IsoKiero

@IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Looking for help/guidance on how to setup a server for a business⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Others have already mentioned about the challenges on the software/management side, but you also need to take into consideration hardware failures, power outages, network outages, acceptable downtime and so on. So, even if you could technically shoehorn all of that into a raspberry pi and run it on a windowsill, and I suppose it would run pretty well, you’ll risk losing all of the data if someone spills some coffee on the thing.

  So, if you really insist doing this on your own hardware and maintenance (and want to do it properly), you’d be looking (at least):

  • 2 servers for reundancy, preferably 3rd one laying around for a quick swap
  • Pretty decent UPS setup, again multiple units for reundancy
  • Routers, network hardware, internet uplinks and everything at least duplicated and configured correctly to keep things running
  • A separate backup solution, on at least two different physical locations, so a few more servers and their network, power and other stuff taken care of
  • Monitoring, alerting system in case of failures, someone being on-call for 24/7

  And likely a ton of other stuff I can’t think of right now. So, 10k for hardware, two physical locations and maintenance personnel available all the time. Or you can buy a website hosting (VPS even if you like) for few bucks a month and email service for a 10/month (give or take) and have the services running, backed up and taken care of for far longer than your own hardware lifetime is for a lot cheaper than that hardware alone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Federated social media from before it was cool⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Filtering incoming spam, while not 100% correct, is a pretty straightforward thing to do. Use DNSBL and other lists from spamhaus and it takes care of 90+% of the problem. Incoming spam has not been a huge issue for me, but when people try to send mail to someone in M365 cloud or to Gsuite and they just decide that your server isn’t important enough they just block you out and that’s it. Trying to circumvent that takes a ton of time and effort and while it can be done it’s a huge pain in the rear. And trying to fight your way trough the 1st tier support to someone who actually understands the problem and attempts to fix that while you customers are complaining that “problem with email” is actually affecting on their income is the part I’ll happily leave behind.

  I’ll set up a couple of new VPS servers to host my personal and friends emails, but if they complain that the service I’m paying from my personal pocket isn’t what they’re after then they’re free to switch into whatever they like. And as infrastructure for that is something like 100€/year I’ll happily pay it by myself so that no one has an option to say ‘I paid for this so you need to fix it’ anymore. On commercial case that’s obviously not an option and I’ve had my share of running a business in a very hostile environment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Federated social media from before it was cool⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Also if you’re running an email server for others, it takes very little from single individual, like a small webshop newsletter, which enough people manually marks as junk and you’re on a block list again. Latest one with microsoft took several days to clear, even if all of their tools and 1st tier support claimed that my IP isn’t on a black list.

  I’ve jumped all the hoops and done everything by the book, but that still doesn’t mean that any of the big players won’t just screw you up because some of their automaton happens to decide so. That’s why I’m shutting my small ISP business down, there’s no more money to make on that and a ton of customers have moved to the cloud anyways, mostly to microsoft due to their office-suite pricing. It was kind of fun while it lasted, but that ship has sailed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨which VPS do you recommend?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I recommend Hetzner too. I’ve been a happy customer for a decade. Support, should you need it, works well and services are rock solid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨5 pin connector recommendations that have both male and female sockets available⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s automotive plugs which use more or less standard spade connectors which you can wire yourself and they can easily achieve 10A and things like relay sockets can manage 40A or more. JAE is one of the brands manufacturing all kinds of connectors, with and without panel connectors, but there’s a ton of manufacturers around. I suppose on marine stuff you can find connectors like that too.

  But if it’s for a LED strip and you don’t need to constantly move them around, I’d suggest using a dirt cheap spade connectors with color coding (reverse male/female connectors on the live one so it’s physically impossible to connect led strip in reverse polarity). Or even cheaper, use screw terminals and be extra careful when wiring the strip in.

  And for the dupont-style connector commonly seen on LED strips, 10A feels like quite optimistic value. Obviously a LED strip can pull 10A and many times that, but quickly googled ballpark estimation for 2,5m 10A led strip calls for 2,5mm² wiring all the way trough and your cheap flexible LED PCB from amazon/ebay is pretty far from that. But that depends heavily on what you actually have and if you’ve measured 6A then it’s pretty reasonable to have the rest of the setup to manage 10A.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Man-in-the-Middle PCB Unlocks HP Ink Cartridges⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  My ecotank died just like all the other inkjets. It went few weeks without printing and blue nozzle dried completely up and on the pipes I can see dried up ink on other colors as well. So I had to dig up old Brother HL3040 back to the duty which I retired after print quality started to drop (it needs new fuse unit or something similar, so not that big of a deal) and I thought having an option to print nice color pictures would be nice.

