irmadlad
@irmadlad@lemmy.world
Incessant tinkerer since the 70’s. Staunch privacy advocate. SelfHoster. Musician of mediocre talent. soundcloud.com/hood-poet-608190196
- Comment on Self Hosting for Privacy - Importance of Owning your own Modem/Router? 1 hour ago:
Instead I use one from OpenNIC
Fast? How would it compare to the evil Cloudflare?
- Comment on Self Hosting for Privacy - Importance of Owning your own Modem/Router? 3 hours ago:
I’ve often wondered about down votes as well. It’s not the points, as I care nothing about that. However, if you’re going to down vote something, have the balls to explain why. Maybe the down voter knows something that we all can learn from. It just seems like a common courtesy to do so.
- Comment on Self Hosting for Privacy - Importance of Owning your own Modem/Router? 4 hours ago:
Owning your own modem/router gives you full access to security features. It gives you opportunity to install custom firmware. If you can spring for the $$, I think it would be advisable. That way, the only thing you need from your ISP is the cable/delivery device piping internet into your house.
- Comment on a VPN that is easily self-hostable and resistant to blocking? 4 hours ago:
I sort of said as much. It really doesn’t matter, imho, what you use. As soon as that service becomes abused globally, everyone blocks it, including Tor. Any server using DPI or TLS will spot it a mile away. Now, if you have a fool proof way, than I am very much ready to be educated.
- Comment on a VPN that is easily self-hostable and resistant to blocking? 7 hours ago:
resistant to blocking?
That’s going to be the sticky wicket right there. It is rather trivial for server admins to know what IPs go with VPNs and not. Wireguard is about the best thing on the planet right now, imho, but it will also get blocked. Occasionally, I will happen on a site that outright blocks me. If I can’t bend the site to my will, I just move on. The information on the blocked site will 9 times out of 10 be found duplicated somewhere else.
One ‘trick’ I’ve found works fairly well is Opera. So, when I go to pay my bills online, my VPN coupled with the way I have Firefox configured, will trigger a block. I can fire up Opera, engage it’s built in VPN, still keep my local VPN connected, and have no problem accessing my bills. It’s not an elegant solution, and some users have preclusions to Opera. However, that generally works for me.
- Comment on Tailscale serve and sharing devices 1 day ago:
Yes, you can create a second Tailnet in Tailscale and add your server without including your personal devices. You’ll have to create a separate account with a separate email address. Then you can join this second Tailnet with your server while leaving your other devices out. The separation allows you to manage connectivity and network policies independently.
- Comment on noob questions seeking non-noob answers 1 day ago:
What would you guys recommend for a server machine?
I would recommend buying fairly modern equipment, say within the past 5 years or so. Desktops, workstations, with a few additions/adjustments, can make excellent, energy efficient servers. As far as RAM, if your equipment takes DDR3, you will escape the ridiculous current price gouging. For RAM, I shop at MemoryStock. HDD drives still make good storage units, tho I go with SSD for the OS, and HDD for everything else. I would stay far away from enterprise type equipment, even though the prices may be tempting. The money you may save buying cheap, enterprise equipment will be spent on your power bill.
Redundancy covers a lot of ground. You can have a redundant server to fall back to should the wheels fall off of the main server. In the case of say a NAS, RAID gives you redundancy where if one drive fails, you can hot swap it for a fresh one and keep on rocking…pretty much. Redundancy can also apply to backups. I have a main, daily backup, and the same backed up to two different locations.
In addition to equipment selection, you will need to do some reading up on securely setting up a server, if you’ve never done so. Also start thinking about firewalls, WAFs, etc. I would recommend going through the Linux Upskill Challenge. Get your server set up and secured. Familiarize yourself with your server. Add a single service, and play around with that until things start to gel. Then you can think about slowly adding additional services.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
I guess there will be a time where I take notes of what month it is!
You may jest, but there are times when I can’t remember what I had for breakfast. They say that you never truly forget anything, but that our recall mechanism fades over time. For a myriad of reasons, including age, my recall mechanism is shit.
- Comment on How to check if Proton VPN has switched locations? 2 days ago:
Without rDNS
nslookup xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (VPN IP) ** server can’t find xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.in-addr.arpa: NXDOMAIN
With rDNS it might look like this:
nslookup 208.104.203.197 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.in-addr.arpa name = xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx.reserved.example.net.
- Comment on How to check if Proton VPN has switched locations? 2 days ago:
Proton will reconnect in the background which means the port changes and the IP address changes.
