fidzu : Fedora

Datacenter moves

There was one gigantic Datacenter move, and one smaller one. Overall I am glad we moved and we are in a much better situation for doing so, but I really hope we can avoid moving more in 2026. It takes so much planning and energy and work and there is so much else to do that has to be put on hold.

As a reminder, some of those advantages:

• We have lots of new machines. They are newer/faster/better in almost every way.

• dual 25G links on all the new machines (and 10G on old ones)

• all nvme storage in new machines

• space to expand for things like riscv builders and such.

• ipv6 support finally

So much of my year was datacenter moves. :(

Scrapers and outages

This year was sadly also the year of the scrapers. They are hammering pretty much everyone these days and it's quite sad. We did deploy anubis and it really helped a lot for most of the scrapers, but the's another group of them it wasn't able to. For those before the holidays I just tossed enough resources at our stuff that they can scrape and we can just not care. I'm not sure what next year will look like for this however, so we will just keep doing the best we can. I did adjust caching some that also really helped (all the src static files are cached now).

There were also a number of outages toward the end of the year, which I really am not happy about. There were a number of reasons for them:

• A tcp_timeout issue which turned out to be a firewall bug that was super hard to track down.

• The scrapers causing outages.

• I myself caused a few outages with a switching loop of power10 lpars. ;(

• Various smaller outages.

We have dicusssed a bunch of things to improve outages and preventing them, so hopefully next year will be happier on that front.

Power10

Speaking of power10, that was quite the saga. We got the machines, but the way we wanted to configure them didn't end up working so we had to move to a much more complex setup using a virtual hardware management console appliance and lpars and sr-iov and more. It's pretty complex, but we did get everything working in the end.

Fedora releases

We got Fedora 42 and 43 released this year, and pretty much on time too. 43 seems to be a release with a lot of small issues sadly, not sure why. From the postgresql upgrades, dovecot changing config format completely, nftables not enabled and matrix-synapse not being available, my home upgrades were not as smooth as usual.

Home Assistant

This was defintely a fun year of poking at home assistant and adding sensors and tweaking around with it. It's a nice fun hobby and does give you real data to solve real problems around your house. Also, all your data is your own and stored locally. This has really turned my perception of iot things all around. Before I woulde deliberately not connect things, now I connect them if they can be made only to talk to my home assistant.

I added a weather station, a rain guage, a new zigbee controller, a bunch of smart power plugs and temp sensors, and much more. I expect more on the way in 2026. Just when I think I have automated or instermented everything, there's a new thing coming along.

AI

I'm still in the 'There are in fact use cases for LLM's' group, but I am pretty weary of all the people wedging them in where they are not in fact a good use case, or insisting you find _some_ case no matter what.

I've found some of them useful for some things. I think this will continue to grow over time, but I think we need to be measured.

On the other side I don't get the outrage for things like calibre adding some support for LLM's. Its there, but it does exactly nothing by default. You have to set it up with your desired provider before it will do anything. It really doesn't affect you if you don't want to use it.

laptop

I have stuck with using my Lenovo slim 7x as my main laptop for most of this year. The main thing I still miss is webcam working (but I have an external one so it's not the end of the world). I'm looking forward to the X2 laptops out in the next few months. I really hope qualcomm has learned from the X1 ones and X2 will go better, but time will tell.

Fedmsg finally retired

We finally managed to turn off our old message bus. It took far too long, but I think it went pretty smoothly overall in the end. Thanks to much to Michal Konečný for doing everything around this.

nagios (soon to be) retired

Thanks to a bunch of work from Greg Sutcliffe, we have our zabbix setup pretty much done for a phase one and have officially announced that nagios is going to be retired.

iptables finally retired

We moved all our iptables setup over to nftables. There were a few hiccups, but overall it went pretty smoothly. Thanks to James Antill for all the work on this.

Blogs

I wrote a bunch more blogs this year, mostly for weekly recaps, but also a few home assistant review blogs. I find it enjoyable to do the recaps, although I don't really get much in the way of comments on them, so no idea if anyone else cares about them. I'll probibly continue to do them in 2026, but I might change it to do them sunday night or friday so I don't have to think about doing them saturday morning.

The world

The world was very depressing in 2025 in general, and thats speaking as someone living life on the easiest difficulty level ( https://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/ ) I really hope sanity, science and kindness can make some recovery in 2026.

I'll probibly see about doing a 'looking forward to 2026' post soon.

comments? additions? reactions?

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