big fan of mini PC’s

Same, but just be careful if you venture outside of the “reputable” vendors.

I bought one recently from Aliexpress, and while it’s perfectly functional, it’s using an ethernet chipset that doesn’t have in-kernel drivers so I have to keep compiling new drivers for it every time the kernel upgrades.

Not the end of the world, but an annoyance that I could do without, and not something a slightly more expensive version of what I got would have.

Privacy regulations are all fine and dandy, but even with the strictest ones in place,

They’re also subject to interpretation, regulatory capture, as well as just plain being ignored when it’s sufficiently convenient for the regulators to do so.

“There ought to be a law!” is nice, but it’s not a solution when there’s a good couple of centuries of modern regulatory frameworks having had existed, and a couple centuries of endless examples of where absolutely none of it matters when sufficient money and power is in play.

Like, for example, the GDPR: it made a lot of shit illegal under penalty of company-breaking penalties.

So uh, nobody in the EU has had their personal data misused since it was passed? And all the big data brokers that are violating it have been fined out of business?

And this is, of course, ignoring the itty bitty little fact that you have to be aware of the misuse of the data: if some dude does some shady shit quietly, then well, nobody knows it happened to even bring action?

How exactly are “communities offering services” a different thing than “hosted software”?

I think what they’re saying is that the ideal wouldn’t be to force everyone to host their own, but rather for the people who want to run stuff to offer them to their friends and family.

Kinda like how your mechanic neighbor sometimes helps you do shit on your car: one person shares a skill they have, and the other person also benefits. And then later your neighbor will ask you to babysit their kids, and shit.

Basically: a very very goofy way of saying “Hey! Do nice things for your friends and family, because that’s kinda how life used to work.”

The master-omnibus image bundles all that into a single container is MUCH simpler to deploy.

Literally just used their compose file they provide at https://github.com/AnalogJ/scrutiny/blob/master/docker/example.omnibus.docker-compose.yml and added in the device names and was done.

Are uptimekuma and whatever you’re trying to monitor on the same physical hardware, or is it all different kit?

My first feeling is that you’ve got some DNS/routing configuration that’s causing issues if you’re leaving your local network and then going through two layers before coming back in, especially if you have split horizon DNS.

For sure, just wanted to mention that it’s not just the China side of the trip you need to be vigilant about.

If your device is out of your sight, then yeah, you should probably assume it’s compromised.

Of course, that’s hardly JUST China doing funky shit with your devices, but depending where you’re calling home, odds are customs/immigration when you head home will try to do the exact same thing, too.

And the answer to everything is yes, always use a VPN if you don’t trust the network and you should never trust the network.

Judging from the last time I looked at their comment platform, it had the feeling that the only users of it were ones that were banned from Youtube because of the toxic shit they’re wanting to post so I mean, I guess, but it’s not the experience you’re wanting, probably.

Yeah quicksync won’t help you there.

I thought nVidia’s limit was enforced by their drivers, but that’s probably changed since it’s been a while since I looked at nvenc as a solution (quicksync, then an ARC card over here).

If you have an Intel CPU with quicksync, it will likely perform better than the 1060 in terms of visual quality, if its coffee lake or newer (8th gen).

If not, well, it’ll be fine up to whatever the stream limit is (4?).

Fair, but he said he wants to move from Windows to Linux, so I just assumed there wasn’t going to be any of those since, well, they’re not going to run in Linux anyways.

Not in a way you’re probably going to like.

You could set up a bare metal hypervisor on the system and set up a VM for your NAS, Windows, and Linux and swap between them as needed, but uh, that’s not really an exceedingly pleasant desktop use case, for a number of reasons, one of which is that you really won’t have the normal ‘sit down, and use the computer’ desktop experience.

Alternate option: run the NAS and either the Linux or Windows install in a VM, and keep it booted into, say, the desktop Linux environment with everything else being a virtualized setup.

Since android apps are required, I’d maybe go about this another way: find the app you like the most, then stand up whatever backend it uses for sync.

