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Cake day: November 5th, 2023

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  • Your $1 has absolutely changed in value by 10pm. What do you think inflation is? It might not be enough change for the store to bother changing prices but the value changes constantly.

    Watch the foreign exchange markets, your $1 is changing in value compared to every other currency constantly.

    The only difference between fiat and crypto is that changing the prices in the store is difficult, and the volume of trade is high enough to reduce volatility in the value of your $. There are plenty of cases of hyperinflation in history where stores have to change prices on a daily basis, meaning that fiat is not immune to volatility.

    To prevent that volatility we just have things like the federal reserve, debt limits, federal regulations, etc that are designed to keep you the investor (money holders) happy with keeping that money in dollars instead of assets. The value is somewhat stable as long as the government is solvent.

    Crypto doesn’t have those external controls, instead it has internal controls, i.e. mining difficulty. Which from a user perspective is better because it can’t be printed at will by the government.

    Long story short fiat is no different than crypto, there is no real tangible value, so value is what people think it is. Unfortunately crypto’s value is driven more by speculative “investors” than by actual trade demand which means it is more volatile. If enough of the world changed to crypto it would just as stable as your $.

    Not saying crypto is a good thing just saying that it isn’t any better or worse. It needs daily usage for real trade by a large portion of the population to reduce the volatility, instead of just being used to gamble against the dollar.

    Our governments would likely never let that happen though, they can’t give up their ability to print money. It’s far easier to keep getting elected when you print the cash to operate the government, than it is to raise taxes to pay for the things they need.

    The absolutely worthless meme coin scams/forks/etc are just scammers and gamblers trying to rip each other off. They just make any sort of useful critical mass of trade less and less plausible because it gives all crypto a bad name. Not that Bitcoin/Ethereum started out any different but now that enough people are using them splitting your user base is just self defeating


  • I just did a playthrough recently and I think it holds up pretty well. A lot of wasted time on little cutscenes like opening Atla/boxes, and switching characters that gets quite annoying, but gameplay was fine.

    One or two bosses that are difficult but a little leveling up, or wiki hints on how to cheese them, and they are a piece of cake. Once you hit the ship dungeon and have easier access to backrooms (since you can buy the fish to enter them) you can grind for gemstones and you end up being able to one hit almost everything from there on out.

    Grinding gets a bit boring after a while, I’ll admit I enabled some fish point cheats in my emulator after I had one character with a maxed out weapon. Clear that I could easily do it myself but wasn’t going to waste that time to upgrade the other weapons I wanted leveled up.



  • Since the ER-X is Linux under the hood the easiest thing to do would be to just ssh in and run tcpdump.

    Since you suspect this is from the UDR itself you should be able to filter for the IP of the UDRs management interface. That should get you destination IPs which will hopefully help track it down.

    Not sure what would cause that sort of traffic, but I know there used to be a WAN speed test on the Unifi main page which could chew up a good amount of traffic. Wouldn’t think it would be constant though.

    Do you have other Unifi devices that might have been adopted with layer 3 adoption? Depending on how you setup layer 3 adoption even if devices are local to your network they might be using hairpin NAT on the ER-X which might look like internet activity destined for the UDR even though it is all local.


  • Named volumes are often the default because there is no chance of them conflicting with other services or containers running on the system.

    Say you deployed two different docker compose apps each with their own MariaDB. With named volumes there is zero chance of those conflicting (at least from the filesystem perspective).

    This also better facilitates easier cleanup. The apps documentation can say “docker compose down -v”, and they are done. Instead of listing a bunch of directories that need to be cleaned up.

    Those lingering directories can also cause problems for users that might have wanted a clean start when their app is broken, but with a bind mount that broken database schema won’t have been deleted for them when they start up the services again.

    All that said, I very much agree that when you go to deploy a docker service you should consider changing the named volumes to standard bind mounts for a couple of reasons.

    • When running production applications I don’t want the volumes to be able to be cleaned up so easily. A little extra protection from accidental deletion is handy.

    • The default location for named volumes doesn’t work well with any advanced partitioning strategies. i.e. if you want your database volume on a different partition than your static web content.

    • Old reason and maybe more user preference at this point but back before the docker overlay2 storage driver had matured we used the btrfs driver instead and occasionally Docker would break and we would need to wipe out the entire /var/lib/docker btrfs filesystem, so I just personally want to keep anything persistent out of that directory.

    So basically application writers should use named volumes to simplify the documentation/installation/maintenance/cleanup of their applications.

    Systems administrators running those applications should know and understand the docker compose well enough to change those settings to make them production ready for their environment. Reading through it and making those changes ends up being part of learning how the containers are structured in the first place.


