Yup. Treating VMs similar to containers. The alternative, older-school method is cold snapshots of the VM, apply patches/updates (after pre-prod testing & validation), usually in an A/B or red/green phased rollout, and roll back snaps when things go tits up.

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If you are in a position to ask this question, it means you have no actual uptime requirements, and the question is largely irrelevant. However, in the “real” world where seconds of downtime matter:

Things not changing means less maintenance, and nothing will break compatibility all of the sudden.

This is a bit of a misconception. You have just as many maintenance cycles (e.g. “Patch Tuesdays”) because packages constantly need security updates. What it actually means is fewer, better documented changes with maintenance cycles. This makes it easier and faster to determine what’s likely to break before you even enter your testing cycle.

Less chance to break.*

Sort of. Security changes frequently break running software, especially 3rd party software that just happened to need a certain security flaw or out-of-date library to function. The world has got much better about this, but it’s still a huge headache.

Services are up to date anyway, since they are usually containerized (e.g. Docker).

Assuming that the containerized software doesn’t need maintenance is a great way to run broken, insecure containers. Containerization helps to limit attack surfaces and outage impacts, but it isn’t inherently more secure. The biggest benefit of containerization is the abstraction of software maintenance from OS maintenance. It’s a lot of what makes Dev(Sec)Ops really valuable.

Edit since it’s on my mind: Containers are great, but amateurs always seem to forget they’re all sharing the host kernel. One container causing a kernel panic, or hosing misconfigured SHM settings can take down the entire host. Virtual machines are much, much safer in this regard, but have their own downsides.

And, for Debian especially, there’s one of the biggest availability of services and documentation, since it’s THE server OS.

No it isn’t. THE server OS is the one that fits your specific use-case best. For us self-hosted types, sure, we use Debian a lot. Maybe. For critical software applications, organizations want a vendor so support them, if for no other reason than to offload liability when something goes wrong.

It is running only rarely. Most of the time, the device is powered off. I only power it on a few times per month when I want to print something.

This isn’t a server. It’s a printing appliance. You’re going to have a similar experience of needing updates with every power-on, but with CoreOS, you’re going to have many more updates. When something breaks, you’re going to have a much longer list of things to track down as the culprit.

And, last but not least, I’ve lost my password.

JFC uptime and stability isn’t your problem. You also very probably don’t need to wipe the OS to recover a password.

My Raspberry Pi on the other hand is only used as print server, running Octoprint for my 3D-printer. I have installed Octoprint there in the form of Octopi, which is a Raspian fork distro where Octoprint is pre-installed, which is the recommended way.

That is the answer to your question. You’re running this RPi as a “server” for your 3d printing. If you want your printing to work reliably, then do what Octoprint recommends.

What it sounds like is you’re curious about CoreOS and how to run other distributions. Since breakage is basically a minor inconvenience for you, have at it. Unstable distros are great learning experiences and will keep you up to date on modern software better than “safer” things like Debian Stable. Once you get it doing what you want, it’ll usually keep doing that. Until it doesn’t, and then learning how to fix it is another great way to get smarter about running computers.

E: Reformatting

Everything they’re willing to tell you they have on you.

Check the link I posted above, or you can look at the 802.15.4 wiki for an overview.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.15.4, scroll to the security section.

No apology needed, one thing about security is that paranoia is good. One problem with security is that paranoia leads to assumptions and misinformation, rather than understanding.

Symmetric key encryption is much faster than asymmetric, and can use much larger keys with less compute penalty. So we use acPU intensive asymmetric TLS handshakes to safely exchange the keys, and then switch to the faster method for the data.

So when ZigBee use AES 128, you can be reasonably sure the data packets are safe. The next question to ask is “do they exchange their keys safely?”

Which in this case would be “no” if you just leave the ZigBee controller in pairing mode all the time. However, you only allow pairing when you want it, and only pair with devices you explicitly allow. Unauthorized devices never get your network key.

That’s fair, since it’s possible these chips have some backdoored bootloader or something, I’ve never personally analyzed them with an electron microscope, but the architecture and wire traces are published, so you could start a chip fabrication plant and roll your own silicon.

The actual running code on them is usually GitHub hosted though, or you can write it yourself and just import the libraries you need, again usually from GitHub or the platform specific repositories.

If you’re worried about Chinese chips in your open source though, I have some real bad news for you.

If you’re using FOSS specifically as a control against Chinese spying, and not analyzing the commit logs of every package you download, I have more bad news for you.

Your Https connections are also symmetric, so that’s a silly thing to dislike.

The handshake and key exchange are asymmetric, and used to establish a symmetric session key.

ZigBee encryption is fine for the use case, because you’re only adding devices you know are being added. You inherently trust that your physical ZigBee device is the device it claims to be.

There’s potentially an opportunity to hijack the key exchange between devices at network join, but you’d have to approve the listening device to your network in the first place.

https://development.libelium.com/zigbee-networking-guide/security-and-data-encryption

There is an entire ecosystem of open SoC devices, code, platforms, development boards, etc. One of the most popular is the ESP32/8266 boards, which is a pretty good place to start.

This is an AB problem in which you’re going to eventually solve the actual problem that isn’t actually systemd after looking real hard at ways to replace systemd.

Or else you’re going to find yourself in an increasingly painful maintenance process trying to retrofit rc scripts into constantly evolving distributions.

There’s a lot I prefer about the old SysV, and I’m still not thrilled that everything is being more dependent on these large monolithic daemons. But I’ve yet to find a systemd problem that wasn’t just me not knowing how to use systemd.

.local is reserved for mDNS responses, don’t use that.

It’s more than best practice. Your active directory controllers want to be the resolvers for their members, separate from other zones such as external MX records or the like. Your AD domain should always be a separate zone, aka a subdomain. “ad.example.com”.

If your DCs are controlling members at the top level, you’ll eventually run into problems with Internet facing services and public NS records.

Also per below. You can’t get commercially signed certificates for fake domains. Self hosting certificate authorities is a massive pain in the ass. Don’t try unless you have a real need, like work-related learning.

made it a subdomain

That is the correct answer.