I'll start with mine. yes part of this was to brag about my somewhat but not too unusual setup. But I also wanna learn from your setups!

Anyways: I primarily use Gentoo Linux.

I have two headless servers: a Raspberry Pi 4B and a Oracle cloud VM (free tier). Both running OpenRC, and both were running mainline kernel with custom config (I recently switched the Pi to PiFoundation kernel due to some issues). The raspberry pi boots from SSD and has no sd card inserted.

Both servers were running musl libc instead of glibc for a while. This gave me a couple of random issues, but eventually I got tired and switched back to glibc.

I have a desktop running gentoo and a laptop running arch, but hoping to switch the laptop to gentoo soon.

Both are daily driving wayland (the desktop had nvidia card and used for gaming). The desktop is running a kernel with a minimal config that compiles in 2-3 minutes.

What's your unusual setup like?

  • timicin@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    8 months ago

    i have a single box i use for data storage; backup; wifi; router; and switch.

    it runs ubuntu on the bare iron with

    • a windows 10 kvm/qemu vm with pci pass through on wifi to get 1 gig wifi speeds on intel in ap mode (intel won't allow it using linux drivers)
    • a pfsense kvm/qemu vm for router & firewall to internet and with pci pass through on a 1 gig nic to gap the internet from the base ubuntu
    • dns & ip masquerade along with kvm/qemu based sofware defined networking for windows, pfsense and ubuntu to forward all wifi and cabled network through to internet and
    • connected via 3 gig nic and switch for much faster local data storage and backup on the ubuntu install.
    • vpn and remote backup using pfsense for access to my setup from anywhere else in the world. (eg routing traffic from the office to my home connection for personal use and access to my data)

    topographically, it looks like this, but in reality it's all one box:

                                  ┌────┐                    ┌─────────────┐                             
          ┌───────────────────┤vpn │ ┌──────────────────┤windows (wifi│                             
          ▼                   └────┘ │                  └─────────────┘                             
┌──────────┐                         │                                                              
│ internet │                         │                                                              
└──────────┘                         ▼                  ┌───────┐        ┌──────┐      ┌───────────┐
          ▲                ┌─────────┐                  │ubuntu │◄───────┤switch│◄─────┤  backups  │
          └────────────────┤ pfsense │◄─────────────────┴───────┘        └──────┘      └───────────┘
                           └─────────┘
    • mFat@lemdro.id
      ·
      8 months ago

      That's very interesting. I thought that intel Wi-Fi cards can't do AP mode anywhere. I had no luck on ubuntu and openwrt. Didn't know Windows could help. I'll try to build a Windows VM with passthrough.

      • timicin@lemmygrad.ml
        ·
        8 months ago

        the windows driver allows for full wifi-6/7 speeds in ap mode and is the only way, afaik, to get it with intel cards

        there are other efforts to backwards engineer or hack the changes that disables higher speeds in ap mode for linux; but none worked when i tried about 10-ish months ago. i tired these ones:

        https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/wifi-6-gets-134-gbps-on-raspberry-pi-cm4 https://gist.github.com/iffa/290b1b83b17f51355c63a97df7c1cc60 https://askubuntu.com/questions/1163145/intel-wireless-iwlwifi-ubuntu-19-04-slow-upload-speed-but-only-on-certain-wi/1163146#1163146

        and if you don't have a windows key like me, do yourself a favor and create a windows image instead of a vm and keep re-using it to get around the windows validation setup timeout after 30 days. (i didn't realize this until after the fact so i had to create a work around with ansible to stop/copy/paste/launch the vm every 30 days)