Can you use a dummy address or a friend’s address in another country and/or sign up via a VPN to mask your location? There are companies that will open and scan your mail and make it available online so it could be a real address. But they are a little pricey. It’s likely due to UK laws not the provider themselves, so probably all reputable providers (that follow the law) may require it.
If it’s closed source but can be self hosted, what is the business model? I think it would be hard to fight piracy in that case. If it requires connecting to a service periodically for licenses and has no free version that doesn’t require that, then I believe it should be banned. I don’t consider that self-hosted. If the company disappears and the served goes down, its dead. That’s just running on your hardware, but not under your control. If the application is open or can be run locally without connecting to their servers and the paid portion is an add on like working as a proxy or something, then I have no real issue with that.
That said, there definitely should be a higher standard for users who are only marketing here. They should be making posts specifically for this group, not just sharing generic ads. The post should specifically state why it’s useful to self-hosters and thus relevant to the group.
I run a single instance of Postgres and one of MariaDB on my NAS that all services connect to. And all of my containers store their settings in NFS shares from that NAS and backup most other things to the NAS. This greatly simplifies off-site backups overall when a copy of almost everything critical lives on the NAS.
Of course, the NAS needs to be powerful enough to handle the load, but since settings don’t get changed often and backups are during off hours and NFS has good caching anyway, the DBs are really the only heavy load on the NAS outside of storing and serving media. It has plenty of memory and has two 2.5Gb ports trunked together and a couple of small SSDs for fast caching in addition to the RAID array of HDDs. So it’s easily able to handle all of its file sharing duties as well as hosting the DBs.
Only negative might be that there’s no fail over if the NAS goes down. But I also don’t have a second router, so that’s another even more devastating single point of failure. But since everything critical is backed up to the NAS and then off-site, it’s an acceptable risk considering the cost to properly remediate it and the unlikelihood of major issues outside of times I’m doing maintenance…
ISP: $75/month for symmetrical 1Gbit fiber and unlimited data. This is the biggest expense. All other options are 1-25 Mbps up with cable or dsl and most are just as expensive.
VPSs: around $40/month, though I’m planning to cut back a bit as I’m moving some stuff local.
2 Domains: < $30/year
The rest is purchased with no future subscription costs. This covers everything except for the security cams that I need to migrate off of corporate services one of these days.
Reverse proxy with fail2ban or crowdsec. It’s possible to set up things like Pangolin which ultimately use a VPN between external and internal access points but not at the client, though it takes more setup if you want to use apps over pangolin instead of just the browser.
I have a lifetime pass from many years ago when it was cheap. So I’m not in a huge rush to convert and want to do it right. But I am on the path to converting. I decided to make a major change to my home server infrastructure and it’s still in an experimental stage. Moving from a really old standalone computer I’ve used for. HTPC purposes over the years, currently dedicated to Plex combined with a few raspberry pi’s of various generations for the little stuff, and a single, good NUC for my router, to adding two additional NUCs and eventually upgrading the Plex computer with a more modern processor and video card for ML stuff for Immich and a few other systems that I plan to start using. I’m not just moving from Plex, but also a lot of Google and Nest products.
My dilemma has been Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes. I was trying to set up Kubernetes in a way that is easily repeatable and self documenting, but ended up with lots of manual steps required to install things and lots of things that I had to write my own helm charts for as well as the scripts to install and set up Kubernetes itself on each of the servers. Lots of custom stuff. Docker Swarm would be way easier, but the issue is I’m worried about Docker getting so proprietary these days and swarm mode getting so little attention, and Podman quadlets aren’t self balancing across multiple small servers like swarm. So that’s why I haven’t switched to Jellyfin yet.
Seems funny that they continue to increase the price as that value sharply declines with the limited life left in it.
I mean at this point in its evolution, what parts does vaultwarden rely on from bitwarden? The clients, but there are alternatives like keyguard for Android devices. What other layers does it rely on, I actually have been trying to figure this out myself.
Glad I started using Vaultwarden a while back. Just need to find better apps for android and Firefox I guess because I’m guessing they’re going to try to break compatibility.
Right, but my point is, most US ISP are shitty and don’t offer IPv6 blocks. If you are in the lucky minority who’s ISP does provide proper support for IPv6, then why bother dealing with IPv4 at all, ignore it. Almost nothing needs it anymore besides the majority of ISPs in the US which all suck.