  So, if you plan to run ecotank (which does have pretty good printing quality when it works) set up a scheduled task on your computer to print something, in color, quite frequently even if it wastes some ink and paper. I think the main issue with mine was that even if I print stuff somewhat often there was a period where I only needed b&w documents so color nozzles went unused for a while.

  I might get a new set of nozzles and ink tanks for my unit as it’s a ton cheaper than a whole new printer, but if you’re looking for a printer this is something to take into consideration, regardless of their marketing material.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the difference between a $50 HDD and a $200 HDD?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  As a rule of thumb, if you pay more money you get a better product. With spinning drives that almost always means that more expensive drives (in average) run longer than cheaper ones. Performance is another metric, but balancing those is where the smoke and mirrors come into play. You can get a pretty darn fast drive for a premium price which will fail in 3-4 years or for a similar price you can get a bit slower drive which will last you a decade. And that’s in average. You might get a ‘cheap’ brand high-performance drive to run without any issues for a long long time and you might also get a brand name NAS drive which will fail in 2 years. Those averages start to play a role if you buy drives by a dozen.

  Backblaze (among others) publish their very real world statistics on which drives to choose (again, on average), but for home gamer that’s not usually an option to run enough drives to get any benefits from statistical point of view. Obviously something from HGST or WD will most likely outperform any no-name brand from aliexpress and personally I’d only get something rated for 24/7 use, like WD RED, but it’s not a guarantee that those will actually run any longer as there’s always deviations from their gold standard.

  So, long story short, you will most likely get a significantly different results depending on which brand/product line you choose, but it’s not guaranteed, so you need to work around that with backups, different raid scenarios (likely raid 5 or 6 for home gamer) and acceptable time for downtime (how fast you can get a replacement, how long it’ll take to pull data back from backups and so on). I’ll soon migrate my setup from somewhat professional setting to more hobbyist one and with my pretty decent internet connectivity I most likely go with 2-1-1 setup instead of the ‘industry standard’ 3-2-1 (for serious setup you should probably learn what those really mean, but in short: number of copies existing - number of different storage media - number of offsite copies),

  On what you really should use, that depends heavily on your usage. For a media library a 5400rpm bigger drive might be better than a bit smaller 7200rpm drive and then there’s all kinds of edge cases plus potential options for ssd-caching and a ton of other stuff, so, unfortunately, the actual answer has quite a few of variables, starting from your wallet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Self-Hosted setup for remote music lessons?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In theory you just send a link to click and that’s it. But, as there always is a but, your jitsi setup most likely don’t have massive load balancing, dozens of locations for servers and all the jazz which goes around random network issues and everything else which keeps the internet running.

  There’s a ton of things well outside your control and they may or may not bite you in the process. Big players have tons of workforce and money to make sure that kind of things don’t happen and they still do now and then. Personally, for a single use scenario like yours, I wouldn’t bother, but I’m not stopping you either, it’s a pretty neat thing to do. My (now dead) jitsi instance once saved a city council meeting when teams had issues and that got me a pretty good bragging rights, so it can be pretty rewarding too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Self-Hosted setup for remote music lessons?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Jitsi works, and they have open relays to test with, but as the thing here is very much analog and I’d assume she’d just need to see your position, how hands move etc, the audio quality isn’t the most important thing here. Sure, it helps, but personally I’d just use zoom/teams/hangouts/something readily available and invest in a decent microphone (and audio in general) + camera.

  That way you don’t need to provide helpdesk on how to use your thing and waste time from actual lessons nor need to debug server issues while you’ve been scheduled to train with your teacher.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I spent ~$35 on new cables and my LAN speed increased 6x⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  At least in here some of the older modems, specially from ADSL-era, only had two pairs in them, so they were only good up to 100Base-T, which is roughly 7MB/s. So maybe check if that’s the case and throw those into recycling bin.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I spent ~$35 on new cables and my LAN speed increased 6x⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  At work where cable runs are usually made by maintenance people the most common problem is poor termination. They often just crimp a connector instead of using patch panels/sockets and unwind too much of the cable before connector which causes all kinds of problems. With proper termination problems usually go away.

  But it can be a ton of other stuff too. Good cable tester is pretty much essential to figure out what’s going on. I’m using 1st gen version of Pocketethernet and it’s been pretty handy, but there’s a ton of those available, just get something a bit better than a simple indicator with blinking leds which can only indicate if the cable isn’t completely broken.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I spent ~$35 on new cables and my LAN speed increased 6x⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep. I’m running 1/1Gbps wan connection over cat5e just fine. Even on very noisy environment at work with a longish run (70+ meters) we ran pretty damn stable 1/1Gbps over good quality cat7.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Self-Hosted AI is pretty darn cool⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It depends heavily on what you do and what you’re comparing yourself against. I’ve been making a living with IT for nearly 20 years and I still don’t consider myself to be an expert on anything, but it’s a really wide field and what I’ve learned that the things I consider ‘easy’ or ‘simple’ (mostly with linux servers) are surprisingly difficult for people who’d (for example) wipe the floor with me if we competed on planning and setting up an server infrastructure or build enterprise networks.

