stratself

@stratself@lemdro.id

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Geo-distributed Jellyfin⁩ ⁨⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m in a similar rut with intercontinental internet issues, and would like to share my thoughts

  While not a full-fledged CDN, you may consider setting up an Asian VPS to serve as a second reverse proxy/ingress route, terminate TLS there, and route plaintext HTTP back to your homelab (this virtual tunnel shall be behind a WireGuard VPN interface). As I’ve figured out in my blogpost here (see scenario 2), this allows the initial TCP and TLS handshakes to happen nearer to the user instead of going all the way to Europe and back home.

  Before renting compute, I suggest trying these smaller actions first - if they work you mightn’t need a VPS anymore:

  • Look into Linux sysctls tuning of network parameters. My personal tweaks for the /etc/sysctl.conf stuff are:
    • Increasing all the memory usage for network stuff (net.core.(rmem_max/wmem_max/rmem_default/wmem_default), net.ipv4.tcp_(mem,rmem,wmem)`. Relevant blogpost and another. YMMV
    • Enable BBR (net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control=bbr), a modern congestion control algo suitable for long distance/high latency.
  • Implement some sort of Smart Queue Management on your router (e.g. CAKE algorithm)
  • Enable HTTP/3+QUIC on your reverse proxy for reduced handshakes. Though it’s unlikely native Jellyfin clients also benefit from such features

  Curious to see if any of this helps :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Self-Host Weekly (30 January 2026)⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The Cloudflare Matrix blog in the newswire section is an AI slopfest, featuring vibe-coded repos lacking fundamental protocol features, trivially false claims about Matrix projects, and misinformed or dishonest claims to market their software offerings. It is not anything of proper substance.

  To the selfh.st maintainers, please kindly include the community’s responses towards this action, for completeness of the situation

  • Jade’s blogpost - tech.lgbt/@JadedBlueEyes/115967791152135761
  • news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46781516 - Hacker News thread of above
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Messaging apps - XMPP vs Matrix vs ???⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m running continuwuity, and ejabberd as text-only IM servers to talk to some communities. The latter (and XMPP in general) has more moving parts (more ports, SRV records, etc) to set up, but messages deliver much faster and take much less resources. They’d probably both run fine on a VPS with the proper tweaks anyhow - the Rust-based server makes Matrix actually not suck after all

  For bridges, I’ve used maunium-discord as a Matrix bridge in the past, and trying out slidcord right now. I think Matrix bridges still got better UI/UX due to more supported features (spaces/threads) and coherent clients, though let it be known Slidge is a hobbyist project. If your chat server is mainly for bridges, stick to Matrix and consider disabling federation. Also Matrix if you’d like your friends to switch over from Discord - it has more Discordesque features like custom emojis/stickers and SFU-backed group calls

  Though this doesn’t mean I’m unrecommending XMPP. I do appreciate its clients’ snappiness, in-band notifications, and unrivaled efficiency. I kinda wanna write a blogpost comparing both software and protocols, but right now I don’t have an opinion about one over the other. They’re both cool albeit they both leak different metadata differently

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A new look for Snikket on Android⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s basically XMPP with a clear packaging, from server to client

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New to Tailscale. Can I use it along with my own DNS and NPM to access my services externally using my existing internal custom domain?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes.

  If you want to access your NPM stuff on both Tailscale and LAN, either:

  • Advertise a subnet route for your LAN range, configure Tailscale devices to use it, and use your LAN IP on the AGH rewrite, or
  • Split Horizon: Have your DNS respond with a Tailnet IP when it’s queried from the Tailnet range, and respond with a LAN IP when queried from LAN. AGH cannot do this, but other software like Technitium can
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New to Tailscale. Can I use it along with my own DNS and NPM to access my services externally using my existing internal custom domain?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Do a DNS rewrite at AGH, but instead of the LAN IP make it the Tailscale IP of your NPM machine. Then configure AGH as one of the global nameservers on your Tailscale admin panel

  Delete all A/AAAA records on Cloudflare, only use it for registrar purposes and the occassional certs authentication.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In your Tailscale DNS panel, disable “Use with exit node” option for your nameservers.

