Max_P
@Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me
- Comment on Retailers who pack & ship HDDs right?! 13 hours ago:
Ordered two drives from them, came in very well packaged and even included the PWDIS adapter. Very good deals. Could throw the box across the yard and the drives would probably survive.
- Comment on Starting to self host 1 day ago:
As a starting point. Are there any hardware recommendations for a toy home server?
Whatever you already have. Old desktop, even old laptop (those come with a built-in battery backup!). Failing what, Raspberry Pis are pretty popular and cheap and low power consumption, which makes it great if you’re not sure how much you want to spend.
Otherwise, ideally enough to run everything you need based on rough napkin math. Literally the only requirement is that the stuff you intend to run fits on it. For reference, my primary server which hosts my Lemmy instance (and emails and NextCloud and IRC and Matrix and Minecraft) is an old Xeon processor close to a third gen Intel i7 with 32GB of DDR3 memory, there’s 5 virtual machines on it (one of which is the Lemmy one), and it feels perfectly sufficient for my needs. I could make it work with half of that no problem. My home lab machine is my wife’s old Dell OptiPlex.
Speaking of virtual machines, you can test the waters on your regular PC by just loading whatever OS you choose in a virtual machine (libvirt if you’re on Linux, VirtualBox or VMware otherwise). Then play with it. When it works makes a snapshot. Continue playing with it, break it, revert to the last good snapshot. A real home server will basically be the same but as a real machine that’s on 24/7. It’s also useful to test things out as a practice run before putting them on your real server machine. It’s also give you a rough idea how much resources it uses, and you can always grow your VM until it fits and then know how much you need for the real thing.
Don’t worry too much about getting it right (except the backups, get those right, verify and test those regularly). You will get it wrong and eventually tear it down and rebuild it better what what you learn (or want to learn). Once you gain more experience it’ll start looking more and more like a real server setup, out of your own desire and needs.
- Comment on Starting to self host 1 day ago:
I feel like a lot of the answers in this thread are throwing a lot of things with a lot of moving parts: Unraid, Docker, YunoHost, all that stuff. Those all still require generally knowing what the hell a Docker container is, how to use them and such.
I wouldn’t worry about any of that and start much simpler than that: just grab any old computer you want to be your home server or rent a VPS and start messing with it. Just pick something you think would be cool to run at home. Anything you run on your personal computer you wish was up 24/7? Start with that.
Ultimately there’s no right or wrong way to do things. It’s all about that learning experience and building up that experience over time. You get good by trying out things, failing and learning. Don’t want to learn Linux? Put Windows on it. You’ll get a lot of flack for it maybe, but at the very least over time you’ll probably learn why people don’t use Windows for server stuff generally. Or maybe you’ll like it, that happens too.
Just pick a project and see it to completion. Although if you start with NextCloud and expose it publicly, maybe wait to be more comfortable with the security aspect before you start putting copies of your taxes and personal documents on it just in case.
What would you like to self host to get started?
- Comment on Mozilla is already revising its new Firefox terms to clarify how it handles user data 6 days ago:
They have no business collecting any data in the first place. If I wanted my data collected I’d be using Chrome like everyone else. I’m not choosing to use their buggy ass inferior and slower browser for any of Mozilla’s services, I’m choosing it because I want to support non-Chromium browsers and regain my privacy.
There’s no point whatsoever to using Firefox if it’s just a worse Chrome.
- Comment on is shadowbanning a thing on lemmy? 1 week ago:
Nope. The protocol is way too public for shadowbanning.
You can be banned by other instances than your home instance, when that happens no new post/comment from you will federate to that instance in particular but the others still sees it as normal.
- Comment on Qualcomm and Google team up to offer 8 years of Android updates 1 week ago:
Because phones are a mess of out of tree patches specific to that phone model with zero hope of being upstreamed into the Linux kernel without a cleaner rewrite because it’s not good, it’s made to work and nothing more.
It’s improved but companies like Qualcomm also used to basically drop the code to the manufacturers when the chip launches and then move on with little maintenance for the code and stop maintaining the code once the chip is not produced anymore. Manufacturers don’t have the expertise to maintain that forever nor the will, so you end up with a kernel that keeps aging and isn’t keeping up with Android and the community hasn’t been successful in integrating it all either.
Google’s been pushing hard for this to improve but they’re the only ones to even care. Samsung and others would much rather sell you a new phone.
- Comment on Why should someone join the Fediverse? 1 week ago:
Yeah the best campaigns I’ve seen for the Fediverse were reactionary to something happening on big socials: Lemmy when the API fiasco happened, Mastodon when Elon bought Twitter, recently Pixelfed to replace Instagram, and Loops the last 2 weeks before TikTok was about to get banned.
People don’t change because it’s better, they change because they’re pissed off at their current platform.
