me busy, and I havent had the "IT" energy of late.

I did upgrade all my VMs to Rocky Linux 9 though (one could only go to 8), so at least now I'm only configuring 1 linux distro...


...лоеп
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