megaman

An android messaging app that sends everything as an image where the text is in a blue bubble. All images, baby.

So, I know very little and have a poor understanding of the software licenses, hence why I'm asking.

I have a 'smart' thermostat that came with the new HVAC system. It is the AprilAire 8920W. It has a touchscreen, connects to wifi, does lots of 'computer' things. I cannot imagine that this furnace company built their own OS and kernel and everything else from scratch; it seems most likely it is running linux, yea? And with that, includes libraries and other tools that are under some version of the GPL, yea?

I went down the router rabbit-hole some weeks ago and found the firmware for routers available on the Linksys website, the Linksys site has this 'GPL Code Center'. I'm finding nothing of the sort from AprilAire, though...

So, if we assume that my 'smart' thermostat is running Linux (and, say, busybox, a common GPL-ed tool on small systems, like routers), they are obligated to provide the code for at least those pieces of software, right? They need to give me a CD or have a page on their website (and include the link in the manual) and all that?

Do they need to give me access to the entire firmware as well? The router folks do, but you also sometimes need to re-install the firmware manually, so that may not be a license issue.

However, how would we know if they are violating a license if we don't know what is running on it?

I'm curious about how the GPL / copy-left licenses work, and wondering if I found someone who is violating it. I also want to hack the thermostat to control it without the motherfuckin' cloud, but that is a bit separate.

I've got my main house server that has a number of dockerized applications, including nextcloud-aio. Nextcloud-AIO comes with a built-in backup system using BorgBackups. I've had this running and doing my backups, it is probably fine. Notable, it does encrypt the backup.

Now, I recently setup a separate machine to use rsnapshot to backup the things from the main machine that need backing up. It is SSHing on a schedule to do that, and backing up the folders I've listed.

When I set that up, I skipped the nextcloud borg backup, because that is already backing up; however, it is not a remote backup, so is of limited use (granted, my 'official' backup computer is using about 18 inches away from the main server, so also of limited use).

I can easily just include the nextcloud-borg-directory on the rsnapshot list, but does anyone know if it will properly handle just the updates?

That is, both Borg and Rsnapshot are set up so that each backup isn't a complete backup but just incremental changes, so that you don't fill your whole disk in two weeks. But if Borg does that first on the nextcloud data, will rsnapshot just not work and then try to backup the full 50GBs every day? Or just do the incremental changes? Will the borg encryption jack up the ability of rsnapshot to see the changes?

If no one knows, I will just do it anyway and report back in a few days if my disk is completely full or not.

Edit: it has been ~4 days, and I think it is not all busted (not going to say it is a good idea). The total space it is taking up on the second (backup) machine is what I expect - it hasn't ballooned because it can't properly grok the borg backup format or anything like that. Importantly, this is after ~4 days and very few changes (updates/deletions/edits) to anything on the nextcloud.

Hey, all.

Is it possible to skip this 'register your server' step when creating a self-hosted Rocketchat instance? I just don't want to, ya know? Regular websearching is just giving a lot about how to disable user registration rather than skipping the server registration with Rocketchat HQ.