- Comment on Why should someone join the Fediverse? 1 week ago:
Good luck with “exhaustive” because people have different unique reasons to come to the fediverse. It would be a very long list.
For the average user I’d approach it with points that affects everyone:
- We can’t have a Twitter-style take over
- We can’t have a Reddit API disaster
- It’s distributed so while parts of the fediverse come and go, you’ll never lose the platform as a whole.
- It’s distributed geographically so one hostile country can’t silence information from other countries like Facebook and Twitter are doing.
- No algorithms designed to keep you scrolling forever
- No ads or commercial content being pushed by the algorithm
- Loads of choices for instances and moderation style for everyone’s taste.
- Users get to choose how they want to browse and with which apps: you’re not stuck with the latest crappy redesign you hate. You’ll never be forced to have reels and stories in your feed if you don’t want that.
- Not controlled by big corporations like Meta and Google, but rather the community for the community.
- If you have sensitive communities you can own the servers to ensure it’s survival in situations where Facebook would immediately ban that page/group.
- No bullshit AI products shoved in your face like Grok or Reddit Answers.
- You as a user are in control of what you see and don’t see.
- No advertiser friendly content policies forcing you to use stupid words like “unalive”, “pewpew”, “corn” or algorithmic downprioritization because you swore.
- If you prefer to browse Instagram-like, you still get to see Twitter-like post, and you friends can see your photos from a Twitter-like interface. Or you can have a Twitter-like interface and interact with Reddit-like posts on Lemmy.
It’s harder to onboard and figure out by the common people but it would be the final platform switch. You may move instances over time but you will never be left looking for a new platform because the old one enshittified. You just move to an instance that hasn’t, done.
- Comment on Why did Microsoft use Windows 3.1 for the Windows 95 setup? 2 weeks ago:
It does work with plain VGA still, it’ll even use 32 CPU cores to render that. It is still pretty slow though, slower than RDP into the same VM even.
The old stuff just runs great for a minimal bootstrap environment. It’s there, might as well use it instead of designing a stripped down Windows 11 UI just for the installer.
It’s all there in the final install too, if you kill dwm you’ll get those same Vista decorations (and broken modern apps).
- Comment on Why did Microsoft use Windows 3.1 for the Windows 95 setup? 2 weeks ago:
While they do use Windows PE for modern versions of Windows, it still often looks like the previous version. Windows 8 all the way to pre-24H2 Windows 11 have Windows Vista basic decorations in the installer, like they basically never updated the installer environment.
- Comment on USA | White House bans AP journalists from Oval Office amid continued Gulf dispute 3 weeks ago:
Imagine the outrage if the democrats banned Fox News from the white house press conferences.
That simple question would solve so many problems… Would you be outraged if your opponent did what you’re doing? If yes, then it’s fucking bad.
- Comment on Google abandons 'do no harm' AI stance, opens door to military weapons 4 weeks ago:
A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.
IBM, in 1979.
This is wide open to send a nuke on allies and blame the AI.
- Comment on Changes to Lemmy/PieFed to adjust to living under fascism 4 weeks ago:
No idea, never used it, I just happen to know it exists.
- Comment on Changes to Lemmy/PieFed to adjust to living under fascism 4 weeks ago:
You probably want something like Aether instead of the fediverse: getaether.net
It’s peer to peer, encrypted, anonymous, ephemeral and all that.
- Comment on Changes to Lemmy/PieFed to adjust to living under fascism 4 weeks ago:
The fediverse is plainly just not appropriate for this. The ActivityPub makes too many assumptions that the data is fully public.
End-to-end encryption: Encrypt all user communications, private messages, and sensitive data
That could work probably, it’s a lot of work and will break interoperability but could be done. You’d still have to vet your users very well though, which might contradict the next point. It takes one user to leak everything.
Anonymous accounts: Allow users to create accounts without requiring personally identifiable information (PII), such as email or phone numbers. How can we balance this with the need to combat spam?
There’s a fair amount of instances already that will let you sign up with a disposable email
Tor and VPN Integration: Ensure compatibility with privacy tools like Tor, and provide guidance on using VPNs.
A fair chunk of instances already allow VPN/Tor traffic. The bigger ones don’t because of spam and CSAM and all that crap, but even Reddit is fully functional over a VPN.
Remove or minimize data collection, including IP addresses, geolocation, and device information. No web server logs.
That’d be very hard to enforce, and the instance owners have to do some collection for the sake of being able to handle lawsuits and pass the blame. But you can protect yourself using a VPN or Tor.
Ephemeral content: auto-deleting posts, messages, etc after a set period.
As an admin, I can literally just restore last month’s backup and undelete everything that got deleted. If someone’s seen it, you must assume it can at minimum have been screenshot.
Instance chooser that flags which instances are in unsafe countries.
