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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.
[Thread #905 for this sub, first seen 3rd Aug 2024, 13:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Docker
There’s your first mistake.
Oh, hi, I’m just stopping by from the ‘compile from source and create a systemd unit file’ tribe.
I used to try and compile from source first. Was good experience. Don’t see why I should bother now, though 🤣
Setting up synapse is particularly painful.
Yeah the documentation (if it even exists) of most projects is usually clearly written by people intimately familiar with the project and then never reviewed to make sure it makes sense for people unfamiliar with it. But writing good detailed documentation is also really hard, especially for a specialist because many nontrivial things are trivial to them and they believe what they’re writing is thorough and well explained even though it actually isn’t.
This is why Technical Writer is a full time job.
It’s also why the humanities are important. Stemlords who brag about not doing literature classes write terrible documentation.
Humanities are very important. Robots are not yet capable of flipping burgers!
Robots can definitely flip burgers.
Some can even do it twice!
Maybe, just maybe, people have different strengths and weaknesses and cooperating around our differences is what makes us succeed.
If you know your weakness is writing documentation, please hire a technical writer.
If the documentation is sufficient for the intended audience, it’s good enough.
Most open source projects rely on volunteers, and few technical writers volunteer.
Totally agree. And I’d argue that we don’t even need technical writers. Even if all people do is correct grammar and spelling mistakes it would be helpful, let alone actually writing docs. It’s one of the easiest ways non-technical folks can get involved with open source projects.
Every time I get stuck on something confusing I’m a README and figure it out I try to submit a patch that makes it more explicit.
That’s exactly what I’m saying, sorry if it came across somehow askew.
My point was there is no point in competing over whose job is “better”, we should be working together.
There is a case to be made that people should be a bit more well rounded in general, and not just find a specific niche.
So non-technical people should still have a decent familiarity with computers and maybe be able to do some very basic coding. And technical people should spend some time working on their written and verbal communication.
Because in both cases, it makes people more effective in their roles.
I think this is why the “my code documents itself” attitude appeals, even though it’s almost never enough. Most developers just can’t write, nor do they want to.
The problem with “It’s self-documenting” is that there are inevitably questions about what it says, and there’s no additional resources to pull from.
“my code documents itself” and “no, our CI system doesn’t upload the source jars to Artifactory, why?”
My CS major required me to take two upper division English classes and I think they helped me more in my career than my upper division CS classes. People forget that documentation is for ourselves too
I’m really thankful that I had a great English teacher in high school, and that my degree required a technical writing class. Being able to write a coherent email got me further in my career than the technical stuff I learned in college.
I completely agree. Most peer feedbacks that I get mention my documentation. It has helped me so much
This is why I did a “walkthrough test” when I had to write documentation on this sort of thing. I’m a terrible technical writer, so this shit is necessary for me.
I grabbed my friend who knows enough about computers to attempt this, but not enough about infrastructure to automatically know what I meant when I was too vague.
Took two revisions, but the final document was way easier to follow at the end
The mistake is the assumption of a certain level of end user knowledge.
You have to assume some level of end user knowledge, otherwise every piece of documentation would start with “What a computer does” and “How to turn your computer on.”
I’ve found the best practice is to list your assumptions at the top of the article with links to more detailed instructions.
I do agree, manies have I found documentation saying “make a fresh install of Raspbian” as if I’m using the computer for this single issue
(Disclaimer: I am not running matrix on a Raspberry Pi)
Another case is listing a huge number of steps to do some task, without acting describing what the end goal for each set of instructions is (common in “how to” guides, and especially ones that involve a GUI).
This means that less technical users don’t really understand what is going on and are just following steps in a rote way, and it wastes the time of technical users since they probably know how to achieve each goal already.
It’s easy to forget what other people don’t innately know (or can intuit).
Why’s that a mistake? Not everything is built for a novice
I agree with this. When I publish my code, it is documented for someone in my field with around my level of knowledge. I assume you know DNS, I assume you know what a vector is, I assume you know what a dht is, I assume you know what O(log n) is.