  • For shared lines like cable and wireless it is often asymmetrical so that everyone gets better speeds, not so they can hold you back.

    For wireless service providers for instance let’s say you have 20 customers on a single access point. Like a walkie-talkie you can’t both transmit and receive at the same time, and no two customers can be transmitting at the same time either.

    So to get around this problem TDMA (time division multiple access) is used. Basically time is split into slices and each user is given a certain percentage of those slices.

    Since the AP is transmitting to everyone it usually gets the bulk of the slices like 60+%. This is the shared download speed for everyone in the network.

    Most users don’t really upload much so giving the user radios equal slices to the AP would be a massive waste of air time, and since there are 20 customers on this theoretical AP every 1mbit cut off of each users upload speed is 20mbit added to the total download capability for anyone downloading on that AP.

    So let’s say we have APs/clients capable of 1000mbit. With 20 users and 1AP if we wanted symmetrical speeds we need 40 equal slots, 20 slots on the AP one for each user to download and 1 slot for each user to upload back. Every user gets 25mbit download and 25mbit upload.

    Contrast that to asymmetrical. Let’s say we do a 80/20 AP/client airtime split. We end up with 800mbit shared download amongst everyone and 10mbit upload per user.

    In the worst case scenario every user is downloading at the same time meaning you get about 40mbit of that 800, still quite the improvement over 25mbit and if some of those people aren’t home or aren’t active at the time that means that much more for those who are active.

    I think the size of the slices is a little more dynamic on more modern systems where AP adjusts the user radios slices on the fly so that idle clients don’t have a bunch of dead air but they still need to have a little time allocated to them for when data does start to flow.

    A quick Google seems to show that DOCSIS cable modems use TDMA as well so this all likely applies to cable users as well.




  • Can you run more cat6? There are plenty of HDMI over cat6 adapters that work well over some fairly long distances.

    There are also plenty of extended length HDMI cables that are 50+ feet if you can fish through the HDMI end. They get a bit expensive at that length because they are hybrid fiber optic but no noise concerns.

    USB also has adapters to run over cat6. They are usually limited to USB2.0 but that should be plenty to plug a small hub in for mouse and keyboard.


  • greyfox@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldSharing Jellyfin
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    2 months ago

    Depending on how you setup your reverse proxy it can reduce random scanning/login attempts to basically zero. The point of a reverse proxy is to act as a proxy, as a sort of web router, and to validate that the http requests are correctly formatted.

    For the routing depending on what DNS name/path the request comes in with it can route to different backends. So you can say that app1.yourdomain.com is routed to the internal IP address of your app1, and app2.yourdomain.com goes to app2. You can also do this with paths if the applications can handle it. Like yourdomain.com/app1.

    When your client makes a request the reverse proxy uses the “Host” header or the SNI string that is part of the TLS connection to determine what certificate to use and what application to route to.

    There is usually a “default” backend for any request that doesn’t match any of the names for your backend services (like a scanner blindly trying to access your IP). If you disable the default backend or redirect default requests to something that you know is secure any attacker scanning your IP for vulnerabilities would get their requests rejected. The only way they can even try to hit your service is to know the correct DNS name of your service.

    Some reverse proxies (Traefik, HAproxy) have options to reject the requests before the TLS negation has even completed. If the SNI string doesn’t match the connection just drops it doesn’t even bother to send a 404/5xx error. This can prevent an attacker from doing information gathering about the reverse proxy itself that might be helpful in attacking it.

    This is security by obscurity which isn’t really security, but it does reduce your risk because it significantly reduces the chances of an attacker being able to find your applications.

    Reverse proxies also have a much narrower scope than most applications as well. Your services are running a web server with your application, but is Jellyfin’s built in webserver secure? Could an attacker send invalid data in headers/requests to trigger a buffer overflow? A reverse proxy often does a much better job of preventing those kinds of attacks, rejecting invalid requests before they ever get to your application.


  • Agreed. The nonstandard port helps too. Most script kiddies aren’t going to know your service even exists.

    Take it another step further and remove the default backend on your reverse proxy so that requests to anything but the correct DNS name are dropped (bots just are probing IPs) and you basically don’t have to worry at all. Just make sure to keep your reverse proxy up to date.

    The reverse proxy ends up enabling security through obscurity, which shouldn’t be your only line of defence, but it is an effective first line of defence especially for anyone who isn’t a target of foreign government level of attacks.

    Adding basic auth to your reverse proxy endpoints extends that a whole lot further. Form based logins on your apps might be a lot prettier, but it’s a lot harder to probe for what’s running behind your proxy when every single URI just returns 401. I trust my reverse proxy doing basic auth a lot more than I trust some php login form.

