Incessant tinkerer since the 70’s. Staunch privacy advocate. SelfHoster. Musician of mediocre talent. https://soundcloud.com/hood-poet-608190196

  • 34 Posts
  • 1.79K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 24th, 2025

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  • i thought linux was a small community!

    No, it’s always been a fairly large community, globally. Maybe relegated to geeks and nerds tho. It’s early iterations didn’t have a ‘Windows like GUI’. It did have interfaces, but not what people using Windows were used to. Then as the versions became more user friendly with a GUI that had icons, and such, it gained an even wider audience. Now, gaming has exploded on Linux making it even more popular. A program called Wine, can run some Windows apps in a Linux environment. If I were to guess, I’d say about 60%+/- of the global servers are Linux/Unix. It’s a very powerful OS, and one that I will probably never use to it’s fullest capabilities. Hopefully, in the future as all us old heads die off, and the younger generations who have adopted Linux as their OS of choice, will influence even more subsequent generations.


  • No no it’s fine . I still have soo many questions

    Like I said my man, I’m willing to answer anything I can. I am not an expert nor a IT guy. There are many more skilled and knowledgable here. I just do a ton of reading, and a lot of trying, until it works correctly, then I write all that down because my brain is shit.

    I saw in your dashboard that you have tailscale

    I have Tailscale as an overlay VPN on both the pfsense firewall, and the servers themselves as a security measure. I can ‘tunnel in’ via Tailscale if I need to. It’s also useful if pull a boner like I’ve done in the past and locked myself out of my server. DOH! Dumbass. LOL

    I would like to get into reading any recommendations ? any genre is fine

    Such as technical material, or just casual entertainment reading? If you’re a new kid on the Linux/selfhosting block, I highly recommend Linux Upscale Challenge. TechnoTim has some good stuff to read. There’s also blogs like https://selfh.st/ and https://noted.lol/ tho noted.lol doesn’t seem as active as selfh.st.

    Your answers were written in near perfect english… How did you do that !

    Well, English is my native tongue, tho I wouldn’t say I speak it perfectly. I do know a few other languages such as Spanish, Patois (which you’d hear throughout the Caribbean), and a couple others just enough to get by. I also use spellcheck prolifically. If anyone ever got access to my browsing history, they’d see a ton of searches to see if I’m actually using a word correctly. I really can’t explain it more specifically than that, other than it’s just the way I converse normally? Thanks for the compliment tho, I guess. LOL


  • I use ArchiveBox occasionally to archive websites into a browsable, offline copy, regardless of the data disappearing online, and independently of whether or not ArchiveBox is in operation after the archiving finishes, if of course you persist the data locally. I’ve archived several self-hosted sites because they contained data I would like to conserve for personal use at a later date. It does it quite thoroughly, tho obviously large sites would take a little time to ingest. It might be worth spinning up a Docker instance and run it through it’s paces to see if it would fit your criteria.


  • czkawka

    That certainly would thin the pile and cut down on the manual labor aspect. It uses a hashing method, iirc. Used it to thin out duplicate audio files, being careful not to delete files that might have the same filename but one would be a live rendition, and a studio/album rendition of the same song. Jimi Hendrix, in my experience, is notorious for this. One of the things that I dig about him, is that he never really performed the same song the same way. He sort of just really went with a stream of consciousness and pulled it off quite well.


  • What does that mean? and How does that work?

    Oh, I think I meant, in my own insufficient vernacular: ‘my network’. Meaning the LAN that I administer. Servers, TV’s, iot devices(1), servers(3), security measures like a standalone pfsense firewall, security cams, etc. Much like a commercial ISP network, just scaled down considerably and local. My services are reachable exterior of my network, protected by SSO (Authentik). I am the only user so I do not make my services publicly available to anyone but me. It’s a playground to me, that has it’s very practical uses, Even tho I’m old as dirt, I still like toys. LOL

    Sorry. “so I run my network” was not really a complete thought.


  • do you know about YaCy?

