When you upgrade your desktop PC, plan for it to be the home server after that.

I got a rackmount case to transplant my old desktop montherboard into every 5 years. I also got a 4-port NIC so it can also be a router. My server is a 4th gen Core i5 and it’s still plenty of power for a home server.

If you’re a laptop guy, I’m not sure what you’d do. Maybe ask friends for their old desktops. The Win10 discontinuation next month would be a great opportunity to snap up some business PCs destined for landfill.

For Home Assistant, I think you either need Docker or a dedicated box. I kinda hate how there isn’t a .deb package for it like literally every other service on my server.

I did this a few months back.

Some things aren’t as great, but you get full control and your server idles way better on JellyFin.

Well, that would be putting on a mask.

The educational route I took was Hurricane Electric’s free IPv6 online course. It taught me a bunch of networking principles. When you finish the course (and get “sage” status), you get free lifetime DNS access. This includes dynamic DNS that automatically updates when your IP address changes.

Because of this, I can self-host on a basic residential plan without paying for any additional services.

If your reverse proxy only acknowledges jellyfin exists if the hostname is correct, you won’t get discovered by an IP scanner.

Mine’s on jellyfin.[domain].com and you get a completely different page if you hit it by IP address.

If it does get found, there’s also a fail2ban to rate-limit someone brute-forcing a login.

I’ve always exposed my home IP to the internet. Haven’t had an issue in the last 15 years. I’m running about 10 public-facing services including NTP and SMTP.

Every single thing anyone says or does is in self-interest.

Like, I have almost never witnessed anything contrary to it.

Done! I’ve been selfhosting for over 20 years now.

I have a job, and the office is 35km away. I get a locker in my office.

I have two backup drives, and every month or so, I will rotate them by taking one into the office and bringing the other home. I do this immediately after running a backup.

The drives are LUKS encrypted btrfs. Btrfs allows snapshots and compression. LUKS enables me to securely password protect the drive. My backup job is just a btrfs snapshot followed by an rsync command.

I don’t trust cloud backups. There was an event at work where Google Cloud accidentally deleted an entire company just as I was about to start a project there.

I love when they talk about vibrational frequencies of crystals. I tell them about the power of quartz and its vibrations and frequencies. How I always wear a piece on my wrist. How it vibrates at 32768Hz, and is accurate to within a few seconds per month.

Almost all of selfhosting is editing config files, setting permissions and starting/stopping services.

Setting it up so you can administer a server by desktop is probably as hard as learning how to edit config files from a terminal. Maybe harder.

Ray tracing at 24fps is not a big ask for a modern gaming PC.

I’ve got 3 subnets on an L2 switch. You will have clashes over DHCP if you have both broadcasting on the same L2 switch without VLANs.

My guest wifi is on a vlan, but the switch is L2 and it’s fine. The router has separate physical ports for each subnet. The “guest” subnet is only accessible over Wifi, and the access points are configured so that the guest VLAN is mapped to a separate SSID.

My third subnet has no VLAN. It’s IPv6-only and all devices have a static IP address. It’s only used for security cameras. I did this so they don’t transmit on the same physical cables as my primary subnet. It is otherwise insecure, as I can join the subnet by simply assigning myself a static address in the same range.

Note: There is a bug in Windows where it will join an IPv6 subnet on a different VLAN. I had to tweak my DHCPv6 / radvd so that Windows would ignore it. Yes, Windows is this dumb.

If I’m in a toxic mood, I go to reddit.

I think the August 2001 backup is a good restore point.

It’s a photo of a guy who shot a CEO and a text that basically says “there’s more”.

While I agree with the message, it’s still a call to voilence.

It feels like I spend 15 hours waking up.

OMG Hypnotoad HTPC is so much better! Why didn’t I thnnk of that?

Server (big iron): Bender

Desktop (main character): Fry

Laptop (for accounting): Hermes

Netbook (small and dumb): Nibbler

Phone (held to my head): BrainSlug

HTPC (one big viewport): Leela

That’s basically it. My Ubuntu server is a router, NAS, plex server, public statum-1 NTP server, wordpress server, nextcloud server, security camera NVR, SMTP/IMAP mail server, CUPS print server, tor relay, and probably a few other things I forgot about.

You can do a lot with a single CPU from 2015.

I don’t have hostapd on it anymore. I now have dedicated APs on OpenWRT. The main problem with using a WNIC for an AP is that they don’t typically have a very strong broadcast output. I had to add an amplifier, and even then it wasn’t great.

I’ve done this before on Ubuntu. You can install nftables for routing, then install hostapd for a wifi AP.