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Cake day: Jun 09, 2024

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I’ve never liked web UIs that have that level of permissions to screw around with the OS it’s hosted on.

Maybe that’s just some grumpy greybeard thing, but I’d really rather not have a single management plane that has full access to EVERYTHING, since that just feels like you’re one configuration oopsie away from some guy in Albania (<3 you, Albania) uploading all his hentai to your server and then trying to hack the FBI or some shit. (Or, you know, the much more boring oops-i’m-a-zombie-now outcome.)


Speed running Wii Sports?

Huh.

(I have probably 50 copies because I kept ending up with more and more due to buying game lots at estate sales and garage sales and such.)


Wii games worth something?

Maybe I’ll be able to retire on my collection of Wii Sports disks.


Yeah I ran ethernet everywhere when I bought my house and it’s fantastic. Multi-gig everywhere!

I’m also never fucking doing that again because the builder of my house must have gotten a fantastic fucking deal 120 years ago on 2x4s, because they decided to do a narrow cross-bracing between studs on every damn wall, so I had fucking rock-hard old growth 2x4s to drill through every 14 inches or so in every damn wall I was running cables on.

Killed several hundred dollars in drill bits and other tools (broke a few fish tapes!) getting this shit done, AND it took like a month to get finished and then the walls patched where I had to cut into it to see what in the fuck the drill was hitting.

But yeah, ethernet everywhere is great!



Yeah, I’ve never seen a multi-bay enclosure that doesn’t just randomly decide it’s done with this bullshit and have random dropouts or just plain fucking off entirely.

I don’t know WHY they’re so bad, but they are :/

I just converted part of a closet to a network closet and added some shelves and stuffed everything in there, though I know that’s not an option everyone has.


Should ask what platform here, IMO: virt-manager is Linux-only. (Or, I suppose, doing remote X stuff to run it elsewhere but that’s probably not what OP is after.)

There’s some command line stuff you can run on Windows, but then at that point, you can just use virsh on the host itself.

I’m of the opinion that virsh to manage and then a spice or vnc client to access the VMs is the “best” way to go so you’re not tied down to having to have a specific OS running a specific tool in order to do any admin stuff, since I mean, after you deploy how often are you screwing with the VM settings?


IME, they’re all the same chipset/set of chipsets and are all pretty awful.

That said, the most reliable ones I’ve found actually come from drives that have been shucked. Western Digital or whomever aren’t going to do the absolute lowest price piece of shit enclosure for something they’re going to warranty for 3 or 5 years, so those have been what I try to find and have had reasonable luck with them in terms of reliability and not-catching-shit-on-fire.

Usually cheap as shit on eBay or whatever, since they’re basically the packaging trash around something that was purchased for the gooey insides.


Have you been to a theater recently? You only wish it was silent.

Idk when it started but its fine to talk through the whole movie or fuck with your phone volume turned on now.


Politely, but no.

It’s a compression tool that is also used to mask malware, and you’re proposing to expand it’s use in a use case that’s ALREADY coated in enough malware to give you herpes just by walking past your average tracker.

It’s a bad idea from a security perspective, and it’s not going to outperform a LZMA-based compression tool using a large dictionary (7zip, etc.) which also isn’t fucking with binaries in a way that makes detecting and preventing malicious software more complicated for the average user, who typically knows absolutely zero about what’s going on.



Pack what executables exactly?

Like take a copy of Nodobe Notoshop and repack it?

If that’s what you mean, uh, politely, but fuck no. Malware is enough of a problem that there’s no way I’d want to start downloading crap that’s been UPXed since that’s going to make it impossible to determine if it’s legitimate or not by (most) endpoint tools, or they’ll just see UPX and go ‘bad shit!’ on everything.


Either is fine: the question is what happens when something breaks and if you care about issues and such.

If your docker host depends on the pihole it’s running, there can be some weirditry if it’s not available during boot and whatnot (or if it crashes, etc.).

