cecilkorik

I build a Linux system with multiple NICs. It’s heavyweight for a router, and probably not very efficient, but it does the job very well and I love it. I’m using foomuuri to manage the NFTables and NAT and it was very easy (although it’s a very obscure piece of software and the documentation and community isn’t excessively comprehensive, you might have better luck with something more common but it works nicely for me). It can pull in all the adblocking lists and all that fun stuff. I find it pretty intuitive to configure, at least compared to the horrors of most networking/routing configuration nonsense.

For DHCP I tried using the ISC’s new “kea” in the hopes it would be modern and clean alternative to the venerable old isc-dhcp-server but it turned out to be a horrible mistake. They made some awful, insane, unjustifiable design decisions in that software. It gets confused about IP addresses already being claimed (by the exact same host/MAC) address because some arbitrary value changed in how it identifies itself, and then does absurd things with static leases, it just randomly decides to give it a dynamic lease instead, and then will fixate on that dynamic lease and never let it have the static lease back, I fought with it for months, it kept breaking my network for absolutely no reason and it was a nightmare.

Back to trusty old isc-dhcp-server for me. And of course bind for DNS, I’m a bit old-school but it’s very comfortable.

dnsmasq might be a lighter-weight and easier alternative you could consider, I think it does DHCP as well, convenient.

And of course, being a full Linux server means you can put all kinds of other stuff on it too. Stuff that needs to be both publicly visible and privately visible on the LAN seems like an obvious fit, but in fact it’s probably the worst place to put those services, because you run into issues with NAT hairpinning and other nonsense. For services that are strictly intended for the private LAN/VPN, or services that are strictly public facing, it can handle those just fine by restricting them to a specific interface. But you should avoid stuff that needs to listen on both sides of the connection, it can be done, but it’s tricky and annoying and not ideal.

If you need both internal and external access, port-forwarding from the outside through the NAT to another dedicated internal host is a much better solution if possible, it’s still a bit tricky (you may have to override the DNS for that domain internally to use the private IP instead of the public one) but it’s quite reliable and functional once you have it set up.

None of this is really for the faint of heart, it’ll likely require a fair bit of trial and error and physical access to the machine to resolve issues. But it’s a fun project and I think the end result is worth it.

I’m from the 40+ demographic but also weird and I don’t think it’s really about age or generation. I don’t care about how you reached this particular stage of enlightenment; all that matters is if you’re on the fediverse, y’all are my people.

Good man(/woman/person/other-identity-that-represents-you)!

My biggest complaint is calling it “Pi” anything, there are already way too many things called “Pi”, some of which are for Raspberry Pi, some of which aren’t, and then there’s Pi itself (the number) it’s just an all-around confusing name and it sometimes makes related things incredibly difficult to search for and find.

For legal purposes: I am not a person, I am a meat popsicle. I am a corporate asset however, so don’t get any ideas: I still have plenty of rights. More than people, at least.

It absolutely is, and it’s harder than it seems.

Content curation and the “discovery problem” (which includes the algorithms of how we deliver search, feeds, recommendations, related content, news, current events, and more) of how people discover new-to-them content is a genuine and important problem. In fact, I believe it’s so important that even the people who acknowledge it as a serious problem in places like the fediverse and the open web are generally underestimating how fundamentally important and challenging it actually is. It’s a foundational and crucial prerequisite for any sort of information sharing and that gives it so much more significance that I think people struggle to actually follow how its ripples turn into waves. And it’s a very hard one to solve, unfortunately.

(Editor’s note: I begin descending into meandering philosophical nonsense beyond this point, proceed at your own risk.)

Without tackling that problem, which is still a largely unsolved problem at scale, and preferably doing so honestly (unlike the manipulative big tech engagement-farming, advertisement-selling “solutions” to this problem) we’re always going to end up building disparate and disconnected silos of information that most people will never gain access to. And we all suffer because of that. We have come so close to tapping into the collective and cumulative knowledge that humanity and civilization has built up to this point, and now we are fighting against something similar to the last-mile problem of how do we actually enable all humanity to access and build on it. This requires both access and education, and it’s hugely challenging, massively widespread and most of the time people can’t even see the forest for the trees when it comes to this. We are on the verge of something genuinely transformative for civilization, and unlike the hype it’s not all doomsday scenarios about AI taking over and killing all humans, it’s about finding ways of giving real humans direct or indirect access to the overwhelming library of information that other humans have spent millennia building into a globe-spanning technological empire. That’s the transformative part.

