486

Matrix also does have a pretty big problem with meta data. By default it stores a ton of meta data (at least the reference server implementation does) and I am not sure if this is even a solvable problem without redesigning the protocol. When opting for an alternative to Signal, XMPP is probably the better choice.

Sure, cloud services can get quite expensive and I agree that using used hardware for self-hosting - if it is at least somewhat modern - is a viable option.

I just wanted to make sure, the actual cost is understood. I find it rather helpful to calculate this for my systems in use. Sometimes it can actually make sense to replace some old hardware with newer stuff, simply because of the electricity cost savings of using newer hardware.

Well, what they are stating is obviously wrong then. No need to use some website for that anyway, since it is so easy to calculate yourself.

Before anyone loses their minds, imagine you get the i3-8300T model that will peak at 25W, that’s about 0.375$ a month to run the thing assuming a constant 100% load that you’ll never have.

Not sure how you came to that conclusion, but even in places with very cheap electricity, it does not even come close to your claimed $0.375 per month. At 25 W you would obviously consume about 18 kWh per month. Assuming $0.10/kWh you’d pay $1.80/month. In Europe you can easily pay $0.30/kWh, so you would already pay more than $5 per month or $60 per year.

Lots of answers about use-cases of additional wifi networks, so I won’t go into that. I haven’t seen the downsides mentioned here, though. While technically you can run lots of wifi networks of off the same wifi router/ap, each SSID takes a bit of air time to broadcast. While this might sound rather insignificant since this is only a rather tiny bit of information transmitted, it is actually more significant than one might expect. For one the SSIDs are broadcast quite often, but also they are always transmitted at the lowest possible speed (meaning they require a lot more airtime than normal WiFi traffic would require for the same amount of data) for compatibility reasons. This is also the reason why it is a good idea to disable older wifi standards if not needed by legacy clients (such as 54 Mbit/s 802.11G wifi).

Having two networks is usually fine and doesn’t cause noticable performance degradation, having 4 or more networks is usually noticable, particularily in an already crowded area with lots of wifi networks.

For many li-ion laptop batteries, the manufacturer’s configuration of a 100 % charge is pretty much equivalent to overcharging. I’ve seen many laptops over the years with swollen batteries, almost all of them had been plugged in all the time, with the battery kept at 100 % charge.

As an electrical engineer you should know that technically there is no 100 % charge for batteries. A battery can more or less safely be charged up to to a certain voltage. The 100 % charge point is something the manufacturer can choose (of course within limits depending on cell chemistry). A manufacturer can choose a higher cell voltage than another to gain a little more capacity, at the cost of longterm reliability. There are manufacturers that choose a cell voltage of 4250 mV and while that’s possible and works okay if charged only occasionally, if plugged in all the time, this pretty much ensures killing the batteries rather quickly. I would certainly call that overcharging.

Since you already mentioned charging thresholds, I just want to say, anyone considering using a laptop as a server should absolutely make use of this feature and limit the maximum charge.

When it comes to privacy (and also security), using a router provided by the cable company is a concern, because that router can see and access all devices on your local network and you can’t be sure that security issues are patched in a timely fashion if ever… Using a modem provided by the cable company on the other hand is not much of an issue, because you have to trust the company anyway, when it comes to your traffic to/from the Internet. These days most of the Internet traffic is encrypted (except DNS, which is often still unencrypted), so that is not a big deal. Of course there can be other reasons to use a different modem.

In either case, it makes sense to switch to a non-ISP DNS server, preferably an encrypted one (DNS-over-TLS or DNS-over-HTTPS), so the ISP can’t see which websites you are accessing.

Compared to other SBCs, Raspberry Pis have been pretty inefficient for a while. A Pi 5 idles at about 3 W, which is pretty terrible for such a board, compared to other similar devices. You can get X86 PCs that idle at 3 W which are way more powerful. Other ARM SBCs use less than half that at idle and similarly less under load.

There are probably multiple reasons for that. The Pi’s SoCs have always used rather old process nodes, which are more power hungry than more modern ones used by other single board computers and PCs - 16 nm for the Pi 5 SoC and 28 nm for the Pi 4. Also, with the Pi 5 there is this additional “south bridge” chip which is attached via PCIe. This consumes additional power and for some reason the PCIe link is configured such that it never enters power saving states. I don’t know why.

