• 1 Post
  • 100 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: December 20th, 2023

help-circle

  • Daily life…it depends. Overall, things as running as usual, except for some things that cause everyone’s anxiety.

    First is, obviously, heavy Internet censorship. Living without a VPN is so unbearable even older generations call the younger one for help. Government is currently high on pushing the state-controlled messenger Max, but no one, even the older folks, wanna join. So, they do everything in their power, from forcing government services to use Max as a communications platform, to blocking all other options. People keep using Telegram regardless, and find ways not only around blacklist, but even whitelist blocking. Max is nearly universally despised. VK remains a not-much-better alternative for those who didn’t yet find their way around whitelists. Unease grows about plans to use state-controlled apps to monitor VPN connections on Android phones and block respective IPs. iPhones are better protected in this respect, but other plans are devised as well.

    Second is war. The last 2-3 years of it were relatively chill for most Russians, but with drone strikes appearing as far as Saint Petersburg, the war knocks back home. The unease is amplified by Russia turning mobile connections to whitelist mode when drones appear. The appearance of circumvention methods (bridging through whitelisted resources into the wider Internet), on one hand, relieves the anxieties of losing last bits of access to the world, but on the other, shows governments inefficiency at maintaining the drone defense.

    Third is more broad and globally known - the cost of living crisis, which hits here just as everywhere else. Housing is practically unattainable for most, and rent goes through the roof. Food gets more expensive, and scandals arise about managing the existing supply, such as Miratorg claimed to push government’s hand in exterminating private farms’ livestock under the guise of disease prevention.

    Overall, plenty of room for anxiety and sense of instability.

    The Putin support has long switched from “go go Putin” to “who, if not Putin?” and then to “if Putin loses, the country is going to collapse”. So, over time it became less of actual support and more of added anxiety about war’s resolution and what it means for Russia going forward. Putin is often seen as a beacon of some, fainting, stability. But even with all that, support does indeed fade.



  • Alternatively, you can download Amnezia VPN client app on your phone or PC, and it has this amazing function where you provide the IP and root credentials, and it installs server software automatically.

    Obviously, only use it when you don’t have other things running on your server.

    Advantages:

    • No need to install anything manually, just direct Amnezia VPN client to a blank Linux server or VPS
    • You can install all sorts of protocols in this manner, not only AmneziaWG. Options include OpenVPN (basic and over Shadowsocks/Cloak), classic Wireguard, IPsec, Xray.

    Disadvantages:

    • It doesn’t show the SSH terminal as it goes installing things on your server and goes fully automatic, reducing user control and troubleshooting capabilities.


  • One thing many people have surprisingly low comprehension of is that people ≠ government.

    Regular Israeli civilians did not partake in the war, did not cause the apartheid, and did not steal the land. They were born there, or went there on a promise of entering a friendly Jewish community - not of murdering people.

    When the latest Hamas strike happened, this has played into the hands of Israeli government and military command. They got yet another excuse to bomb the hell out of Palestine. Some civilians were scared enough to support the “retaliation”, many others vehemently opposed and denounced it.

    In any case, deporting all Israelis is clearly not a solution now. Israel is their home. Imagine that your birthplace originally belonged to another country, and they wanted to take it back, sending you out wherever. Would it be reasonable to oblige, to leave your home and your entire life behind, forever?

    This is catastrophic when it happens to Palestinians, and not much better should it happen to Israelis.








  • No worries, answer anytime :)

    Since LXC works on top of the Linux kernel, anything that works with it can be easily used as an image. For example, you can just throw any distribution .iso into it, and it will handle it as a container image. Proxmox does all the interim magic.

    Say, you want to make a container with programs running on Debian. You take the regular Debian .iso, the one you use to install Debian on bare metal or VM, feed it to Proxmox and tell it to make an LXC container out of it. You specify various parameters (for example, RAM quotas) and boom, you got a Debian LXC container.

    Then you operate this container as a regular Debian installation: you can SSH/VNC into it and go from there. After you’ve done setting everything up, you can just use it, or export it and use somewhere else as well.


  • Proxmox can work with VMs and LXC containers.

    When you need to always have resources reserved specifically for a given task, VMs are very handy. VM will always have access to the resources it needs, and can be used with any OS and any piece of software without any preparations and special images. Proxmox manages VMs in an efficient way, ensuring near-native performance.

    When you want to run service in parallel with other with minimal resource usage on idle, you go with containers.

    LXC containers are very efficient, more so than Docker, but limited to Linux images and software, as they share the kernel with the host. Proxmox allows you to manage LXC containers in a very straightforward way, as if they were standalone installations, while at the same time maintaining the rest behind the scenes.


  • What exactly is proxmox?

    In layman terms, it’s a Debian-based distro that makes managing your virtual machines and lxc containers easier. Thanks to an advanced virtual interface, you can set up most things graphically, monitor and control your VMs and containers at a glance, and just generally take the pain away from managing it all.

    It’s just so much better when you see everything important straight away.




  • The expenses are mostly upfront though. I’ve spent like $400 on a relatively fancy NAS and two 3TB WD Red CMR drives five years ago, and since then, there was that.

    Of course, depending on your use case, there could be extra expenses as well, some of them recurring:

    • Bigger drives
    • Backup storage (I already had a place I could back up to)
    • Domain name and DNS records (if you expose it to the public Web with a URL; you can otherwise just use a VPN tunnel to access NAS from outside the home network, which is free unless you do anything fancy)
    • Some kind of paid software (if you don’t enjoy the perfectly good collection of open-source apps)
    • Etc.

    Now, for the streaming alternative:

    • Netflix Standard: $18/mo
    • Spotify: $12/mo
    • Total: $30/mo, or $360/yr. Just these two services alone.

    Your NAS system will pay off in a little over a year (maybe two years if you go all in with huge drives, fancy NAS configs, extra expenses here and there), and it’s smooth sailing from there.

    My unit works for 5 years already with no maintenance, is still fully supported by the manufacturer, and I don’t expect to replace it in a few more years.