I’m not writing a CS50 course, I’m helping you use the code I wrote.
Might be different for software like libre office which is supposed to be used by anyone, but most software on earth is built with other developers in mind.
That’s just sloppiness.
The information that familiarity gives you is “WTF does this field means”, and it’s the only thing that’s actually there. How you get a value and how a value is formatted are things no amount of expertise will save you from having to tell the computer, and thus you can’t just forget about.
(And let me guess, the software recommended install is a docker image?)
Reminds me of the time I asked a question about a Magic: The Gathering card tomy local game store’s Facebook page. The card was Sublime Archangel. I asked what happened if it gave a creature Exalted that already had one. Someone sarcastically replied that it already says it on the card. I was a new player, how was I supposed to parse the phrase “If a creature has multiple instances of exalted, each triggers separately”? For all I knew that could mean that they didn’t stack because they would need to trigger together. I didn’t have the vocabulary to understand those things.
I try to remember this when explaining what I might believe are simple concepts to people because that person really upset me.
That’s why blog posts rock. Most popular projects will have a dozen blog posts for different configurations. For example, when looking to set up NextCloud, I found docs for almost all combinations of the following:
- Apache and Nginx configuration
- running through Docker or directly on the host
- MariaDB and Postgres configs (and SQLite, with proper disclaimers)
- Collabora and OnlyOffice config
It does take some knowledge of each of the above if you need one of the few configs that’s not available on a blog post, and some of the posts are outdated, but with a bit of searching almost everything is documented by someone on the internet.
This shouldn’t be necessary (official docs should be more comprehensive), but at least it’s available.
I’d rather have a great documentation than five different blog posts, where some of them might be outdated, wrong or insecure (and you only find out later).
But yes, they are helpful and easily available for popular software.
Okay, please point me to the blog posts that helped you with collabora/onlyoffice. Thanks have NEVER been able to get that to work with my nextcloud (currently using the Docker AIO).
Same with me. I played around with the setup a few times on my local machines. It took quite a bit to get it set up, then I saw an error after a couple of days and gave up. Its easier to just pull down the file and run it locally than use collabora.
I’m not at the same computer I used to look it up, so I don’t have my search history, but I think this one was pretty decent. I don’t use Traefik, but the rest describes the important bits w/ docker compose. I don’t know much about the AIO image though (I used separate images).
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I don’t think it’s (just) that. It’s also a different skill set to write documentation than code, and generally in these kind of open source projects, the people who write the code end up writing the documentation. Even in some commercial projects, the engineers end up writing the docs, because the higher ups don’t see that they’re different skill sets.
Bold of you to assume I know how to read!
“set all environment variables”
More recently its go to discord for the env…no joke.
My face actually dropped when I read this. I will be so mad if I ever encounter this live.
It sucks…and seems to be catching on. Ive seen a quite a few on GitHub that are now referencing using it instead of the issue tracker.
That is so depressing. Literally a markdown file in the repo would be a better issue tracker.
Don’t forget to run your shell over Discord!
This is cursed, but also cool. Hijack another platform for your authentication
Exclusively using Discord as a support channel should get you banned from the internet
This reminds me of when I sent someone a program in a zip folder. Windows now opens zip folders by default, and it looks just like any other folder.
So of course they opened the zip and double clicked the exe, but everyone knows you can’t open an exe inside a zip folder (at least, if the exe depends on the folders and files around it). If you try to, windows will extract the exe into a temp space, but leave all the dependencies behind. So the exe promptly crashes.
I didn’t think I needed to specify “you need to extract the contents of the zip folder first, then run the exe.” It feels like saying “you need to take the blender out of the box before you can use it. And not just the _base _ of the blender, you have to take out all the parts.”
Some things just feel so much like second nature that we forget.
One of the few things that Mac kind of got right. Every application is actually a deep tree with all kinds of crap all over the place but they never let the user see that.
In many ways, the silky-smooth convenience offered by modern computer software makes everything much harder to learn about and understand. For anyone that used zip files before this Windows feature, the problem is obvious - but for younger people it’s not obvious at all. Heck, a lot of people can’t even tell whether or not a file is locally on their computer - let alone whether it is compressed in some other file.