There are some cases where locally defined addresses (private IPv4 or IPv6 ULAs) and NAT are useful for controlling what people and devices on your LAN can access, but usually not in a residential or home lab situation. So why bother. Either if your ISP offers proper IPv6, just use that, or if they don’t, just use IPv4 and ignore the transitional IPv6 addresses. With both you end up writing every NAT and firewall rule twice, I don’t see the point unless you have an old device that can’t handle IPv6.
As for performance hits, I was referring to the fact that most ISPs dont offer proper blocks of IPv6 and the transitional technologies they do offer like 6rd or 6to4 do have performance hits, sometimes extremely significant ones. So if you implement dual stack and your DNS query returns AAAA record and your systems prefer it, they will always take a hit. This is from lots of experience. I always disable IPv6 because my ISP uses 6rd and it is the only one in the major city I live in that offers >10Mbps upstream, so it’s not feasible to switch. When I was on Comcast and got an IPv6 block, I disabled IPv4. Dual stack would be too much work.
What do you use for repeatable recovery and deployment of systems?
I’ve looked at ArgoCD and FlexCD. ArgoCD was too flaky. When I made changes to helm files it would often fail to deploy them and the UI often wouldn’t really show the detailed errors from things like helm syntax errors, so it was a pain to troubleshoot.
FlexCD was just really a pain to configure in the first-place and I didn’t want to learn kustomize when I already have helm charts.
And neither really supported staged deployments or dealt with dependant services well. So I couldn’t get it to deploy the infrastructure level helm charts like PostgreSQL before deploying the services that depend on it. Technically, with Kubernetes it shouldn’t matter about the order of deployment but in reality when ArgoCD would deploy the other stuff first and wait for it to come up and it never came up because the dependencies weren’t there, it caused it to choke a lot.
Just an example of the issues I’ve had. But I really want an easy way to make lots of small changes to charts and deploy them quickly as well as being able to quickly recover the cluster from backups if something catastrophic happens like a fire without having to manually deploy each chart. Just curious how others handle it or if it’s always manual deployment of charts via CLI only.
But why bother if you get ULAs. It doesn’t enhance anything and adds complexity if you use NAT or other routing as you need to add rules for both IPv4 and IPv6. Most ISPs, in the US anyway, don’t offer true IPv6 only what was supposed to be transitional technology decades ago like 6rd. I hate to say anything good about Comcast, but it’s the single thing I miss from that they actually do. But having such limited upstream speeds on cable just isn’t reasonable for much of anything these days, but definitely not when self-hosting. 1-10Mbps up on Cable or most DSL just doesn’t cut it.
If you’re starting from scratch implementing IPv6 on your LAN might be worthwhile if you dont mind the limitations of or don’t require the transitional technologies on your LAN like NAT64 and the hit to performance from the translations/tunneling when accessing the internet doesn’t bother you (it sure annoyed the hell out of me every time I accessed a website, among other things).
But dual stack, seems like it’s not worthwhile. Just choose one or the other. Few software applications or modern hardware are going to have an issue with IPv6. But if you’re using both ULAs and IPv4 private addresses, it seems like a lot of extra hassle to write duplicate routing rules for everything.
I can’t get IPv6 in any worthwhile form from my ISP. IMHO IPv6 isn’t any more useful than IPv4 if you only have ULA. And NAT is not as well supported since it wasn’t intended to even be really necessary for example. So even if you are starting from scratch or just using it internally, there are some disadvantages to implementing it over just sticking with IPv6. But if your ISP actually provides IPv6 it might be worth it as long as your devices all support it. But otherwise you’re going to need to set up IPv4 in addition, anyway, so you’re just going to create problems for no good reason, IMHO.
I mean, most people dont really understand what a reverse proxy is doing, and with dynamic IP addresses and other complications that residential customers often can’t control, it can be a challenge to configure properly. Not to mention if you want to use Jellyfin on a device that travels between home and outside you need to either modify the domain or IP Address each time you enter or leave the home Otherwise you just end up routimg all the traffic over the internet and back losing the advantage of LAN speeds and sucking down your ISP traffic quotas. Or you need to configure something much more robust like a local DNS server to properly route traffic to the LAN IP address instead of your WAN IP address. That might not be an issue if you’re lucky enough to have an IPv6 block of addresses from your ISP and assign one to your server, but at least in the US most ISPs still use IPv4 with workarounds like 6rd for a single dynamic external IPv6 address with all of the same issues of the dynamic IPv4 addresses. Anyway, for most users hosting a Plex server is simple (unless they have double NAT kinds of issues) compared to setting up everything correctly to TailScale.