…I ended up with a docker container of pihole and an actual pi as the secondary so that it’s nice and redundant.


off-brand Super Soakers until they get frustrated

I’m now imagining the leaders of the Andromeda Initiative shopping for guns at the Citadel branch of Temu, which is Commander Shepherd’s least favorite store.


Yeah, I tried to use music and audiobooks in Jellyfin and even with apps focused on that it was just… rough.

Pity, since I’d love to have been able to scope down how much shit I’m running, but alas, that’s not going to be the way to do it.


Wait you’re saying 30 year old drives are all dying or dead?

I, for one, am COMPLETELY shocked at this totally unexpected and impossible to plan for eventuality.

Who could possibly have known that hard drives might fail after decades?


It looks like it supports the getSimilarSongs API endpoint, which means if your client has support then navidrome can kinda do it.

As to what clients support that, uh, no freaking idea lol, but probably googleable from that point.

(I’m a grumpy old boomer and listen to whole albums or curated playlists, so never really looked into if you could do that or not.)


I know you’ve mentioned it, but Navidrome is probably the best choice, but it won’t be exactly what you want since you need to interact with a proprietary service.

But, that said, I’ve gone through basically every single music server I’ve found and ended up landing on none of them.

They’re all broken or missing features that another one has, and there’s no One True Music Streaming Server, just a bunch of mostly-kinda-sorta-almosts.

At this point, I just use a network mapped directory and/or a synced copy on the sd card of my phone and local players and don’t bother with anything more complex anymore.

The local players that can play media seem to have a much better, richer feature set than ANY streaming one does.


That’s also an option, yeah.

And, if you have the disk space, not an unreasonable one, but for me? DVD quality is pretty bad compared to anything newer and I’ve never noticed any real degredation transcoding a mpeg-2 stream to x265 which is like 25% the filesize, but that’s very ymmv.


Yeah. You can’t offer a half-secure and half-private platform and expect your average person to be able to figure out which half is which, which leads to crazy misconceptions, misunderstandings, and ultimately just a bunch of wrong and misleading information being passed around.

I’d argue, though, that Telegram probably did this on purpose, and profited GREATLY from being obtuse and misleading.


At the moment, essentially.

The way Google got carrier buy-in for yet another messaging platform was to basically run it for them at no charge.

The carriers COULD run their own RCS infra, but if you’re getting the milk for free, why buy the cow?


It’s still a quality-at-a-given-bitrate deficient.

If you’re doing temporary encoding for like, streaming, or something where real-time encoding performance matters it’s still probably the way to go, but if you’re wanting to create high-quality archival stuff it’s still not quite as good as your other options.

Granted, x265 on the cpu is probably still the way to go (excepting maybe if you’re doing AV1 on an ARC gpu), but nvenc and qsv still outclass AMF.

Wish AMD would get a little more serious and bring that up to par, but they seem to be waffling on what they even want to do for consumer gpus so I’m not really holding my breath here.


Assuming you mean commercial DVDs, handbrake+libdvdcss.

It’s pretty much ‘insert disk, hit button, wait some amount of time, video file!’

Would recommend, however, that you do not use AMF (AMD) for encoding, and just stick to QSV/NVENC/x264/x256 because AMD’s quality is uh, less than stellar and you probably want the best possible quality for archiving your DVDs.


Don’t do that, please: there’s less than no reason to make your entire password vault accessible on the public internet.

Vaultwarden is probably secure, and the vault data is probably encrypted in a way that’s not vulnerable, but I mean, why add the attack surface?

Yeah yeah, exceptions, but if you legitimately have an exception you already know it and I’d bet that the vast majority of people don’t, or would be much better served by a VPN tunnel than just rawdogging an argo tunnel.


Meh, you never could trust them.

Group chats were NEVER encrypted, so I’m surprised that people are just now figuring out that if it’s not encrypted = people can read it.

