tburkhol

tburkhol , 4 days ago to Selfhosted in Any MythTV Users Here?

It's even easier with digital broadcast. I finally had to give up my PCI tuner, because who puts PCI slots on a modern mobo? $25 will get you a USB TV tuner capable of getting all the OTA and cable channels. I used to get, like, 7 analog OTA channels - ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and a regional independent - but I get 30 digital. All the majors have added 3-5 channels of SD reruns or other filler. I mean, it's mostly shit, and the only thing I actually watch is local news, but for a one-time $25 cost, it's a great supplement to streaming.

My biggest problem with MythTV is it doesn't interface with streaming, so I use Kodi on the frontend to source from mythtv, netflix, hbo, or whatever.

tburkhol , 7 days ago to Selfhosted in What are your thoughts on exposing a tool like dockge to outside of your man?

I just don't like my logs filling up with scripted login attempts. Even with fail2ban, for a while there I was getting 100+ login attempts every day, and it upset my sense of order.

tburkhol , 8 days ago to Selfhosted in A Short IPv6 Guide for Home IPv4 Admins

This is an old post about ipv6, but it inspired me to go looking, and I wanted to share my findings.

1. for globally routeable IPv6 addresses, probably do let it happen automatically, either direct from the ISP, through the router by prefix delegation, or your own implementation of prefix delegation.

2. for devices you want to access, internally, create a ULA within the fd00::/8 space, and assign numbers (and names) however you like. Translate all your 192.168.x.y IPv4 addresses to fd00::x:y and go. Only limitation is you won't be able to access those devices, using the ULA, from outside your network.

3. you can do both of these on the same subnet, and devices pick up both addresses then use the global address for internet and the ULA for intranet.

That means you can do dhcp, dynamic DNS, private domains, and all the stuff you know about IPv4 for IPv6, and still do all the stateless autoconfig that "they" want. Some devices, like my android phone, never played well with dhcpd6, but immediately preferred IPv6 as soon as I let them SLAAC.

If the prefix assigned by the ISP doesn't change, then device SLAAC address shouldn't change, either, because they're calculated from MAC, so if you need to access some internal devices from the internet, you have to mark that address, but (IMO) marking the full address is not that much worse than marking the prefix and remembering the device number.

tburkhol , 12 days ago to Selfhosted in What are your thoughts on exposing a tool like dockge to outside of your man?

I do ssh because I'm more comfortable with it: it's ubiquitous and as close to bulletproof as any security. Put it on a nonstandard port, restrict authentication to public keys, and I have no qualms.

tburkhol , 12 days ago to Selfhosted in Electricians of fediverse, should I have my selfhosting box grounded?

Heh. House I rented was built before ubiquitous electricity. At some point, someone slapped a fuse box on the outside of the back wall and drilled a bunch of 1" holes in said wall to pass wiring. House was built on piers, so they just dragged wires around to places where they wanted outlets, which were mostly planted in the floor. Not a ground wire on site. I have no idea how they got away with renting that out, but it's not like I called code enforcement, either.

tburkhol , 12 days ago to Selfhosted in What are your thoughts on exposing a tool like dockge to outside of your man?

Yeah, I think it really depends on use case. Like, I'm trying to imagine what aspect of my home lab could go so wrong, while I'm out of the house, that it would need fixed right away, and there's nothing. I only leave my house for work or maybe a week of vacation, though, and I can imagine someone who's occasionally away from home/house for 6-month deployments, or has a vacation home they only visit four weekends a year, might want more extensive remote maintenance. I'd still want to do that via ssh or vpn, but that's me.

tburkhol , 18 days ago to Selfhosted in A Short IPv6 Guide for Home IPv4 Admins

Yeah, my ISP "supports" IPv6, but assigns a /128 to users. It seems to wipe out most of the desirable features of IPv6, and has probably given me a distorted view of its philosophy. OTOH, it did force me to learn how to do DNS views, so names can have the ULA address inside and the global address outside the house, which is pretty cool.

tburkhol , 18 days ago to Selfhosted in A Short IPv6 Guide for Home IPv4 Admins

IPv6 does have private spaces. Any prefix beginning with fd is 'private,' and (IIRC) there's a formula to generate the next 40 bits of prefix to minimize the chance of intersections. i.e., you can generate your own internal /48 functionally equivalent to 192.168/16 or 10/8

Don't know if you can use that with SLAAAC, but it works if you run a dhcpv6 and makes ipv6 feel a lot like ipv4. You have to NAT everything inside &c, but if you already have a functioning internal IPv4 network, IPv6 is just a matter of figuring out which config options need to be changed (eg, dhcp6.name-servers for option domain-name-servers)

tburkhol , 20 days ago to Selfhosted in How do I do a bare-metal install (Debian) without a monitor+keyboard?