That’s weird. What is the reasoning behind that? That would drive me up the wall. A new IP and port would require a new leak test for me. Some VPN slots have a reverse DNS which attaches an identifier to the whole shebang, and in my mind, is unacceptable.
- Comment on Dashboard for my servers 2 days ago:
That really looks good bro. Very modern looking card style. I’m keen to know how you have coded it to reject IP, other than VPN traffic.
- Comment on The surreal joy of having an overprovisioned homelab (2025) - from Anubis creator 2 days ago:
to try and prop their own war machine back up.
I don’t honestly think that Russia couldn’t already afford modern infrastructure and military, as much as I think the government crippled because it’s basically run mafia style where everyone is skimming heavily. on the take. and money being funneled to already wealthy pockets. This sounds vaguely familiar. Even down to people ‘falling’ out of a window from great heights. I get what you are saying tho. Russia is rich in natural resources if they can figure out how to extract a lot of it from the frozen tundra.
- Comment on The surreal joy of having an overprovisioned homelab (2025) - from Anubis creator 2 days ago:
Russians aren’t brown skinned people tho. We almost exclusively bomb brown skin people.
- Comment on Dashboard for my servers 3 days ago:
If going with a standalone dashboard service, which one?
I use Homarr and find it suites my needs. However there are quite a few others out there. Homepage seems to be a popular one with loads of integrations available.
- Comment on 3 days ago:
As in a blog or wiki? I do not because I am not authoritative. What I know came from reading, doing, screwing it up, ad nauseam. When something finally clicks for me, I write it down because 9 times out of 10, I will need that info later. But my writing would be so full of inaccuracies that it would be embarrassing and possibly lead someone astray.
- Comment on 3 days ago:
OP, totally understand, but this is a level of success with your homelab. Nothing needs fiddling with. Now, there is a whole Awesome Self Hosted list you could deploy on a non-production server and run that through the paces.
- Comment on 3 days ago:
Right before the end of your day
Oh, gosh, I did this last evening. I didn’t check what time it was, and initiated an update on some 70 containers. I have a cron that shuts down the server in the evening, and sure enough, right in the middle of the updates, it powered off. I didn’t even mess with it and went to bed. Re-initiated the update this morning, and everything is up and running. Whew!
- Comment on 3 days ago:
unnecessary complexity?
I can help with that. It’s a skill I have. LOL
- Comment on 3 days ago:
At 71, I have to document. I started a long time ago. I worked for a mec. contractor long ago, and the rule was: ‘If you didn’t write it down, it didn’t happen.’ That just carried over to everything I do.
- Comment on 3 days ago:
time to test the backups!
Always a white knuckle event for me
- Comment on Self-Host Weekly (13 March 2026) 3 days ago:
BookLore
I have seriously considered spinning up Booklore. Great looking UI. Oh well.
- Comment on Remote KVM recommendations 3 days ago:
It sounds like what you really need is a mesh VPN not really KVM.
Ding!
- Comment on SelfHosting Guilty Pleasure(s) 4 days ago:
…oh you kids and your slang!! (We had plenty too) I had to look it up. Going to have to try to work that into conversation. Thanks. I have a fascination with the etymology of words, phrases, and their history.
- Comment on SelfHosting Guilty Pleasure(s) 4 days ago:
I don’t feel so weird now that I see a lot of people who have the same guilty pleasures.
- Comment on SelfHosting Guilty Pleasure(s) 5 days ago:
No offense intended.
Just pulling your strings man.
- Comment on An actually functional webproxy to self-host 5 days ago:
Why not run your own socks5 proxy server?
- Comment on SelfHosting Guilty Pleasure(s) 5 days ago:
Man, why you want to trample on my vision? LOL My default is ‘deny all until something complains, and address PRN.’ Some of my more productive lists are the Internet Storm set, a lot of Firebog lists, and some I’ve compiled myself. Tons of CIDR rejects, not a whole lot of passes.
- Comment on What is Radicale and how do I use it? 6 days ago:
No worries mate. I was just sitting here jamming some blues on the guitar and felt inspired.
- Comment on What is Radicale and how do I use it? 6 days ago:
Actually one of these free logo maker sites and I just screen grabbed it instead of paying for it, then flooded the background with Gimp. However a logo made with AI that says Zero AI would be irony.
- Comment on What is Radicale and how do I use it? 6 days ago:
Might want to crop it a bit. Go nuts!