Kamin's Corner

Although the real-time collapse of Twitter and now seemingly Reddit as well has sent shockwaves throughout the social media landscape and the internet as a whole, in a way it's been an enlightening experience for myself.

The sale of Twitter and it's subsequent pandering towards extremists is what pushed me to Mastodon in the first place. Although I initially wanted to find an alternative to what I had, I instead found something much better – a closer-knit community of people with genuine attitudes and more organic and thoughtful discussion of the topics I was interested in. Even though by nature Mastodon, and the Fediverse as a whole, is scattered and distributed by design, the collective community felt much closer than anything I had ever found on Twitter.

I went through the same eye-opening experience when I moved from Reddit to Lemmy. Although I sought something similar to replace the hole left behind by my favorite subreddits, I found communities that seemed much more engaging and informed.

Now as I ponder going through the same process once again with moving from Instagram to Pixelfed, I hope that I once again can find a new social community that is not only engaging, but even enthusiastic to be here. In some ways it's like reliving the earlier days of the internet, when it was more tech-oriented (i.e. nerdy) folks who had a genuine love of the platform as much as the topic itself. I hope that I can once again find that same enthusiasm as I did back then, and as I have now with the Fediverse.

In the process of moving over to Fedora as my server OS, I've been exploring how to replicate some of the things I did in Proxmox – one of which is running a sort of legacy “ant farm” network. The core of that network was a Windows NT 4 virtual machine acting as a primary domain controller, serving DNS, WINS, and DHCP to that subnet.

I followed Virtually Fun's guide to setting up NT4 on Proxmox and wanted to see if I could replicate it here. Since both Proxmox and Libvirt in Fedora use QEMU/KVM underneath, I knew it was possible – it was just a matter of replicating the Proxmox configuration in a Libvirt domain XML.

I began by using virt-install to create a basic domain as a template. I ran the following command:

virt-install --virt-type kvm --name winnt4 --cdrom /machines/en_winnt_4.0_svr.iso --os-variant winnt4.0 --disk size=2 --memory 64 --sound sb16 --cpu pentium --network user,model=pcnet

This creates a new domain with a 2GB hard drive, 64MB of RAM, a virtual SoundBlaster 16 sound card, a pentium-equivalent CPU, and an virtual AMD PCNet NIC.

This gets us a running machine, but you may notice that the web viewer isn't available in Cockpit. That's because the new machine only has a SPICE viewer, not a VNC output Cockpit needs.

Run virsh edit winnt4 to drop into the XML editor, and add the following under <devices>:

<graphics type='vnc' port='-1' autoport='yes' listen='127.0.0.1'> <listen type='address' address='127.0.0.1'/> </graphics>

This will create a VNC port that Cockpit can hook into. Save the domain and reboot the VM and we should be able to get some screen output:

From here on out, you should be able to continue on with installation and get up and running with network support. I may go into detail in a future post about some finishing touches, such as installing better mouse and VGA drivers, and enabling ACPI shutdown.

Red Hat announced today that moving forward, the only RHEL source code releases will be for CentOS Stream. This is definitely a disappointing decision and one that might cause me to re-evaluate whether I continue to use RH-derived Linux.

I cut my teeth on Linux with Red Hat Linux 7.2, found in the back of a library book. Since then I've always come back to RHL, and later Fedora and CentOS because not only was it familiar, but I liked Red Hat's model of working with and contributing back to Linux and the open source community.

Sadly, it seems like that era has come to an end. It started with CentOS being moved to upstream Stream releases only, and it looks like now they're taking it a step further by restricting source access, likely to hamper the efforts of projects like Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux that have taken its place.

I worry what will happen next. Will Red Hat/IBM have a heavier hand in the direction that Fedora goes? Will they possibly kill it off completely? Either way, I don't like the way things are headed.