Samba VS Portainer

Samba

The TLDR is that you create the filesystem on Linux/Raspberry Pi. Then you "export" that file system via some software to remote computers. You can use Samba (https://www.samba.org/) to create CIFS shares which can be mounted by either Linux or Microsoft Windows devices. There are of course other software/protocols you can use to export the filesystems like NFS, iSCSI, CEPHFS, etc; but these are a bit more complicated than what a novice can deploy. I would start with Samba/CIFS and then branch out once you get more experienced.

You could try to use samba via cgo.

I think you want a CIFS/SMB client? A quick search turned up smbc, which looks like it does what you want. All three crates are based on libsmbclient, which is a C implementation from the Samba project.

Remember kids, there is always Samba.

> First, the article doesn't say that "Linux is not ready for the desktop" - or concern itself with this as an abstract question.

Well, it does, but in a sarcastic manner:

"Yeah, let's consider Linux an OS ready for the desktop :-)."

> Also, I find the "GNU/Linux is already ready for the desktop; I and others use it" argument tired. I've used GNU/Linux for the desktop in 1998, but it sure as hell wasn't ready then.

Conversely, that it doesn't work for certain people does not mean that "it is not ready", which the post does state (sarcastically) as I pointed out above.

> Many use cases aside...

I'm not sure how the browsing, docs and email is miserable, maybe you can expand on that. The video editing is indeed a bit limited from my experience too. However, I don't think "limited proprietary options" is a problem. The community largely and specifically avoids proprietary software. Proprietary incursions into the community are generally seen as a negative thing. And for the lack of codecs, software patents for the most part are to blame.

And then it just comes to my original statement; many things stated in the article are non-issues to most Linux users or just falsehoods:

- Neither Mozilla Firefox nor Google Chrome use video decoding and output acceleration in Linux.

Firefox does.

- NVIDIA Optimus technology is a pain

NVIDIA is a pain.

- You don't play games, do you?

I do.

- Linux still has very few native AAA games.

So "it's not ready" because it doesn't have AAA games? What a pitty.

- To be fair you can now run thousands of Windows games through DirectX to Vulkan/OpenGL translation (Wine, Proton, Steam for Linux) but this incurs translation costs and decreases performance sometimes significantly.

No, not 'significantly' for dxvk.

- Also, anti-cheat protection usually doesn't work in Linux.

For good reason. Blame the dev, and don't make it work on Linux.

- Microsoft Office is not available for Linux

Thankfull.

- LibreOffice often has major troubles properly opening, rendering or saving documents created in Microsoft Office.

And whose fault is this? Use ODT.

- Several crucial Windows applications are not available under Linux.

Thankfully. Also, 'crucial' is subjective.

- In 2022 there's still no alternative to Windows Network File Sharing.

It's available since 1992: https://www.samba.org/

- Linux doesn't have a reliably working hassle-free fast native (directly mountable via the kernel; FUSE doesn't cut it) MTP implementation.

I can transfer files to my phone just fine.

- Too many things in Linux require manual configuration using text files.

No.

etc.

I have a media server that runs ubuntu, and today I wanted to copy some files off of it from my windows laptop. But the samba shares weren't showing up in file explorer (but they showed up on fine on my macbook).

brew info samba samba: stable 4.16.0 (bottled) SMB/CIFS file, print, and login server for UNIX https://www.samba.org/ Not installed From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/HEAD/Formula/samba.rb License: GPL-3.0-or-later ==> Dependencies Build: [email protected] ✔ Required: gnutls ✘, krb5 ✔ ==> Caveats To avoid conflicting with macOS system binaries, some files were installed with non-standard name: - smbd: /usr/local/sbin/samba-dot-org-smbd - profiles: /usr/local/bin/samba-dot-org-profiles ==> Analytics install: 1,477 (30 days), 3,287 (90 days), 6,917 (365 days) install-on-request: 1,459 (30 days), 3,246 (90 days), 6,863 (365 days) build-error: 5 (30 days)

Portainer

> Any tips on the minimum hardware or VPS's needed to get a small swarm cluster setup?

From my testing, Docker Swarm is very lightweight, uses less memory than both Hashicorp Nomad and lightweight Kubernetes distros (like K3s). Most of the resource requirements will depend on what containers you actually want to run on the nodes.