It’s not about the success of companies or nations, it’s about how effective we are at giving information to other humans, it’s always been about that. The myth of Prometheus is sort of misleading. The person who actually changed the course of humanity’s future isn’t the one who first learned about fire (or any other tool we’ve learned to use), nor the one who discovered how to reliably create or use fire. In fact, there were probably many, many such people throughout humanity’s history, but they either died with the knowledge or kept it secret and hidden until it died out again after a few generations when they refused to share it and others became jealous or threatened by it. They achieved little. The person who actually changed humanity’s future is the person who, with that information, decided to teach it openly to someone else, not as magic or as a secret, but as something they could understand, something that became part of cultural practices, oral traditions, recorded histories, got turned into tools and equipment or some other form of institutionalized knowledge, something that people could then re-use and teach to the people who came after them, and let it spread from there to more and more people. Everything we have ever built is built entirely on top of education, teaching, documenting, and sharing information with others and thus with future generations and sustaining the information, building systems like language and writing to sustain that information further. Whenever that information comes to a dead end, it is lost, sometimes forever, and that’s not a cautionary tale, that can happen, it does happen, it has happened. Even recently. Our success and progress is measured by our ability to transfer our knowledge, not by the knowledge we have at any given moment. Dumping our collective creativity and thoughts and independent research into an unsearchable, disorganized pile to be archived, forgotten and lost serves no-one. But how do we share it with others? How do we distill it so that the endless firehose of what’s available still provides the information we need but doesn’t hit us with brutal, overwhelming amounts of it? That’s the fundamental question.

It was linked to catbox.moe for me, but I downloaded it myself using the code you provided and that worked, thanks. Also, found myself listed as one of the blacklisted users haha, I guess I pissed somebody off. Success!

The link to the policy file isn’t working, which is a shame, I’d love to dig through it.

I want the subreddit to be at least 95% NOT AI, but without completely excluding AI content (which must be tagged) and I don’t want to see everything tagged “[NOT AI]” because that’s genuinely obnoxious.

I understand that this is maybe not realistically achievable given the technical limitations within the Lemmy platform, but those limitations are not going to make such an implementation any less obnoxious, even if it is implemented that way for my benefit.

I would rather trust the mods and downvoters to clean up not-tagged or dishonestly Not-AI-tagged AI content, personally.

This is the kind of quirky, distinctly human non-slop that I can’t help but appreciate. Nice work, you lovely person you.

Email chains and mailing lists are not really a practical way to develop anymore, and it is increasingly anachronistic (as is the idea of tying your identity to an email which is also baked into basic git). This was the only realistic democratic and federated option when git was designed, but it was never the ideal one. Forgejo is trying to build a better, more ideal, also-federated alternative that is really designed for code collaboration from the ground up. Once the design is stabilized, there’s no reason it couldn’t get built into git also. I would love to be able to create a PR with git itself and have it automatically submitted to the origin repository.

Find something on craigslist or local pickup on ebay, check government/police surplus, or do some freecycling. At least in my area a lot of people leave their e-waste computers at Best Buy, often in the doorway, nobody cares if you come and pick them up. Even if they’re broken (and they’re often perfectly functional and sometimes surprisingly powerful) it likely only takes a few before you’ve got some functional combination of parts.

It’s likely not as much of a picker’s heaven anymore since I imagine the huge wave of windows-10-obsolete computers being thrown away for no reason has probably mostly subsided, but there is so much old and perfectly functional stuff out there it’s really unjustifiable to be buying something new especially at today’s modern prices.

The only problem with something like Revanced is that it can go away at literally any time. It could be shut down tomorrow and you’d lose access to everything it provides. That’s fine, or at least tolerable, if you ALSO have something self-hosted you can rely on in case that happens. If you don’t have downloaded music self-hosted, then you’re totally relying on Revanced permanently and you lose everything if it goes away. Maybe for something like music that’s an acceptable risk, but you have to consider it and decide where it is an acceptable risk. What are you going to do if those services you’re relying on go away?

