If Alexander's surname is Roshenko then surely his dad is the same?

In that case, why isn't it 'Commander/Lt Roshenko"?

Say ww3 kicks off and power goes off - how are you keeping your servers up? Solar panels and batteries?

What if there's a biblical flood and you dont have the means to build an arc? All your servers are destroyed beyond repair?

What if you heard the Feds are coming to cart you and your servers away cos they suspect you of bad mouthing Emperor Tromp? (you're on the run or subject to months of torture and yeah, you're never getting your kit back)

What if theres a war and Luxembourg (you know, the enemy) let's of an EMP pulse that kills your servers and all the infrastructure (power, internet...). How do you access all those cherished pics on Immich?

I'm not suggesting any of this will/can happen, its all just for lols, but have you made any contingency plans? Big binders full of printouts, bug-out bags, those flower-type solar things that track the sun, Faraday cages....

FYI - not AI. I just waste too much time mucking about with Photoshop.

Inspired by a similar English survey, I travelled the length and breadth of my garden to find out what mythical character delivers presents to children at Christmas. The results may surprise you.

(Completely fictitious and not AI)

I'm wondering what folks do to optimise the power efficiency of their Linux servers. I've never really got to the bottom of what is the best way to do this and with the current energy crisis its a pertinent topic.

I'm talking about home servers, so the availability requirements are not the same as in a corporate environment. There might be vast chunks of time during the day or night when they sit idle, and home users are more tolerant of a lag when accessing resources if it means lower energy bills.

Specifically I've been thinking about:

• allowing lower power states when idle
• spinning-down hdd's when they're not in use
• MAYBE letting machines sleep/hibernate
• setting schedules of times where you know demand will be low/zero and efficiency can be managed aggressively
• any other quick wins I've missed

It would be amazing if there was one tool or one guide that helps with all of that but thats never the case, is it 😅

Thoughts?

What's everyone using to auto-transcode their media library?

Tdarr and unmanic are both freemium/proprietary. I dont mind paying for software but I prefer to support open source projects.

Is there anything similar worth looking at?

You're probably already aware of this, but if you run Docker on linux and use ufw or firewalld - it will bypass all your firewall rules. It doesn't matter what your defaults are or how strict you are about opening ports; Docker has free reign to send and receive from the host as it pleases.

If you are good at manipulating iptables there is a way around this, but it also affects outgoing traffic and could interfere with the bridge. Unless you're a pointy head with a fetish for iptables this will be a world of pain, so isn't really a solution.

There is a tool called ufw-docker that mitigates this by manipulating iptables for you. I was happy with this as a solution and it used to work well on my rig, but for some unknown reason its no-longer working and Docker is back to doing its own thing.

Am I missing an obvious solution here?

It seems odd for a popular tool like Docker - that is also used by enterprise - not to have a pain-free way around this.

Besides "don't use Cloudflare/AWS/etc", how can we make our selfhosted setups resilient to outages like the ones we've seen recently?

Trying (and failing) to setup Timeshift. Hoping to have it do snapshots of an ext4 LUKS-encrypted Arch system partition.

Documentation is thin on the ground and relates heavily to the GUI so problem solving hasn't been easy.

This is what I get when I run it for the first time:

$ sudo timeshift --create --comments "initial snapshot" First run mode (config file not found) Selected default snapshot type: RSYNC Mounted '/dev/dm-0 (nvme0n1pX)' at '/run/timeshift/991/backup' ------------------------------------------------------------------- Estimating system size... Creating new snapshot...(RSYNC) Saving to device: /dev/dm-0, mounted at path: /run/timeshift/991/backup Syncing files with rsync... E: rsync returned an error                                             E: Failed to create new snapshot Failed to create snapshot ------------------------------------------------------------------- Removing snapshots (incomplete): ------------------------------------------------------------------- Removing '2025-11-07_10-30-22'... Removed '2025-11-07_10-30-22'                                          ------------------------------------------------------------------- E: Failed to remove directory Ret=256

I initially left timeshift.json empty except for 'backup_device', but this is how it filled it out:

{  "backup_device_uuid" : "ab13bb9a-e4d6-4884-b8c8-XXXXXXXX",   "parent_device_uuid" : "904be7d0-a38d-4aed-9ee4-XXXXXXXX",   "do_first_run" : "false", "btrfs_mode" : "false",   "include_btrfs_home_for_backup" : "false",   "include_btrfs_home_for_restore" : "false",   "stop_cron_emails" : "true", "schedule_monthly" : "false", "schedule_weekly" : "false", "schedule_daily" : "false", "schedule_hourly" : "false", "schedule_boot" : "false", "count_monthly" : "2", "count_weekly" : "3", "count_daily" : "5", "count_hourly" : "6", "count_boot" : "5", "date_format" : "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", "exclude" : [ "/root/","/home/joe/" ], "exclude-apps" : [] }

I believe that unless you tell it otherwise, it will write snapshots to the same partition, which is what I want. 'parent_device' appears to be the LUKS crypto container that the root sits in.

Anyone spot the problem? Any help would be much appreciated!

Also, if I wanted to exclude a dir (inc. all subdirs & contents) at root called 'blah', would "/blah/**" be the correct exclude pattern?

A few ideas:

• it'd come in like a wrecking ball
• it would be slimmed-down, surgically
• notification every 5 secs to remind you that her dad is (supposedly) a big deal
• it would be annoyingly noisy

I'm going round in circles on this one.

What I want to do is:

• serve up my self-hosted apps with https (to local clients only - nothing over the open web)
• address them as 'app.server.lan' or 'sever.lan/app'
• preferably host whatever is needed in docker

I think this is achievable with a reverse proxy, some kind of DNS server and self-signed certs. I'm not a complete noob but my knowledge in this area is lacking. I've done a fair bit of research but I'm probably not using the right terminology or whatever.

Would anyone have a link to a good guide that covers this?

What are the options for increased privacy in how you pay for things where you live?

Cash is the obvious answer, but what about buying stuff online?

UK here. Thinking of ditching cards/contactless for good old cash. No idea about online payments - not doing anything illegal so might persevere with cards for now. Zero experience with crypto.