I was already in the FreshRSS ecosystem, but man, I don’t really like any of the android apps on offer, but swapping at this point would be annoying (bookmarks, saved stories, etc.)

good ideia to run restic as root

As a general rule, run absolutely nothing as root unless there’s absolutely no other way to do what you’re trying to do. And, frankly, there’s maybe a dozen things that must be root, at most.

One of the biggest hardening things you can do for yourself is to always, always run everything as the lowest privilege level you can to accomplish what you need.

If all your data is owned by a user, run the backup tool as that user.

If it’s owned by several non-priviliged users, then you want to make sure that the group permissions let you access it.

As a related note, this also applies to containers and software you’re running: you shouldn’t run docker containers as root unless they specifically MUST have a permission that only root has, and I personally don’t run internet facing ones as the same user as all the others: if something gets popped, then they not only do not have root permissions, but they’re also siloed into their own data in the event of a container escape.

My expectation is that, at some point, I’ll miss a CVE and get pwnt, so the goal is to reduce how much damage someone can do when that happens, rather than assume I’m going to be able to keep it from happening at all, so everything is focused on ‘once this is compromised, how can i make the compromise useless to the attacker’.

Unifi Gateway Ultra

How have you liked the gateway? Any stupid decisions that have annoyed?

My USG has decided that, after a decade, it’s going to be flaky and crash if it wants to (even after replacing it’s 4th dead PSU and 2nd USB stick) and I’m thinking it’s probably time to upgrade.

I’ll admit to both liking the Unifi ecosystem and firmly not trusting the Unifi ecosystem one damn bit, which is bit of a weird situation where I’ve been really really unwilling to upgrade anything because that hasn’t always gone uh, smoothly.

Also if you’ve never seen it, lazydocker might be something up your alley.

It’s a TUI, but it provides easy access to docker containers, logs, updating/restarting/stopping/etc them and so on.

You could also use nginx if you wanted; it’ll do arbitrary tcp data with the stream plugin.

I mean, recovery from parity data is how all of this works, this just doesn’t require you to have a controller, use a specific filesystem, have matching sized drives or anything else. Recovery is mostly like any other raid option I’ve ever used.

The only drawback is that the parity data is mostly equivalent in size to the actual data you’re making parity data of, and you need to keep a couple copies of indexes since if you lose the index or the parity data, no recovery for you.

In my case, I didn’t care: I’m using the oldest drives I’ve got as the parity drives, and the newer, larger drives for the data.

If i were doing the build now and not 5 years ago, I might pick a different solution but there’s something to be said for an option that’s dead simple (looking at you, zfs) and likely to be reliable because it’s not doing anything fancy (looking at you, btrfs).

From a usage (not technical) standpoint, the most equivalent commercial/prefabbed solution would probably be something like unraid.

A tool I’ve actually found way more useful than actual raid is snapraid.

It just makes a giant parity file which can be used to validate, repair, and/or restore your data in the array without needing to rely on any hardware or filesystem magic. The validation bit being a big deal, because I can scrub all the data in the array and it’ll happily tell me if something funky has happened.

It’s been super useful on my NAS, where it’s the only thing standing between my pile of random drives and data loss.

There’s a very long list of caveats as to why this may not be the right choice for any particular use case, but for someone wanting to keep their picture and linux iso collection somewhat protected (use a 321 backup strategy, for the love of god), it’s a fairly viable option.

I just uh, wrote a bash script that does it.

It dumps databases as needed, and then makes a single tarball of each service. Or a couple depending on what needs doing to ensure a full backup of the data.

Once all the services are backed up, I just push all the data to a S3 bucket, but you could use rclone or whatever instead.

It’s not some fancy cool toy kids these days love like any of the dozens of other backup options, but I’m a fan of simple and well, a couple of tarballs in a S3 bucket is about as simple as it gets since restoring doesn’t require any tools or configuration or anything: just snag the tarballs you need, unarchive them, done.

I also use a couple of tools for monitoring the progress and a separate script that can do a full restore to make sure shit works, but that’s mostly just doing what you did to make and upload the tarballs backwards.