I’m not sure anyone shares the same glee I feel when I view all the blocked IPs scrolling by in my pFsense firewall. Suricata does a lot of heavy lifting for sure.
What’s your selfhosting guilty pleasure or pleasures?
I get a good deal of satisfaction seeing my aliases of blocked connections.
Not really a guilty pleasure though.
Do you feel guilty if I’d asked you about that?Do you feel guilty if I’d asked you about that?
Yeah I probably would because I spend a lot of time watching it, blocking new threats and unwanted guests. My goal is to achieve the cleanest stream possible.
watching all the ads and tracking domains get blocked is not guilty at all for me. i could do it all day.
lol
- Seeing the rising request count as ai bots circle around in iocaine
- Knowing where my photos and files are
- Having useful services that don’t require a subscription to random company
- Learning and experimenting with things
Seriously, of there is a guide for how a newbie can set this up, please let me know. My little website is being bashed everyday.
Learning and experimenting with things
This is the part I really love.
Pushing my commits that trigger my own gitlab runners that build my c++ application across 32 cores/threads homelab server.
A second guilty pleasure would be looking at my grafana dashboards.
My proxmox dashboards make me feel tingly in my no no parts
Third guilty pleasure is 10gbit/s fiber network at home.
Well, would you look at Mr Moneybags over here. LOL I wish tho. I just have a 1gbit connection.
I bought the server hardware 3 years ago, so when the prices of ram were also fine. Today it’s not fun anymore… I really hope those ram and nvne prices go down again! I can’t upgrade anything now.
It’s a trade off. Buy older equipment and DDR3 is cheap. I dropped 40 more gb on the server for about $45 USD. The downside is that older equipment is not as energy efficient and as fast as newer equipment.
Crying in 70Mbps copper… 15 upload.
10gbit fiber locally doesn’t mean I have this speed to the internet (I’m not).
Realistically, 1gbit connection is good for uploading and downloading huge architectural plans, but other than that, I rarely use anything close to it’s max capacity. It’s like having a killer sports car that will go 0 to 60 in a few seconds, but you rarely have the need to do that.
Fact. I only use more then 1gbit/s for file transfers internally between computers or between the server and a computer.
Ahhhh I do like my grafana dashboards.
Waaay out of my field of moderate expertise. Rock it tho!
Gaming with friends and family over Tailscale on my servers; it just works
We used to need tools like Hamachi back in the days. And it was awful, didn’t work and caused me way too much headache
Do you get a lot of latency with Tailscale?
Why would they? It is peer to peer
Nope! We use it for Jellyfin too which also works great 😸
Cool. I just figured traversing a Tailscale VPN would be yet another ‘thing’ between you and your gaming partners.
Tailscale runs on Wiregaurd which is ridiculously fast. Also helps we’re located physically near each other on fiber from the same company so less network hops.
I’m no stranger to Tailscale, I just thought it would have been a bit slow for gaming.
Either way you’re just going over the internet. There will be overhead, but not enough to be that big a deal.
Watching the bots eat my iocaine poison. Its most of my traffic.
Muuhahahaha!
Tweaking my various Nix configs feels good and satisfying.
… When it works, that is.
I love to fiddle to see if I can improve on some app, service, or configuration of my server just to see if I improve performance, etc. Example: pFsense…great googlymoogly at the options. I kept trying this or that tut, no joy. So I sat down with the manual, and just did what I knew, Then did a lot of reading, and I did find one or two tuts that actually were, I guess you’d say, ‘at my level’. Then I fiddle to see if I can get better performance or to see what one of the thousands of options does. I have leaned heavily on backups from time to time.
Mine is using a network share to transfer files faster than any USB device we have at home.
…and how do you manage those speeds?
Three important factors:
- Gigabit ethernet
- SATA-attached storage
- My family not knowing what the fuck USB 3.0 is, and why blue USB is better than black USB.
Mine is seeing the “removed” and “started” when I update all my dockers
Can relate.
Use Watchtower. You’ll miss out on this pleasure though.
Not maintained anymore.
Please look for replacements and stop recommending it.I like manual updates, keeps me in the loop
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
[Thread #150 for this comm, first seen 9th Mar 2026, 10:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Sure, but why? If you’ve a simple router running OpenWrt or something with all WAN ports closed you basically have the same thing.
Maybe it’s a pretty graph/reports thing? I enjoy looking at the pihole dashboard and reviewing top blocked domains. I even look at the top allowed domains and add some to the blacklist.
I too use my PiHole for this pleasurable activity
Look at all the bots and trolls that slammed against my Skynet OpenWRT module… and died.
It really is satisfying. I can’t explain it fully, but there is a sense of satisfaction.
It reminds us we are on the side of The Good.
It is also wonderful schadenfreude to see scammers frustrated.
Why do I like to watch them? Can’t explain that fully, but I also find watching the flows in ntopng to be fascinating. Maybe I’m just easily entertained. As far as why I would run pfsense over OpenWrt or similar, it’s mainly what I know and I can drive the pfsense bus well enough. Back in the day I experimented around with OpenWrt, and it may have improved over the years, but I found it kludgy.
ETA: Also to do IDS/IPS you’ll have to install Suricata, Snort or SoftEther anyways so…
Do check OpenWRT again. These days even a network-ignorant person like myself can point and click to set up guest networks, configure individual devices’ access, adblock, crazy good firewalls, …
Very slick & professional