Doesn’t Windows give a popup saying “Do you want to extract the folder before running the executable” anymore?
Edit: typo (funning to running)
No, it does.
Perhaps this occurred in the small window of time when it had been implemented and it didn’t ask, or perhaps they just said no.
Regardless, I had to troubleshoot
Not that I know of. If I know it correctly (not doing it very often as I usually extract the whole content anyway) it just asks if I want to run the file.
But I could be very wrong.
I totally and completely blame Microsoft for this. They do so many other ridiculous things in the name of not confusing the average tech illiterate user.
Clicking a Zip file and having it transparently open and treating it like a regular folder when it is not. This. THIS is borderline criminal.
Propose a better way to browse the contents of a zip folder in a native 1st party way
Something like this would be helpful:
Perfect.
Have a popup text line in explorer that says “you are browsing inside of a compressed file, you must extract the contents to use them” or something. The functionality is already there, when you go to “network” it says “network sharing and discovery is turned off, click here to turn it on”
The operating system could mount it as a virtual drive, then all its contents could be used directly just like any regular folder.
Imo not really noob-user friendly.
My proposal: Keep current behaviour and make a prompt if the user tries to run an executable. Prompt should be something like “You are trying to open an executable, would you like to extract the whole folder in the current directory?”. This way the user can still browse the zip with relative ease.
Upside from Windows: We have only a handful of extensions unlike (afaik) Linux where everything can be made executable and be run.Imo not really noob-user friendly.
In what way? It would make it entirely invisible that the archive file isn’t just a normal folder, it would be possible to use it just as if it were. What would be unfriendly about that?
There should be instructions that range from beginner, where every little step is included as well as major details as to why - all the way up to expert, which are just a few sentences.
Unless it’s a company, good luc…
Hay, how would you like writing documentation for all these open source projects? We would be ever greatful, you could even put your name in the credits!
you lost me at “docker”. The only people using docker are morons and those that trust software by morons.
Hey! That’s “Mr Moron” to you.
I have no mistress, and I know no misters.
What’s bad about Docker? It’s secure and easy to setup.
Your hate comment lacks vital information just like the docs shared by OP.
While security has nothing to do with my disgust for docker and people advocating its use, docker adds a layer of complexity, which means it is not necessarily more secure.
What is extremely bad about docker:
- it enables extremely shitty configuration control on the side of a developer. There are way too many developers who have a chaotic approach to configurations, and instead of being forced to write a proper installation and configuration guide from scratch, and thereby making themselves(!) aware of active configuration changes they made to make their system work, they just roll out the docker container they develop in, without remembering most of the configurations they made. Which, naturally, means that they are unable to assist in troubleshooting problems or reproduce issues that users might have.
In general, if you can’t write a good user manual, or at least clearly identify needed dependencies and configurations, you should not be developing software for other people.
-
it combines the disadvantages of a VM (shitty performance) and running directly on the host OS (sandboxing is not nearly as good as on a VM)
-
it creates insane bloat, by completely bypassing the concept of shared libraries and making people download copies of software they already have on their system
-
it adds a lot of security risks because the user would have to not only review the source code they are compiling and installing, but also would have to scan all the dependencies and what-not, and would basically have to trust the developer and/or anyone distributing an image that they did not add any malware.
Alternatively, you can create new users from the command line.
This can be done as follows:If synapse was installed via pip, activate the virtualenv as follows (if Synapse was installed via a prebuilt package, register_new_matrix_user should already be on the search path):
cd ~/synapse
source env/bin/activate
synctl start # if not already running
Run the following command:
register_new_matrix_user -c homeserver.yaml
This will prompt you to add details for the new user, and will then connect to the running Synapse to create the new user. For example:New user localpart: erikj
Password:
Confirm password:
Make admin [no]:
Success!This process uses a setting registration_shared_secret, which is shared between Synapse itself and the register_new_matrix_user script.