If it wasn’t a 1:1 “secret chat” encrypted message, then congrats, you weren’t as opsec-y as you thought you were.


The discussion around special offers and pricing are actually why I don’t subscribe to a lot of things.

It always feels like there’s likely going to be a better deal if I just go away and wait and don’t bother right now, which typically means I forget I was even interested.

I’d rather places be honest with pricing than play those variable price games because it always feels like I’m going to get scammed if I don’t just do nothing and see if the price gets better.


Amused that the ‘This is private! You no hack!’ banner nonsense isn’t a dead thing yet.

Life protip: the bots scanning your shit will absolutely not care, and shockingly, criminals will also absolutely not care.


Well, a fault isn’t just an outage.

You said the other person involved isn’t technical: what if say, a database corrupts itself and you’re on vacation for a week.

Is the expectation that you’ll always be available all the time to fix technical problems?

And, as a failure state: what happens if you simply cannot be reached for that week no matter what. What’s the failover plan for the rest of the people involved in the business?


I’m going to being contrarian, as is my bit.

I self-host everything and fully believe everyone else should too.

HOWEVER, if your self hosted shit breaks for say, 3 days, how much money is this going to cost you?

For business stuff you really really should determine what your backup plan for ‘Oops shit’s dead’ is well before shit’s dead, and honestly, in some cases, maybe it makes more sense not to host everything and have a couple of things that would wreck your business provided by a SaaS company that has a SLA, and on-call engineers, and all that good shit.

Just a thought to keep in mind, I suppose.


I get it as a means to generate revenue, but I wouldn’t ever want to be responsible for mail deliverability if I’m getting paid for the email.

I’d just outsource that shit to SES, or mailgun, or mailchimp, or brevo, or whoeverthefuck and not worry about it.

The host it yourself thing just struck me as a weird thing that suddenly was EVERYWHERE I was looking and I couldn’t figure out what in the world the use case was.


So basically an RSS feed for people who don’t understand RSS feeds.


So I’m curious: why does everyone suddenly have newsletters?

There’s not a single selfhosted forum/subreddit/community/magazine/whatever that’s NOT full of lots and lots and lots of people who suddenly have the need for a newsletter.

Like who is subscribing, and to what, and like… why?


I wonder if some of these long dev cycle flops that have happened are because they’re long development cycles.

Like, this game may or may not be any good at all, but I would assume the logic was reasonable when they started work on it 8+ years ago.

I wonder if the push for everything having to be RTX-enabled AAAA live service games is kneecapping them, simply because it takes far far too long to make and bring to market.

Or it was just a flaming pile of junk, but I kinda think there’s maybe more going on than just that with some of these releases.


Comedy NNTP option here.

It’s an established, stable, understood and very very thoroughly debugged and tested protocol/server solution that’ll run on a potato and has clients for every OS you’ve ever heard of, and a bunch you haven’t.

Setting up your own little mini-network and sharing groups is fairly trivial and it’ll happily shove copies of everyone’s data to every server that’s on the feed.

Just encrypt your shit, post it, and let the software do the rest.

(I mean, if it’s good enough to move 200TB of perfectly legitimate Linux ISOs a day, it’ll handle however much data you could possibly be backing up.)

Disclaimer: it’s not quite that simple, but I mean, it’s pretty close to. Also I’m very much a UNIX boomer and am a big fan of the simplest solution that’s got the longest tested history over shiny new shit, so just making that bias clear.


Little bit of A, little bit of B.

I probably go through at least one full discharge cycle a month, if not more because the power around here suuucks. (The NAS goes down, but I leave the network gear up until the UPS dies, because fuck it, why not.)

It’s also a ~10 year old UPS that likes to eat a $25 battery every 18 or so months so I just haven’t really had any justification to replace the whole thing yet since there’s an awful lot of $25 batteries in a new UPS.


I replace the batteries in my UPS every 18 months, and don’t try to outlast power outages.

