NaibofTabr

I’m not sure you know what SNMP is

Oops, I was definitely confusing that with ICMP. Good point.

oneuptime.com/blog/post/…/view

Also Iot devices aren’t really much of a threat.

I consider it a threat if a device maps my local network, identifies the other devices I have connected, and/or monitors my network traffic and then sends a report on that back to its control server.

Also don’t put things on the internet. That is generally a really bad idea and will bite you in the butt eventually.

Ain’t that the truth. We really should just not.

I’m looking for advice to maximize security.

The most important answers to this all live outside your server. What is your home network like? Do you control the gateway? Do you have a dedicated firewall? Do you have devices segregated into VLANs so they can’t observe each other (especially IoT devices)? Do you have SNMP disabled?

1. Containers are not a security barrier. They cannot be, they never will be.
2. If you are defending against intrusion at your local file server, it is already too late. The call is coming from inside the house.

If you want security, you block all inbound and outbound traffic by default at your network firewall (not the server OS firewall), and then you open only the ports that you actually need, one by one. You set all the closed external ports to do not respond (“stealth” mode), so that anybody trying to reach your network from outside just gets nothing back except on the ports you specifically need to use. You segregate your internal network into logical areas, and you put things that need to talk to each other on their own VLAN, which may or may not have access to the upstream WLAN port depending on what they’re doing. You don’t allow crosstalk between VLANs except in very specific cases. You set static IPs and document them, so that you never have to ping or traceroute internally to find something, so you don’t need SNMP. Anybody trying to use SNMP is conducting surveillance on your network and should stick out from other traffic (some “smart”/IoT devices do this automatically - they are bad and should be treated as malicious and should not be allowed to phone home). And then you monitor your traffic at the firewall, and you deal with anything unexpected as it comes up (like once a week review the logs until you have a sense of what normal looks like on different days at various times, then maybe set a few automatic alerts for things that exceed normal-ish boundaries, then go to reviewing like once a month or so - you don’t need to be checking your logs hourly unless you have some reason to be actively paranoid).

If you handle everything correctly at the router/firewall level, you’re way way beyond the security of most residential and small business networks. You’re not, you know, impenetrable, but you’re at the point where somebody with experience and resources will have to be trying to break into your network specifically on purpose. If you’re that kind of target then nothing short of an actual SOC is going to help you, and running self-managed servers on your home network is a bad idea.

And possibly worse, sales calls are being replaced with bots.

the best device for school is a generic laptop that you can easily find guides and replacement parts for. That way you can fix things

This is the right idea. The qualifier is unnecessary. Repairability is always valuable. The more generic a device is, the more spare parts for it there will be on the market, and the longer those spare parts will be continue to be available on the market.

Buy common refurb/resale tech. Keep it for years, or decades.

memory is impossible dream

Yeah, it’s one of the best reasons to actually RTFM: “How does the guy that designed this think it works? What did they intend for it to do?”

I also find it’s useful when I’m vague on the specifics, especially with network protocols. I might be expecting it to do something and then find out, oh, this doesn’t solve that problem, I’m in the wrong config file.

Well the “critical/irreplaceable” qualifier is kind of important - that’s why I specified it. It’s up to you to decide what that means for your data and risk tolerance.

For everything that I consider irreplaceable, I’m not comfortable with anything less than 100% duplication on the live system, and also an external offline backup. Even with enterprise-grade hardware, I don’t trust storage devices, they’re all destined to fail. Storage is the most important part of a data server, and should be treated like it is constantly trying to light itself on fire, like a library with wooden shelves lit with torches. All the other components are just as unreliable, but more expendable.

Admittedly, when you account for hot standby drives, the cost is that my storage availability is only 40%. A 16TB storage pool is in fact 5x 8TB drives: 2 mirrored pairs and 1 standby. On the plus side, thanks to ZFS and TrueNAS those drives can be whatever, no need to worry about RAID considerations for matched drives. SAS or SATA? who cares? They can even be different speeds, ZFS will compensate. Buy whatever is the right size for the pool, let the system deal with the other issues.

Can you put a price on stability? longevity? peace of mind?

The server hardware is all old repurposed stuff - a desktop build from 2013, secondhand data center surplus, refurbished/used drives, none of it’s worth much and almost all of it is well past end of life, any part of it could fail without warning at any moment. It doesn’t matter, it is highly reliable because the redundancies have redundancies, including the boot drives. Trying to squeeze every bit of value out of the hardware is a losing game because it’s basically worthless anyway, but the same would be true if it were all new top-of-the-line gear. The hardware is expendable, the data is not. Buy more cheap hardware, plan for it to explode, learn how to build stable, recoverable systems.

Used data center drives are great for a home lab. They’re built like tanks for hundreds of thousands of hours of constant operation. Unless you’re running a business hosting a bunch of public-facing websites out of your garage, you don’t have that kind of workload (and if you are doing that you should just be buying new drives anyway and writing them off as a business expense).

