Right, but you could have just made one yourself

And then there would be a bus factor of one. It’s not just about making a helm chart for myself, it’s about having something that can be shared with the community, that doesn’t depend on any single person to be maintained and updated.

It’s about having an organization that provides “packages” for Kubernetes, for people/orgs that don’t have the time, expertise, and energy to maintain them.

I greatly respect Ananace, who is in the comments of this post, and mentioned their Helm charts. The work is excellent. But looking through the commits, it’s just one person, doing something that primarily consists of bumping version numbers. Contrast this to the Matrix ESS helm chart, where the commits consist of many more contributors, and also include feature additions to the helm chart.

Hello Ananace! :)

I actually have seen your helm charts many, many times before when searching for matrix, synapse, or lemmy on Artifacthub.

An official helm chart isn’t really a hard requirement to me, even if I were to use one and it were to stop getting maintained, I could continue on my own. But an official helm chart has big community benefits that are very important to me. Like, there becomes the option of paid support, which is a must have for many entities. Also, an official organization may support a wider variety of usecases than someone making helm charts for personal use.

I also ended up chatting with one of the core devs of Synapse about ways to improve regular Python Synapse for use with Kubernetes back in the ending of January, so hopefully it’ll improve in that direction when time allows

Do you know anything about the claims that they have rewritten synapse in rust?

Yes and no. There are many things that are much easier with Kubernetes, once you figure Kubernetes out.

High availability is the most notable example — yes, it’s doable in docker, via something like swarm, but it’s more difficult. In comparison, the ideas of clustering and working with more than one server are central to the architecture of Kubernetes.

Another thing is that long term deployments with Kubernetes can be more maintainable, since everything is just yaml files and version is just a number. If you store your config in code, then it’s easier to replicate it to another server, either internally, or if you share it for other people to use (Helm is somewhat like this).

This helm chart is not just matrix/synapse, but also element (web ui), and “matrix authentication service”, which adds SSO/OIDC support to a normal synapse instance, which is pretty neat. I haven’t seen any helm charts that include the full matrix stack, just separate synapse or element helm charts. And helm definitely makes deploying services to Kubernetes easier than other ways of deploying applications.

The other reason why I like an official helm chart, is because I have seen unofficial one’s be stopped being maintained by the community member(s) maintaining them. With an official one, it will (probably) be maintained indefinitely.

The mitre cve database is more like that big block just below what’s being pointed too.

But it does look like they have a backup plan: https://www.thecvefoundation.org/

Joysticks on the bottom again… whyyyyy…

My hands find that setup so uncomfortable, I wish they would put them on the top.

I don’t think so, now. You’ll have to do those yourself.

Which means my distro-morphing idea should work in theory with OpenStack

I also don’t recommend doing a manual install though, as it’s extremely complex compared to automated deployment solutions like kolla-ansible (openstack in docker containers), openstack-ansible (host os/lxc containers), or openstack-helm/genestack/atmosphere (openstack on kubernetes). They make the install much more simpler and less time consuming, while still being intensely configurable.

Personally, I think Proxmox is somewhat unsecure too.

Proxmox is unique from other projects, in it’s much more hacky, and much of the stack is custom rather than standards. Like for example: For networking, they maintain a fork of the Linux’s older networking stack, called ifupdown2, whereas similar projects, like openstack, or Incus, use either the standard Linux kernel networking, or a project called openvswitch.

I think Proxmox is definitely secure enough, but I don’t know if I would really trust it for higher value usecases due to some of their stack being custom, rather than standard and mantained by the wider community.

If I end up wanting to run Proxmox, I’ll install Debian, distro-morph it to Kicksecure

If you’re interested in deploying a hypervisor on top of an existing operating system, I recommend looking into Incus or Openstack. They have packages/deployments than can be done on Debian or Red Hat distros, and I would argue that they are designed in a more secure manner (since they include multi tenancy) than Proxmox. In addition to that, they also use standard tooling for networking, like both can use Linux Bridge (in-kernel networking) for networking operations.

I would trust Openstack the most when it comes to security, because it is designed to be used as a public cloud, like having your own AWS, and it is deployed with components publicly accessible in the real world.

Again, this is distracting from the original argument to make some kind of tertiary argument unrelated to the original one: Is ssh secure to expose to the internet?

You said no. That is the argument being contested.

This is moving the goal posts. You went from “ssh is not fine to expose” to “VPN’s add security”. While the second is true, it’s not what was being argued.

Never expose your SSH port on the public web,

Linux was designed as a multi user system. My college, Cal State Northridge, has an ssh server you can connect to, and put your site up. Many colleges continue to have a similar setup, and by putting stuff in your homedir you can have a website at no cost.

