i_am_not_a_robot

MagicDNS works the same as in regular Tailscale. It creates DNS names that are visible to devices connected to the VPN.

On my coax network, which is also completely isolated from any TV or internet signals, I was not getting the advertised 2.5gbps and I was getting about 4ms of latency, and they would very occasionally disconnect. I don’t know if that’s typical or if my MoCA adapters were bad.

Even if they’re all working perfectly, unlike on switched networks like Ethernet, the signal between device A and device B also uses bandwidth on the connection to device C. I don’t know if there’s some trick with different channels to lessen this effect, but there’s no switch in your MoCA network and all cables will carry all data destined for any endpoint at the same time.

I ended up replacing the most heavily used MoCA link with essentially this exact setup, including replacing the included 1gbps modules with 10gbps: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2FbzCyiNr4 Besides being over 4x faster, I don’t need to deal with ensuring that latency sensitive wireless devices are connecting to the access point on the same side of the MoCA link as the other device.

A. It’s not an OS update. It’s part of Google Play Services.
B. I’m pretty sure this applies even on Android 12 because it’s Google Play Services. Years back, Google started moving functionality like this into Google Play Services so your phone could get new features even if you had a bad manufacturer and OS updates were months or even years behind. It was introduced as a feature then.
C. This does work, but some apps (notably banking apps) block non-Google Android, even if there is no legitimate security reason for doing so. This will vary by OS and even phones running the same OS. Official GrapheneOS builds for officially supported devices probably have the best compatibility with apps in terms of the apps not blocking your phone. Maybe there are some rooted phones that patch apps to bypass “integrity” checks. Some features of your phone just will not work, even if you have a third-party OS with official support for your phone (contactless payments). Hopefully the EU gets on this and at least Europeans or people who can trick their phones into thinking they are Europeans will get some of their control back.
D. Most people can’t live without the apps that are available only on Google’s store or that require Google Play Services. That’s most apps. Even if you don’t need those specific apps, you will need to deal with other stuff like setting up Unified Push if you want to receive timely notifications. My parents are not going to set up a Unified Push gateway.

Porkbun is a registrar that also has DNS hosting, and ACME DNS challenges just need DNS hosting. I also use Porkbun and I am happy with them as a registrar, but their DNS service wasn’t working out for me and I host my DNS records on Desec. It’s working well for me after I increased some timeouts in my ACME client configuration but I can’t recommend it if you’re having problems with Porkbun because the Desec rate limits are strict and their TTLs are high and if you don’t already know what you’re doing you’re likely to spend a lot of time waiting for propagation or rate limits.

If they cut the validity time for certificates, I’d expect them to also increase the rate limits by a corresponding amount. It’s not like they have anything to gain by making it so regular users can’t use the service anymore. They can’t upsell you to Lets Encrypt Premium with a higher rate limit.

Is this why everything has been broken for me recently? I use an RSS reader so my entrypoint into the site is by clicking a link directly to a post. I do not see Anubis when I do that. Firefox was able to load the page content, but the scripts and stylesheets were all coming back with “corrupted content” errors and that made it impossible to comment or vote through the web app. I had to use Interstellar on my phone instead.

I went to the front page to try to find this community to see if other people were having the same problem and I got Anubis, and then the front page loaded successfully with all its styles and scripts. Now when I refresh other pages that I had previously opened from the RSS reader they load correctly as well.

You can use exit nodes, but at least in my case that would be really stupid of me to do. If you have a router connected to a VPN and you use that router as an exit node, all of your traffic is going from your mobile device to the VPN server to your router back to the VPN server to the destination host and any return traffic takes the same route in reverse, adding additional latency and limiting your bandwidth to the minimum of any link in either direction along the entire chain. You can potentially exclude the mobile to router Tailscale traffic from the VPN tunnel to skip a little bit of latency, but it probably doesn’t help much unless your VPN server is in a third location that is not along the path between your current location and your router. My slow upload speed would become a slow download speed, and when I travel long distances my latency to services at my destination would become half a second.

What I do is I have a travel router that I deploy where I’m staying, and that router has a site-to-site VPN with my home network. That way traffic doesn’t need to travel across continents to reach a server only 20ms away.

I also have a set of services that are exposed directly to the internet and I can reach those servers without Tailscale. I can live with being connected to a different VPN and not having the Tailscale-only services.

It may be possible to just use Wireguard. The main benefit of Tailscale instead of Wireguard is that two Tailscale nodes that are next to each other can connect directly without going through another server, and this is accomplished by continuously reconfiguring Wireguard. If you just want a private network VPN where you have a fixed route to your private network and a fixed route to a public internet VPN, you can do that without Tailscale. If you are traveling with a phone and a laptop, connections from the phone’s VPN IP to the laptop’s VPN IP will be slower as they route through your VPN server, but they will work.

This is sadly the only way to do it on Android. It’s not supported by Headscale and it only supports Mullvad.

You can load models for Frigate yourself, and the documentation tells you how to do it, but the recommended Frigate+ models are easier to use. For example, downloading and configuring YOLO-NAS becomes just copying and pasting a plus:// URL when you’re signed in to Frigate+.

As another example, I would consider GitLab not to be free because GitLab is a for-profit company, the open source version of GitLab intentionally lacks features that would be particularly useful to business users, and you can pay GitLab to get those features in a special GitLab distribution distributed under difference licensing terms. If GitLab had a plugin model, and unaffiliated developers created paid plugins for those features, then I think GitLab itself could be considered free. But if paid plugins were developed by the same developers, would that make it not free again?

More strange examples:

• Redis, which relicensed to a non-Free license in 2024, but would have still been usable by most people who are self hosting. Redis is available under AGPL since 2025.
• All Hashicorp software, such as Terraform and Vault, which relicensed to a non-Free license in 2023, but is still usable for most people who are self hosting.
• Docker, which is only free on Linux since it relicensed in 2022. Docker Engine only runs on Linux, but the closed-source Docker Desktop runs Docker Engine in a Linux VM and wraps the API to make it almost seamless on Windows and Mac OS, and for that you may need to pay a subscription.

I guess to me it seems like there’s this gray area where you start having to think about intention and whether the software is really intended to be usable for the purposes that people in this community will want to use it for without having to pay the person doing the promoting.

Are Home Assistant and Frigate exempted? Home Assistant is free and open source and you can self host it, but there is a built-in feature where you can pay a subscription to use Nabu Casa’s ingress server and cloud GPUs, and many of the integrations are only useful if you have paid money for some piece of hardware or have a subscription to a cloud service. Frigate is free and open source, but it has built-in support for specially packaged computer vision models that are offered for a fee that supports the project. I wouldn’t consider either application crippleware, but you can pay money to people who are affiliated with the project for a direct benefit that is related to the software.

You’re already doing more than companies that charge people to host their photos.

KDE Connect can do all three of these.