Data center drives get replaced when they hit a ceiling of operating hours, with no actual faults, or if they experience any minor faults (it’s a business expense - drives are consumables - data centers have storage rooms of spares sitting around, they just replace them).

Any competent reseller should be able to give you a SMART report, and that should tell you if there are any major issues (generally they don’t get resold if there are, nobody will buy them). If the seller won’t give you a SMART report then obviously don’t buy, they’re either a scammer or incompetent.

If your array redundancy is set up properly then there’s no reason to be “scared” or trust in “good luck”. Assume luck will be bad. Mirror every storage device that has critical/irreplaceable data on it, and have at least one hot standby drive in every pool. Don’t bother with complicated striping schemes to try and scrape a little more storage space out of your drives, that’s dumb. One-to-one mirroring for every drive. Storage drives are consumables. They will fail, not if but when, even if you only buy new. Learn to read a SMART report. Enjoy quality hardware with no real problems at low prices.

You say you got PEBKAC faults, I feel bad for you son.
I got 99 problems but wetware ain’t one.

Computer networking is basically a completely different field from operating systems and programming, though obviously some of the concepts are relevant. Turns out plugging these things into each other so that they can share information in a useful way is kind of difficult. A lot of very smart people have been working on it for almost 70 years, and frankly it’s still a fucking mess, so don’t feel bad if you feel a little lost.

Starting with the basics is the right instinct, in my opinion. Start with the OSI model:

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…telkomuniversity.ac.id/7-osi-layer-the-building-… geeksforgeeks.org/…/osi-model-analogy-osi-7-layer…

This helps to break down the actual functioning of the network into logical steps. It’s very helpful when you’re trying to visualize the operarion of some of the more abstract bits of the technology stack (like TCP/UDP), and when you’re trying to think through what piece of it might be causing your problem in the moment (the router is on and the cables are plugged in, why is there no connection?). It’s a map that can help you when you’re lost. It’s also a guide to how a lot of people who work on networking technology think, so it can help you understand how things are supposed to work.

Beyond that, Professor Messer is a great resource: www.professormesser.com

If you feel reasonably confident with computer hardware components and various types of cable connectors, you can probably skip the A+ part and go straight into Network+. Because you’re doing this as a home hobbyist (not for the actual certification), I recommend just listening to the courses like you would a podcast. Don’t try to memorize or fully understand everything, just use it to get a grasp of the terminology and purpose of the various pieces.

I also recommend taking on a project to gain experience. Implenting PiHole pi-hole.net for your home network will cover routing, DHCP and DNS, plus you can do it with a Docker container.

Who’s that then?

Must be a king

How d’you know ‘e’s a king eh?

He ‘asn’t got shit all o’er ‘im

Oh yeh, right

There are other video sharing sites, like Odysee or BitChute or of course PeerTube, but there is no alternative to the 30 years of content that is YouTube.

There is a JB Weld UV glue product that comes with a UV LED attached:

www.jbweld.com/product/superweld-light-activated

It’s a blend, not pure UV resin, that will harden quickly where the light hits it but will also slowly cure without UV exposure, so the inner parts of the joint will harden over time.

Apple’s evil style

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HMS Target Practice

HMS Leaky Bucket

HMS Smoke on the Water

Yeah if you’re down to put the effort into fault tracing, you’ll need an oscope. Something like this: ebay.io/m/PDLGdu will work fine.

It will take some time, but if you’re lucky you’ll find it’s just a capacitor that you can replace cheaply. If you’re unlucky you might find that it’s a faulty IC, in which case you might have to replace an entire circuit board from a donor unit anyway.

You’re going to have a hard time pinning this down to a specific component without a circuit diagram. I did find that there’s a service manual for this unit: elektrotanya.com/…/download.html

Seems to be legitimate and has diagrams.

I would recommend starting on the output side - is the popping present on every speaker output? Both left and right? Use a very simple speaker for this, one that doesn’t require its own power source, just a red and black wire. Also, is the popping present with no input audio?

If you can narrow it to a certain output you can backtrack it to a specific section of the circuit that feeds that output. Alternatively, if it’s present on all outputs then it must be a component that is common to all, and therefore behind the area that splits to the different outputs.

An oscilloscope would be handy - you could identify the faulty signal at the speaker output, then check points along the path backward. Half-splitting is your friend. You don’t have to buy an expensive piece of lab equipment, a cheap $30-40 digital oscope will be good enough.

Another option would be to throw parts at it. I see units listed for parts on eBay for ~$80. You could try swapping out circuit boards one at a time.

I mean… We do have the Wayback Machine

You can see what the Internet was like in 1996:

McDonald’s

GeoCities

Microsoft

I thought we were an autonomous collective.

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What if I want to cut my spaghetti?

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