Find two more selfhosters and they will criticize both of us!

Absolutely. However I’d argue that some BSD variant is at the other end, not Gentoo, so there’s at least some critics to you ;).

I’m running proxmox and (mostly) Debian on top of that, and I’m sure that there’s someone thinking I’m doing things the wrong way.

With Windows Servers I think the bigger problem is that there’s way less people running things on top of it, so there’s less knowledge about problems and solving them. However, many of us are on corporate IT jobs too and thus have to work with Windows, so that might somewhat cancel out the difference in popularity.

In the grand scheme of things the only thing on my server stack that’s really worth anything is immich. The rest will have very little value to anyone once I’m gone. Plan is to create printed books from the photos and those should stay accessible for the future generations, our archive just needs a ton of work on creating those photos and possibly adding descriptions on who’s on the pictures and when they’re taken.

I don’t really plan for ww3 nor solar flare frying half of the planet, but one thing that’s a real problem is that if something happens to myself. My wife or kids don’t know how to manage/access a majority of the stuff there is even if their everyday digital life is using network and services in it I’ve built. They’ll be just fine without pihole or jellyfin, but data in immich/nextcloud is valuable and bus factor for the digital environment is pretty low.

I should at least verify that all server passwords are on my bitwarden vault and set up dead mans switch on that. Then they can at least get someone to pull the data out of the systems or even hire someone to maintain them. Best option would be if one of the kids would learn the ropes, but so far it doesn’t seem like they’re interested on anything like that.

Obviously there’s a ton in successful email hosting since it’s not just configuring few services. Proper DNS-records and privilege controls are mandatory, you need to occasionally clear up your domain/IP from spamlists (specially at the start) and single mistake can ruin your DNS reputation quite quickly which then takes time to build back.

But it’s still perfectly doable and, when you have proper knowledge on how the whole circus actually runs, not too difficult either. Only problem is that there’s no longer money on just email hosting since cloud hosting offers much more than just emails for the price a small gamer can’t just compete with. At least around here.

I flagree that hosting email servers on residential IPs is a recipe for being filtered and blocked

Unless your ISP gives you a static address and agrees to change PTR record to your server address. Then it’s no different than any other server on the internet. Obviously odds are that you’re not getting one or if it’s an option they’ll likely charge more than VPS is going to cost you, but it’s not unheard of.

But for the actual topic, I don’t get the myth either. I’ve got a good old postfix+dovecot setup running and the only problem I have is that spam filtering isn’t quite as good as with commercial providers, but the handful of trash coming trough is easy enough to take care of manually.

Sounds reasonable approach to me. Also I’d include VPS and other cloud services too. “Is this VPS enough to run NextCloud” is a perfectly reasonable question for this community just like “is my old thinkpad good for…”. I don’t think there should (nor can) be a hard rule about what hardware to use. Questions obviously outside of self hosting (e.g. “what GPU I should by to play minecraft”) should go elsewhere but otherwise I don’t think there’s even a real need to limit activity.

And also there’s a half a dozen of posts here daily (unless mods remove posts really efficiently). My opinion is that even if the post could go to some other community but leans to self-hosting side of things it can stay. Maybe if there was tens or hundreds of posts daily it would make more sense to limit what goes, but as things are now I don’t think any kind of (in a lack of a better word) gatekeeping is beneficial to this community nor anyone else.

Editing original post and including steps which helped would be great. I don’t expect anyone to reply to each an every comment separately, but a summary on what caused the problem and what fixed it would be nice. Specially when someone later finds the post with similar issue.

I would go with separate devices. You can add a button with two set of terminals to trigger both the traditional chime and IOT thingy on the same time. Personally I don’t see the appeal on video/audio with a doorbell, but I’d guess there’s some raspberry pi project around to achieve what you want. SIP just for a single house doorbell at a first glance sounds like a massive overkill, camera with a two-way audio, possibly integrated to home assistant, works equally well without the overhead of running a whole IP telephone system with it.

And moving borders isn’t that hard.

It actually kind of is. Depending on the laws on both countries. There was a petition that Norway would’ve gifted a top of one mountain to Finland when Finland celebrated 100 years of independence. Border would’ve moved something like 20 meters in the middle of nowhere, without any resources or pretty much anything else of any value. It would’ve just made the officially highest spot in Finland a bit higher.

It just wasn’t legally possible. Constitution in Norway says that the only way to lose land is to lose it in a war and changing their constitution isn’t really practical just for that kind of feat. Also there was more or less serious discussion that what if Finland claims a “war” against Norway and conquers that hilltop, but that would’ve meant that Finland (not a NATO member at a time) would be in a war with a NATO country, which is not trivial either.

There was also legal issues on Finland side of things too, but those would’ve been far simpler to resolve.

I don’t know about legal situation in Russia nor in China, so that might not apply, but in general countries tend to have legal limits on how they can lose or gain land. China has not annexed areas from Africa, they’ve just bought the rights for resources and use them as they see fit, but internationally agreed borders stay where they are. If they actually took land from Russia that would cause other kinds of legal issues, like having to build stuff in there to meet their legal minimum standards, set up administration and whatever their legal system requires. So, in many ways it’s just far easier to buy what they want and leave the border and land ownership politics out of the equation.

