While AI-bros warn everyone how dangerous their newest version of slop-machine is this is the part I’m genuinely worried about. LLM hallucinations about nuclear threat could genuinely push someone in the current US admin to believe that pre-emptive strike to China is actually a good idea.

AI overlors in the 1980s knew better. A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

Just for comparison, my VPS server has ~20 active email boxes (postfix,dovecot,spamassassin,clamav), a few small-ish active wordpress sites (apahce,php-fpm,mariadb), radicale and some other smaller services running with 2 cores and 4GB RAM and it’s mostly just fine. Occasionally, specially during heavier updates on wordpress-sites, memory tends to get pretty full, but it’s still just fine. Tweaking memory cache for php (or running something else than php) would increase performance by a lot, but even without optimization the 5€/month VPS is quite capable to keep your internet presence around and on your own hands.

Ironically the site itself advertises login via google or twitter on pop-up dialog.

Nothing wrong with good old ssh. My VMs are different enough that building and maintaining ansible playbooks or something similar would be a bigger task than actually doing it in the traditional way. Maybe I could benefit by building simple playbooks to populate user accounts, ssh keys, smtp relay settings and other common things, but I don’t really set up new servers that often that it would justify spending time to set up tools for that.

Can I have a dog-sized dragon? Smaug would not fit in our living room and our budget can’t manage dozens of sheeps every week.

LLM gives you a concrete concise answer to your question while the search engine gives you dead links or spam.

LLM also very confidently gives you a wrong answer way too often. Just over the weekend I tinkered with diy-home automation gadget and fed a bunch of documents to duck.ai in hope that it could dig up protocol and electrical behavior of HAN port on our electric meter. The documentation is there, but it’s recursively referenced to a crapload of different standards so the actual answer is pretty labour intensive to dig up manually.

LLM spat out an answer which seemed to make sense, but the solution it offered didn’t work and when I asked for sources for spesific facts it just said that it doesn’t have any and that it shouldn’t have recommended such a solution in the first place, with apologies of course.

I’d much prefer the old school way of searching things, but that doesn’t really exist anymore either. Search engines, google specially, are far less useful than they used to be. Part of the problem is LLM slop filling the whole internet but somehow I feel that’s not the only reason.

My ISP offers unauthenticated SMTP for their customer addresses. It’s pretty heavily rate limited, but well enough for the occasional status email my system throws out. At least around here they are pretty common for residential customers, so that might be an option.

Other possibility is to set up SMTP relay to your network and give it credentials to an actual email account (with SMTP support, which isn’t granted these days). It can take in emails from your network without credentials and throw them to the internet with your account. It’s pretty simple to set up, search for postfix + smarthost. Added bonus is that you can read the replies to that address too via your email provider services.

I have several old but working electronics and I literally haven’t been able to give them away for free.

Few years ago I got a pile of old switches and other network stuff. Unmanaged 24 port gigabit switches, some firewalls and other network hardware you might find in a generic ~50 person office. No one wants them, but I don’t want to throw away working and (potentially) useful hardware either. I suppose I eventually have to as my own network doesn’t really need 200 ethernet ports and they are consuming the already crammed storage space I have.

And no, I’m not offering to ship them across the globe on my own expense. But trying to sell them on our version of craigslist for 15€ (shipping included) doesn’t seem to work either.

OrgAbuseHandle: ABUSE9107-ARIN

OrgAbuseName: ABUSE

OrgAbusePhone: +1-313-516-8908

OrgAbuseEmail: abuse@hostodo.com

OrgAbuseRef: https://rdap.arin.net/registry/entity/ABUSE9107-ARIN

They have options. No idea if they actually do anything for the reports, but it’s worth a shot.

I’m running Dahua cameras. They can pull new firmware straight over the internet, but they don’t rely on any cloud services. All kinds of flavours available and they do run on POE.

https://thecybersecguru.com/news/lg-smart-tv-spying-investigation/

There are roughly 216 million LG smart TVs in homes, hospitals, offices, and hotels worldwide. Each one maps its local network, fingerprints its content, and logs audio, on or off, whether you’re talking to it or to someone else, whether you’re online or not, and feeds that into an ad engine that sells access to your living room.

They do a lot more than just scan the network.

