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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: September 14th, 2023

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  • Rather than leave another long reply to read, I’ll leave my thoughts simple: if you have another computer you’re not using, try Linux mint and see if it fits your needs. If it’s too much and you can’t get the time needed to figure things out, 11 might be the choice (for now).

    But either way, keep Linux on the second and learn a little bit as you get time to! :)


  • As a professional, my reasoning for NOT using AI is as follows:

    1. I don’t want to lose the muscle memory of what I do. Sure AI might be able to do annoying things like test templates… But that’s not a skill I want to forget or lose, as self written unit tests have actually helped me catch mistakes that “would have worked” in prod (i.e. Code functions, but has undesired outcomes). AI can’t usually spot that.
    2. As a person who digs deep in cyber security and monitors heavily the malicious realm, I’m paranoid of malicious or weak code being spit into my repos.
    3. I’m a privacy nut, too. Most “good” AI solutions are anti privacy.
    4. If anyone here has done a proper code review of AI generated code from coworkers, they should know it adds a ton of extra time because of errors, inconsistencies with repo practices, etc and actually wastes the time of the developer and reviewers.

    Am I saying “NEVER AI?”? nah. But it’s far from ready for me personally to even consider for programming purposes. I’m also well aware this isn’t what many others think or feel; I don’t scream at people for using it if it’s what they feel helps them.


  • I’m not familiar with those two… But I’ve always been hunting for the perfect replacement.

    I started with Nextcloud Deck and used it extensively until they got rid of my markdown support.

    So then I tried taiga and a few others before landing on Wekan. Really great software, but the terrible API, horrible mobile support, and slow outdated UI drove me away…

    Now I’m on Vikunja, which ironically doesn’t support markdown text. So I basically returned to square 1 with a better UI lol. I almost stayed on Wekan because of the checklist support, but the faster speeds, nice API, and slick UI in vikunja landed me here… for now.


  • If you go for btrfs, be careful going backwards on kernel versions.

    I had upgraded my kernel on Gentoo, which also happen to include a btrfs update. Booted up and found the latest kernel didn’t like something about my full disk luks encryption with RAID mirror setup (for the root partition, and unrelated to btrfs), so I decided to go back to the previous kernel. Big mistake.

    My entire root partition got corrupted to hell. It mounted read only at first so I decided to try to go through regular repair steps. It got worse. Got to an eventual step that someone said could take a few weeks to restore (forgot the commands). This isn’t an option for my server. So with snapshots broken, unable to use the old and now new kernel due to corruption from attempting to go back to a previous kernel, I had to restore with a full partition clone backup I had created prior to the kernel upgrade… Also went back to ext4 again afterwards.

    Btrfs treated me really well for a few years, and snapshots and performance are great, but once it hits a hiccup, you might in a world of trouble. Don’t think I’ve ever run into such a thing with ext4 over the years, which is why I reverted to it - not saying it’s immune to such things, but this is just me.

    Not sure if zfs would have such a dramatic situation, but maybe something to consider about btrfs if you ever decide you’ll need the ability to go back a kernel version due to whatever reason.




  • My personal advice, secure it down to only permitting what needs it, regardless of your trust to the network.

    Treat each device as if they’ve been compromised and the attacker on the compromised device is now trying to move laterally. Example scenario: had you blocked all devices except your laptop or phone to your server, your server wouldn’t have been hacked because someone went through a hacked cloud-connected HVAC panel.

    I lock down everything and grant access only to devices that should have access. Then on top of that, I enable passwords and 2FA on everything as if it were public… Nothing I self host is public. It’s all behind my network firewall and router firewall, and can only be accessed externally by a VPN.


  • Yeah, in my example, I have various genres of music I listen to and some days I’m in the mood for one and not another. Some of those might have subgenres I am in the mood to listen to. For example: Metal might break into subfolders called black metal, thrash metal, melodic metal, etc. Based on where I feel they belong the most. If I’m in the mood for some melodic metal today, I’ll go there. Or EDM, I’ll have a folder for Psytrance, another for House, etc…

    Rather than trying to edit the metadata on thousands and thousands of files every time I change media systems as I’ve done over these years, it’s 100x simpler for me to just navigate to the folders directly and not care about how the system “wants” to organize it. Every media system wants to organize differently and I’m kind of tired of having to spend hours editing all my music just to get it to organize the way that works for me, so that’s where I’ve gotten to the point of just using folder structures.


  • I could never get Plex to work the way I wanted it to, so I’m actually someone who moved to Kodi and then to Emby. Once I got into Emby, I’ve yet to leave it. My biggest problem now is that I want to leave it for Jellyfin, but the lack of many things I love about Emby have never been moved to Jellyfin.

    For example, I have a very specific organization of my music libraries I use to navigate what I want to listen to much quicker, since I’m into all kinds of genres of music. Emby allows me to navigate by folder structure, so if I’m in the mood for heavy metal one day, go to that folder. If classical another day, go there. Jellyfin on the other hand didn’t have folder structure view and even though it’s one of the top requested features for the past few years when I last checked, it’s never been added…

    I think the day Jellyfin does fill in these gaps, assuming new ones aren’t introduced due to Emby also improving, I’ll finally jump over.

    I guess to the original topic, I do think Jellyfin exceeds Plex though lol.





  • Raid 1 has saved my server a couple of times over from disaster. I make weekly cold backups, but I didn’t have to worry about it when my alert came in notifying me which drive went dead - just swap, rebuild, move along. So yeah I’d say it’s definitely worth it. Just don’t treat raid as a backup solution - and yes, continue to use an external cold storage backup solution as you mentioned. Fires, exploding power supplies, ransomware, etc don’t care if you’re using raid or not.



  • I’d say anyone wanting to go this deep into a home monitoring setup will likely go with what works best for them instead of reading and following the entirety of this guide… I’m one of those people…

    Wrote my own log parsing software to put into a database, display and alert through grafana, which is alerting through a homemade webhook that sends a notification to ntfy based on severity… And I also use uptime Kuma like mentioned, but my notifications channel is ntfy. No cloudflare for my internal services, only wireguard to connect home and use everything. And definitely no telegram.

    Plenty of other stuff setup, but my security alerts and monitoring rely heavily on the syslog/grafana server which helps me monitor everything.


  • I converted my gaming machine into a server as well. I actually took the graphics card out as I couldn’t find a major use for it, but kept the 12 core Ryzen and upped it to 128gb memory. It now self host way too many things, including a few game servers my friends and I play… But even with all this, CPU carries along nicely and not even at half memory consumption (yet).

    But as others have asked, what’s your goal? Don’t overkill it if you’re only hosting one service or something. If you’re doing a lot like I do, then up the RAM. And seriously consider whether the GPU is even useful or needed if you’re not using a desktop environment.