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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 14th, 2023

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  • I’d say anyone wanting to go this deep into a home monitoring setup will likely go with what works best for them instead of reading and following the entirety of this guide… I’m one of those people…

    Wrote my own log parsing software to put into a database, display and alert through grafana, which is alerting through a homemade webhook that sends a notification to ntfy based on severity… And I also use uptime Kuma like mentioned, but my notifications channel is ntfy. No cloudflare for my internal services, only wireguard to connect home and use everything. And definitely no telegram.

    Plenty of other stuff setup, but my security alerts and monitoring rely heavily on the syslog/grafana server which helps me monitor everything.


  • Not an opinion, I have an actual situation with my eyes where they twitch uncontrollably when presented with bright lights for a long period of time. I have tried minimum screen brightness, lowered contrast/colors, auto brightness based on the environment, various software solutions to removing blue light 24/7 from the screen - none of it worked. Went permanently dark theme on everything, magically eyes haven’t twitched in years.

    Light theme vs dark theme is not just a preference, it’s an actual accessibility need for some of us.



  • I converted my gaming machine into a server as well. I actually took the graphics card out as I couldn’t find a major use for it, but kept the 12 core Ryzen and upped it to 128gb memory. It now self host way too many things, including a few game servers my friends and I play… But even with all this, CPU carries along nicely and not even at half memory consumption (yet).

    But as others have asked, what’s your goal? Don’t overkill it if you’re only hosting one service or something. If you’re doing a lot like I do, then up the RAM. And seriously consider whether the GPU is even useful or needed if you’re not using a desktop environment.





  • My solution to this question a year or so ago was to take my gaming desktop, which was collecting dust after I moved to my gaming laptop, and gut it down to a 4U server rack case. Best decision I’ve ever made. 12 core Ryzen and 128gb memory. Got a 10g adapter in the pci express, 8xHDD for data and then 2 mirrored nvme for the OS itself. Only thing I kept out was the video card since I had no use for it (yet)

    An equivalent “server” on the market would probably cost a fortune and cost you a ridiculous amount of electricity.


  • I’ve had the opposite experience and was actually referring to this generation in my comment, specifically for the series X.

    With Xbox 360 and even some Xbox one games, I was able to come home with the game and put it into the console knowing I could play it right away from the disc (or install for the Xbox one and play). When I buy a game now, referring to physical copies, I’m unable to play without requiring internet. I understand some games have limitations on disc size, but once upon a time, that’s where multi disc came in. Just the other day I forgot to unplug my console from the network to play a game and was hit by a firmware update request that I couldn’t say “later” to. Once that finally finished, I unplugged but I guess the console already got wiff of an update for the game I wanted to play and said I need to be connected to the internet to continue.

    This is definitely not something I ran into with older generations, personally. That being said, it sounds like your experience was different, so I suppose mileage may vary



  • Lots of comments already mentioning the differences. I have tried these, including the mentioned ipfire, and decided on the end to use opnsense plus openwrt on two different devices.

    I chose opnsense at the time many years ago because it supported wireguard out of the box, where as pfsense required some weird install process I didn’t want to deal with. Plus I liked the UI to opnsense more.

    My moden has been literally replaced by my firewall so I have the ONT connected to it and then use it to do all the heavy lifting for… Well, firewall stuff. It connects to a VPN so my entire network routes through the VPN. Then my openwrt device is connected to that. It also handles firewall stuff, but more at an internal level (keeping network devices only permitted to communicate with devices I say are okay, blocking internet access, etc) and also hosts my nginx setup to route to various servers.

    While I could do everything on one machine with opnsense, I’ve got a particular setup that allows me to have multiple devices at the firewall level, truly isolated from the rest of my internal network (for a couple of internet open port services). And it gives me peace of mind that if someone found a zero day in opnsense, I’m not totally screwed unless they also got one in openwrt.

    To answer “which is better to begin with”, I personally find opnsense way more flexible and robust than the other 2 options. Has a lot more capabilities and upgrading is super easy without requiring jumping through weird hoops and such like openwrt does.


  • Unless it’s my cat. Got heavily filtered water and use it to fill 3 different fountain bowls in different parts of the house (none near the food source, but I did that because if they are, she’ll eat her food over them…) and the cat still demands I turn the sink on instead. Same exact water, and even though I change her water out almost every other day, the sink wins. Just glad she hasn’t figured out how to turn it on yet…

    Funny enough the last fountain I got looks like a faucet and she’s like “nah I’m not stupid, turn the sink on.”





  • I hate short variable names in general too, but am okay with them for iterators where i and j represent only indices, and when x/y/z represent coordinates (like a for loop going over x coordinates). In most cases I actually prefer this since it keeps me from having to think about whether I’m looking at an integer iterator or object/dictionary iterator loop, as long as the loop remains short. When it gets to be ridiculous in size, even i and j are annoying. Any other short names are a no go for me though. And my god, the abbreviations… Those are the worst.


  • Agreed! I was just mostly showing my gratitude to the people fighting Sony and my relief that I can get a chance to play, didn’t mean for my message to be taken literal on the “too long” part lol.

    That being said, my reasoning for wanting to play it soon is that I’ve got a few friends who are all now interested in picking it up… I’d rather enjoy the time to play with them now then not be able to play it with them in a year when they’ve moved onto something else.



  • Not much for myself, like many others. But my backups are manual. I have an external drive I backup to and unplug as I intentionally want to keep it completely isolated from the network in case of a breach. Because of that, maybe 10 minutes a week? Running gentoo with tons of scripts and docker containers that I have automatically updating. The only time I need to intervene the updates is when my script sends me a push notification of an eselect news item (like a major upcoming update) or kernel update.

    I also use a custom monitoring software I wrote that ties into a MySQL db that’s connected to with grafana for general software, network alerts (new devices connecting to network, suspicious DNS requests, suspicious ports, suspicious countries being reached out to like china, etc) or hardware failures (like a raid drive failing)… So yeah, automate if you know how to script or program, and you’ll be pretty much worry free most of the time.