There are plenty of usecases which involve exposing ssh to the public internet.

And when it comes to raw vulnerabilities, ssh has had vastly less than stuff like apache httpd, which powers wordpress sites everywhere but has had so many path traversal and RCE vulns over the years.

Firstly, Xen is considered by secure by Qubes — but that’s mainly the security of the hypervisor and virtualization system itself. They make a very compelling argument that escaping a Xen based virtual machine is going to be more difficult than a KVM virtual machine.

But threat model matters a lot. Qubes aims to be the most secure OS ever, for use cases like high profile journalists or other people who absolutely need security, because they will literally get killed without it.

Amazon moved to KVM because, despite the security trade off’s, it’s “good enough” for their usecase, and KVM is easier to manage because it’s in the Linux kernel itself, meaning you get it if you install Linux on a machine.

In addition to that, security is about more than just the hypervisor. You noted that Promox is Debian, and XCP-NG is Centos or a RHEL rebuild similar to Rocky/Alma, I think. I’ll get to this later.

Xen (and by extension XCP-NG) was better known for security whilst KVM (and thus Proxmox)

I did some research on this, and was planning to make a blogpost and never got around to making it. But I still have the draft saved.

The short version is: it depends, and they can fluctuate slightly on certain tasks, but they are mostly the same in performance.

default PROXMOX and XCP-NG installations.

What do you mean by hardening? If you are talking about hardening the management operating system (Proxmox’s Debian or XCP’s RHEL-like), or the hypervisor itself?

I agree with the other poster about CIS hardening and generally hardening the base operating system used. But I will note that XCP-NG is more designed to be an “appliance” and you’re not really supposed to touch it. I wouldn’t be suprised if it’s immutable nowadays.

For the hypervisor itself, it depends on how secure you want things, but I’ve heard that at Microsoft Azure datacenters, they disable hyperthreading because it becomes a security risk. In fact, Spectre/Meltdown can be mitigated by disabling hyper threading. Of course, their are other ways to mitigate those two vulnerabilities, but by disabling hyper threading, you can eliminate that entire class of vulnerabilities — at the cost of performance.

I don’t know how to retire a car but my dad has guided me through replacing a few bits of the engine mount, so does that count?

18 points.

I’ve owned a dictionary and an encyclopedia.

It’s worked fine for me with no configuration. If you ask for help, we can troubleshoot and get it working.

I despise the way Canonical pretends discourse forum posts by their team members* are documentation.

I’ve noticed they have been a bit better lately, and have migrated much of the posts to their documentation, but it seems they are doing it again.

As this is developed, we will update this post to link to the new documentation and feature release notes.

Pro tip: You could have just made the documentation directly, with the content of this post. Or maybe a blog post. But please stop with the forum posts. They are very confusing for people not used to these… unique locations.

*Not that people are easily able to find this out when they don’t give any indication that the forum post is something other than just another post by a rando. Actually, I’m just guessing here, based on the quoted reply, for all I know this could be a post by someone unrelated to Canonical. The account is 3 months, and the post itself is identical to a regular forum post from a regular forum member…

It actually is a language issue.

Although rust can dynamically link with C/C++ libraries, it cannot dynamically link with other Rust libraries. Instead, they are statically compiled into the binary itself.

But the GPL interacts differently with static linking than with dynamic. If you make a static binary with a GPL library or GPL code, your program must be GPL. If you dynamically link a GPL library, you’re program doesn’t have to be GPL. It’s partially because of this, that the vast majority of Rust programs and libraries are permissively licensed — to make a GPL licensed rust library would mean it would see much less use than a GPL licensed C library, because corporations wouldn’t be able to extend proprietary code off of it — not that I care about that, but the library makers often do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Libraries — it’s complicated.

EDIT: Nvm I’m wrong. Rust does allow dynamic linking

Hmmmm. But it seems that people really like to compile static rust binaries, however, due to their portability across Linux distros.

EDIT2: Upon further research it seems that Rust’s dynamic linking implementation lacks a “stable ABI” as compared to other languages such as Swift or C. So I guess we are back to “it is a language issue”. Well thankfully this seems easier to fix than “Yeah Rust doesn’t support dynamic linking at all.”

Edit3: Nvm, I’m very, very wrong. The GPL does require programs using GPL libraries, even dynamically linked, be GPL. It’s the LGPL that doesn’t.

Openstack cluster!

If you have an older nvidia gpu, you can use vgpu unlock to unlock these features on that.