486

486 , 23 days ago

Did anyone manage to build this? It seems something is missing, or I am doing something wrong. The build fails due to missing symbols for me. Also, interestingly the assembler complained about one line in a certain file being too long. Fortunately that lines was just a comment, so it was easy to fix that.

486 , 23 days ago

This explains it, although it is not really Git's fault as that article suggests, but rather the charset conversions to UTF-8 that broke things. With all that fixed it builds fine. I've been using DOSBOX and since all the required build tools are included in the repo, it is easy to build.

486 , 1 month ago

Matrix also does have a pretty big problem with meta data. By default it stores a ton of meta data (at least the reference server implementation does) and I am not sure if this is even a solvable problem without redesigning the protocol. When opting for an alternative to Signal, XMPP is probably the better choice.

486 , 1 month ago

Before anyone loses their minds, imagine you get the i3-8300T model that will peak at 25W, that’s about 0.375$ a month to run the thing assuming a constant 100% load that you’ll never have.

Not sure how you came to that conclusion, but even in places with very cheap electricity, it does not even come close to your claimed $0.375 per month. At 25 W you would obviously consume about 18 kWh per month. Assuming $0.10/kWh you'd pay $1.80/month. In Europe you can easily pay $0.30/kWh, so you would already pay more than $5 per month or $60 per year.

486 , 1 month ago

Well, what they are stating is obviously wrong then. No need to use some website for that anyway, since it is so easy to calculate yourself.

486 , 1 month ago

Sure, cloud services can get quite expensive and I agree that using used hardware for self-hosting - if it is at least somewhat modern - is a viable option.

I just wanted to make sure, the actual cost is understood. I find it rather helpful to calculate this for my systems in use. Sometimes it can actually make sense to replace some old hardware with newer stuff, simply because of the electricity cost savings of using newer hardware.

486 , 2 months ago

Awesome project. Thanks for sharing.

486 , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Lots of answers about use-cases of additional wifi networks, so I won't go into that. I haven't seen the downsides mentioned here, though. While technically you can run lots of wifi networks of off the same wifi router/ap, each SSID takes a bit of air time to broadcast. While this might sound rather insignificant since this is only a rather tiny bit of information transmitted, it is actually more significant than one might expect. For one the SSIDs are broadcast quite often, but also they are always transmitted at the lowest possible speed (meaning they require a lot more airtime than normal WiFi traffic would require for the same amount of data) for compatibility reasons. This is also the reason why it is a good idea to disable older wifi standards if not needed by legacy clients (such as 54 Mbit/s 802.11G wifi).

Having two networks is usually fine and doesn't cause noticable performance degradation, having 4 or more networks is usually noticable, particularily in an already crowded area with lots of wifi networks.

486 , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

For many li-ion laptop batteries, the manufacturer's configuration of a 100 % charge is pretty much equivalent to overcharging. I've seen many laptops over the years with swollen batteries, almost all of them had been plugged in all the time, with the battery kept at 100 % charge.

As an electrical engineer you should know that technically there is no 100 % charge for batteries. A battery can more or less safely be charged up to to a certain voltage. The 100 % charge point is something the manufacturer can choose (of course within limits depending on cell chemistry). A manufacturer can choose a higher cell voltage than another to gain a little more capacity, at the cost of longterm reliability. There are manufacturers that choose a cell voltage of 4250 mV and while that's possible and works okay if charged only occasionally, if plugged in all the time, this pretty much ensures killing the batteries rather quickly. I would certainly call that overcharging.

Since you already mentioned charging thresholds, I just want to say, anyone considering using a laptop as a server should absolutely make use of this feature and limit the maximum charge.

486 , 3 months ago

When it comes to privacy (and also security), using a router provided by the cable company is a concern, because that router can see and access all devices on your local network and you can't be sure that security issues are patched in a timely fashion if ever.. Using a modem provided by the cable company on the other hand is not much of an issue, because you have to trust the company anyway, when it comes to your traffic to/from the Internet. These days most of the Internet traffic is encrypted (except DNS, which is often still unencrypted), so that is not a big deal. Of course there can be other reasons to use a different modem.

In either case, it makes sense to switch to a non-ISP DNS server, preferably an encrypted one (DNS-over-TLS or DNS-over-HTTPS), so the ISP can't see which websites you are accessing.