  When turned on, that option actually allows you to talk directly to nameservers without tunneling DNS queries through the exit node. Since Quad9 in fact has a worldwide CDN, this would leak your (general) DNS query location.

  I believe Tailscale send the queries in parallel and fetch the faster response, which is Quad9 in this case. Ideally for your use case, all your queries should be able to reach and show up in Pi-hole’s logs. Use tailscale dns commands for further debugging

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DNS kicking my ass (Technitium and opnsense)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Glad to know you got it working.

  When you use a VPN as a matter of privacy, I believe you should use their DNS service too to blend in with the crowd. Because of DNS leaks, websites would likely know which DNS server you’re querying from, so using a selfhosted one instead of a VPN’s can be a major uniqueness vector. On the contrary however, I’ve seen many do exactly that, so I guess it’s not as big of an issue. So it’s your choice ultimately.

  Now, if you opt for commercial VPN’s DNS servers, be aware that don’t usually block any ads (if they do it’s likely a paid option), and you’d want to configure your own local zones too. To intercept DNS queries and forward only the approved ones to the VPN, I think you have 2 options:

  • Host Technitium on the VPN’d machine (your computer) and set up blocklists there. Create Conditional Forwarding zones: 1 towards the main TDNS server for your local domains, and the rest towards the 10.2.0.1 server for your public queries. Technitium may be overkill, AdGuard Home can also do this.
  • Configure your main TDNS server to forward queries via the VPN tunnel. This requires the VPN tunnel having an available SOCKS5/HTTP proxy, to be used with TDNS’ Proxy and Forwarders options. Even better, you may use the Advanced Forwarding app to only use this routing for the VPN’d device, and use another routing for other devices
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DNS kicking my ass (Technitium and opnsense)⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Have you solved your problem? It seems like there are some issues with your setup:

  TDNS is set to “allow recursion only for private networks” this means that if something external tried to resolve using my TDNS they’ll be refused, correct?

  Correct. It only accept recursion queries from private networks and can do outbound requests to the internet as normal

  10.2.0.1 turned out to be my vpn’s dns server

  On the computer, you’re also using your VPN’s DNS service accessible within the VPN tunnel (hence the weird IP address). If you wanna use Technitium you should disable such service

  I set NAT rules to force TDNS port 53 routing. TDNS is set to forward to quad9 and cloud flare externally. DNS blocking lists are set in TDNS.

  Unable to reach external net when NAT rules active.

  If you’re forcing every device to talk to TDNS, then your TDNS server is also talking to itself and cannot make queries to Cloudflare/Quad9 on port 53. You can either:

  • Create an exception rule to allow your TDNS address to talk to Cloudflare/Quad9
  • Use DNS-over-HTTPS/DNS-over-TLS as your TDNS forwarder protocols as they aren’t affected by rules on port 53 (recommended)

  It seems the DHCP is handing out the fire wall’s ip for DNS server, 100.100.100.1 is that the expected behavior since DNSmasq should be forwarding to TDNS 100.100.100.333.

  Yes it’s expected, if you’re telling your clients to forward their queries to dnsmasq, and then let dnsmasq forward those queries to Technitium. If you want clients to talk directly to TDNS instead, set the DHCP option to advertise its address and don’t use your firewall’s address as a forwarder. I prefer the second option as it’ll give you correct client IPs in query logs and save some round trips.

  I don’t really know what I’m doing with zones but I have a primary zone set with example.com. I set some static hosts records in this zone and enabled reverse lookup, expecting servicehost.example.com

  If you can query the zone and its reverse PTR record in Technitium’s DNS client, then you’ve properly set it up. Remember you’ll have to tick the PTR options when setting up said record. Also you can open an issue on Technitium’s Github or their subreddit for assistance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How are people discovering random subdomains on my server?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My guess would be NSEC zone walking if your DNS provider supports DNSSEC. But that shouldn’t work with unregistered or wildcard domains

  The next guess would be during setup, someone somewhere got ahold of your SNI (and/or outgoing DNS requests). Maybe your ISP/VPN service actually logs them and announce it to the world