I have everything configured to shut down if the power goes down and stays down more than 5 minutes, which is ~20% of the maximum rated runtime. (I’m using repurposed desktop hardware that loves it’s watts as a home server.)

I picked the low number for the reasons you’ve outlined: even if the battery is severely degraded, it’s probably not THAT severely degraded and it’s a safe time span to ride out short hiccups, but still well under the runtime limits so that a safe shutdown can happen.

That and I’ve noticed that, typically, if the power is down for 5 minutes it’s going to be down for way longer than 5 minutes, so it doesn’t matter and I’m not going to have enough batteries to outlast the outage.


Good luck, I guess?

Seems like it’s not worth the tens or hundreds of thousands you’re going to spend fighting in US Federal court over the next 5 years, but also not my money.


I just went with a plain boring Ubuntu box, because all the “purpose built” options come with compromises.

Granted, this is about as hard-mode as this can get, but on the other hand I have 100% perfect support for any damn thing I feel like using, regardless of the state of support of whatever more specialized OS is for aforementioned thing.

I probably wouldn’t recommend this if you’re NOT very well versed in Linux sysadmin stuff, and probably wouldn’t recommended it to anyone who doesn’t have any interest in sometimes having to fix a broken thing, but I’m 3 LTS upgrades, two hardware swaps, and a full drive replacement, and most of a decade into this build and it does exactly what I want, 95% of the time.

I would say, though, that containerizing EVERYTHING is the way to go. Worst case, you blow up a single service and the other dozen (or two, or three…) keep right on running like you did absolutely nothing. I can’t imagine maintaining the 70ish containers I’m running without them actually being containers and/or without me being a complete nutcase that runs around the house half naked muttering about the horrors of updates.

I’m not anti-Cloudflare, so I use a mix of tunnels, their normal proxy, as well as some rawdogging of services with direct port forwards/a local nginx reverse proxy.

Different services, different needs, different access methods.


NFSv4

I’m an idiot. I do have NFS setup on the NAS (I mean, because why not?) but I always forget it’s there, since one client OS (Mac OS) doesn’t support it basically at all, and the other (Windows) does, but it’s not really integrated into the GUI at all, and I’m lazy. I should see what the performance looks like between Windows SMB and NFS implementations are.

As for your key storage, I bloody love my (pair of) Yubikey 5s. I’ve stuffed a giant pile of keys and certs in there and basically don’t think about managing them anymore because, well, it’s just there and just works*.

*Okay the setup was a fuck and a half, but I mean, that does technically qualify as works.


Good post; kinda surprised sshfs is outperforming cifs and makes me need to take a second look at that because, boy, do I ever not like how samba performs, though I’m willing to chalk some of that up to configuration weirdness on my end since I have samba configured to allow any version of Windows that could ever connect to smb/cifs shares to be able to. (Retro computing yay.)

Also, I’d also like to toss in iDrive e2 as a cheap S3 blob storage provider.

I’m paying ~$30 a year for 1tb, with “free” egress. (They operate on the IT’S ON SALE! pricing nonsense so your price will certainly vary because well, it’s always on sale, but always different amounts but $30 is the usualish price.)

You get zero useful support, less than the best performance I’ve ever seen, but it’s shockingly cheap and in the last ~2 years (out of the VA datacenter) I’ve had exactly ONE downtime where it wasn’t working, for about three hours.

Good enough to stuff server backups and object storage for a couple of websites.

Oh, and “free” egress means up to 3x the amount you have stored, so it’s probably bad if your majority use is going to be public downloads, but if it’s not, it’ll probably never be an issue; I have like 600gb of backups sitting there so lots of buffer.


Anyone else get an email from Portainer?
Just got an email thanking me for being a 5-node/free user, but Portainer isn't free and I need to stop being a cheap-ass and pay them because blah blah economic times enshittification blah blah blah. I've moved off them a while ago, but figured I'd see if they emailed EVERYONE about this? A good time to ditch them if you haven't, I suppose.
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