Plus, ZFS supports native encryption!

Hmm, I think that was the one I was wondering about. I use Gentoo, and when I was initially setting everything up on my machine, I saw there were a lot of caveats for using ZFS on linux from the Gentoo wiki entry on it. Maybe that’s changed or those issues are no longer related to native encryption specifically.

Is ZFS on Linux getting better? I’ve heard mixed things. I use BTRFS on my daily driver, and I really like (ab)using the file compression with zstd.

If you are not too stuck on bsd

Not really. It’s more out of the curious of how DragonflyBSDs HAMMER2 filesystem works. I’ve good things about it and ZFS on FreeBSD. ZFS on Linux I’ve heard is still getting up to where it is on FreeBSD.

It’s the interest in how well the HAMMER2 filesystem works for everyday storage, as well as how swapcache performs. Not much besides that, plus I’ve generally decent experiences with Net and OpenBSD.

https://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/

If you’re gonna spend that level of money, you may as well go for an M1 Mac Mini.

I was joking. I don’t feel like shelling out $600 for a starting media server.

If you really want Intel, just get an N100 or N300. Low power, Intel HW transcoding on iGPU on Linux kernels 6.3+, and can handle Jellyfin no problem.

Didn’t think about that either. I’m finding I didn’t give this as much thought as I should’ve.

You can get a minipc with everything you for $175 for a no name brand, or maybe $250 for a more well-known brand.

But why do that when I could spend +$600? 😜

Good point. So what we’re really talking about then is

• something like a raspberry pi
• 1 or 2 hard drives for base storage
• 1 external hard drive as a backup

I don’t think anyone here would recommend BSD

I’m guessing this is due to issues of support, compared to Linux?

I mean, right now, that’s definitely not on the table.

4K would be nice, obiviously, but I don’t think I myself am to act nor do I want to act as the alternative to Plex for a bunch of family and friends. 😆

I’m beginning to realize I haven’t looked into this as much as I should’ve. 😅 So for most people, with what @AtariDump@lemmy.world has mentioned, a raspberry pi with 1 or multiple hard drives (if you really want) is a good start.

As the project mentions:

Even though there are builds available online for these platforms, they are unofficial and from a separate project. If you do encounter issues on these platforms, please ask for support in their respective support channels first.

This that project:

https://github.com/Thefrank/jellyfin-server-freebsd

Ah, okay. So, if I understand correctly, unless I’m trying to have Jellyfin do what YouTube does with offering multiple resolutions and bitrates for video, I don’t need to bother with looking for a GPU that’s good at video transcoding?

Great point. I don’t know why I didn’t think about that.

Currently, and I could be wrong, the alternative to a Pi 4 from Pine64 now would be a Pine64’s Quartz64 Model B. A Star64 might be interesting, but that’s RISC-V so who knows what OS you could boot on it currently and if it would even be stable.

Plus with the Quartz64 Model B, who knows if you’ll able to get a good case for it. There’s the $28 “Model B” ALUMINUM WATERPROOF ENCLOSURE, but, eh, no thanks. There’s the open enclosure, but that’s also a no for me. I want a case I can hide the device itself, the cables, put a heatsink and fan on, be able to use an SSD with USB connect and connect a power supply all stuffed in a case. Which you can find plenty of for Raspberry Pi’s.

Not to mention the Pi 5 isn’t even out yet, and it’s entirely possible it’ll be better than the Quartz64 Model B, on top of having a ton of accessories. Plus, I can Pi up practically any Pi at the Microcenter or similar store near me as opposed to having to pay for good shipping.

I’m totally for having alternatives to the Pi, heck I might pick up a Quartz64 Model B if I can find a case, but a lot of alternatives don’t have the same support and accessories the Pis do.

I got a RPi 3B as my Pi-Hole that I’ll eventually use as my Wireguard VPN, too. Hoping to get another Pi device for hosting Jellyfin on.

Outside of the (theoretical) technical specs of the OPi5 being better, I’ve heard/read mixed things about OPis. Some say they’re a good alternative, some say they’re cheap Chinese-made crap. I’ve had no experience myself, so take it with a grain of salt.

