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jjlinux

@jjlinux@lemmy.ml

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jjlinux ,

My use of session is limited to my kids, wife and a couple of friends. I had high hopes for it when I started using it, but its devs have fallen incredibly short. I have also tried SimpleX on and off, but for some reason, it drinks battery like there's no tomorrow, so I'm off of it for now.

Have you ever bough an external hardrive only to take the disk out of it?

Hiya, so am looking to buy more storage and while browsing am seeing some external harddisks, such as Western Digital My Book and Seagate Expansion Desktop for cheaper than the internal harddisks themselves. Have seen this one video from KTZ Systems where he bought up multiple of these external ones just to open them up and use...

jjlinux ,

Indeed. That's how I populated my NAS with 3 10TB drives and saved around 120 dollars total, and this was 4 years ago.

These are the ones I got: https://a.co/d/8x58jBY

The only extra thing was disabling the 3v pin, and that was it. Been running rock solid all this time.

Just make sure to research what disks are in the external housings you're planning on getting, as not all drives need to have pins removed/covered.

jjlinux ,

If by "average" you mean someone with little to no technical background AND not willing to make too much of an effort, it's still super easy by getting something like a Synology or QNAP NAS.

jjlinux ,

Agreed. If it was for a search engine, it would make some sense, but the browser, WTF for?

What cloud vps server host do I use?

What cloud VPS host is the best for privacy and security? I want to self host stuff for myself some tools. Mental Outlaw make a video last year about self hosting your own VPN with a service called Vultr but back in December vultr added to their TOS that they own what you host and a bunch of other scary stuff. So I don't trust...

jjlinux ,

That's a load of crap. Anything you have to subscribe to will turn out to be more expensive than owning at some point. And even if that was not the case, the monetary value that you give your data is what should determine how much you should pay, up front or over time.

jjlinux ,

I have half of what you have. Did away with Google Photos and moved to self-hosted Immich. No regrets. My case could be somewhat different though, since I only share my pictures and videos with my wife (almost 1TB between pics and videos).

I'm sold on Pixels, mainly because they are basically the only phones that can be seamlessly deGoogled (the irony).

jjlinux ,

I have half of what you have. Did away with Google Photos and moved to self-hosted Immich. No regrets. My case could be somewhat different though, since I only share my pictures and videos with my wife (almost 1TB between pics and videos).

I'm sold on Pixels, mainly because they are basically the only phones that can be seamlessly deGoogled (the irony).

jjlinux ,

An individual with cultural galore over here. Great choices.

jjlinux ,

I use venice.ai because it's browser based and does not require an account. It is somewhat limited, but it works for my extremely limited purposes.

jjlinux ,

I know your pain all to well, but when I figured my mental health and privacy were at risk, I just took the leap. It is not an easy choice. Having said that, think about these benefits:

  • from your "inner circle" those who really want to keep in touch won't mind installing another app. This give you a broader view of just how important you and what YOU consider your well-being is to each of those people.
  • may not feel that way at first, but after a few days you will start feeling refreshed by having reduced notifications dramatically. This helps for focusing on whatever you enjoy.
  • the knowledge that you're giving a tech giant less, or even nothing, is an epic feeling that can only be experienced, not described.

I also live in a country made to be driven by Meta and all its crap by the population, so much so that even the oldest and largest corporations, banks and stores have all but abandoned their websites, and handle everything over WhatsApp for transactions, and Instagram and Facebook for publicity and offers. Some of these sites have not been updated in over 10 years, and good luck getting them to reply to an email and God forbid, picking up a phone.

I've been out of that environment for almost 10 years now, and all it's done for me is make me happier, save money and give me plenty of time for video games without being disturbed.

