Can you use a dummy address or a friend’s address in another country and/or sign up via a VPN to mask your location? There are companies that will open and scan your mail and make it available online so it could be a real address. But they are a little pricey. It’s likely due to UK laws not the provider themselves, so probably all reputable providers (that follow the law) may require it.

If it’s closed source but can be self hosted, what is the business model? I think it would be hard to fight piracy in that case. If it requires connecting to a service periodically for licenses and has no free version that doesn’t require that, then I believe it should be banned. I don’t consider that self-hosted. If the company disappears and the served goes down, its dead. That’s just running on your hardware, but not under your control. If the application is open or can be run locally without connecting to their servers and the paid portion is an add on like working as a proxy or something, then I have no real issue with that.

That said, there definitely should be a higher standard for users who are only marketing here. They should be making posts specifically for this group, not just sharing generic ads. The post should specifically state why it’s useful to self-hosters and thus relevant to the group.

I run a single instance of Postgres and one of MariaDB on my NAS that all services connect to. And all of my containers store their settings in NFS shares from that NAS and backup most other things to the NAS. This greatly simplifies off-site backups overall when a copy of almost everything critical lives on the NAS.

Of course, the NAS needs to be powerful enough to handle the load, but since settings don’t get changed often and backups are during off hours and NFS has good caching anyway, the DBs are really the only heavy load on the NAS outside of storing and serving media. It has plenty of memory and has two 2.5Gb ports trunked together and a couple of small SSDs for fast caching in addition to the RAID array of HDDs. So it’s easily able to handle all of its file sharing duties as well as hosting the DBs.

Only negative might be that there’s no fail over if the NAS goes down. But I also don’t have a second router, so that’s another even more devastating single point of failure. But since everything critical is backed up to the NAS and then off-site, it’s an acceptable risk considering the cost to properly remediate it and the unlikelihood of major issues outside of times I’m doing maintenance…

ISP: $75/month for symmetrical 1Gbit fiber and unlimited data. This is the biggest expense. All other options are 1-25 Mbps up with cable or dsl and most are just as expensive.

VPSs: around $40/month, though I’m planning to cut back a bit as I’m moving some stuff local.

2 Domains: < $30/year

The rest is purchased with no future subscription costs. This covers everything except for the security cams that I need to migrate off of corporate services one of these days.

Reverse proxy with fail2ban or crowdsec. It’s possible to set up things like Pangolin which ultimately use a VPN between external and internal access points but not at the client, though it takes more setup if you want to use apps over pangolin instead of just the browser.

What do you use for repeatable recovery and deployment of systems?

I’ve looked at ArgoCD and FlexCD. ArgoCD was too flaky. When I made changes to helm files it would often fail to deploy them and the UI often wouldn’t really show the detailed errors from things like helm syntax errors, so it was a pain to troubleshoot.

FlexCD was just really a pain to configure in the first-place and I didn’t want to learn kustomize when I already have helm charts.

And neither really supported staged deployments or dealt with dependant services well. So I couldn’t get it to deploy the infrastructure level helm charts like PostgreSQL before deploying the services that depend on it. Technically, with Kubernetes it shouldn’t matter about the order of deployment but in reality when ArgoCD would deploy the other stuff first and wait for it to come up and it never came up because the dependencies weren’t there, it caused it to choke a lot.

Just an example of the issues I’ve had. But I really want an easy way to make lots of small changes to charts and deploy them quickly as well as being able to quickly recover the cluster from backups if something catastrophic happens like a fire without having to manually deploy each chart. Just curious how others handle it or if it’s always manual deployment of charts via CLI only.

I can’t get IPv6 in any worthwhile form from my ISP. IMHO IPv6 isn’t any more useful than IPv4 if you only have ULA. And NAT is not as well supported since it wasn’t intended to even be really necessary for example. So even if you are starting from scratch or just using it internally, there are some disadvantages to implementing it over just sticking with IPv6. But if your ISP actually provides IPv6 it might be worth it as long as your devices all support it. But otherwise you’re going to need to set up IPv4 in addition, anyway, so you’re just going to create problems for no good reason, IMHO.

Ok, so short, wide bus from CPU to memory? Makes sense. I didn’t really mean the CPU so much as the main board is very laptop like. Very little expansion capabilities other than external connectors like audio, Ethernet, etc., but no ability to add functional or incremental upgrades like a GPU or an additional stick of memory respectively.

So just glancing at the site, are these basically laptop CPU and RAM parts just packaged in a desktop form-factor case and that’s why they’re soldered? Seems like they also don’t have much expansion capability much like a laptop such as only having a single PCI-E x4 slot with a proprietary connection interface, so I couldn’t later add a graphics card for example. Unless, I’m just missing something, and if so please let me know.

Either way thanks for letting me know about the option.

I didn’t realize they were making desktops. I almost bought a laptop from them a few years ago but ended up finding an ASUS laptop that worked well with Linux and was significantly cheaper which fit my needs better for that. I’ll check them out.

Possibly, but it’s going to have issues. Immich can run on 4GB if you disable machine learning features for image recognition and such. And Jellyfin can run on a minimal system with 4GB if you have a graphics card, but with integrated graphics likely to be in a sub-$300 system the recommend 8GB. And graphics cards are still expensive even after the crypto craze has settled because LLMs benefit but also because of the artificial memory shortages they’ve created. Running both might work if you set a lot of virtual memory and never have them operating at the same time so it’s not swapping constantly. And that’s not leaving room for the other stuff. I’d say you could squeak by with 16GB, but that’s going to be most of the budget even for low-end, off brand sticks that are available right now.

Not much right now due to LLM training hogging all of the memory across the industry. Best bet is lightly used.

Definitely not needing something that high-end. It’s just me and maybe one other person using it periodically for voice commands that needs to be realtime. The rest is background processed stuff like Immich image recognition and Jellyfin audio/video processing. Nothing fancy is needed. I mention motherboard because the system I’m thinking of using is currently running Plex which I’m in the process of replacing with Jellyfin on my Kubernetes cluster of minipcs and Raspberry pis that runs most of my stuff pretty well, but could benefit from dedicated LLM/ML. So, that machine will be freed up, but it’s nearly a decade old and not up to the task as it is.

As for specific budget, I don’t have specifics in mind. My Kubernetes cluster is super energy efficient since it’s all small systems that only spin up when needed. So thinking about overall cost of ownership vs benefit. Having something too high end would just waste energy as well as the initial investment.

Yeah,but I dont want to get locked into a proprietary OS or have to put a lot of effort into hacking it to run Linux.