It doesn’t matter what it is (a random value is generated by --generate-config), but it should be kept secret, as anyone with knowledge of it can register users, including admin accounts, on your server even if enable_registration is false.https://element-hq.github.io/synapse/latest/setup/installation.html
Old I.T. Proverb: Documentation is like sex. Even bad documentation is better than no documentation at all.
this meme got so much funnier after I realized it was synapse/matrix
Step one: use Dendrite instead.
Step two: come back and help me set up my Dendrite instance, it’s definitely not easier.Step one: email must be much easier, I’ll just make an email server instead.
Step two: screw this, I’m writing letters and posting them.
Isn’t running your own SMTP server effectively impossible nowadays?
Running a server is very doable. There are packages to deploy and configure almost everything for you and removing a ton of headache.
Getting your email recognized as not spam by the major providers is pretty much impossible. You need all sorts of stuff to help verify integrity including special DNS records and public identity keys, but even if you do everything right, your mail can very easily get black holed before it even reaches a user’s inbox because of stupid shit like someone abused your rented server’s IP years ago, and you can’t seem to get it off everyone’s lists.
Email as a decentralized tool has effectively been ruined by spam and anti-spam measures. You’re effectively forced to use a provider because it’s near impossible to make your outgoing mail work as an individual. I think some of those anti-spam measures are anticompetitive, but I do think some are just desperate attempts to reduce the massive flow of spam.
It’s not impossible, many people I know and myself successfully self host their email. Yes it’s not trivial, and yes the ip reputation can be annoying to deal with (but it’s possible to cycle to another server to get another ip), but apart from that, if following the best practices (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, proper setup of the mailserver) once it’s set up it can run for years without issue.
To set things straight, I’m not saying that it is easy, but it’s also not impossible, and only giving up will further contribute to centralized email provider monoculture.
Not for everyone, but for those who can, I feel they should.
Am I the only one in this thread that took this as it’s asking for a clear text credential which is a terrible idea?
A temporary one that you’re expected to remove as soon as you’ve created the admin user(s) you need, but yes. It should only be there during initial setup and ideally removed before the server is ever exposed to the internet.
The “if you no longer need it” part doesn’t really suggest that you are expected to do it as part of normal operation.
Yes because having a user remember to do something is a great line of defense, better than encrypting it from the get go. It should just be encrypted in the file.
The step tells you to remove it after at least
I think that’s the way both Splunk and JFrog work – you generate or enter a password into the key field in a YAML file somewhere, start the service, and next time you come back the field’s been encrypted.
Honestly, as a newbie to Linux I think the ratio of well documented processes vs. “draw the rest of the fucking owl” is too damn high.
The rule seems to be that CLI familiarity is treated as though its self-evident. The exception is a ground-up documented process with no assumptions of end user knowledge.
If that could be resolved I think it would make the Linux desktop much more appealing to wider demographics.
That said, I’m proud to say that I’ve migrated my entire home studio over to linux and have not nuked my system yet. Yet… Fortunately I have backups set up.
Don’t forget the situations where you find a good blog post or article that you can actually follow along until halfway through you get an error that the documentation doesn’t address. So you do some research and find out that they updated the commands for one of the dependency apps, so you try to piece together the updated documents with the original post, until something else breaks and you just end up giving up out of frustration.
Pre-systemd tutorials 💀
That shouldn’t be too bad if you understand systemd though, right? Or is there something weird i’m missing? Do you have an example guide that illustrates the problem?
That sounds an awful lot like modifying an ESP32 script I’ve been trying to follow from a YouTube tutorial published a while back. Research hasn’t uncovered anything for me to troubleshoot the issue so it’s a really shit experience.
I think if you’re talking wider demographics your model OSs are (obviously) Windows and macOS. People buy into that because CLI familiarity isn’t required. Especially with Apple products everything revolves around simplicity.
I do dream of a day when Linux can (at least somewhat) rival that. I love Linux because I am (or consider myself) intricately familiar with it and I can (theoretically) change every aspect about it. But mutability and limitless possibilities are not what makes an OS lovable to the average user. I think the advent of immutable Linux distros is a step in the right direction for mass adoption. Stuff just needs to work. Googling for StackOverflow or AskUbuntu postings shouldn’t ever be necessary when people just want to do whatever they were doing on Windows with limited technical knowledge.