Definitely agree for a single install. If OP has a bunch of these installs to do, then editing an install USB to configure networking and enable sshd might be worth the effort. Do the install over ssh and hope the machine starts up as desired, but even then, if it doesn't just magically appear on the network, he's going to need a monitor to see where the startup failed.

Raspberry Pi's disk imager will let you pre-configure networking, accounts, and ssh, so you just write the image to an SD card, plug it in, and go. That's a great solutions for systems usually meant to be headless and removable media. If OP's client hardware allows, he could plug in the M2 or SATA drive meant to be the server's startup, install Deb there, and. transfer to the server hardware. That's definitely more work that just swapping the keyboard & monitor, but it accomplishes OP's stated goal. (Otherwise, a lot of this thread follows the linux meme of "How do I [X]?" "[X] is dumb, do [Y] instead.")

tburkhol , 25 days ago to Technology in Raspberry Pi launches its IPO

I don't so much care where it's made. The real selling point, to me, for Pi is that their products are well documented, in English, and solutions for problems are easily googled. There's tons of SBCs out there, some of them even inexpensive, but I can't tell if any are going to last longer than a single production run. Meanwhile, I can still buy a Pi 3 after almost a decade. Or I can take the hat I made for a Pi3, plug it straight into a new Pi Zero, and expect it to work without changes.

IPO is a big step down the path to enshittification, especially when there's no clear, dominant alternative.

tburkhol , 29 days ago to Selfhosted in Alternatives to Adobe Creative Cloud for an easily frustrated boomer...

Especially if she has 20 years' experience with CC apps. All of the deeply entrained jargon, keyboard shortcuts, menu structures... Switching apps after that long takes months of training and practice, and the cost of that training is a key lever of enshittification.

tburkhol , 1 month ago to Selfhosted in What's your server wattage?

With 25 GbE, even 10, I'd be tempted to PXE boot client systems. Maybe still have a local PCIe SSD for windows game files.

Dunno how that would actually work with Windows, but it was fun when I did it for beowulf nodes. Setting RPis to netboot is a little involved, but you can create an OSMC image and give all your TVs a consistent 'smart' interface. You don't even need 10GbE to be pretty functional for the Pi, but my experience is that WiFi is not fast enough.

tburkhol , 1 month ago to Selfhosted in Home entertainment with NAS?

There are 3rd party plugins for kodi to work with a lot of streaming services, using your account and not 'cheating' in any way that's obvious to me.

Netflix: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=329767

Fairly extensive collection: https://github.com/matthuisman/slyguy.addons

tburkhol , 1 month ago to Selfhosted in Why You Should Self-Host Everything

I don't get this counter-argument. Is TFA actually suggesting that the average grandma quit using Yahoo mail or Facebook and set up her own email server and mastodon instance? The only people even considering self-hosting are people with technology interest and reasonable passion. It's an article written for a niche techie website, and we're discussing it on a forum for self-hosting nerds.

The counter-argument is like saying the average layman should stick to televised football, because they don't have the physical savvy or aptitude for the game, and most people aren't gonna put in the time or effort to build their strength & endurance to compete. It may be an accurate statement, but the people you're addressing (grandma) weren't TFA's target audience and weren't even going to try in the first place, and you discourage people who might really enjoy giving the hobby a try.

tburkhol , 1 month ago to Selfhosted in Why You Should Self-Host Everything

Depends on how you calculate costs. Like, I have Kodi running on a RPi for home entertainment/theater. There's no way to outsource that, but the RPi is idle most of the time. Adding services to it is effectively or marginally free, except for my time, and there's still a significant time cost to get paid, off-site cloud services set up.

But charging for your own time is kind of disingenuous. You don't include your time in the cost of eating (a Big Mac worth $60??), watching a video, or going on vacation. The only people self-hosting have a personal, hobby/entertainment interest in it, and I think it's more accurate to compare the costs of self hosting with the costs of other forms of entertainment. Do you get more fun-value out of the costs of self hosting or out of a theater ticket?