If they don’t actually take over land by the end of this, they will effectively control all the resources in large parts of modern day Russia.

China has plenty of land already. Why would they officially want something with piss poor infrastructure and corrupt officials. It’s a lot easier just to buy what they want, specially now when Russia doesn’t really have an option but to sell. It’s also politically much, much more easier than actually moving borders. Also, that’s what China has been doing already for quite a while in Africa (and likely in other places too).

I agree with division/multiplication issue. Or maybe just simply an assumption that VAT is always there and sanity checks on the systems just won’t allow 0 (or negative number) as a tax percentage.

I meant that in general even ‘official’ systems have stupid bugs or practices just because things have been in a certain way for long time. Years ago I wrote a small invoicing program which had obviously manage VAT and it would’ve been a simple mistake to assume that VAT (or any tax percentage) is just a whole number since that’s what I’ve ever seen before. That particular piece of software is well obsolete now, but that would’ve managed the decimals since it handled all the numbers in the same way just to keep things simple and monetary values obviously need decimals. However, without any verification it wouldn’t been a crazy assumption to store tax percentages as a two digit integer everywhere.

I’ve used local supplier for years who has spesifically selection for UPS batteries. Even APC ones tend to be pretty standard, just rip the APC stickers off and get the actual battery model number and ask from your local shop for replacement. I got a pair for new-for-me UPS a few weeks ago. Official APC kit would’ve been several hundred euros, the ones I got were ~50 with postage. They might not last quite as long as ‘brand name’ ones and power output is a slightly lower even on spec sheet, but that unit is running at around 15% load anyways, so in my case it doesn’t really matter.

How could you possibly build something this stupid?

Out gereric VAT rate changed to 25,5% about a year go. It’s been a whole number since current implementation was introduced in 1994. There was quite a few big systems running on accounting, cash registers, payment processors and whatever which couldn’t store decimals on VAT value. And obviously all the official information never stated that VAT couldn’t have decimals at some point, it just never had them before and thus vendors have just stored it as an plain integer and quite a lot of systems needed upgrade or on some cases full replacement.

So, apparently it’s pretty easy to build something that stupid.

Most likely not. However, proxmox is a bit strict here and there on how it wants drives, networking and other stuff laid out. Also the hypervisor itself is quite strictly only for that. So, if you want to tinker with something without virtualization platform or use your drives for something else than just proxmox-installation it’s likely not officially supported at least and might cause some headache or even bigger problems, like potentially losing data, if you run it in a way it’s not meant to.

However, if you just want a pretty capable hypervisor and run all your stuff on top of that it’s perfectly fine, specially for hobbyists. For bigger enterprises it has some issues and management for a bigger server fleet, at least for now, isn’t as polished as the ‘big players’ have, but, again, for home gamer it’s pretty good solution.

Router has 35d uptime, WAN interface stats shows Tx/Rx 3,9TB / 28TB. Most of the downstream is obviously IPTV and other streaming services, upstream is mostly offsite backups.

No errors and I have separate local backup server with spinning drives too which works just fine. Local backup server has ~5,7TB of data and verifications complete in about 5,5 hours. Actual (incremental) backups to S3 take about two hours with that ~2TB on VMs which seems decent enough.

I’m using OVH, not AWS. Their console gives estimation of ~20€/month for the ~2TB I have stored. Versioning is disabled and i’m currently runnign on their signup offer of 200€ credit, so I’m good to go for few weeks more. The storage I’m using includes the traffic, it’s just practically unusable due to verification speeds.

Local server has SSDs with zfs and well enough memory for arc.

150W or so for the main server now that I upgraded it to full SSD setup. Maybe a bit more when under heavier load. Another maybe 100W for router, main switch, frigate-server and other bits and bobs with full load. And then backup server with 4 spinning drives another maybe 150W. Haven’t really measured anything, just ballbark figures.

So around 500W total. But I’ve got electric heating anyways and hobbies tend to cost something.

really helps for that antenna to be on the 2nd floor, in a window, with clear view unobstructed by aluminum siding.

It’s on a roof already and quite capable of receiving signal, we just haven’t used OTA broadcasts for a while as IPTV used to work good enough. So no problems with the antenna, I’m just wondering what I should plug in to that.

Hardware is too wide to tell anything useful out of the blue, depends on what you can get your hands on (as in what’s available locally) and what you actually want to run. Used corporate desktop might be fine, raspberry pi might be good too, mini-pcs are popular and so on. All have their pros and cons.

For the OS proxmox is a solid choise. It has both containers and ‘full’ virtual machines as an option. Debian is good too.

And for the utilities, build something you actually want to use. Pihole is pretty nice. Gaming severs are good to practise with if you’re into that stuff. But if you just build stuff for the sake of it you’ll of course learn on the way but it leaves very little to actually enjoy on what you’ve built.

I really like my immich and nextcloud servers and they’re well worth my time to keep up and running. But with those there’s additional challenge to keep them backed up. Losing pihole server wouldn’t be that bad, it’s easy enough to rebuild, but losing a terabyte of photos is a bit another thing.