You might build a cluster from a bunch of Raspberry Pis, some old OptiPlex boxes or laptops, or whatever you have laying around and it's mostly going to be okay. On a practical level, anything with 1-2 CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM will be okay for running any actually useful software, like a web server/reverse proxy, some databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL/MariaDB), as well as either something for a back end or some pre-packaged software, like Nextcloud.

So, even 5$/month VPSes are more than suitable, even from some of the more cheap hosts like Hetzner or Contabo (though the latter has a bad rep for limited/no support).

That said, you might also want to look at something like Portainer for a nice web based UI, for administering the cluster more easily, it really helps with discoverability and also gives you redeploy web hooks, to make CI easier: https://www.portainer.io/ (works for both Docker Swarm as well as Kubernetes, except the Kubernetes ingress control was a little bit clunky with Traefik instead of Nginx)

In this section, we will add Portainer to help us in managing our Docker containers. You can find more details about it here. To integrate Portainer into our EC2 project, we can follow these steps:

Git issues pointing to: https://docs.portainer.io/v/ce-2.9/start/install/agent/swarm/linux gives a ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS.

I am currently running Portainer, but webhooks (GitOps) appear to be broken ( [2.19.0] GitOps Updates not automatically polling from git · Issue #10309 · portainer/portainer · GitHub ) and so I cannot send webhook to redeploy a stack. So, looking for alternatives. Using this as a good excuse to learn more about docker and CI/CD etc.

A Synology NAS running Portainer (https://www.portainer.io/) running Paperless NGX (https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx)

This works better than I can possibly tell you.

I have an Epson WorkForce ES-580W that I bought when my mother passed away to bulk scan documents and it scans everything, double-sided if required, multi-page PDFs if required, at very high speed and uploads everything to OneDrive, at which point I drag and drop everything into Paperless.

I could, thinking about it, have the scanner email stuff to Paperless. Might investigate that today.

Paperless will OCR it and make it all searchable. This setup is amazing, I love living in the future.

> I've come to the conclusion (after trying kops, kubespray, kubeadm, kubeone, GKE, EKS) that if you're looking for < 100 node cluster, docker swarm should suffice. Easier to setup, maintain and upgrade.

Personally, I'd also consider throwing Portainer in there, which gives you both a nice way to interact with the cluster, as well as things like webhooks: https://www.portainer.io/

With something like Apache, Nginx, Caddy or something else acting as your "ingress" (taking care of TLS, reverse proxy, headers, rate limits, sometimes mTLS etc.) it's a surprisingly simple setup, at least for simple architectures.

casaos it just makes things like backups, offsite syncing and many other nas related things so much easier to manage. And gives you a proper nas like experience similar to that in which you'd fine on companies like tnas or synology. I actually also use it as a replacement for portainer when i don't need the more advanced features it offers

> I moved to docker swarm and love it. It's so much easier, straight forward, automatic ingress network and failover were all working out of the box. I'll stay with swarm for now.

I've had decent luck in the past with the K3s distribution, which is a bit cut down Kubernetes: https://k3s.io/

It also integrates nicely with Portainer (aside from occasional Traefik ingress weirdness sometimes), which I already use for Swarm and would suggest to anyone that wants a nice web based UI: https://www.portainer.io/

Others might also mention K0s, MicroK8s or others - there's lots of options there. But even so, I still run Docker Swarm for most of my private stuff as well and it's a breeze.

For my needs, it has just the right amount of abstractions: stacks with services that use networks and can have some storage in the form of volumes or bind mounts. Configuration in the form of environment variables and/or mounted files (or secrets), some deployment constraints and dependencies sometimes, some health checks and restart policies, as well as resource limits.

If I need a mail server, then I just have a container that binds to the ports (even low port numbers) that I need and configure it. If I need a web server, then I can just run Apache/Nginx/Caddy and use more or less 1:1 configuration files that I'd use when setting up either outside of containers, but with the added benefit of being able to refer to other apps by their service names (or aliases, if they have underscores in the names, which sometimes isn't liked).

At a certain scale, it's dead simple to use - no need for PVs and PVCs, no need for Ingress and Service abstractions, or lots and lots of templating that Helm charts would have (although those are nice in other ways).