Yeah cgnat is such a stupid thing. Why can’t we get IPv6 already and avoid all of the headaches of NAT and dynamic IP addresses and such. None of that stuff should be so complicated in a residential environment.
Plex prices are expensive just to access your own media. Tailscale can do it for free.
Tailscale isn’t exactly free. It requires a lot more knowledge, configuration, maintenance, etc, than Plex alone.
Sure, many self-hosters have the ability to figure it out and the proper networking and/or server hardware to implement it. But many Plex users aren’t really self-hosters in that sense. Hosting a local media server that deals with all of the networking stuff for you is much easier than maintaining a tailscale or similar setup on top of the media server stuff. I mean for me, if I hadn’t gotten a lifetime Plex Pass early on for cheap, I probably would have put more effort into my Jellyfin setup. But Plex mostly just works and I have other bigger priorities. I hate the functionality they’ve removed that makes things more difficult than it should be, or I wouldn’t be switching, but it’s not all that bad. So if I didn’t have the expertise and hardware already, I could see it being worth the money to stick with it.
GPU has longer more specialized processing that is significantly better at doing certain things than a generalized CPU. Things that benefits from tons of parallel threads more than being able to react more quickly to changing conditions will process significantly faster on a GPU than a CPU. Having the ability to add more parallel processing units (I.e. additonal GPUs is a huge advantage in crypto, machine learning analysis, video and 3D polygon rendering, etc. Basically things that have tons of work to get done, and that set of work is unlikely to be affected by the outcome of work running in parallel. A CPU needs ro balance that fact that it wastes a ton of processing if it tries to calculate something that is more dynamic. The content of the pixels in a video, or needing to process the entire set of millions of relationships to reach a conclusion will benefit from the GPU and adding more GPUs in parallel benefits more because most of those workloads will always be extremely large multiples of the number of threads in a single GPU. In a CPU, things like unpredictability of human input or branching logic that has too many possible branches to just calculate them all in the hopes that one of those branches might be the one that actually gets used, so the threads calculate much smaller units and adding more CPU cores/threads then has greatly decreasing return on investment because either you have to wait for something to actually happen or you haven’t calculate all the most probable outcome and waste a ton of work. The shorter threads mean less efficient at complex calculation, but getting results that some other process is waiting in faster.
Anyway, there’s a reason we still have GPUs and dont just keep increasing CPU cores instead.
Ok, so short, wide bus from CPU to memory? Makes sense. I didn’t really mean the CPU so much as the main board is very laptop like. Very little expansion capabilities other than external connectors like audio, Ethernet, etc., but no ability to add functional or incremental upgrades like a GPU or an additional stick of memory respectively.
So just glancing at the site, are these basically laptop CPU and RAM parts just packaged in a desktop form-factor case and that’s why they’re soldered? Seems like they also don’t have much expansion capability much like a laptop such as only having a single PCI-E x4 slot with a proprietary connection interface, so I couldn’t later add a graphics card for example. Unless, I’m just missing something, and if so please let me know.
Either way thanks for letting me know about the option.
I use Signal because it’s the best balance of privacy and security vs. convenience and reliability I have found. Not self-hosted, but I’ve yet to find a self hosted alternative that is as reliable, especially since I don’t want to set up distributed servers, and it’s one of those things that “just needs to work” or people will abandon it quickly.
And the older people I’ve convinced to use it, like my mom, have had very little trouble adopting it. It helped that RCS messaging is so unreliable on my phone since Google or my carrier keep seeming to break it (likely became I use GrapheneOS), and also for those with iPhones it is way more compatible with itself vs Apple and Google refusing to implement RCS in a way that all features work between them, like message reactions. Without RCS, my mom couldn’t send me decent quality pictures of my niece all the time, and I couldn’t send nice pictures of my outfits to the girl I’m dating, LOL.