Solar Bear

Whatever you get for your NAS, make sure it’s CMR and not SMR. SMR drives do not perform well in NAS arrays.

I just want to follow this up and stress how important it is. This isn’t “oh, it kinda sucks but you can tolerate it” territory. It’s actually unusable after a certain point. I inherited a Synology NAS at my current job which is used for backup storage, and my job was to figure out why it wasn’t working anymore. After investigation, I found out the guy before me populated it with cheapo SMR drives, and after a certain point they just become literally unusable due to the ripple effect of rewrites inherent to shingled drives. I tried to format the array of five 6TB drives and start fresh, and it told me it would take 30 days to run whatever “optimization” process it performs after a format. After leaving it running for several days, I realized it wasn’t joking. During this period, I was getting around 1MB/s throughput to the system.

Do not buy SMR drives for any parity RAID usage, ever. It is fundamentally incompatible with how parity RAID (RAID5/6, ZFS RAID-Z, etc) writes across multiple disks. SMR should only be used for write-once situations, and ideally only for cold storage.

Refurbished drives get their SMART data reset during the process, they absolutely had more than that originally.

Never trust corporations. If you’re not profitable, they will abandon you. Only trust community-driven projects with a true open source commitment.

Every government is authoritarian by its very nature. The government derives authority from having monopoly on legalized violence.

For goodness’ sake, can we not do this? I’m an anarchist, I know this. I oppose the state on a conceptual level for this very reason. I’m speaking to you like a normal person using language that I know you understood the intended meaning of. There’s no need to engage in academic fartsniffery here. Just be normal.

The only reason there is the illusion of freedom of speech is due to the fact that mainstream views are carefully curated.

The owners of our media have a vested interest in maintaining their own control. They are not compelled to act by outside force, they largely act of their own free will to maintain their position in our corrupt system. Understanding this distinction is crucial to being able to fix it. This is the true insidious nature of our system, at this point it is maintained by people pursuing their own interests rather than by an overarching plot. There’s no need for one anymore, it is self-sustaining and perpetuating, like a cancer.

When people talk about censorship, they usually mean of media. Yes, I’m aware that the US government is an evil institution that targets activists and whistleblowers. You’ll never believe me, but I actually despise my government and nearly every person in it. However, authoritarian regimes also strike down those people, but additionally censor the media on top of it. So to say that state censorship is worse here and now is just asinine. There’s no need to make things up to seem worse than they are when they’re already very bad, it just leads to people swinging at ghosts.

What I said was that people in the west are subjected to orders of magnitude of western propaganda, and perhaps should worry about that first.

I’m capable of worrying about two things. Perhaps even three on a good day.

Chomsky even pointed out recently that censorship in the west now is even worse than it was in USSR.

Media being bad because capitalism pushes them to do evil to further their own ends is not the same thing as censorship enforced with state violence. These are both bad things, but uniquely bad in their own ways. I’m sad that Chomsky’s age has caught up to him and he can no longer distinguish the two.

Imagine thinking any large state isn’t constantly injecting propaganda into the Internet. Couldn’t be me.

People are fine. Hierarchy turns man into monster. Destroy the hierarchy, destroy the beast.

We all go down this hole at the start. The truth is, you should only reserve IPs if you actually need it to stay the same. You don’t need to check IPs as often as you think, I promise. The only segmentation and planning you should do for a home network is for subnets/vlans; LAN, Guest, IOT, Server, etc.

Instead of managing the IP addresses, just manage hostnames. Make sure every device with a customizable hostname is easily identifiable. This will help you so much more in the long run.

That’s what I do. All my IOT stuff that I can’t get wired or via Zigbee/Z-Wave goes on a separate VLAN along with my Home Assistant server. I have an mDNS repeater for ease of access to TV stuff via apps (might spin TVs off into its own VLAN, just haven’t gotten around to it) but a 1-way firewall rule that only allows the main network to initiate connections. Certain devices which don’t need internet at all get static IPs and completely firewalled.

They don’t; there was an internal tech demo that never went anywhere but was spread around online a few months ago with a bunch of misinformation that Microsoft was preparing to fight the Steam Deck head on.

https://gamerant.com/microsoft-windows-handheld-mode-leak-dev-details/

the developer also noted that the project itself “didn’t go much of anywhere.”

It’s a docker container that runs an OpenVPN/Wireguard client in order to provide a connection for other containers, yes.

This is a completely valid option and one that more people should consider. You don’t have to selfhosted everything, even if you can. I actually prefer to support existing instances of stuff in a lot of cases.

I use https://disroot.org for email and cloud, and I’m more than happy to kick them a hundred bucks a year to help support a community. Same with https://fosstodon.org for Mastodon. I’m fully capable of self-hosting these things, but instead I actively choose to support them instead so that their services can be extended to more than just myself. I chose those two because they send excess funds upstream to FOSS projects. I’m proud to rep those domains.

Cheers for this, I just bought a stack of new hard drives myself and this is exactly what I didn’t know I needed.

You can absolutely attach each VM and even the host to separate NICs which each connect back to the switch and has its own VLAN. You can also attach everything to one NIC and just use a virtual bridge(s) on the host to connect everything. Or any combination therein. You have complete freedom on how you want to do it to suit your needs. How this is done depends on what you’re using on the host for a hypervisor though, so I can’t give you exact directions.

One thing I should have thought of before; if two NICs are on one single PCI card, you probably can’t pass them through to the VM independent of one another. So that would limit you to doing virtual networking if you want to split them.

Having tried both, I found it far easier and less troublesome to just add a PCI passthrough than it is to worry about managing the network both on the host and in the VM. As long as FreeBSD supports the driver, I strongly recommend passthrough vs virtualized NICs.

Yeah, this is perfectly doable. I ran a very similar setup for a while. I’d recommend passing one of the NICs directly through to the VM and using one for the host to keep it simple, but you can also virtualize the networking if you need something more complex. If you do pass through a single NIC, you’ll need a switch capable of handling VLANs and a bit of knowledge on how to set up what’s called a “router on a stick” with everything trunked over one connection and only separated by VLANs.

Keep in mind, while this is a great way to save resources, it also means these systems are sharing resources. If you need to reboot, you’re taking everything down. If you have other users, that might be annoying for everyone involved.

I’ve used both, each for a long stretch of time; they are fundamentally extremely similar and you’ll be fine with either. I switched to AdGuard Home entirely because I could run it directly from my OPNSense router instead of a second machine. There isn’t really anything else major I’ve noticed different between them, but my usage is fairly basic. AdGuard’s interface felt a bit more mature and clean, but that’s it.

If you’re happy with your PiHole, there’s no reason I’m aware of to switch.

The idea that there’s only two options, doing nothing or complete pre-emptive defederation, is not accurate. If we can’t even acknowledge that, I don’t think this conversation will be productive.

Defederation doesn’t prevent that from happening at all. They don’t need us to do that, and I’m sure they’ll absolutely be doing stuff like that. It just doesn’t affect our servers in any way.

The idea that they can lure in people currently on the Fediverse just doesn’t seem realistic to me. Look at how many people have had an immediate reaction to completely block them; you think this is fertile ground for recruitment, really?