    I always see posters on Lemmy about setting up elaborate VPN setups for as the only way to access internal services, but it seems like awful overkill to me.

    VPN still needed for some things that are inherently insecure or just should never be exposed to the outside, but if it is a web service with authentication required a reverse proxy is plenty of security for a home lab.


  • You are paying for reasonably well polished software, which for non technical people makes them a very good choice.

    They have one click module installs for a lot of the things that self hosted people would want to run. If you want Plex, a onedrive clone, photo sync on your phone, etc just click a button and they handle installing and most of the maintenance of running that software for you. Obviously these are available on other open source NAS appliances now too so this isn’t much of a differnentiator for them anymore, but they were one of the first to do this.

    I use them for their NVR which there are open source alternatives for but they aren’t nearly as polished, user friendly, or feature rich.

    Their backup solution is also reasonably good for some home labs and small business use cases. If you have a VMware lab at home for instance it can connect to your vCenter and it do incremental backups of your VMs. There is an agent for Windows machines as well so you can keep laptops/desktops backed up.

    For businesses there are backup options for Office365/Google Workspace where it can keep backups of your email/calendar/onedrive/SharePoint/etc. So there are a lot of capabilities there that aren’t really well covered with open source tools right now.

    I run my own built NAS for mass storage because anything over two drives is way too expensive from Synology and I specifically wanted ZFS, but the two drive units were priced low enough to buy just for the software. If you want a set and forget NAS they were a pretty good solution.

    If their drives are reasonably priced maybe they will still be an okay choice for some people, but we all know the point of this is for them to make more money so that is unlikely. There are alternatives like Qnap, but unless you specifically need one of their software components either build it yourself or grab one of the open source NAS distros.


  • If your NAS has enough resources the happy(ish) medium is to use your NAS as a hypervisor. The NAS can be on the bare hardware or its own VM, and the containers can have their own VMs as needed.

    Then you don’t have to take down your NAS when you need to reboot your container’s VMs, and you get a little extra security separation between any externally facing services and any potentially sensitive data on the NAS.

    Lots of performance trade offs there, but I tend to want to keep my NAS on more stable OS versions, and then the other workloads can be more bleeding edge/experimental as needed. It is a good mix if you have the resources, and having a hypervisor to test VMs is always useful.


  • If you are just using a self signed server certificate anyone can connect to your services. Many browsers/applications will fail to connect or give a warning but it can be easily bypassed.

    Unless you are talking about mutual TLS authentication (aka mTLS or two way ssl). With mutual TLS in addition to the server key+cert you also have a client key+cert for your client. And you setup your web server/reverse proxy to only allow connections from clients that can prove they have that client key.

    So in the context of this thread mTLS is a great way to protect your externally exposed services. Mutual TLS should be just as strong of a protection as a VPN, and in fact many VPNs use mutual TLS to authenticate clients (i.e. if you have an OpenVPN file with certs in it instead of a pre-shared key). So they are doing the exact same thing. Why not skip all of the extra VPN steps and setup mTLS directly to your services.

    mTLS prevents any web requests from getting through before the client has authenticated, but it can be a little complicated to setup. In reality basic auth at the reverse proxy and a sufficiently strong password is just as good, and is much easier to setup/use.

    Here are a couple of relevant links for nginx. Traefik and many other reverse proxies can do the same.

    How To Implement Two Way SSL With Nginx

    Apply Mutual TLS over kubernetes/nginx ingress controller


  • The biggest question is, are you looking for Dolby Vision support?

    There is no open source implementation for Dolby Vision or HDR10+ so if you want to use those formats you are limited to Android/Apple/Amazon streaming boxes.

    If you want to avoid the ads from those devices apart from side loading apks to replace home screens or something the only way to get Dolby Vision with Kodi/standard Linux is to buy a CoreELEC supported streaming device and flashing it with CoreELEC.

    List of supported devices here

    CoreELEC is Kodi based so it limits your player choice, but there are plugins for Plex/Jellyfin if you want to pull from those as back ends.

    Personally it is a lot easier to just grab the latest gen Onn 4k Pro from Walmart for $50 and deal with the Google TV ads (never leave my streaming app anyways). Only downside with the Onn is lack of Dolby TrueHD/DTS Master audio output, but it handles AV1, and more Dolby Vision profiles than the Shield does at a much cheaper price. It also handles HDR10+ which the Shield doesn’t but that for at isn’t nearly as common and many of the big TV brands don’t support it anyways.


  • I am not a SAN admin but work closely with them. So take this with a grain of salt.

    Best practice is always going to be to split things into as many failure domains as possible. The main argument being how would you test upgrades to the switch firmware without potentially affecting production.

