• 2 Posts
  • 230 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • You can get refurbished hard drives for around 300$/20TB (quickly searched estimation). So, 15 drives plus maybe another 5 for raid reundancy takes you back 6k$. Server to hold those drives 1-2k$ (used), UPS, internet connection and other bits’n’bobs and your total is very roughly around 8k$ (or €, as I threw the estimations on a pretty big ballpark).





  • Not spesifically helpful with your cgnat-situation, but my jellyfin runs on a isolated network and it’s just directly exposed to the internet via named reverse proxy in order to share the library with family and friends. Should someone get access to that they can obviously use the VM for nefarious purposes, but it’s a known risk for me and the attacker would need to breach trough either my VLAN isolation or out of the virtual environment to my proxmox host if they wanted to access my actually valuable data.

    Sure, there’s bots trying every imaginable password combination and such, but in my scenario even if they could breach either the jellyfin server or reverse proxy it’s not that big of a deal. Obviously I keep the setup updated and do my best to keep bad actors out. but as I mentioned, breach for that one server would not be the end of the world.

    With cgnat there’s not much else to do than to run a VPN where server is somewhere publicly accessible and route traffic via that tunnel (obviously running a VPN-client on jellyfin-server or otherwise routing traffic to it via VPN). Any common VPN-server should do the trick.




  • And given how “fast” IPv6 adoption has been, switch to something non-IP based is not going to happen any time soon.

    Also, while I kind of get the idea author is talking about, pulling random addresses out of thin air and managing routing for that, even on a small scale, is going to have a crapload problems. Without subnet hierarchy with routes, gateways and stuff would mean something like globally broadcasted ARP packets and absolutely massive routing tables on endpoints. Plus with that approach the reslience of IP-networks would be lost (or routing tables would need to grow even more).

    Also there’s some pretty big issues with malicious actors on the network, incompatibility with every router on planet and a ton more. What that kind of approach working globally would need is some scifi-level networking without latency or bandwidth limitations.





  • I’d rather have a physical remote which acts as a keyboard so it’ll support waking the system up from suspend. Plus I prefer a dedicated device for that instead of a phone as I’m not a only user for the thing. There’s plenty of those around, only problem is to find one that works reliably and local stores don’t seem to have a lot of options so I might need to dig one up on ebay even if it’s a bit of a PITA to order from China to EU today with customs.


  • I installed Jellyfin on my server and threw kodi on a minipc I dug out of dumpster pile at work. Works pretty well, but my server needs more RAM and the minipc needs either a wireless keyboard or a USB-HID remote controller to finalize the setup. Also ran some wiring in the house and added two network sockets to a room where the whole kodi-tv-gamingpc-whatever-pile is going to live.

    On the server RAM I found some on ebay, but if anyone is interested on 64G DDR4 ECC DIMMs I have a few. I thought they were supported on my server motherboard when I took them out from a old server at work but it supports only up to 32G ECC dimms.


  • It’s kinda-sorta social problem, but originally not the way you intend. It used to be possible to self host XMPP and chat with people regardless of the platform since both Google and Facebook (it wasn’t Meta at the time) adopted the protocol. But then they changed their policy and created the walled gardens they have now and thus it’s a social and/or political problem.

    They fully followed the playbook of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish which eleijeep@piefed.social mentioned few messages up the thread and pretty much devastated XMPP out of existence. Sure, there’s still handful of users and project itself isn’t dead, but before their policy change I saw quite a lot of servers around which are now either dead or forgotten.

    On a previous comment I didn’t mean to describe that as a technological problem but a problem related to big corporations embracing FOSS projects/protocols and killing them by introducing their own walled garden variant of it.


  • It’s not really a same thing. I can’t reach my mother or neighbor over fediverse since they don’t know nor care what that is. But they use whatsapp, facebook and other stuff which are in their own walled gardens and there’s no option to communicate to those gardens with anything I self host.

    And trying to convince everyone to switch is not a battle I’m actively fighting for multiple reasons. Of course I mention signal, fediverse and everything to anyone who’s willing to listen, but those encounters are pretty rare.



  • How you imagine things send messages to reset your passwords, sending notifications and whatever is currently managed via email than some piece of code creating and sending messages, managing possible errors with them and potentially also monitoring/logging the message traffic for statistics or debugging?

    User adoption matters if you want your thing to be actually useful for the actual users. And supporting any messaging system requires effort, so it makes sense to spend limited resources on a thing which has the biggest userspace. If you want to run matrix server which has you and your dog using it, go ahead, but don’t be surprised if you want to contact your neighbor and he’ll look like you have two heads when you start to explain how to reach you.


  • It’s a crapload more work to support XMPP/Matrix/whatever messaging on any platform than…SMTP

    It’s absolutely not.

    And you know this since you’ve written code to manage both on different environments, right?

    Also, whatsapp supports all kinds of “bots” and it has absolutely massive userspace compared to pretty much any other instant message application. It doesn’t matter if you create the perfect protocol and platform for this kind of thing if there’s 7 people globally using it.


  • It’s a whole lot less work than configuring email.

    It’s a crapload more work to support XMPP/Matrix/whatever messaging on any platform than just using a robust, reliable, resilient, widely supported good old SMTP. For you it might be easier to input your account (which at least on XMPP resemble quite a bit of email address) but for the developer it’s totally different thing. Also practically everyone accessing a website has an email address and if they’d decide to support some mesaging platform it’d make more sense to use whatsapp than XMPP since it’s vastly more popular.


  • Self hosting is not just one thing. You are system adminstrator, network engineer, security specialist, service architect and many other things, specially if you expose anything to anyone outside your very private network. And to get anything even running on that complex mess requires some knowledge on a lot of things. Making them run securely with proper backups requires even more knowledge on things.

    Sure, you can just throw some docker images on your old desktop and be happy, even forward ports from the public internet to your things if you like. But that exposes your stuff to quite a lot of dangers and if you just click buttons without any understanding you’ll soon be a part of a botnet or lose your data or lose money if someone decides to mess around with your home automation or something else.

    I get what you’re saying, not all of us are very polite and answers can be pretty harsh, but more often than not the generic idea behind those answers is not trying to be an asshole or gatekeep anything. It’s just that there’s a skillset you need to build things safely and if it’s clear from the start that someone looking for answers is way over their head it’s better for everyone to get them take a step back and learn instead of trying to create a meaningful answer since there’s too many variables or it’d just take immense effort to write down comprehensive guide on what to do, why and how for everything from the ground up.

    I know for a fact that in my area there’s a bunch of surveillance cameras, home automation stuff and even some farm equipment directly open to the public network just because someone just plugged things in without any idea on the whole picture. Sometimes the correct answer is ‘stop shooting yourself on the foot and learn the basics first, then come back’.