Try it, let everyone know you're moving to (insert name of alternative and privacy focused app) and will be eliminating your WhatsApp in (whatever amount of time). Then, after the first week, disable all notifications on WhatsApp, and just check it when you feel like it. I'm not going to tell you to stop replying to people, but take longer (12 hours, 2 days, whatever you can handle) and when they ask what took you so long, just tell them what you think about WhatsApp, and that you're easier to reach on the other app. If at the end you're not comfortable, just don't eliminate WhatsApp and keep it, it's not going to harm anyone (other than your privacy, of course), and you still walk out having at least tried.

Full disclosure, I'm not young anymore, will be 50 soon, so understand that I'm in a point in life where I don't want more people in my life, I want less 🤣🤣

jjlinux OP ,

The main issue here seems to be that no other provider, voip or otherwise, allows to pause the invoicing. Fi allows it for 90 days, and if those 90 days go by, all we have to do is pause it again and get charged for the 1 day that the pause expired on.

It's a pretty hard to beat feature, but I really want off of Google, so I'm going over every single one of the suggestions here.

jjlinux ,

That's exactly right. A hardened fork of Firefox, enjoy.

jjlinux ,

That's my goto browser on desktop and Mull on mobile. No regrets. Keep my bookmarks on Nextcloud and sync via Floccus.

jjlinux ,

I don't see it, so please do share. Honestly, I'd love to know too. I'm not the type of person that gets easily offended. Heck, my friends and I show our live through incessant reciprocal bullying.

I know it's hard to believe here, but I'm all for laughing at myself, and even share it with my wife to give her some bullying ammo too, haha.

jjlinux ,

Ok. And I apologize. Since English is not my native language, sometimes I still get confused with figure of speech. However, I don't mind people laughing at me, with me or even at my expense. We humans are silly creatures, and life is just too stresses it is, laughing, regardless of the reason, should always be enjoyed.

Having said that, you're exactly right. Floccus does sound funny. I'm going to try it on my kids today, see how that goes. Something along the lines of "go clean all that Floccus" and enjoy the confusion on their faces 😝

jjlinux ,

You've done it now. I'm on my way to brag to my boss, lol.

jjlinux ,

We're on the same boat. I keep being told that all I get is "overkill", but I like to think of it as "future-proffing", even though I'll probably upgrade something in my box within 3 months 🤣. Self-delusion my wife calls it. Some people don't believe in God, I don't believe in overkill.

jjlinux ,

"But they’ll be reserved for premium models starting at $999."

Translation: "We want to start with the data of people that can spend, then we'll move to the rest".

The last Windows computer in my house was my wife's, and she's been extremely happy on Fedora Gnome for the last couple of months, asking me why I didn't tell her about it before (I did, lol).

jjlinux ,

Same here. The only tweak I had to do was set up Flameshot, my wife finds Gnome's screen shot app lacking, and so do I.

The only thing we run different is office. I set her up with OnlyOffice because of the similarities with MS office, but I prefer libreoffice.

jjlinux ,

Wao, you really let'em have it. Love it.

There's also Session, Simplex, Riot, Delta Chat, etc.

There are plenty of options. Yes, Signal is one of the lesser evils, but certainly not the holly grail as some would make it look.

jjlinux ,

Absolutely. It's probably the most likely to be accepted by people that are in the mainstream apps life, for sure.

jjlinux ,

I also added that to my wife's phone, but "inadvertently" wink set the sensitivity to 5. I had quite a laugh that first day.

Private lock just works, and needs Google like I need hangovers.

jjlinux ,

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.wesaphzt.privatelock/

@TheAnonymouseJoker mentioned it.

jjlinux ,

It does only 1 thing and does it well. Has absolutely no connection (Wi-Fi, data, BT). How is that dangerous? I genuinely don't know, which is why I'm asking.

jjlinux ,

I'm going to guess this one doesn't allow to relock bootloader after flashing either?

jjlinux ,

Thanks. I'm stuck with a Nord n200 dre until the end of the month and have it running LineageOS. Unfortunately DivestOS does not have the Dre among the supported devices.

jjlinux ,

These guys are running a very cool email option.