I’m interested to see more data on the RPi5 when it’s out, as to figure out if it’s worth getting over trying an OPi5 for a home media system with Jellyfin.

your traffic is not routed through the Headscale server

Damn, well is there a means of using both Headscale and routing your traffic somewhere else?

My big reason for looking into Tailscale/Headscale is the ability to connect to my devices at home, at the office or a VPS that’s in a different state/province and having the ability to use my PiHole as my DNS, but I would still like my network traffic to be (mostly, as an VPN doesn’t save you from other tracking methods) protected.

To a first approximation, Tailscale/Headscale don’t route and traffic.

Ah, well damn. Is there a way to achieve this while using Tailscale as well, or is that even recommended?

Are younreally expecting 10gb/s speeds over your encrypted links?

Eh, no. You have a good point there. I mean in a more perfect world that would be wonderful, but that’s not the case.

but your traffic is not routed through their servers,

Hmm so correct me if I’m wrong (I probably am), but with a basic Wireguard setup you’d have one device act as the server and other devices that connect to it are the clients. But can’t you have 2 devices that act as servers/clients to each other, and then have other devices connect to them and the connect with bounce between those two devices?

I’m assuming that if this is even achievable, it’s not something Tailscale or Headscale will let you do.

are you the only user or is this for some family members also?

Probably just me and my fiance at the moment.

you can 9/10 just get a basic 5$ or less gigabit VPS.

Sweet, good to know!

$20 per month for 400mb of email + a VPN was an acceptable cost maybe in 1998, now it’s insanely expensive

Yea I have a business plan with Proton. No idea why I upgraded but I remember doing it.

And then you need to tell us why you’re using the VPN. Just privacy when using unsecured wifi? Or ISP tracking paranoia? Or torrenting?

Yes, yes and yes lol. Also I would like to connect to devices privacy and see if I can make use of my PiHole when I’m not on my home network where the PiHole is located.

I have a business account with them. I don’t really remember why I upgraded to a business plan. Might downgrade it to save a few bucks for now.

If you are not trusting Proton, you should not trust Tailscale as well, in my opinion.

True, although I don’t know if I say I don’t trust them. It’s more of a sense of skepticism that’s always in the back of my mind when it comes to any service.

Another question is that why are you paying $19 for that? They have $10-12 plans that come with 500 GB storage, emails with 3 custom domains and high-speed VPN.

I have a business account with them. I’m trying to remember why I upgraded…

Another question that pops in my mind is, why do you need a VPN? Do you need to connect to your services privately, or do you just need to change your IP for (relatively) better privacy?

At this point, if I’m going to do be doing more self-hosting I’d want the ability to connect to services privately. The other thing is that with Tailscale I can set my PiHole as my DNS server. That way any device on the tailnet gets the ad blocking as well. Plus, if I can get unbound with DNS-over-HTTPS (via stubby) setup on it then I have a pretty secure and fairly private setup. That’s kind of what’s got me thinking about moving to Tailscale.

Interesting, thank you for your response!

I don’t know why I didn’t think about the fact of having network specific ACLs is probably something we’ve developed since the dawn of the internet.

Also it makes sense that the configurations would be hosted in one place, and I see what Headscale is for now.

Maybe I’ll dump my VPN provider for Tailscale or setup a Headscale instance on a VPS some day. I also saw Netbird, which their $8/month plan gives unlimited users. Seems slightly similar to Tailscale.

Hmm, I guess my question would be how does this all work? I mean, is it not possible to configure STUN/DERP services yourself? Or add control lists yourself?

I’m curious as to how all of this is done, not just to see if it’s possible (even if it’d be a headache) but for confirmation. Granted, networking is my worse subject when it comes to any related to computers. For ACLs, I guess Apparmor and/or SELinux profiles would be configured? The removing a key I can understand why it’s be a nightmare yourself, but how does Tailscale do it where it’s just so simple?

EDIT: Another question I have is how does Tailscale work when I have a VPN for securing network traffic when browsing the internet etc.? Or is that just seamless?

