JKN

For years now, I've been using Netdata to monitor my servers, both local and remote nodes. It's a great system – easy to setup, well supported, and presents a great deal of data just by default, even before adding any of the many available plugins.

Not only does it make a nice dashboard for an overview of server statuses, but all that data lets you dive in to do some real troubleshooting without having to manually find and parse tons of logs.

But at the end of the day, Netdata is a commercial product for enterprise deployments. The free “community” account limits you to 5 nodes via their cloud aggregator, which is the only way to view and combine data across multiple nodes. My “mini datacenter” and remote routers have passed that limit.

So began my search for a completely FOSS community project for server monitoring. Of course, there's the Grafana+Prometheus stack, but that's quite a bit of work and probably way too feature-rich for what I need.

Enter Beszel – a rather new and upcoming project that aims to offer a simple and lightweight monitoring system with a pretty GUI. Nice!

Setup

Beszel runs as a server + agents architecture. Both components can be installed via either Docker or a convenience bash script, each resulting in a container or systemd service accordingly. This worked great in most cases, except when it came to my “big boy” server running Enterprise Linux. Beszel doesn't come with a SELinux policy, and it only monitors either Docker or Podman hosts, but not both. A little tweaking was needed to setup the agent in Podman to disable container monitoring altogether. The agents installed just fine within Debian-based VMs, however. (Alpine is now supported too.)

Fair to say, Beszel isn't prioritizing the enterprise market, which is fine by me.

In use

Beszel does exactly what it says on the tin – simple, lightweight, and easy on the eyes. The homepage is a nice reactive dashboard with just simple linear bars for the most basic metrics of each node. Clicking into a node presents more metrics in pretty graphs. The CPU graph currently doesn't show app/cgroup breakdowns, but the Docker graph does show individual containers.

With Netdata, system load for agents was around 2-4% on 7th-gen Intel cores, with significant spikes when pulling the full data streams. Beszel OTOH runs really lean at less than 1%.

Alerts (email) are also really simple, with toggles for each of the basic metrics for each node.

Conclusion

Beszel is no enterprise monitoring system; and it doesn't pretend to be. Netdata and other solutions exist for that. Instead, it is a simple and useful dashboard for keeping an eye on your server fleet, with no commercial limitations. Perfect for the homelabber.

#homelab #FOSS #sysadmin

After trying to use Logseq for the past 2 years, I've decided to switch to Joplin.

Main differences

Logseq puts daily journaling first. Every time you open Logseq, it starts with a new page for today's date. This promotes a “jotting” workflow, where you start by jotting down brief notes which can then be linked to further details elsewhere.

Another big feature of Logseq is the visual graph view – a dynamic node-network of all entries and their relationships. A kind of “mindmap” style visualizer for all your content.

Joplin, on the other hand, is a more of a rich-text (markdown) editor combined with traditional tree organizer plus tags.

Not for Me

While I appreciated the graph-view of Logseq, the journaling/jotting workflow just wasn't for me. If you enjoy journaling, then Logseq will probably be up your alley.

In terms of UI, Logseq also seemed to rely heavily on markdown and use of an extensive command pallete. Joplin has a command pallete too, but users who aren't inclined to use it can get by completely without it. In fact, I'm using Joplin right now as a markdown editor, with live view, to draft this post.

Sync

But the straw that broke the camel's back for me, was trying to sync Logseq across multiple devices. I already use Nextcloud for my cloud-sharing needs, but somehow Logseq just never could sync correctly between desktop and mobile (Android).

Might have something to do with Logseq's business model of selling their own cloud-sync service.

Joplin has native sync support for Nextcloud, as well as S3 and generic WEBDAV. You also have the option of paying for their premium cloud-sync service if you're not inclined to host your own.

Perfect.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Loqseq seems to serve a more specific audience, oriented towards journaling and mind-mapping. Joplin is pretty typical of what most people imagine a note-taking app to be, plus nice creature comforts and self-hosting support.

#software #opensource

An OS is not something you can arbitrarily replace with a different 'brand' and continue to do computing the same way you always have.

It's like switching from taking a train to driving a car. Both are vehicles, both are means of transport that get you from A to B – but in very different ways, requiring different skills and supporting ecosystems.

The earlier you realize this and start learning, the less confusion and frustration you will have.

#linux #opensource #FOSS #windows

But #Thailand can't seem to decide if it wants it or not.

Have I finally got WriteFreely running? I think I have.