dan

Definitely true. The Pi 5 is especially powerful compared to older versions, but it can get kinda expensive once you add things you’d want for a server, like a case, SSD hat, etc.

Ex-office mini and small form factor PCs (Lenovo Tiny/ThinkCentre, HP ProDesk/EliteDesk, Dell Optiplex, etc) can be a better deal than a Pi. In the US at least, you can often find 9th or 10th gen Core i5 systems for less than $150 on eBay. Works great as a server.

A lot of companies have a 3-4 year refresh cycle, after which the hardware is fully depreciated (essentially meaning its value to the company is $0) and they have e-waste companies collect them. The e-waste recyclers test them, refurbish the ones that still work, and list them on marketplaces like eBay.

I forgot to mention - stay far away from SSDNodes. Their prices look good, but they massively oversell their RAM. They use ballooning (virtio_balloon) to overallocate RAM, and require you to use their customized Linux distro images that have it enabled. Ballooning means that they take unused RAM from your VM and lend it to other VMs to use. If you try to use all your RAM, they shut down your VPS.

GreenCloud, HostHatch, and RackNerd all let you install whatever OS you want, by mounting an ISO, connecting to the VPS via VNC, and going through the normal setup process just like you would on a regular computer. They do have pre-built images, but I always prefer to install from my own ISO so I know that the installation doesn’t have any non-standard modifications.

My guess would be renting a dedicated server, or a home server. It can end up cheaper than colo.

self host?

Hosting at home, renting a dedicated server, or colocating are all considered self-hosting.

They’re reliable, but overpriced for what you get, especially after the Akamai acquisition. Akamai are not known for affordability :)

I use GreenCloudVPS for a bunch of things. They used to have VPSes starting at $15/year for 2GB RAM and 20GB disk, but their current budget deals are still good (starts at $25/year for 4GB RAM and 35GB disk). These are on older hardware (mostly AMD EPYC Rome Zen 2 systems, ~5 years old) which is why they haven’t been affected by increased RAM and storage prices yet.

greencloudvps.com/billing/store/budget-kvm-sale

They also have “premium” plans which are newer (AMD EPYC Milan Zen 3 or Genoa Zen 4, and PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage in RAID10): greencloudvps.com/billing/store/premium-kvm-sale

I suspect they’ll eventually increase the pricing, but I’ve been using them for five years and haven’t seen them increase pricing for existing customers, just new customers.

HostHatch is good too. Their regular pricing aims to compete with Hetzner, but in 13 locations worldwide. hosthatch.com/products. They do sometimes have sales on LowEndTalk with pricing similar to GreenCloud’s “premium” plans.

If you want to stick to big names, OVHcloud and Hetzner both have pretty good VPS pricing. OVH runs theirs on very old hardware like Haswell (2014/2015 era) Xeon E5 CPUs which is the main reason why they have cheaper pricing that Hetzner.

If you’re using AWS for anything, they have a service called Lightsail that’s essentially Amazon’s version of a VPS. Storage and data transfer are included in the monthly price (unlike EC2).

I wish more modern TPUs were available for purchase. Google’s TPU v8i is very powerful, but you can only rent it via Google Cloud. (that and they’re most useful in big clusters, and the pricing for such a cluster is definitely out of reach for anyone that’s not running their own data center)

For small options, there’s mini PCs with the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395, and the Nvidia DGX. Their memory bandwidth is quite low compared to a GPU though, so expect slower performance.

Do you want to run TensorFlow Lite / LiteRT models? PyTorch Mobile? onnx? YOLO? Something else?

Google Coral was decent for TensorFlow Lite, but it’s EOL (end of life) now. I’ve got the dual TPU Mini PCIe version in my home server, via a PCIe adapter board. I use it for object detection with Blue Iris + CodeProject AI and it works pretty well for that use case.

And I don’t ever know if it’ll get better because you need to know why you want to build something someway.

The major issue I’m seeing with junior developers at work is that they trust that the AI will always do things the correct way, and don’t question its approach.

To get decent quality output out of an AI model, you need to have critical thinking skills, at least basic knowledge of the overall architecture for whatever you’re trying to build, and enough knowledge to question the model when it does something wrong.

Blindly trusting AI is why so many old security issues are coming back - stored/reflected XSS, SQL injection, exposing databases directly to the internet with no password, things like that. Newer frameworks mostly got rid of them, and now AI is bringing them back. It’s a fun time for red teams at least.