Self-hosting, like you said, is about the independence, and the knowledge that once it’s up and running on your own hardware, it won’t just go away on its own, and it can’t just get “shut down” unless you choose to. You might not need that for every service you rely on, but there are probably at least some you would struggle without, and those are things you should consider self-hosting. The more you think about it, and the more comfortable you get with it, the more likely you’ll decide other things are important enough to self-host after all.

Gitea is developed by a corporation. If you trust corporations not to enshittify eventually, maybe Gitea will be the exception to the rule, but I doubt it, for sufficiently long definitions of “eventually”. Forgejo was forked specifically because the governance needed to be detached from the corporation, and that wasn’t going to happen with Gitea. The community of open-source developers mostly voted with their feet. Forgejo is, in my humble opinion, going places. Gitea is not. Nothing specifically wrong with it, per se, but it doesn’t really offer a sustainable development path forward I don’t think.

I use the same, I just forget about it because I hate and so rarely use my phone, haha.

Welcome. It’s smaller, but the people are better. Most of them, anyway. Sometimes some of them are brilliant and amazing, just like on Reddit. Sometimes some of them suck (sometimes including me) but it’s not so overwhelming because there aren’t as many. Small is beautiful, even if it is a little quieter than you’re used to. You’ll get used to it though, and it’s better for your mental health.

The simple, maybe unhelpful answer is that fail2ban needs to have two things at once: the logs, and a way to block the network traffic.

Where exactly you want those things to coincide is really up to you, there might only be one point that simultaneously has access to both those things, or there might be multiple points depending on how your systems and services and network is configured, or if you’re in a bad situation you might find you don’t really have any single point where both those things are simultaneously possible, in which case you’ll need to reconfigure something until you do have at least one point where both those things are again coincident.

As far as best practices, I can’t really say for sure, but I know that one of the more convenient ways to run it is usually on the same system, I usually run it outside of docker, on the host, which can pretty easily get access to the container’s logs if necessary, and let fail2ban block traffic on the whole system. For me, any system running any publicly accessible network services that allow password login gets a fail2ban instance.

A whole-network approach where you block the traffic on the firewall is fine too, if that’s what you prefer and what you want to work towards, but it’s probably going to be significantly more complex to set up because now you need to either figure out how to get fail2ban to be able to access your firewall or a way for your firewall to get the logs it needs.

It’s literally the core foundation of my entire self-hosting configuration. I could not live without Forgejo. I can’t imagine being shackled to Github or some other hosted provider anymore for something as important as my git repositories.

Gitea’s okay too in every practical respect, but Forgejo is the more community-led fork and in my opinion less likely to be corporatized and enshittified far in the future, so I’ve hitched my wagon there and couldn’t be happier. The fork is starting to diverge slowly, so it seems like direct migration is no longer possible. That said, git repositories are git repositories, and they have most of the important history and stuff inside them already, so unless you’re super attached to stuff like issues and whatever you can still migrate, you’ll just lose some stuff.

You don’t have any great options but you do have some options. You’ll need dynamic DNS, which you can get for free by various providers. This will manage a “dynamic” DNS entry for your occasionally changing, non-static IP at home. The dynamic DNS entry won’t be on your own domain name, it will be on the provider’s domain name. But wait! That’s just step one.

You can still get your own, fully-functional domain name, and you can have all the domains and subdomains you want, and set them up however you want, with one important restriction: You can’t use IP addresses (because yours is dynamic, and changes all the time and you would have to be constantly updating your domain every time it does, and there would be delays and downtime while everything gets updated).

Instead, your personal domains have to use CNAME records. This substitutes the IP from a different domain INTO your domain. So you CNAME every entry on your own fancy domains to point at your dynamic DNS provider, which manages the dynamic part of the problem for you and always gives the real IP you need. Nobody sees the dynamic DNS name, it’s there, but it’s happening behind the scenes, they still see your fancy personalized domain names.

It’s still not going to be perfect, it won’t work well or at all for certain services like email hosting (self-hosting this is not for the faint of heart anyway) that are very strict about how their DNS and IP addresses need to be set up, but it will likely be good enough for 99% of the stuff you want to self-host.

I’m always open to somebody’s redemption arc, even if I dislike them. The great thing about people is that we are capable of growth, even if not all of us always grow in the right direction, we always can.