Also, the power supply circuitry on the Pi 5 is far from ideal with its 5 V / 5 A power supply. Such a low voltage at such a high current can easily cause additional losses on the wire. That’s mostly relevant under high load though.

Since none of these require a Raspberry Pi to run, I would suggest using a mini PC (with an Intel N100 or similar) instead of a Pi 5. With all the accessories needed for the Pi, a mini PC can actually be cheaper and of course a lot more powerful. Since the Pi 5 is very power-inefficient, a mini PC can even be better in that regard too if that matters to you.

Especially for Jellyfin a PC with an Intel CPU with integrated GPU is awesome, since Jellyfin supports hardware transcoding with that.

Of course harassment is never okay, but I’d say when it comes to GNOME, this is not surprising. GNOME developers have been so hostile towards both users and other developers for a long time. I’m not saying every single person associated with the project does this, but it is pretty common (e.g. here and here ). Of course the GNOME devs don’t have to accomodate everyone, but it is a common theme with the project to remove features despite user backlash and also to close bugs as WONTFIX often without good explanations as to why, even when there are pull requests for fixing the problem.

I am simply avoiding the project, since there are enough good alternatives.

I’d choose LUKS over Veracrypt for simplicity. If the drive is solely for backup, depending on the backup tool you use, you might not even need encryption on the file system level. Several backup solutions support data encryption.

Yes, the Odroid H series SBC probably come closest to OP’s requirements. Schematics are available on their website. They are also really low power with even the older H2 idling below 4 W.

Disableing the root login gains nothing in regarding security.

This is usually not the reason people recommend disabling root login. Since root is an anonymous account not tied to an actual person, in a corporate setting, you do not really know who used that account if you allow root login. If this is relevant for a personal home network is for you to decide. I would say there is not such a strong argument for it to be made in that setting.

Highly susceptible to replay and man in the middle attacks.

fwknop isn’t susceptible to either.

I was thinking about doing something similar and was considering running Android on a Raspberry Pi. There are unofficial LineageOS builds for the Raspberry Pi. I haven’t tried that yet, but I guess it should be possible to use the Jellyfin Android app on such a setup.

There is quite a significant difference. An ssh server - even when running on a non-default port - is easily detectable by scanning for it. With a properly configured Wireguard setup this is not the case. As someone scanning from the outside, it is impossible to tell if there is Wireguard listening or not, since it simply won’t send any reply to you if you don’t have the correct key. Since it uses UDP it isn’t even possible to tell if there is any service running on a given UDP port.

I always found the software updates of AVM - the manufacturer of those "Fritz!Box"es - to be of questionable quality. If you take a look at the source code that they have to release upon request of the GPL’ed source code they use, you’ll notice that they use ancient versions of the Linux kernel, Busybox and other tools. By ancient, I mean many years old, unsupported by upstream for years. Also, they only publish those sources manually when someone asks for them, which doesn’t bode well for their internal development processes. If they used CI/CD pipelines, they could easily push out updates of those sources with every new release…

This thread has some interesting details as well: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=257144
There people managed to get idle power on a Raspberry Pi 4B to a little under 1.8 W. Interestingly, people there report that on their Pi 4’s disabling USB doesn’t do much. If I remember correctly, there were a few Pi 4 firmware updates that optimized power consumption over time. So the different firmware versions can behave differently when it comes to power consumption.

Your 2.3 W doesn’t sound too bad to begin with. Certainly better than the 5 W mentioned in the article.

Sure! Shutting down certain peripherals can reduce power consumption. The biggest difference can usually be achieved by disabling the USB controller - this is also true for the Raspberry Pi 3 (although on the Pi 3 you would also lose access to the Ethernet controller). So if you don’t use it, turn it off (and it looks like the author didn’t use any of the USB ports, so this would have been an option). Even turning of the HDMI port saves a little bit of power - it makes a difference even if no display is attached. A tiny bit of power can also be saved by turning off the LEDs. I also tried lowering the CPU clock, but that didn’t result in a noticable difference in idle power consumption.

At the moment I don’t currently have a Pi 4 on hand to experiment with, but I do have a Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module (CM4) on a very minimalistic carrier board and with that I am able to idle at about 1.3 W.

Always nice to see solar projects, although I wonder why the author didn’t try to lower the Pi’s power consumption. This would have been the first thing I would have done when trying to optimize things. 5 W is quite a lot for a Raspberry Pi and there are a couple of things one can do to lower its power consumption.