Does Patchmon not have a setting to look for the Docker socket in a different location?

I could be wrong but I don’t think there’s any security issues making a symlink to a socket, since permissions/ACLs on the socket would still apply.

My Epyc 7702 does have onboard TPM, but my supermicro H11DSi-NT doesn’t pass it through to the OS, for some reason

Huh… That’s interesting. At my workplace we have Linux EPYC servers with working TPM (it’s mandated that all computers, both clients and servers, must have TPM 2.0), but I’m not a hardware person and don’t know exactly how they’re configured.

This is good to know. I haven’t had issues with using a USB drive though, since it doesn’t receive many reads or writes - the system is copied to a RAM drive on boot and runs off that rather than the USB.

I assume this means I’d need another drive to boot it from? My current setup is that I have 2 x 22TB drives in a ZFS mirror for data storage, and 2 x 2TB NVMe SSDs in a ZFS mirror for things like VMs, Docker containers, documents, etc.

I had to get a Supermicro AOM-TPM-9665V TPM chip for my motherboard

How old is your CPU that it doesn’t have onboard TPM? It’s been a standard feature for quite a while now

Does it use http or MQTT?

Home Assistant uses HTTP for this. Realistically, you won’t see much difference between HTTP and MQTT for this use case.

MQTT is harder to secure than HTTP, and has some limitations (eg it normally only supports username and password auth - no SSO, no 2FA) so I’d avoid it for anything public-facing unless you have a specific reason to use it. Using it via a VPN is fine, but you’d still need to configure a separate MQTT username and password per user.

iptables should still work, but these days it gets converted to nftables so you may as well just learn nftables.

Having said that, I find it a pain to manually configure iptables or nftables. There might be a better way to do what you want.

The end goal is to have no reliance on tailscale as i am preparing for the eventual enshitification.

Tailscale is mostly open-source. If they do anything bad then someone could fork the project.

The coordination server isn’t open-source, but you could self-host Headscale as a replacement.

iptables is deprecated… If you really do want to do your own custom thing you should learn nftables.

It’s not too bad if you use an outbound SMTP relay for sending. SMTP2Go is pretty good, and they have a free plan with 1000 emails per month. I use Mailcow and you can configure relays in their web UI, but it works just as well with the sender_dependent_relayhost_maps setting in Postfix.

Sure, it’s not fully self-hosted, but the interesting part to self-host is the storage of your emails, not the sending (which will just relay through other SMTP servers along the way anyways).

Unfortunately it looks like that one is for Apple devices, whereas I use Linux on desktop and Android on mobile.

There’s some, but I haven’t seen any that have the main features Plex and Plexamp have:

• Cross-fading when playing random tracks, but gapless playback when playing an album in order
• Analysis of the music using a local neutral network, such that you can tell it to play play “similar” sounding songs to the current one
• Automatic playlists - liked songs, decades, etc
• Downloads for offline playback
• Multiple libraries, for example I keep regular music separate from DJ mixes
• Equalizer with presets for common headphones

And probably other things I’m forgetting.

Thankfully CGNAT isn’t as common in the USA as it is in other countries. In the US, ISPs generally either offer native IPv4 (most of the major ones), or only use IPv6 and provide IPv4 at all. The latter is the case with a lot of the mobile carriers, especially T-Mobile. Your phone only gets an IPv6 address, and their network uses 464XLAT to connect to legacy IPv4-only servers.

Do you have a CVE for this?

Plex still has the most fully-featured music streaming app (Plexamp)

If you want to play files over SMB, you can just open the SMB file in the file explorer and double click it. I don’t understand how mpv is easier for that use case.

I’d say 9/10 aren’t doing proper backups given most people don’t actually do DR runs and verify whether they can fully recover from their backups. If you don’t test your backups, you don’t have backups!

Which containers do automatic backups?

Where’s the MySQL option? Some of my servers are running MySQL instead of MariaDB because it allowed binding to multiple IP addresses (although I think Maria has implemented this now), and some query plan optimizations were implemented in MySQL but not MariaDB.

You still need to know what database system is being used in order to make backups of the database. You can’t just snapshot or backup the data directory while a database is running, because you might end up with an inconsistent state that won’t restore properly. You need to either stop the DB before doing the backup, or use the relevant DB-specific tools to perform a backup.

The book was written to sell Windows Home Server.

At least there’s some competitors now, which could be used as drop-in replacements if Let’s Encrypt were to disappear.