Anyone can get a VPS in just about any country, so you’d have to personally verify the owner which is PII and probably one of the most vulnerable part of the group. You take down the owner you take down the whole thing.
Once again however users have plenty of choices already for that, if you trust your instance’s admins.
Defederate from instances in unsafe countries?
Same as previous point. Plus, one can still use the API to fetch the content anyway.
Better opsec around instance owners, admins and moderators
Also pretty hard to enforce.
You probably want something like Aether: getaether.net
- Comment on Is lemmy slow for anyone else? 4 weeks ago:
Lemmy is decentralized, there is no singular Lemmy as a whole unless you’re talking specifically about the server software. As a user you interact with your home instance, in your case lemmy.world.
Most connectivity problems and slowdowns are instance-specific unless you’re talking about a federation problem specifically, for example you posted but it doesn’t show up on other instances, that’s a problem between your instance and the community’s instance.
In your case you most likely just hit something on lemmy.world’s side. Lemmy as a whole is way too small for them to even care about it.
- Comment on UPS and servers : simulated sine wave good? 2 months ago:
Reposting my answer from the original thread. Maybe a bit rough for AskElectronics but still gets the gist.
To kind of visually see it, I found this thread of some guy that took oscilloscope captures of the output of their UPS and they’re all pseudo-sines: …anandtech.com/…/so-i-bought-an-oscilloscope.2413…
As you can see, the power isn’t very smooth at all. It’s good enough for a lot of use cases and lower end power supplies, because they just shove that into a bridge rectifier and capacitors. Higher end power supplies have tighter margins, and are also more likely to have more safety features to protect the PC so they can get into protection mode and shut off. Because bad power can mean dips in power to the system which can cause calculation errors which is very undesirable especially in on a server. It probably also messes with power factor correction circuits, which is something cheap PSUs often cheap out on but a good high quality one would have and may shut down because of it.
As you can see in those images too, it spends a significant amount of time at 0V (no power, that’s at the middle of the screen) whereas the sine waves spends an infinitely short time at 0, it goes positive and then negative immediately. All the time spent at 0, you rely on big capacitors in the PSU to hold enough charge to make it to the next burst of power. With the sine wave they’d hold just long enough (we’re going down to 12V and 5V from 120/240V input, so the amount of time normally spent at or below ±12V is actually fairly short).
It’s technically the same average power, so most devices don’t really care. It really depends on the design of the particular unit, some can deal with some really bad power inputs and manage just fine and some will get damaged over long term use. Old linear ones with an AC transformer on the input in particular can be unhappy because of magnetic field saturation and other crazy inductor shenanigans.
Pure sine UPSes are better because they’re basically the same as what comes out of the wall outlet. Line interactive ones are even better because they’re ready to take over the moment power goes out and exactly at the same spot in the sine wave so the jitter isn’t quite as bad during the transition. Double conversion is the top tier because they always run off the battery, so there’s no interruption for the connected computer at all. Losing power just means the battery isn’t being charged/kept topped off from the wall anymore so it starts discharging.
- Comment on UPS and servers : simulated sine wave good? 2 months ago:
To kind of visually see it, I found this thread of some guy that took oscilloscope captures of the output of their UPS and they’re all pseudo-sines: …anandtech.com/…/so-i-bought-an-oscilloscope.2413…
As you can see, the power isn’t very smooth at all. It’s good enough for a lot of use cases and lower end power supplies, because they just shove that into a bridge rectifier and capacitors. Higher end power supplies have tighter margins, and are also more likely to have more safety features to protect the PC so they can get into protection mode and shut off. Because bad power can mean dips in power to the system which can cause calculation errors which is very undesirable especially in on a server. It probably also messes with power factor correction circuits, which is something cheap PSUs often cheap out on but a good high quality one would have and may shut down because of it.
As you can see in those images too, it spends a significant amount of time at 0V (no power, that’s at the middle of the screen) whereas the sine waves spends an infinitely short time at 0, it goes positive and then negative immediately. All the time spent at 0, you rely on big capacitors in the PSU to hold enough charge to make it to the next burst of power. With the sine wave they’d hold just long enough (we’re going down to 12V and 5V from 120/240V input, so the amount of time normally spent at or below ±12V is actually fairly short).
It’s technically the same average power, so most devices don’t really care. It really depends on the design of the particular unit, some can deal with some really bad power inputs and manage just fine and some will get damaged over long term use.
Pure sine UPSes are better because they’re basically the same as what comes out of the wall outlet. Line interactive ones are even better because they’re ready to take over the moment power goes out and exactly at the same spot in the sine wave so the jitter isn’t quite as bad during the transition. Double conversion is the top tier because they always run off the battery, so there’s no interruption for the connected computer at all. Losing power just means the battery isn’t being charged/kept topped off from the wall anymore so it starts discharging.