Mine is several years old by now, I doubt that the firmware on that has all the options enabled. And also I live in a pretty rural area, there’s no open networks around.

But something LG has achieved with this, I’m going to look for other brands when I’m on a market for new TV. Which I hope will be many years in the future, maybe there’s a change on products while waiting and something better is available by then.

My LG TV is blocked from my network and always has been. However, the andriod tv connected to it is a different thing, so it’s more or less lost cause anyways and I haven’t had enough incentive to block the android box from the rest of network since it’d need some tweaking so that casting and other occasionally used features still work. And even if I’d block the android tv box there’s still our cellphones gathering all the data, so I’m pretty much just running things on hopium that EU offers at least some protection on my data.

There’s a better way. Here in Finland it’s pretty common that you can just call/text your boss that you have a common cold and you can be on a sick leave for few days (3 days is pretty common limit) just self-diagnosing it. With longer sickness you’ll need a doctors note, but at least on my company with common cold and other minor stuff it’s taken care of either over text chat or via a call with a doctor.

Obviously if the doctor thinks the whatever you have requires more in depth examination they can schedule a meeting, but for seasonal flu and stuff like that it’s pretty rare you need to see a doctor in person at all. And of course they’ll follow the numbers, so that if you call in sick every monday or whatever the rules are more strict and examinations are done more frequently, but for vast majority a few days laying in bed with a fever isn’t any kind of issue.

You are obviously correct on that but we could also grab pitchforks about the term ‘sideloading’. Everyone knows what ‘installing’ is and ‘sideloading’ (in this context) is just a bullshit term to make it feel like something mysterious and/or dangerous. Installing software from play store is no different than installing from f-droid.

Another recommendation for storagebox from here. Cheapest option I’ve found and they are pretty reliable. I use proxmox backup server to sync my VMs there (encrypted of course).

There’s plenty more reasons than filesystem corruption to use clean shutdown and even just plain UPS without any status information to the host. I haven’t seen a full drive corruption due to power loss ever. Various levels of corruption, yes, but not ‘all the data is gone’ scenario due to filesystem being broken. But I have seen multiple hard drives which have died on host shutdown without any warning (no smart errors or such), after power loss they just refused to start again.

Just today we had multiple short (~30 second) power outages and without UPS that would’ve put considerable strain on my hardware. Gladly those are pretty rare and those were well short enough that my UPS kept the system running, without one that would’ve meant that my hypervisor would’ve crashed and that would’ve resulted on several unclean reboots for the VMs.

Also, back to filesystems, with selfhosting, some kind of hypervisor is often in the picture, so the drive activity is generally much higher than with single workstation and corruption on a single file or some part of filesystem is way more likely. Total data loss is pretty unlikely, but a corrupted VM image can be a pretty big deal, regardless if it’s filesystem or single file which is the main issue.

there’s no standardized mechanism for forcing applications to save

On Linux (and I guess BSD and other *nix variants) there is. SIGTERM is exactly for that situation. Sure, programs can choose to ignore it, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen at least any FOSS software which wouldn’t respect that. Of course the program might crash and cause loss of data, but the mechanism is there.

You’re of course generally correct about modern filesystems being more resilient to power loss, but they’re not immune to problems and also you’ve omitted a large chunk of other reasons why people like to have UPS on their system, with or without monitoring them.

For me personally the hardware is least interesting part of running a homelab. I’d happily run everything on VPS if there was no constraints on money or bandwidth (among other things). But as the limitations are there running things on my hardware is a necessary evil and for that an UPS or two are practically must to have to prolong life span of hardware and prevent data losses. Of course that’s just one box to check on the stack, but when planning for a home server setup for anything I’d say it’s a pretty vital part for the whole setup.

But in the real world it doesn’t really matter if it’s the whole filesystem or an idividual file which is corrupted. Either way the data is compromised and nitpicking that the filesystem is actually just fine doesn’t make any difference.

Modern filesystems can corrupt as well with unclean shutdown. They are just less likely to do so. My server stores photos of our life over couple of decades with other nearly irreplaceable data so having the UPS and clean shutdown on power loss gives at least some confidence that the files stay where they are.

Of course I also run backups of the data, but it’s another layer on data safety setup.

Heat exchangers and/or heat pumps to move energy to water and then pump that to district heating network which then takes care of heating of all kinds of buildings.