I’ve always wanted to learn programming (more than at uni - that was useless for the most part) but life has pushed me into the endless pit of dopamine that is system administration. At times I’ve thought of going into dev it was always C or C++ (who hasn’t dreamt of writing a game, huh? :D) but I’m so rusty on that type of logic - bash has rewired me - that it never really took off.

What’s your init, if you will, on getting into C?

Side note - is Beehaw going through a revival of sorts or is it lemmy’s algo that started showing me more content from you guys?

No, comercial IPs are fine. You’ll have trouble with some of them - Digital Ocean is a notorious example - where the provider itself blocks outbound port 25 and there’s nothing you can do. I think DO only does that for new accounts.

I myself am running it on Linode - it did get purchased by Akamai a couple of years ago, so I can no longer blindly recommend it - but so far it’s been working fine. One thing I did recently discover was the ability to request a /56 block on Linode - my pre-assigned IPv6 got blacklisted somewhere as at least the whole /64 and simply generating another IP from the same /64 did not help. Getting a fresh block solved it for me, though, and now I know that if this /56 gets blacklisted - it’s my fault. Unless, of course, I get caught up in a /48… 😳

You won’t be able to host email on a residential IP - all of them are on a permanent blacklist. I understand the money argument - and it’s a real argument - but host your own email is just so cool!

Not a direct answer, but any distro can be immutable if running on some CoW filesystem like BTRFS. Even That’s not a prerequisite, as such, but it does makes things so much easier.

This is really cool!

I’m still excited. I’ve probably used it long enough to simply not miss autocorrect. And it does multilingual bit very well!

For those already owning one - try setting up pihole or an equivalent. Sony could be serving ads from a domain used by something like a cdn, but I bet they don’t.

I’m a syaadmin now, but self hosting nextcloud is what got me my first IT job. I now host a bunch of stuff (even email!), lemmy included.

how did you decide that you would like to self-host? I wanted my friends to play a cs1.6 map I had created.

dire problems, including those that accumulate over time

That’s not a thing. You create problems over time by experimening in what is, effectively, production load. If all you ever did was install any distro and kept it up to date - not much can break. Granted - shit happens, but it’s incredibly rare.

As an example - I’ve set up my mail server in May 2019. Chose archlinux, because I never wanted to go through a big upgrade. The only exta software installed there is mail-server related. Direct from the repos. I’ve become confident enough that now there’s a nightly cronjob to update the system with a hook to reboot if kernel or init gets updated.

In all those 5 a bit years I’ve had one issue where I hqd to revert a kernel update.

Another example is tang on an ubuntu server. This was at a previous workplace, but essentially it’s a piece of software from the repos. Originally installed on 16.04, has gone without reprovisioning all the way to 22.04. I’ve now left the company, but I hear it’s still running.

Upgrading an ubuntu desktop fleet with a myriad of custom software, on the other hand… let’s just not talk about it.

I’m not the best person to query about backups, but in your situation I would do the following, assuming both server and desktop run on BTRFS:

Have a script on the desktop that starts btrfs-receive and then notifies the server that it should start btrfs-send.

You can also do rsync if BTRFS is not a thing you use, but It would either be expensive storage wise, or you would only ever have 1 backup - latest.

Not sure how much of your ground it would cover, but I’ve used easyeffects in the past to apply noise cancellation. Worked very well. It’s also on pipewire level so you don’t have to mess with alsa directly.

I do recall it having many more plugins as well as eq, I just didn’t have a reason to use it.

Wireguard works best for private traffic, but you can’t host a public site with that.

Of course you can! Nginx and wireguard on a VPS and actual services wherever you want.

If you can dedicate some time to constant keep up - pick a rolling distro. Doing major version upgrades has never not had problems for me. Every major distro has one.

My choice is Gentoo, but I’m weird like that. Having said that - my email server has been running happily on Arch for just over 5 years now.

The lemmy instance I host is on Debian testing - Gentoo was not available on DO - no issues so far.

Even when it’s mostly containers - why waste time every n years doing the big upgrade? Small change is always safer.

Is this the repo of the tool?

That’s not what I meant.

Never had a chance to give syncthing a shot, but nextcloud works very well. On top of that, if you ever want to ditch apple/google - it will also happily sync your contacts, calendar, etc, as well as more niche stuff like bike rides. It can become chonky, but that really depends on how much stuff you’re asking it to do.

Gentoo OpenRC 🥰

Precision guesswork here, but I’ve had nginx (not on opnsense) redirecting me to the default host quite a few times recently - all times it was me cocking up its config. It could be that nginx is waiting for the actual target until it times out and then just gives a your opnsense gui as the most reasonable response.

I’d start checking its config. Or pasting it here, after removing secrets, it any.

Dunno, worked well for me. Give it a shot and see if anything needs to be disabled.

I’d been running OPNsense in a VM for some time. I used xen as a hypervisor, but that shouldn’t really be a requirement. Passed the nics through and it was golden! All the benefits of a VM - quick boot-up, snapshots on the hypervisor - it’s truly glorious :)