https://www.autistici.org/

Now, I do believe that they will probably close unused accounts, so there's that. However, as far as I know, there is no other option out there as private as this one. If there are, please share with us as well.

jjlinux ,

I could not agree more. Self hosting is fairly easy for pretty much any need, once you get the hang of it. But self hosting email servers is inherently hard and requires too much maintenance. I tried, did, and then dropped. It's a real pain in the ass.

jjlinux ,

The domain in mine is paranoici.org, so it's actually pretty accurate 🤣

jjlinux ,

At the end of the day, you should follow your personal priorities. Everyone that wants to contact me easily uses signal, and I choose to live life without much contact with those that do not use signal. Sure, they can call me over the phone, that's one way to reach me, assuming I don't have it in airplane mode (it spends around 70% of its on time there). But, I am one of those people that don't really care to know about anyone else's life. If they want me to know they'll figure out how to reach me.

My wife and kids contact me exclusively over session, as do my business partners.

Haven't been on FB for over 9 years now, and about 7 out of WhatsApp, and I have not missed them at all, not even the first day without. Never had Instagram.

I killed my Twitter the day before the acquisition by Musk was completed, and enjoy my online time researching self hosting, interacting in Lemmy, and having a few laughs on Mastodon.

I feel my mental health has improved exponentially because of these choices. But you're going to have to choose where it starts to be a heavy task for you, and I suggest you stop right at that point.

Randomly getting Notion email, after having deleted my account years ago... (slrpnk.net)

Welp I guess this is the perfect example of companies not deleting your credentials and account info when asking for it... I deleted my Notion account several years ago. And completely randomly today got an email from them about data retention, assuming this is one of those "important" emails they have to send out. Sadly, years...

jjlinux ,

This is a shit show. But from what I've been able to see, when you remove yourself from the companies, as time goes by, there's not much of the data you leave behind that can be easily visible to others, other than whatever company has your data, or who they choose to sell it to.

I haven't been in any social network for over 8 years now, except X, that I killed my account, coincidentally, the day before the acquisition was announced. Last night I did a Google search for my name in my country, and another one global, and the only place I found info about me, after digging down 30+ pages, was linked-in, which my wife manages for our business. Granted, they all probably hold all the data they got from me when I was stupider, but I'm sure they understand how useless data becomes over time if it's not updated.

I guess my advantage is that I used Gmail accounts for absolutely everything back then, and since I killed all of them, I never get emails from anyone I'm not directly associated with.

jjlinux ,

I have a hard time believing they actually delete anything.

jjlinux OP ,

Yup. I think I'm going to go the 2 servers way after all, but not before I try doing it in one, because, we'll, why not? Isn't that what home labs are about? 🤣🤣🤣

jjlinux OP ,

Thanks a lot, I'll update my progress, if my wife chooses to spare my life once I start 🤣

jjlinux OP ,

I do have the advantage of having a mirror of my server 2.5K miles away in my brother's house. That's probably why I'm thinking about being so candidly careless.

I appreciate the great advise. But now I'm willing to take one for the team and come back with either am horror story or an epic win.

BRB.

jjlinux OP , (edited )

Oh, ok. Mainly 3 things:

  1. Manage all my containers and VMs over ProxMox instead of inside UnRaid directly, effectively leaving UnRaid to be just manage storage only.
  2. This, from my understanding, will in turn allow me to play with container options other than docker (docker is awesome, I know, but it also has limitations), effectively opening new roads of knowledge to me. UnRaid doesn't even support Kubernetes or LXC.
  3. Easier VLAN management in the server side. I have to play with firewall permissions on my PFSense to allow some containers to talk to others. ProxMox, being VLAN aware, would allow me to eliminate those permissions from PFSense and just manage interconnectivity via ProxMox.

While I'm aware that I can even compose dockers in UnRaid if there's no UnRaid docker template available, it's not the most user friendly way for managing those containers, in my opinion.

