Bringing back Gnutella.

This is one advantage Gnutella had/has over torrents. Kind of like a federated content library. Too bad low quality content and malware were such a huge problem.

There are many, many, many specialized enterprise applications out there that are windows only.

Agreed. I don’t understand why internet access gets treated as some sort of luxury when it is impossible to function as part of society without it.

Trying to force ISP’s to police their user’s internet traffic, as a means to stop piracy, is phenomenally stupid. All they’ve managed to do is make the internet worse for the average user while forcing a dramatic increase in the sophistication of piracy technology.

Hell, I would argue that the state and quality of pirated media is in some ways the best it’s ever been and the recording and film industries have indirectly contributed to that. Talk about irony.

I use a combination of both. SSD’s to store read/write intensive data. In my case, I run multiple VM’s and store the primary VHD’s on SSD’s. HDD’s for stuff where space matters more than speed, like digital media and local backups.

Every time I think about hosting my own mail server, I think back to the many, many, many times I’ve had to troubleshoot corporate email systems over the years. From small ones that ran on duct tape and prayers to big ones that were robust, high dollar systems.

98% of the time, the reason the messages aren’t coming or going is something either really obscure or really stupid. Email itself isn’t that complicated and it’s a legacy communications medium at this point. But it’s had so much stuff piled on top of it for spam and fraud prevention, out of necessity, and that’s where the major headaches come from. Honestly, it’s one service that to me it’s worth paying someone else to deal with.

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If you’re not hosting any publicly available services, then no. A reverse proxy would be unnecessary. You can just just set static records in your DNS server that tell it which internal hostname goes with what IP and it will relay that info to any device on your local network that requests it. Even with a Wireguard connection, you can tell it to use the DNS server from your local network.

They do maintain an x86 build. I haven’t used pfSense but I have used OpnSense so that’s that closest thing I have to compare it to. I think the upside and downside to RouterOS/Mikrotik is the same thing: it allows very granular control over almost everything. Maybe to a fault. It’s probably overkill for most home networks.

Set up a VPS. Create a VPN tunnel from you local network to the VPS. Use the VPS as the edge router by opening ports on the VPS firewall and routing incoming traffic on those ports through the VPN tunnel to servers on your local network.

I used to do this to get around CGNAT. I ran RouterOS in a Digital Ocean droplet and setting up a wire guard tunnel between it and my local Mikrotik router.

It will obscure your local WAN IP and give you a static IP but that’s about the only benefit. And you have to be pretty network savvy to configure it correctly.

It does not make you immune to DDoS attacks and is honestly more headache to maintain (albeit just a small headache).

I left Reddit because of their shenanigans. The Tiktok crowd deciding Reddit was cool was what guaranteed I would never go back. Now if anyone asks me if I use social media, I just say “No”.

Nice to see they’re still chugging the AI Koolaid after completely blundering their test rollout of AI search results.

Mail servers are the one thing I refuse to self host. Years of managing enterprise email taught me that I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life

Oh, I wouldn’t if I could avoid it. The “fun” of tinkering with IT stuff in my very limited spare time vaporized many years ago. If I could pay for services that did exactly what I wanted, respected my privacy, and valued my business while charging a fair price, I would stop self-hosting tomorrow. But that’s not usually how it works.

Self hosting isn’t super high maintenance once you get everything set up but it still takes up probably 10-12 hours per month on average and I would not mind having that time back.

This is a pretty good summary. In enterprise networking, it’s common to have the ‘DMZ’, the network for servers exposed to the internet, firewalled off from the rest of the system.

If you have a webserver, you would need two sets of ports open, often on two separate firewalls. On the WAN firewall, you would open ports 80/443 pointing to the webserver. On the system firewall, between the DMZ and LAN, you would open specific ports between the webserver and whatever internal resources it needs; a database server for example.

This helps limit the damage if a malicious actor hacks into your webserver by making sure they don’t also have unrestricted access to other parts of your system. It’s called a layered security approach.

However, someone self hosting may not have the expertise or even the hardware to set up their system like this. A VPS for public facing services, as long as it’s configured properly, can be a good alternative. It also helps if you have a dynamic WAN IP address and/or are behind CG-NAT.

Edit: maybe good to mention that securing your local network behind a VPN, even one hosted on your local network, is more secure than allowing public facing services. Yes, it means you still have to open a port. But that’s useless to a malicious actor without the encryption keys. Whereas, if you have a webserver exposed publicly, malicious actors already have some level of access to your system. More than they would if that service didn’t exist anyway. That’s not inherently bad. It comes with the territory when you’re hosting public services. It is more more risky though. And, if the exposed server is compromised, it can potentially open up the rest of your system to compromise as well. Like the original commenter said, it’s about managing risk and different network configurations have different levels of risk.

Apparently offshoring basically all of your manufacturing while not giving a shit about the loss of engineering capability and institutional knowledge has significant downsides. Who knew? Who could possibly have seen this coming?? I’m serious. I would ask the people in engineering but they all got fired like twenty years ago.

Data Rule Numero Uno:

Garbage in, garbage out.

Have fun training your LLM on a big steaming pile of hot garbage. That’s 80% of Stack Overflows content.

Now you can have a computer tell you that you’re an idiot and your question is stupid rather than actual person.

The MPAA should give themselves a great big pat on the back. They, and the studios they represent have done much to not only enable piracy, but also to increase the sophistication of piracy tactics and – somewhat by extension – the quality of the material being pirated. Turns out, fucking over your customers at every possible turn has consequences.