    But my personal experience says that assuming you have a typical A/B fabric that is probably enough to handle those sorts of problems, especially if you have director class switches where you have another supervisor to fail back to.

    I’ve personally seen shared dev/prod switches for reasonably large companies (several switches with ~150 ports lit on each switch), and there were never any issues.

    If you want to keep a little separation between dev and prod keep those on different VSANs which will force you to keep the zones separated.

    Depending on how strict change management is for your org keep in mind that tangling dev+prod might make your life worse in other ways. i.e. you can probably do switch firmware updates/zoning changes/troubleshooting in dev during work hours but as soon as you connect those environments together you may have to do all of that on nights and weekends.


  • Like most have said it is best to stay away from ZFS deduplication. Especially if your data set is media the chances of an entire ZFS block being the same as any other is small unless you somehow have multiple copies of the same content.

    Imagine two mp3s with the exact same music content but with slightly different artist metadata. A single bit longer or shorter at the beginning of the file and even if the file spans multiple blocks ZFS won’t be able to duplicate a single byte. A single bit offsetting the rest of the file just a little is enough to throw off the block checksums across every block in the file.

    To contrast with ZFS, enterprise backup/NAS appliances with deduplication usually do a lot more than block level checks. They usually check for data with sliding window sizes/offsets to find more duplicate data.

    There are still some use cases where ZFS can help. Like if you were doing multiple full backups of VMs. A VM image has a fixed size so the offset issue above isn’t an issue, but if beware that enabling deduplication for even a single ZFS filesystem affects the entire pool, even ZFS filesystems that have deduplication disabed. The deduplication table is global for the pool and once you have turned it on you really can’t get rid of it. If you get into a situation where you don’t have enough memory to keep the deduplication table in memory ZFS will grind to a halt and the only way to completely remove deduplication is to copy all of your data to a new ZFS pool.

    If you think this feature would still be useful for you, you might want to wait for 2.3 to release (which isn’t too far off) for the new fast dedup feature which fixes or at least prevents a lot of the major issues with ZFS dedup

    More info on the fast dedup feature here https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/15896


  • If they are on the same vlan and the same proxmox server the packets likely never leave your proxmox server. The bridge interface on your virtual host acts like its own switch so packets between those VMs would never hit the Ubiquiti ACLs.

    If you have another nic on the host you could attach each VM to a different NIC which would force that traffic through the switch.

    I assume these are Ubiquiti’s Unifi switches not the Edgeswitches? The Edgeswitches can’t be managed through Unifi but have a lot more capabilities like community vlans which would be another potential solution for intra-vlan isolation.

    Proxmox might have its own options to solve this but I am not familiar with their capabilities.


  • Third party solutions can at least partially fix this. I have this site: https://spotifyshuffler.com/ create a shuffled copy of my playlists occasionally. Then you just play the pre-shuffled playlist with shuffle disabled.

    In my case I have a large (several thousand track) playlist, and I turn on Spotify’s shuffle just to pick the first track at a somewhat random spot in the large list and then shut their shuffle off toward continue the pre-shuffled list without their manipulation. Whenever I add content to the playlist I have it reshuffled.


  • Contrary to a lot of posts that I have seen, I would say ZFS isn’t pointless with a single drive. Even if you can’t repair corruption with a single drive knowing something is corrupt in the first place is even more important (you have backups to restore it from right?).

    And a ZFS still has a lot of features that are useful regardless. Like snapshots, compression, reflinks, send/receive, and COW means no concerns about data loss during a crash.

    BTRFS can do all of this too and I believe it is better about low memory systems but since you have ZFS on your NAS you unlock a lot of possibilities keeping them the same.

    I.e. say you keep your T110ii running with ZFS you can use tools like syncoid to periodically push snapshots from the Optiplex to your T110.

    That way your Optiplex can be a workhorse, and your NAS can keep the backup+periodic snapshots of the important data.

    I don’t have any experience with TrueNAS in particular but it looks like syncoid works with it. You might need to make sure that pool versions/flags are the same for sending/receive to work.

    Alternatively keep that data on an NFS mount. The SSD in the Optiplex would just be for the base OS and wouldn’t have any data that can’t be thrown away. The disadvantage here being your Optiplex now relies on a lot more to keep running (networking + nas must be online all the time).

    If you need HA for the VMs you likely need distributed storage for the VMs to run on. No point in building an HA VM solution if it just moves the single point of failure to your NAS.

    Personally I like Harvester, but the minimum requirements are probably beyond what your hardware can handle.

    Since you are already on TrueNAS Scale have you looked at using TrueNAS Scale on the Optiplex with replication tasks for backups?