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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2024

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  • Email is often impossible. you can run your own server but you won’t be able to send email to many people because gmail and other larre providers will ignore everything from any ip address you can get. you endeup with email for only people on you server and the what is the point.

    just a warning there. Some do self host email but it is the most difficult to host. My life is much better now that I pay fastmail to handle my email.


  • Start small. The hard part isn’t installing a lot of software and getting it running. The hard part is keeping everything updated over time. So install one interesting service, and then figure out how the update process goes before installing another. Hopefully the worst thing that happens is you install services and use them only to have the computer fail in a few years after you depend on them and you can’t figure out how to get the data into the new version. There is also the very real possibility that your service is compromised by an attacker.



  • My NAS is behind a firewall and doesn’t normally run the types of things you would compromise. (no web browser). They need to break many things at the same time to compromise it. I’m not saying it would be impossible to compromise my NAS, but is is very unlikely just because of how difficult it is. If I’m target of a state level attack I’m sunk anyway.

    though offline backups are always a good idea. However they by definition need several days to restore (if they take less than that they are too easy for an attacker to target)



  • Just remember any backup is better than nothing. Even if the backup is done wrong (this includes untested!) odds are you can read it and extract at least some data, it just may take a lot of time. Backups that are done right just mean that when (not if!) your computers break you are quickly back up and running.

    There are several reasons to backup data only and not the full system. First you may be unable to find a computer exactly/enough like the one that broke, and so the old system backup won’t even run. Second, even if you can find an identical enough system, do you want to, or maybe it is time to upgrade anyway - there are pros and cons of arm (raspberry pi) vs x86 servers (there are other obscure options you might want but those are the main ones), and you may want to switch anyway since you have. Third, odds are some of the services need to be upgraded and so you may as well use this forced computer time to apply the upgrade. Last, you may change how many servers you have, should you split services to different computers, or maybe consolidate the services on the system that died to some other server you already have.

    The only advantage of a full system backup is when they work they are the fastest way to get going again.


  • Go to local “art in the park”, music nights, and other such local events and listen to the band playing. Unless you live in a very rural area there is likely many many bands playing someplace every day around you. When you hear something you life find the band and ask how to get their music. If they sell CDs buy one - buy one even if you only accept the music but don’t like it just to support the idea that CDs are not dead.



  • Because too often people are asking for a solution to the wrong problem. I can tell how to setup a car to drive from the Hawaii to Iceland, but odds are that is not your actual goal. (most often the correct answer is fly to iceland and rent a car, or perhaps just public transit in iceland. You can also put your car on a ship. It is possible to modify a car to drive on the ocean if that is really what you want to do)