    I do know YaCy. YaCy can use peers in the YaCy network for search results. I’ve never got consistently good results with YaCy tho. It’s been a while sing I experimented with YaCy. Perhaps it has gotten better and I should revisit. I do run Searxng, but that is an aggregator and I’m still using an external search engine, just cutting out all the telemetry and metrics. My point was, selfhosters do not live in a bubble. We, like everyone else, depend on services that a closed source, and out of our control. Sure, we try to be as private, secure and anonymous as possible, however at times you got to do a little dirt. Making money off an app or service seems to be an sticky wicket with some. Yet FOSS is full of apps that require a subscription to unlock more or different features.

    • Buying an opensource app to unlock features. Dev team gets paid.
    • Buying an app for your phone: Dev team gets paid.

    I honestly don’t see much of a difference, other than one is definitely opensource, while the latter may not be, or is a combination of both. That seems to make the defining difference to some. Not all selfhosters align with the same creed.


  • I am unsure how you would go about that without AI. You could probably write a python script that hooks in with AI, that ranks by focus, brightness, saturation or other such criteria. However, I suspect that there would have to be a fair amount of manual labor to do that. That’s an interesting request. I’ll watch the thread and see what the outcome is.






  • I have blocked much of the Digital Ocean IP space

    Over the years, I have blocked the entire probably Digital Ocean spectrum, a ton of Linode, clients.your-server.de, a long string of them. It used to make me paranoid I was setting up something wrong. I’d fire up a brand new, untouched server, and boom! Here they’d come. Then I thought, maybe it was a few Docker containers pushing analytics to a collector. Upon blocking them tho, nothing seemed to malfunction. So instead of trying mitigate each and every offending IP, I switched to a deny all until something complains posture, and block by ip ranges. I can still see them trying to gain access, but as long as I can keep them out on the edge, everything is golden.

    Some ISPs basically advertise to criminals about their ability to evade take down orders and unwillingness to work with law enforcement.

    There are Russian ISPs that advertise VPS services and such by the hour. I’m sure there are other ISPs in other countries that do the same. Nothing good could be coming out of that. When you consider that the internet gobbles through 14,000,000+/- petabytes per 24 hours, and 40%+/- is bot traffic, the picture gets a bit clearer, because that’s a shit load of bots, and they are sophisticated bots at that.


  • How about a clarification to what Rule 1 actually means. If we are going to abide by the downvote system, and if we are to be cival, supportive, and not be insulting, and if we are all indeed adults, then rule 1should kick in somewhere I would assume.

    • OP: Here’s my superduper fantasmgorical app. It’s so good it’ll make your dick hard.
    • Potential User: Is it opensource? Is it vibe coded? is it a paid for product?
    • OP: Yeah or no or explanation
    • Potential User: Ok, that’s not my bag really, Thanks anyways.

    Then exit the thread, and downvote if you must, but do it like a civil adult. What good does it do to denigrate and outright trounce another user if you just so happen to not agree with their product or how they do something? Hive mind leads to gatekeeping, and gatekeeping leads to reddit.

    If it’s AI, it’s 2026 and AI isn’t going away. It is a safe assumption that at some point in the production chain, AI was used in some form or fashion. But it doesn’t give me clearance to rail on the OP and be downright insulting. Just exit the thread and hit the button. No need for the hatred and anger. Let the mod be the mod if need be. How much more civil and adult can that get? There have been a few outright adverts for paid for services. But again, those should fall under the downvote system and not the bullying system.

    Does it read like a post from a person?

    I think sometimes we forget that others do not natively speak the English language and use AI to help them communicate coherently much like Americans think that there is only America. Gosh I know I would would if I were addressing say a Korean forum.

    How old is the account?

    If you want to go that route then say so in the sidebar. Something to the effect of new users must participate in threads before unveiling their project. I’ve been to many forum that had that encoded into the forum itself where you had to participate in x number of posts before you could start your own post.

    It’s not really that hard to be nice.


  • (Yes i’m new to the community lol)

    That’s totally cool man.

    So in a nutshell, the reason for my network is rather multi-faceted. I dig on privacy, anonymity, and security so I run my network. It’s also a learning platform, as I do indeed love to learn new things that I didn’t know. I also just totally love technology, so selfhosting clicks with me. I also like dabbling in automation, minor programing. Additionally, I use things like Readeck because I’m always ‘clipping articles’ to read later, things that catch my fancy. I am a prolific reader. I selfhost my on Navidrome instance so I can listen to my own personal collection of music wherever I am. It’s really just a huge playground for an old soul.