  And of course I’ve also met the other end of spectrum. People who claim to be ‘experts’ or ‘senior techs’ at something are so incompetent on their tasks or their field of knowledge is so ridiculously narrow that I wouldn’t trust them with anything above first tier helpdesk if even that. And the sad part is that those ‘experts’ often make way more money than me because they happened to score a job on some big IT company and their hours are billed accordingly.

  And then there’s the whole other can of worms on a forums like this where ‘technical people’ range from someone who can install a operating system by following instructions to the guys who write assembly code to some obscure old hardware just for the fun of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Best way to keep a hot spare SD card for a raspberry pi?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Grub supports software raid just fine. The main issue is that you need to modify grub configuration to add bootloader on both drives, but even if you don’t it’s pretty simple to recreate needed files for second drive when the primary one dies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Best way to keep a hot spare SD card for a raspberry pi?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Unfortunately, I don’t think the Pi supports RAID1.

  I haven’t ran any Pi with hard drives, but I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work with software raid on linux.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My homelab had the stupidest outage ever⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You could of course use some kind of socket or connetor for supercap, but as they last far less than I thought then I get why it doesn’t make sense. This thinkstation I’m writing with in my garage I got for free at old office is from 2011 and it’s still running original cmos battery. No idea if there’s any juice left on it, but at least it doesn’t complain anything at boot and once it refuses to boot it’ll become e-waste immediately (I do metal working, fix cars etc at the garage, so internals of this thing are far from clean, I think this is 3rd or 4th hardware for 10 years in here with only the SSD moved from setup to another).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My homelab had the stupidest outage ever⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You can deflect rain while you’re at it too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My homelab had the stupidest outage ever⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The only real solution is to make this an extended maintenance task.

  This is the correct answer. No matter how reliable your power feed is you still need to reboot the server at some point for whatever reason and if CMOS battery is dead by then you’ll have the very same issue and you’ll need monitor and keyboard again. And even if you don’t mind about the RTC on board you’ll still lose the settings.

  I wonder why manufacturers haven’t switched over to supercapacitors or something else than a coin cell battery, but perhaps there’s a valid reason for it. I think that supercaps can’t hold charge as long as a coin cell, but if your board is completely cold for a year or so maybe losing bios settings isn’t that big of a deal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dynamic IP - Self hosting⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You can pay for dyndns service which should be more reliable than free ones. I don’t have any experience with those, so I can’t give any recommendations. What I’m running is that I use few of the free ones which are updated either from my router or from a linux VM and I’ve just pointed few easy to remember CNAME records from my own domain to those dynamic addresses. It’s not the best thing in the world, but my dynamic IP tends to be pretty static as it usually changes only when my own hardware is down for a longer period of time (few hours or so, so a longer power outage or a hardware maintenance gone wrong).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Now I have 1 GBit fiber and can't benefit :-(⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The process is to go step-by-step. First direct connect to modem you have, bridged connection if possible, and test with multiple bandwidth measurements (speedtest, fast.com, downloading a big file from some university ftp…) and work your way downstream of the network. And on every step test multiple scenarios where it’s possible, preferably with multiple devices.

  When I got a 1Gbit fiber connection few years back I got an Ubiquiti Edgerouter-X with PoE-options. On paper that should’ve been plenty for my network, but in theory with NAT, DNAT, firewall rules and things like that it capped on 6-700Mbps depending on what I used it for. With small packets and VPN it dropped even more. So now that thing acts as an glorified PoE switch and the main routing is handled with Mikrotik device, which on manufacturers tests should be able to push 7Gbps on optimal conditions. I only have 1/1Gbps, so there’s plenty of room, but with very specific loads that thing still is still pushed to the limit (mostly small packet size with other stuff on top of it) but it can manage the full duplex 1000Base-T. And on normal everyday use it’s running at 20% (or so) load, but I like the fact that it can manage even the more challenging scenarios.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Suggestions for file sync / android backup / sharing software (nextcloud alternative)⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve used Seafile for years just for this. I haven’t ran that on pi, but on virtual machine it runs pretty smoothly and android client is pretty hassle free.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What you can recommend for first time?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d first recommend that you think about what you need.

  This is the absolutely correct option. I’ve set up way too many things without a use case and lost interest shortly after. If you have a real world use case for your project, even if it’s just for yourself, you’ll have the incentive to keep it going. If you’re just setting things up for the sake of it the hobby loses it’s appeal pretty quickly. Of course you’ll learn a thing or two on the way but without a real world use case the things you set up will either become a burden to keep up with or they’re eventually just deleted.

