Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coding since 1998.
.NET Foundation member. C# fan
https://d.sb/
Mastodon: @[email protected]

  • 2 Posts
  • 443 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • If you don’t mind a web UI, Netdata is great. It collects a bunch of metrics once per second and can retain them for a long period of time. The web UI is pretty good. Their Github readme links to some example servers so you can try it out first. Just click the link to use it without an account (that’s optional).

    It’s mainly designed for servers, but there’s no reason you couldn’t run it on a client system. They’re focusing a lot on AI/ML-based anomaly detection as well as their cloud offering at the moment, but you don’t have to use either and can just stick to the open-source agent.



  • why is a tower defense game listed under Automation?

    and two of the most popular automation programs are missing (n8n and Node-RED).

    who on earth needs customer live chat and a lot of business-scale website analytics, webshop systems and CRM and ERP in their homelab??

    Maybe not in a homelab, but plenty of people self-host these. I’m setting up customer live chat (Chatwoot) and invoicing and account (Bigcapital) for my wife for example. I self-host website analytics (Plausible) and bug tracking (used to be Sentry but it got too complex to host, so now I’m trying Bugsink and Glitchtip) for my personal sites/projects, too.





  • This is one of the reasons they’re reducing the validity - to try and convince people to automate the renewal process.

    That and there’s issues with the current revocation process (for incorrectly issued certificates, or certificates where the private key was leaked or stored insecurely), and the most effective way to reduce the risk is to reduce how long any one certificate can be valid for.

    A leaked key is far less useful if it’s only valid or 47 days from issuance, compared to three years. (note that the max duration was reduced from 3 years to 398 days earlier this year).

    From https://www.digicert.com/blog/tls-certificate-lifetimes-will-officially-reduce-to-47-days:

    In the ballot, Apple makes many arguments in favor of the moves, one of which is most worth calling out. They state that the CA/B Forum has been telling the world for years, by steadily shortening maximum lifetimes, that automation is essentially mandatory for effective certificate lifecycle management.

    The ballot argues that shorter lifetimes are necessary for many reasons, the most prominent being this: The information in certificates is becoming steadily less trustworthy over time, a problem that can only be mitigated by frequently revalidating the information.

    The ballot also argues that the revocation system using CRLs and OCSP is unreliable. Indeed, browsers often ignore these features. The ballot has a long section on the failings of the certificate revocation system. Shorter lifetimes mitigate the effects of using potentially revoked certificates. In 2023, CA/B Forum took this philosophy to another level by approving short-lived certificates, which expire within 7 days, and which do not require CRL or OCSP support.


  • Yes, this requirement comes from the CA/Browser Forum, which is a group consisting of all the major certificate authorities (like DigiCert, Comodo/Sectigo, Let’s Encrypt, GlobalSign, etc) plus all the major browser vendors (Mozilla, Google, and Apple). Changes go through a voting process.

    Google originally proposed 90 day validity, but Apple later proposed 47 days and they agreed to move forward with that proposal.





  • Tailscale is great. You should use it. Most of their code is open-source. Their coordination server is closed-source, however there’s a self-hostable open-source reimplemention called Headscale if you want a fully-open-source Tailscale stack.

    Tailscale is a peer to peer VPN, meaning there’s no central server like with OpenVPN. Systems on the VPN connect directly to each other. You can also use Wireguard in this way if you configure it as a mesh (every device on the VPN has every other device configured as a peer, and for each pair, at least one of them has the port open and forwarded). Tailscale is more reliable for that as it uses several NAT traversal techniques, so you don’t need to open the port and it works even if both ends are behind NAT.

    Immich doesn’t rely on Tailscale; you can use any VPN. They don’t recommend exposing it to the public internet at the moment though, which is why you’d use a VPN (edit: as per a reply, this is not the case any more). In general, never expose anything publicly unless it absolutely has to be (like a website that anyone can access). For giving access to friends, you can share a device with them via Tailscale and configure an ACL so they can only access particular services on it.

    For the drives, I’d recommend ZFS instead of Ext4 or NTFS. ZFS can detect bitrot and corruption using checksums, which neither Ext4 nor NTFS can do. NTFS isn’t recommended unless you’re running Windows Server, but you already said you’re using Proxmox.

    IMO, use Syncthing instead of Nextcloud, unless you’ll be using all the other apps that come with Nextcloud (calendar, office tools, chat, etc). Syncthing does one thing and it does it well, which is almost always better than using software that tries doing a large number of things. Consider Seafile too.

    For backups, I’d recommend Borgbackup and Borgmatic. Get a cheap storage VPS to store it. You should be able to get a deal for less than $2/TB/month during the current Black Friday sales. Check LowEndTalk for deals. A Hetzner storage box would work great too.


  • Unfortunately it looks like that one is for Apple devices, whereas I use Linux on desktop and Android on mobile.

    There’s some, but I haven’t seen any that have the main features Plex and Plexamp have:

    • Cross-fading when playing random tracks, but gapless playback when playing an album in order
    • Analysis of the music using a local neutral network, such that you can tell it to play play “similar” sounding songs to the current one
    • Automatic playlists - liked songs, decades, etc
    • Downloads for offline playback
    • Multiple libraries, for example I keep regular music separate from DJ mixes
    • Equalizer with presets for common headphones

    And probably other things I’m forgetting.





  • Prices rarely, if ever, go down in a meaningful degree.

    In 2011, there was a large flood in Thailand that impacted ~40% of hard drive manufacturing. As a result, hard drives significantly increased in price. This was back when SSDs weren’t mainstream yet.

    A year or two later, when manufacturing capacity was restored, prices were essentially back to what they were before the disruption.

    Apart from disruptions like that, HDDs, SSDs, and RAM have always been going down in price.