Another reason is that I'm always trying to learn new things, and from my limited experience with ProxMox (I've only been playing with it for about a month or so on an old rig), ProxMox is incredibly easy and powerful when it comes to container and VM deployment. The management options seem to be infinite.

Your point is very solid, which is why I'm contemplating segregating UnRaid and ProxMox into 2 separate rigs as opposed to virtualizing UnRaid.

These are hard decisions. Keep just 1 rig and spend way more time and probably migraines configuring this, or just build a new rig for ProxMox and migrate all my containers and VMs to it, which is faster, but will come at a higher monetary price, including power consumption.

jjlinux OP ,

You do make a great point. I really am feeling more inclined to spinning up a new rig for ProxMox, and leave my UnRaid to do what it's good at in it's bare metal state as it is today.

This self hosting rabbit hole runs scarily deep.

jjlinux OP ,

Absolutely. This is why I love Lemmy as a whole, and my wife hates it.

The combined amount of wisdom I've found here interacting with so many smart individuals is a serious treasure of knowledge and a powerful drive to keep exploring and learning.

jjlinux OP ,

I actually never considered this. And if I'm understanding you correctly, this would render using UnRaid unnecessary.

This is great info. I'm going to fit my current ProxMox test rig with a few disks I have (old small disks I have replaced over the years that still work) and test this option first. This might make this easier.

If this works out, I can still keep the server I set up off-site to mirror my storage, right? Even if that is still UnRaid? I need more coffee.

jjlinux OP ,

That's why I built 2 of my boxes, and have them Rsync 2,500 miles away from each other. My brother was nice enough to let me set the backup box in his garage.
I too was mistakenly under the impression that parity was enough to keep my data safe. Once I went over some horror stories in the forums, I duplicated my purchase, built an exact replica of my box, and then set it up at my brother's house.

jjlinux OP ,

Yeah. I told my wife what I wanted to do, and she actually would rather have me spend the money than risk spending too much time if and when I break something.
I'm thinking a minispc Ryzen 9 or a Ryzen 7 venus, set it up with a 4TB NVMe. That should do the trick. It's a bit over 300 bucks, but will be a bit more future proof. 64GB DDR5, and fire it away.

jjlinux OP ,

I'm very inclined to use this method instead.

I would like to ask for some suggestions on the initial process to migrate the data from UnRaid.

Considering that:

  • My disk pool is made out of 2 10TB disks, for a total of 20TB
  • It also has a 10TB parity disk
  • The pool is using just -6TB of the storage

The option I see is:

  • Get another 10TB disk
  • I can clear the parity drive and copy my data from the pool to that disk for migrating
  • Configure the pool disks to RaidZ and once I complete that, use the other 2 disks as parity pool

Or, I bite the bullet, get brand new 10TB disks, 12 to make it Raidz2 and have a storage pool of 40TB (35 usable?). I'm thinking 4 groups of 3 disks each should do the trick. Then use the same method to migrate my data.

With 64GB of ECC RAM, I should have a pretty swift storage IOPS that way.

jjlinux OP ,

Thanks so much.

All this info brought me back to the drawing board.

This led me to start searching for new components, as I'm pretty sure that I will want to build a new rig and just probably donate my current box.

Thank you, I really appreciate it. My bank account, not so much 🤣🤣

jjlinux OP ,

I'll be studying that link you sent me deeply before I start my adventure here.

I didn't know this rabbit hole was so deep. Love it!

jjlinux OP ,

So, if I'm running ProxMox off of 2 NVMe drives in RAID, I can just pass through SATA and USB for the UnRaid VM and just NFS my way to happiness, right?

I'm still testing each of my UnRaid containers on ProxMox, and so far they all work fine. With a Ryzen 7 5700G and 64GB ECC RAM, I could give the UnRaid VM just 2 cores and 4GB of RAM, and should be smooth sailing from there, right?

jjlinux OP ,

Awesome. I am happier every day I'm in Lemmy and out of Reddit. You guys are flat out amazing. Thank you.

jjlinux ,

Enjoy.

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