Spyke

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Do any of you bother writing abuse emails?

I’ve actually done this for a Microsoft owned IP before. Someone was Wordpress-scanning a particularly fragile application of one of my clients (which was not Wordpress) which was causing it to fall over. The scan stopped within an hour of sending the abuse email.

Edit to add: I used to work in a NOC for a tier 1 ISP. We had an “abuse department” (a couple people) that investigated these and opened tickets with the NOC. I’ve emailed customers and disconnected circuits as a result of abuse emails, so I wouldn’t say they’re totally useless, but I’m sure it depends on the company involved.

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Good servers for self-hosting

I'd go with something like this Lenovo M900 for $80-$90 used. Sometimes you'll get lucky and find one with a single 8GB stick, then you can get another for ~$20 and you've got a quad core x84-64 machine with 16GB of RAM for right around $100.

The downside would be power consumption compared to a Pi if you're trying to fit in a severely power-constrained setup, but the M900 will draw around 11-13W idle and 55W under higher load. so it's not bad my any means.

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First-time self-hoster here. OS and DNS Questions

I wouldn't want to host anything on Windows unless you have to, or you want to learn more about Active Directory / Exchange / etc to help with a day job (assuming your day job is sysadmin / IT). Even then I'd do that inside Windows VMs on a Linux / ESXi host.

I personally wouldn't (and don't) host authoritative servers externally to the internet. I do split-horizon DNS, so that my internal BIND server handles my LAN, but I have outside DNS handled by someone that has an ACME (Let's Encrypt) module, so that I can do wildcart certs.

One thing to look into as you spin up services at home would be some sort of VPN like Tailscale, WireGuard, or even something like Cloudflare Tunnel so that you're not exposing services directly to the internet if you don't absolutely have to. I believe some of these projects/products let you specify DNS servers so that when your phone (for example) is connected to the VPN, it uses your home DNS servers instead of public ones.

Your very own self-hosting legend is about to unfold! A world of dreams and adventures with self-hosting awaits!

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Deciding between Kubernetes or Docker Swarm

I haven't used Docker Swarm (I have barely used Docker Compose), but I have run a couple on-prem Kubernetes clusters (at my house and for clients at my day job) and cloud Kubernetes clusters, so I can speak to how complex it is it set up and run.

My background is systems administration, engineering, IT, and now DevOps. I've been using Linux since Ubuntu 6.06.

I set up my Kubernetes cluster with kubeadm because I wanted to learn, and it took me about a weekend to get my single master, two worker cluster up and running. I think you could probably do this using k3s much faster and have less learning curve (you don't have to care as much about Container Network Interfaces, for example, because k3s makes that decision for you.)

There is a lot of documentation out there on Kubernetes. Helm as a "package manager" (really a templating engine) can be nice if the software you want to deploy has a Helm chart that is well written. Writing your own Helm charts can be a learning process, I've modified some but not written one from scratch yet.

Kubernetes releases new versions about quarterly. I've done several upgrades on my primary home cluster over the course of the past 2 years and they've been pretty smooth, about an hour of time investment total each. And remember, I'm on the more nerdy and complex flavor of Kubernetes. I think with k3s these would be even smoother and quicker.

I feel like Kubernetes knowledge is probably more valuable out in the industry if that's a factor for you. I haven't come across any Docker Swarm clusters in my DevOps travels, just Kubernetes and some HashiCorp Nomad.

I'm curious to see what folks say about Docker Swarm. If you have any questions about Kubernetes or running your workload on it, I'd be happy to try to help!

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Welcome to [email protected] - What do you selfhost?

I'm running a Kubernetes cluster on the Dell hardware, then another single node k8s cluster on the Lenovo, mostly to run Adguard home / DNS in case the big cluster goes down for whatever reason.

Hardware:

  • Two Dell r610s, each with 12 cores and 96 GB of RAM, running ESXi 6.7
  • Lenovo M900, 4 core, 16 GB RAM, Ubuntu and k3s
  • Synology 1515 with 12 TB usable
  • Synology 1517 with 32 TB usable
  • Juniper SRX 220H (Firewall)
  • Juniper EX 2200 48 port switch
  • UnFi in-wall WiFi APs

I run the following services, all in Kubernetes, with FluxCD doing GitOps from a repo in GitHub (for now, might move to Gitea later):

  • Authentik
  • Bookstack
  • Calibre
  • Flame (Homepage)
  • Frigate NVR
  • Home Assistant
  • Memos
  • Monica
  • Plex
  • Prowlarr
  • Radarr
  • Rocket Chat
  • Sonarr
  • Tandoor
  • Tautulli
  • Unifi
  • UptimeKuma
  • VS Code
  • Zigbee2MQTT

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Local only doorbells

I'm using an Amcrest AD410 doorbell cam that I've firewalled off from connecting to the internet. I'm using it via Frigate in HA, but there's a HA integration for Amcrest / Dahua as well.

Edit to add: I've been using mine for about a year. No issues at all, it's warm to the touch not hot. Granted, I'm not doing any motion detection or anything on-camera.

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Evaporative Humidifier

Here's what I did for humidifiers in my house:

  • Dumb, analog-controlled humidifiers (like with the knobs, no digital displays, buttons, modes, etc)
  • Local control smart plug (Tasmota flashed Sonoff S31 in my case, but it can be anything)
  • Humidity sensor (I use the Zigbee Aqara ones)
  • Create a Generic Hygrostat entity

Now you've got a smart humidifier in Home Assistant. You can set the desired humidity, and when the sensor detects it's below this, it'll kick on the smart switch. When it passes the threshold, it'll turn off. It's been great! My humidifiers shut off when the water level drops, so I can even use the power monitoring in the Sonoff switch to send me a "low water" alert when the humidifier should be running, but it's drawing no power!