However on another note, if you’re talking a home studio migration, not sure what that entails, but it sounds rather technical. I don’t want to be the guy to tell you that CLI familiarity is simply par for the course. Maybe your work shouldn’t require terminal interaction. Maybe there is a certain gap between absolutely basic linux tutorials and the more advanced ones like you suggest. Yet what I do want to say is that if you want to do repairwork on your own car it’s not exactly like that is supposed to be an accessible skill to acquire. Even if there are videos explaining step by step what you need to do, eventually you still need to get your own practice in. Stuff will break. We make mistakes and we learn from them. That is the point I’m trying to get at. Not all knowledge can be bestowed from without. Some of it just needs to grow organically from within.
Linux on the desktop almost never needs CLI interaction though. Maybe you’ll need to copy/paste a command from the internet to fix some sketchy hardware, but almost everything works OOTB these days.
However, self-hosting isn’t a desktop Linux thing, it’s a server Linux thing. You can host it on your desktop, but as soon as you do anything remotely server-related, CLI familiarity is pretty much essential.
That depends on your use case for desktop linux of course. For me, yabridge is the tool I needed to run VSTs on Linux. Its CLI only as far as I know.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not afraid of the CLI. Its just some tools are assuming the end user is a server admin or someone with deeper than the upper crust knowledge of how Linux works.
yabridge
Ah, that’s a pretty niche use-case. But yeah, the deeper you go, the more you’ll have to rely on the CLI.
I always update via CLI 'cause most GUI tools are slow and buggy, so…
I do too, but the GUI tools do work.
CLI familiarity is fine. CD, Nano, mkdir, rm. I am proficient with that. But I am not necessarily proficient with Docker (went with it because it worked nicely for another thing which was well documented and very straight forward). It’s just I’m trying to self host stuff. Some things like Wordpress and Immich are straightforward. Some things aren’t like Matrix and Mastodon. Lemmy is also notoriously bad.
We hold these truths to be self evident
If only i knew the truths 😞
Matrix and its implementations like Synapse have a very intimidating architecture (I’d go as far as to call most of the implementations somewhat overengineered) and the documentation ranges from inconsistent to horrific. I ran into this particular situation myself, Fortunately this particular step you’re overthinking it. You can use any random string you want. It doesn’t even have to be random, just as long as what you put in the config file matches. It’s basically just a temporary admin password.
Matrix was by far the worst thing I’ve ever tried to self-host. It’s a hot mess. Good luck, I think you’re close to the finish line.
funnily there’s an… ansible i think? project that makes selfhosting synapse easy as fuck, you basically just go “ansible deploy synapse” or whatever the syntax is and it does almost everything for you.
My favorite thing is purging remote cached media.
You need a timestamp, which is fine.
You just need to figure out how many miliseconds since the unix epoch the media you want to purge was uploaded, and then offset the time to only purge that old or older.
Easy!
So, you need a unix time value followed by 000?
That first part you can calculate with
date +%s -d '2024-07-02 12:00'.I ended up doing basically that.
Current time in ms, minus 2629800000 (a month) = timestamp to use to prune from.
I still have to sort out having a different server name to the access name so I can use the domain as well. Do I just put a field into the config like the rest? Can it go anywhere?
Ok now it’s asking me to serve a “.well_known” file like… How?
Ah, that goes on my main server. I’m learning.
It’s also optional, my first setup I just pointed to the matrix subdomain
Matrix seemed interesting right until I got to self hosting it. Then, getting to know it from up close, and the absolute trainwreck that the protocol is, made me love XMPP. Matrix has no excuse for being so messy and fragile at this point. You do you, but I decided that it isn’t worth my sysadmin time (especially when something like ejabberd is practically fire and forget).
update: It’s all working perfectly!
I recently set up Synapse just to play around with the protocol, and I do not remember this instruction at all. Where did you get this?