  I suggest next time, try setting up without any over-the-internet traffic at all. E.g. always use curl with the –resolve flag on the same VM as Apache to check if it’s working

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cloudflare Tunnel: proxy-dns Command Removal 2026 | What are some nice alternatives to encrypted DNS?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  they have an official build too: hub.docker.com/r/adguard/dnsproxy

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cloudflare Tunnel: proxy-dns Command Removal 2026 | What are some nice alternatives to encrypted DNS?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Technitium is very powerful and could perfectly handle being a DNS forwarder + DHCP provider for your LAN, replacing both Pihole + cloudflared. Though it does many other things too, which can make the UI overwhelming for starters. But in my opinion if you’d like to fine-tune a lot of things like cache and custom DNS logic (via installable applets), this would be the software for you

  For the upstream provider I guess Quad9 is popular enough to give you fairly good geolocated IPs, but also has some sense of privacy. The main thing is to always validate your andwers with DNSSEC as to detect and refuse any DNS tampering attempts

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you get a certificate for an internal domain?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes it involves nginx’s stream directive

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you get a certificate for an internal domain?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As continued from my answer for ypur previous post I suggest you route pure TCP traffic all the way to your backend and terminate TLS (with a Let’s Encrypt cert) there. In fact, I prefer not to mount any certs on the VPS. This does not involve separate certs nor internal domains.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PSA: If you are running a Matrix homeserver written in Rust, you'll need to upgrade NOW⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  YOU WILL NEED TO UPDATE AGAIN!

  There is another vulnerability making the rounds with details pending embargo. Please update to the latest version (again)

  • continuwuity: v0.5.1
  • tuwunel: v1.4.9
  • conduit: v0.10.11
  • grapevine: commit 0aae932
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My Unifi Dream Machine Pro's ad-blocking was doing more than I expected⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Is there a way for you to talk to upstream DNS bypassing Ubiquiti’s firewall? Maybe do it on a different port? (idk if the RFC permits this)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨reverse proxy over vpn without docker?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are many ways to do this and you got the right gist, but my recommendation:

  • Set up a WireGuard tunnel connecting your VPS and homeserver
  • Set up a layer-4 TCP reverse proxy (Nginx’s stream module/Traefik TCP routers/Caddy-L4/HAProxy are all doable) on the VPS
  • Use that reverse proxy to route all TCP traffic back to the homeserver’s HTTPS service(s), via the wg tunnel

  Here’s a guide that helped me with such a setup: theorangeone.net/…/wireguard-haproxy-gateway/

  Wireguard only need one peer to open a silent UDP port, so use the VPS’ IP and no need to portforward your homeserver. There are other more convenient solutions like Tailscale or Pangolin, but being Wireguard-based they all follow the same principle. Lastly this keeps your certs locally for TLS all the way through

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I migrate my VPS out of Cloudflare?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For the DNS provider I recommend desec.io. It’s a nonprofit running worldwide DNS servers, supports DNSSEC, and has a plugin for Lego. If your registrar supports DNSSEC as well, I’d recommend enabling it to protect from DNS forgery.

  For the DDoS protection I don’t have a recommendation as they’re all “just another SaaS”, but maybe you could limit many more selfhosted things behind auth as to not expose more surface to potential scrapers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Question about accessing my services from corporate Network⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Beat me to it. This is likely the best way as 443 is ubiquitously unblocked on most networks

• PSA: If you are running a Matrix homeserver written in Rust, you'll need to upgrade NOW
  Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨selfhosting@slrpnk.net⁩ | ⁨1⁩ ⁨comment⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Self-hosting with an old laptop⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That doesn’t seem to be too old of a laptop at all. One thing I’d say is to use an SSD as the main partition you run your apps on, as HDDs might be quite slow.

  If you wanna keep the VPS, you can use it as a public inbound gateway + outbound VPN for your homeserver, so traffic looks like it comes in and out of your VPS. I wrote some notes on setting up Tailscale in such a manner, but there’s plenty of other options.

