I thought about switching to the forks for new features, but I like that conduit is a nice boring piece of software that I’ve got set to auto-update so by the time I hear about a new update I’m usually running it.

I like boring server software. Excitement is not something I have time to enjoy.

Generation enough to maybe keep the house from total death in winter for a week or so, but it won’t be pretty.

A few months of non-perishable food.

Some spare parts on the shelf

Some offline backups

But reality is, if the apocalypse really happens, it’ll look like the bronze age collapse on steroids, and we’d be lucky if only 90% of people died without our supply chains, especially once winter hits.

a lot of dell workstation class laptops have an “always plugged in” option in the bios for situations where the battery won’t be exercised much.

What you’ve been talking about here makes perfect sense to me.

A good chunk of myself hosting journey has been hardware. Figuring out the benefits and limitations of different thin clients, the capacity and limitations of various fanless PCs, and even stuff like worrying about the durability of ssds compared to hdds. So to say that you can’t talk about hardware doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, however, of course you want to keep it strictly scoped within the subject at hand, which is self-hosting. My driver work on the haiku operating system may be interesting, but if it doesn’t somehow relate to self-hosting, this just isn’t the place for it.

It’s based on conduit, which itself is really a lot better for self-hosting than synapse or dendrite.

I ran conduit on an atom d2550 alongside other services and it basically idled. Running synapse or dendrite on the same machine made the whole machine max out permanently.

Irc is fine, but not federated…

My dad found one solution that’s specifically for the task (whose name eludes me at the moment), but for me, my nextcloud is a Swiss army knife.

Apache guacamole is something I wish I had when I started. Let’s you connect with telnet, ssh, RDP, or VNC using html5

In sysctl.conf you can put

kernel.panic=1

Where 1 is the seconds until reboot.

For homeservers if you’re not always on-site to look at it, it’s a good idea to set a reset on kernel panic.

More ideal not to reboot of course, but I am often hundreds of miles from my servers so a kernel panic over something that wouldn’t have otherwise killed the system is something I’d rather live with and reboot.

A Klingon throuple is going to have more black eyes than a bag of peas.

Always go with more ram. I can say that from experience.

I’m partial to fanless, but keep in mind my empire of dirt is almost entirely fanless so I’m just partial to it.

I’m running a 4B model on one of my machines, an old surface book 1.

It’s a brutal machine. heat issues, and the GPU doesn’t work in linux. But pick a minimal enough model and it’s good enough for me to have LLM access in my nextcloud if for some reason I wanted it.

Biggest thing really seems to be memory, most cheaper GPUs don’t have enough to run a big model, and CPUs are dreadfully slow on larger models if you can put enough RAM in one of them.

Why my firewall is a fanless sign PC. Never really heats up, and I don’t need to worry about the unreliability added by fans.

To be fair, and this is coming to someone who is fully sold on LibreOffice and hosts Collabera, the two word processors can open each other’s documents, but cannot produce identical outputs for the same files.

For 99.99% of things switching between the two is going to be just fine, but every once in awhile that 0.01% will really bite you, especially if it is something important such as equations which I have seen first hand don’t properly migrate to LibreOffice.

Depends exactly what you’re doing on that old PC.

If you just need to connect for administration and the like, VNC is decent. It’s my default.

If you want to watch videos or the like, I’d definitely suggest Sunlight and Moonlight. It’s a streaming remote desktop that’s meant for streaming gaming, and so it’s really good at video and audio.

Oh, and for anyone who has never used it, Apache guacamole is a really neat tool for centralizing configuration. Effectively, you can set it up as a website with a username and password that will transfer through ssh, telnet, VNC, and RDP, so if you need to hop into something while you are outside the home, it’s going to be effective. That’s something that I wish I had known about earlier, it would have made a lot of rough days a lot easier.

On the topic of dns, I still use GoDaddy. People ask why, it’s because GoDaddy seems like a good idea in 2003 when I got my first domain, and 2006 when I got my current one. At that point it’s just inertia, I tend to buy several years in advance because I don’t like annual payments, I know it makes me a weirdo. That means I’m locked in for several years and it’s not enough of a problem to do anything about.

Anyone who uses GoDaddy knows that they turned off their dynamic DNS option quite some time ago. My system is pretty stable so I don’t usually need to change it, but if I have a power failure at home or I need to reboot my router, I obviously need to change my DNS at those moments.

When I’m away from home, I end up having to use TeamViewer to hop into a jump box vm I have set up for that purpose. The two obvious problems with that are first of that TeamViewer is a proprietary product, and the second of all that they see me hopping into a jump box regularly and they assume that I’m a commercial customer. There is apparently a way to tell them that you’re just a hobbyist, but I haven’t gotten around to filing that.

What I did do is set up a script that compares the current IP to my DNS IP, and if they are different then I send myself an email that contains the old IP in the new IP. This way, I don’t need to hop into my network to find out what the new IP address is. I also added a little bit there to save the last successful IP address sent by email to /tmp/ so that if I lose my IP address but I’m doing something where I can’t hop onto the GoDaddy website to fix it, I don’t get 100,000 emails with my new IP address.

I killed my house power a couple weeks ago, and the whole system worked exactly as intended. I was pretty happy to see that.

Erm… Yeah, that’s matrix with encryption enabled on the room.

A lot of things people say about matrix don’t apply to conduit. I’ve run it on an Intel Atom d2550 and it ran fine.

I’d be worried about having some of the voat stuff on a hard drive I own.

I’m surprised GitHub hasn’t automatically nixed the archive.