- Comment on Single instance Lemmy? 2 months ago:
Latest. 0.18 is very old, over a year old, later versions dealt with a lot of scaling/performance problems.
That sounds very typical of YunoHost to have wildly outdated software
- Comment on Single instance Lemmy? 2 months ago:
- It seems to make a LOT of calls to other servers. Its almost constantly pinging other servers asking for updates.
The fediverse works the other way around: other instances push activities to yours. If you have a lot of subcriptions to large communities like !technology@lemmy.world it will indeed receive a lot of activities.
- It gets de-federated almost instantly from popular instances. Which kinda sucks.
Mine’s not been defederated from anywhere, not even Beehaw
- It uses up quite a bit of CPU compared to other federated applications.
It definitely uses a fair bit of CPU but it is ingesting a fair amount of data, but still not a ton either:
Although I do hear PieFed is a lot lighter.
- Subscribing to instances seems to work most of the time, but sometimes it just errors out and I have to re-do it.
That settled for me after a week or so of running mine. My subscriptions always go through.
- Comment on Beginner asking for advice on self hosting a lemmy instance 2 months ago:
If you look at my username you’ll see I do run my own instance so I’ve gone through the process :)
- Comment on Beginner asking for advice on self hosting a lemmy instance 2 months ago:
I would probably just skip the Lemmy Easy Deploy and just do a regular deployment so it doesn’t mess with your existing. Getting it running with just Docker is not that much harder and you just need to point your NGINX to it. Easy Deploy kind of assumes it’s got the whole machine for itself so it’ll try to bind on the same ports as your existing NGINX, so does the official Ansible as well.
You really just need a postgres instance, the backend, pictrs, the frontend and some NGINX glue to make it work. I recommend stealing the files from the official Ansible, as there’s a few gotchas in the NGINX config as the frontend and backend share the same host and one is just layered on top.
- Comment on Beginner asking for advice on self hosting a lemmy instance 2 months ago:
Hasn’t cost me a penny, hurray for unmetered bandwidth
- Comment on Docker firewall question 4 months ago:
With Docker, the internal network is just a bridge interface. The reason most firewall rules don’t apply is a combination of:
- Containers have their own namespace including network namespace, so each container have a blank iptables just for them.
- For container communication, that goes through the FORWARD table, not the INPUT/OUTPUT ones.
- Docker adds its own rules to ensure that this works as expected.
The only thing that should be affected by the host firewall is the proxy service Docker uses to listen on a port on the host and send it to the container.
When using Docker, each container acts like an independent machine, and your host gets configured to act as a router. You can firewall Docker containers, the rules just need to be in the right place to work.
- Comment on Is a filter for muting Lemmy 'power users' possible? 4 months ago:
You can block them and over time it should get better, or you can write a script that does some checks and blocks them for you.
- Comment on Telegram is exposing their users privacy. 5 months ago:
Telegram was built to protect activists and ordinary people from corrupt governments and corporations – we do not allow criminals to abuse our platform to evade justice.
So who gets to pick what’s a lawful request and criminal activity? It’s criminal in some states to seek an abortion or help with an abortion, so would they hand out the IPs of those “criminals”? Because depending on who you ask some will tell you they’re basically murderers. And that’s just one example.
Good privacy apps have nothing to hand out to any government, like Signal.
- Comment on AT&T is displeased with T-Mobile Priority, calls it out as a confusing marketing campaign 5 months ago:
Because AT&T doesn’t have confusing branding such as the whole 5Ge which is really just them catching up with 4G+ that everyone else already had but totally not to trick users into thinking they’re getting 5G
- Comment on Can I DIY water backwashing through my basement drain? 5 months ago:
I’d at least get a plumber to check it out. You could snake it yourself probably but you could also make it worse. If the pipe’s broken, you might as well just get more debris falling into it and clogging it further.
A regular plumber visit/check usually isn’t that expensive. Not cheap but far from 20k expensive.
It could also be connected to your flooding too, so you probably actually want to at least evaluate the damage ASAP. If the pipe’s broken, you just have a convenient pipe to drain all the rain water straight to your basement.
- Comment on I tried to selfhost Nextcloud at work 5 months ago:
Having the web server be able to overwrite its own app code is such a good feature for security. Very safe. Only need a path traversal exploit to backdoor
config.php! - Comment on I tried to selfhost Nextcloud at work 5 months ago:
Yep, and I’d guess there’s probably a huge component of “it must be as easy as possible” because the primary target is selfhosters that don’t really even want to learn how to set up Docker containers properly.
The AIO Docker image is an abomination. The other ones are slightly more sane but they still fundamentally mix code and data in the same folder so it’s not trivial to just replace the app.
In Docker, the auto updater should be completely neutered, it’s the wrong way to update the app.