486 , 7 months ago

Yes, the Odroid H series SBC probably come closest to OP's requirements. Schematics are available on their website. They are also really low power with even the older H2 idling below 4 W.

486 , 8 months ago

Highly susceptible to replay and man in the middle attacks.

fwknop isn't susceptible to either.

486 , 8 months ago

Disableing the root login gains nothing in regarding security.

This is usually not the reason people recommend disabling root login. Since root is an anonymous account not tied to an actual person, in a corporate setting, you do not really know who used that account if you allow root login. If this is relevant for a personal home network is for you to decide. I would say there is not such a strong argument for it to be made in that setting.

486 , 8 months ago

I was thinking about doing something similar and was considering running Android on a Raspberry Pi. There are unofficial LineageOS builds for the Raspberry Pi. I haven't tried that yet, but I guess it should be possible to use the Jellyfin Android app on such a setup.

486 , 9 months ago

There is quite a significant difference. An ssh server - even when running on a non-default port - is easily detectable by scanning for it. With a properly configured Wireguard setup this is not the case. As someone scanning from the outside, it is impossible to tell if there is Wireguard listening or not, since it simply won't send any reply to you if you don't have the correct key. Since it uses UDP it isn't even possible to tell if there is any service running on a given UDP port.

486 , 9 months ago

I always found the software updates of AVM - the manufacturer of those "Fritz!Box"es - to be of questionable quality. If you take a look at the source code that they have to release upon request of the GPL'ed source code they use, you'll notice that they use ancient versions of the Linux kernel, Busybox and other tools. By ancient, I mean many years old, unsupported by upstream for years. Also, they only publish those sources manually when someone asks for them, which doesn't bode well for their internal development processes. If they used CI/CD pipelines, they could easily push out updates of those sources with every new release…

486 , 9 months ago

Getting certs from Let's Encrypt should work fine with any provider, even if you can't open any ports, since they do support DNS challenge.

486 , 9 months ago

Particularly in low-load scenarios there can be quite a big difference when it comes to PSU efficiency. While newer ATX PSUs have become better with regards to efficiency at low load, a Pico PSU can still be quite a bit better. Older ATX PSU often don't even reach 60 % efficiency at 5 % load (which would be a typical load for such a system at idle), sometimes considerably less than that. At the same load a Pico PSU can easily be at 85 % efficiency.
Of course, at higher loads the difference is way smaller.

486 , 9 months ago

OP mentioned $0.40/kWh, so that would be about $17 per year with a 5 W difference.

486 , 10 months ago

Ansible also comes with its own secrets manager ansible-vault, which you can also use to store your secrets in an encrypted file.

486 , 10 months ago

Speaking of which, I always had issues with WiFi stability on OpenWrt. Maybe I was just unlucky, but I had issues with both Qualcomm Atheros (ath9k and ath10k) and Mediatek based routers. I couldn't find anything regarding stability of the WiFi in their hardware database. Is there a list of devices that are known to run reliably?

486 , 10 months ago

I assume some sort of DSL was meant by 'phone line'. In which case one could always use an external DSL modem, then any supported router should work. Or one could choose one of the few supported devices with built-in DSL modem, but make sure the modem supports the DSL standard you require.

486 , 10 months ago

Mine runs a little under 18 W with one 8 port managed switch, a DSL modem, CM4-based router, a tiny Wifi AP, and an Intel Celeron J4105 based mini PC server.

486 , 10 months ago

BirdNet-Pi is awesome. Highly recommended for anyone who likes birds. The BirdNet app for phones is also nice.
Btw, BirdNet-Pi also works fine on the non-plus Raspberry Pi 3.

486 , 10 months ago

Any backup software that supports incremental backup should work similarly bandwitdth-wise. I like Restic. You can even do incremental backups with plain rsync, if you want. If your data does not change much, than you should be okay. For the initial backup run it would be helpful if you have physical access to the remote location so you can bring a full backup there without having to upload it through your slow uplink.

486 , 11 months ago

From a security point of view it is not a good idea to host multiple web applications in sub directories on the same hostname. With such a configuration, every application sees all cookies from all other applications. This also means that you can have collisions of cookie names between applications if the names are not unique.

So if one application would get compromised, it could easily steal all your sessions for all other applications.