  If you don’t wanna keep the VPS, you can front your inbound traffic with Cloudflare Tunnels, and use a VPN for outbounds. If you don’t have any apps that make frequent network requests (e.g. a Matrix server), then a VPN may not be necessary

  You should leave SSH on, especially if if you wanna run it without a monitor, but use key auth and limit it to your LAN only

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unintended Proxy or Intermediary ('Confused Deputy') and Improper Input Validation in Conduit-derived homeservers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for posting here. I’ll update to continuwuity v0.5.0 immediately when I come back to Matrix

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Suggestions for Community Organizing⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Non-federated Matrix server with rooms bridged to Discord/Whatsapp/Slack/whatever, so everyone can join.

  Use standard webapps for other stuff like polls, surveys, events etc and send the URL to an announcement channel. Not sure of exact solutions but if one app can do it all and send email reminders for them, thatd be great. Same can be done for VoIP with Jitsi links, or even Z**m links.

  Backup the databases if you need the chat logs. All of this should be doable with a small VPS, but a mini PCs cluster could be better

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Router VPN? Express put to rest⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  How did you exactly install Express on the router? Did you use an app or something of that kind?

  If the VPN provider has WireGuard support, you may wanna use a wireguard client software to connect to it. Flash OpenWRT on the router, install and configure a wireguard interface that connects to Express, then forward packets from behind LAN to that interface so they go through the VPN tunnel. A bit tricky for beginners, but I hope you can make it.

  Since OpenVPN protocol seems to become unsupported in the future, Wireguard should be the way to go. Mullvad/IVPN should also support it, and once you know how to set it up it should be usable across many services and devices.

  Do you recommend installing VPN apps on separate devices instead of the router?

  For flexibility I’d do this. In case I’d wanna switch upstream servers for a single device without affecting others.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Recommendations to replace AWS DNS?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Desec.io is a solid option - it allows for various types of records like TLSA and SRV. It can also generate scoped API tokens e.g. for “only TXT records of the _acme-challenge subdomain of example.com” to use in automated cert renewals, so pretty good for automation. It’s also a nonprofit.

  I think selfhosting DNS is beneficial when you wanna control your own DNSSEC keys, but you’d need to account for high availability and safety. With that, you could do what’s called a “hidden primary + public secondary” setup to protect your master DNS data from the public prying. You can even use 3rd-party services like ns-global.zone as your secondaries for redundancy and to reduce load on your primary, too. I recommend Technitium and their guidance if you wanna get started

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Recommendations to replace AWS DNS?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Those are not authoritative DNS providers where you can publish records…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Technically something like DANE can allow you to present DNSSEC-backed self-signed certs and even allow multi-domain matching that removes the need for SNI and Encrypted Client Hello… but until the browsers say it is supported, it’s not

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨**How** should I properly document my homelab?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I write homelab docs mostly for user guidance like onboarding, login, and service-specific stuff. This helps me better design for people by putting myself in their shoes, and should act as a reference document for any member to come back to.

  Previously I built an Mkdocs-Material website with a nice subdomain for it, but since the project went on maintenance mode, I’m gonna migrate all docs back to a Forgejo wiki since it’s just Markdown anyways. I also run an issue tracker there, to manage the homelab’s roadmaps and features since it’s still evolving.

  I find this approach benefiting compared to just documenting code. I’m not an IaC person yet, but I hope when I am, the playbooks should describe themselves for the nitty-gritty stuff anyways. I do write some infra notes for myself and perhaps to onboard maintainers, but most homelab developments happen in the issue tracker itself. The rest I try to keep it simple enough for an individual to understand

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Self hosted Onedrive alternative⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Nextcloud forked from the old PHP-based ownCloud stack, while Opencloud forked from the Infinite Scale Go-based stack. It also by default preserves the filesystem hierarchy on your server without needing a database, using a storage driver called PosixFS.

  The Windows clients currently do support selective syncing so it is on-par with OneDrive. Android client looks to be forked from old Owncloud, and has offline availability too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Looking for a selfhostable chat service that people on phone and computers can log onto⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  due to it missing ideal features

  what features do you want? kindly elaborate

  ---

  XMPP with Snikket could be an easy solution. If you don’t want to talk to the wider web make sure to disable federation.