I’m curious, what’s the benefit of using Tailscale over setting up Wireguard yourself? Is it just not having to do all of the setup? Or do I misunderstand what the main use of Tailscale is?

Find a static site generator you can tolerate and style things the way you want, have the static files be generated, pick your favorite way to host and server up those static files.

It’s not self hosted, but you might like 750words as well.

Seems like I could potentially get around my issue by taking the device out of this “router mode” setting I found and connecting my Pi to it via Ethernet cable and have the Pi be the router for my network.

EDIT: Actually, scratch that. I don’t think a Pi would be powerful enough to act as a router. Well, off to by a modem (not a combo) it is!

So something like this?

I don’t think there’s anything in the Pi-Hole VPN setup with Wireguard that says you need to open up port 53. In fact, in the Pi-Hole userspace you see so many people specifically saying to not open up port 53.

You’ve supplied the actual network address of your pihole machine and not the 192.168.1.250 address shown, right?

I could’ve sworn I did that but I’ll try again.

EDIT: Okay, I found the specific IP addresses for the Pi-Hole’s DNS servers. I tried putting the 2 IPv4 ones, clicked the applied button and got “Invalid IPs.” But what’s stupid is that I can ping those IPs. There’s something else going on here.

And you’ve set your pihole server up to have a static ip address as well, correct?

Yes I’m pretty sure it’s set to have a static IP address. I’m pretty sure it’s something you have to do when setting up the Pi-Hole.

the spectrum supplied router

Oh I should’ve clarified: this is one I bought myself, not one from Spectrum.___

I know there’s a way to do a recursive DNS with DNS-over-HTTPS. I believe there’s a guide out there on how to do this with unbound and stubby on OpenBSD.

I tried to set the Pi-Hole as the DNS via the instructions here, and the exact settings for the Netgear router is under Advanced -> Setup -> Internet Setup. Everytime I’ve set this, no hostnames can be resolved. I followed the Pi-Hole instructions to a tee, so I don’t know if I’d be missing something. Currently, the Pi-Hole acts as the DHCP server.

Have you made sure you’re on the latest firmware?

I don’t even know how I would do this on this Netgear router. I see nothing in the settings to check for firmware updates, and I don’t recall seeing anything in the manual. I guess I’d have to call their tech support.

It’s a combo. Most are these days, I believe, but I know Spectrum is weird and will give you a router AND modem if you just buy it through them. What device would you recommend? I don’t want to buy one just to find out I can’t set the Pi-Hole as the DNS server on a new one.

Here’s what the Pi-Hole installation says to do in the case of not being able to have your Pi-Hole be the DNS server for your router:

If your router does not support setting the DNS server, you can use Pi-hole’s built-in DHCP server; just be sure to disable DHCP on your router first (if it has that feature available).

So can I or can I not use unbound for a recursive DNS (I known you can do DNS-over-HTTPS with unbound and stubby)? Or am I misunderstanding the steps to eventually use my Pi-Hole as a VPN?

This is what Pi-Hole tells you to do, maybe I’m misunderstanding something: https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/how-do-i-configure-my-devices-to-use-pi-hole-as-their-dns-server/245

EDIT: I’m specifying this because I cannot do what’s instructed in that link, and can only have the Pi-Hole be my networks DHCP server. As the post-install instructions say:

If your router does not support setting the DNS server, you can use Pi-hole’s built-in DHCP server; just be sure to disable DHCP on your router first (if it has that feature available).

As I said to someone else, it must be the Netgear modem. If I go to Advanced -> Setup -> Internet Setup and click Use These DNS Servers and put in the address for the Pi-Hole, it prevents me from doing so. Or, rather, I can set the addresses, but then I have no internet access. Hostnames don’t get resolved, so I’m wondering if I’m missing something?

Hmmm then it’s something with the modem I have then. I can’t set the DNS address. It’s some cheap Netgear modem. If I go to Advanced -> Setup -> Internet Setup and click Use These DNS Servers and put in the address for the Pi-Hole, it prevents me from doing so.