  Personally, tinkering with things that are just removed after a while gave me skills which landed me on my current job, but it’s affected myself enough that I don’t enjoy setting things up just for the sake of it anymore. Of course time plays a part on this, I’ve been doing this long enough that when I started a basic LAMP server was a pretty neat thing to have around, so take this with a grain of oldtimer salt, but my experience is that setting up things that are actually useful on a long term is way more rewarding than spinning up something which gets deleted in a month and it’ll keep the spark going on for much longer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hashing is one-way encryption. So, while you’re techcnically correct that they’re not encrypted in the traditional sense (encryption is reversible), for many it’s easier to understand the concept of encryption instead of hashing and terms are often used interchangeable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Logging depends on the instance. Many admins choose to not log any data which could be used to identify any individual, but verifying their claims (without a doubt) as a single user is pretty much impossible and there’s nothing stopping an instance admin of gathering all the data (s)he wants to.

  Like are they protected or encrypted so the hackers can’t use them ?

  Passwords are encrypted, but in case of a security breach on an instance they are still vulnerable, like with any other password leak. Majority of the systems today use one way encryption with their passwords, but still millions and millions of user accounts are leaked almost daily.

  Also what is stoping the instance owners from abusing or selling these behind our back ?

  Nothing.

  or running a modded version of lemmy are they detectable ?

  If done properly, no, you can’t detect them.

  But that’s not any different from any of the services around the net. Companies like Meta and Google make their money by selling user data, advertisers track you and all the other things you’re most likely already aware of.

  Administrator of my instance said that they don’t gather IP addresses or any other data they don’t need to keep the servers running and I trust them on that, but your mileage may vary. And then there’s different legal systems around the world where an admin might be forced to give out information about individual user, but where I live that’s not a thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Self hosted Wetransfer?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Seafile. I’ve used it for years, but I’m moving over to nextcloud as I could use other features it provides. They have paid options too, but unless you need LDAP or something more sophisticated for user management the community edition works just fine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Router recommendation⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I personally like mikrotik routers. They have all the features you could wish for and then some and they’re relatively cheap for the things they can do. I have RB4011iGS+ (I don’t think that exaxt model is available anymore) and it’s been rock solid. As I have fiber I just pulled the SPF-module from ISP’s box and plugged it in on my own hardware, so the router ISP provided is just gathering dust right now.

  But it depends on what you’re really after. If you just need basic firewall/NAT/DHCP functionality and your connection speed is below 1Gbit pretty much any router will do. If you have fast connection and/or need for totally separate networks/VLAN/something else it’s a whole another matter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Devotion to duty⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Firewall kinda-sorta plays with this idea, but all the tech is pretty stupid (and main focus, if memory serves, isn’t even in the technology). It’s not a bad movie as a hollywood 13-in-a-dozen action category, but it’s a far cry from “Server Down” we have here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Devotion to duty⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Bing Chat (so ChatGPT) wrote an opening scene (or maybe more like a trailer, prompt was opening scene) too:

  The opening scene of “Server Down” begins with a shot of a high-tech skyscraper. The camera then zooms into the basement of the building, where we see Jack Bauer, a nerdy and obsessive system administrator, working on his servers. He is surrounded by racks of blinking machines, tangled cables, and humming fans. Jack is wearing a t-shirt with a witty tech joke printed on it, and he is sipping a cup of coffee from a “World’s Best Sysadmin” mug.

  Suddenly, the lights flicker, and the servers go offline. Jack’s face turns pale, and he drops his coffee mug. He frantically tries to reboot the servers, but nothing works. He checks the network connections, the power supply, and the cooling system, but everything seems fine. He then realizes that the problem is not with his servers, but with the building’s infrastructure. He rushes to the security room, where he finds out that the building has been taken over by terrorists.

  The camera then cuts to the terrorists, who are holding the employees hostage and demanding a ransom from the government. They have cut off all communication lines, disabled the security cameras, and planted a bomb in the building. They are confident that they can get away with their plan, but they didn’t count on one thing: Jack Bauer.

  The scene ends with Jack staring at the security monitors, his eyes burning with determination. He knows that he has to act fast to save his servers, his colleagues, and himself. He takes a deep breath, puts on his backpack, and heads towards the ventilation ducts. The adventure begins!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hetzner Server auction worth it?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  have seen some people have networking issues with them.

  I’ve been a happy customer for hetzner for almost a decade and I haven’t had any issues with their networking. If you’re running virtualization you need to take care of you MAC addresses or they won’t allow traffic and eventually will kick you off from their platform (and they have a good reason to do so). As long as you play by their rules on their hardware it’s rock solid, specially for the price.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Alone i n the dark is playable online on this wonderful website.⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Archive.org has a copy too. And ‘a few’ more, with image downloads so you can run them on a emulator (or on a real hardware).