I mean… you really can’t. Contracts and even people on the ground more or less reveal this real fast (and is what the OSINT community lives off of). The US and even Ukraine do the same. You can keep it a secret exactly how juicy a target is but you can’t really hide that missiles or tanks or whatever are being built somewhere.

For example, a buddy of mine lives near a US facility that is near some REALLY nice climbing areas nearby. Every couple of months the army swings by and tells everyone to go the fuck away. And it does not take much brain power to realize that THAT is when they are moving whatever they don’t want people to know is at that base. But any other time? You can literally watch equipment being moved from warehouse/hanger to warehouse/hanger while giving someone a belay.

It is the biggest “problem” of modern warfare. We don’t fight wars of conquest anymore because that tends to actually make other countries care (because those brown people have resources!). So we attack and then leave.

It is similar to why France and England (or China/Japan/Korea) were basically at continuous levels of war for hundreds (?) of years. Because when you roll up and kill a bunch of people and maybe steal a goat? The remaining people want revenge. When you conquer them and either ethnically cleanse them to nonexistence or integrate them into your society? They forget why they were angry after a generation or two.

I very much do NOT believe the world would be a better place with more ethnic cleansing and stealing of land. But we also are in a mess where retaliation between countries just continues with no real consequences to the people who are calling for the attacks. And the civilians just get rightfully angry when their kid is permanently blinded because she was looking the wrong way at the Lebanese equivalent of a Kroger.

And then you get the keyboard warriors who hop in decades (or even centuries) into the conflict, pick a side, and immediately say THESE terrorists are good guys and THOSE terrorists are bad guys.

The pagers were very questionable. Even assuming ONLY hezbollah had the explosive pagers, they were still detonating in public since the point of a pager is to be able to carry it around.

Walkie talkie wise? I still need to reflexively condemn anything that kills children. But… that actually does seem super targeted and would presumably not be something a terrorist “should” carry around in public during their non-terrorist lives.

Supply chains matter a lot and governments, let alone terrorist organizations, fail to protect them.

US centric, but far too much of policy is “Don’t buy Made in China” with no thought beyond that.

For this scenario? My assumption is they ordered from their usual supply sources and nothing was hinky. But Israel (or whoever) compromised a port or fedex center along the way and installed some explosives since the only people buying those pagers were terrorists. And nobody on the hezbollah side even bothered to weigh the packages before handing them out.

In fairness, “gaijin” is any foreigner. And a lot of laws in Japan are very much based on warped Christian values (can’t imagine who they got that from…).

But yeah. One of my best friends is Japanese American and the way she sums it up is: You know you truly understand the culture of Japan if you realize why you only want to visit for a few weeks at a time.

With bonus points for anyone who can read quickly realizing why the general stance toward APA is “Only if you get a REALLY good deal”

I’m just going to reiterate this for no apparent reason:

Propaganda by strongman fascists.

There is a VERY big difference between “nobles of a warrior caste” and “people who fight and die in a war”. yes, danger exists. Zelenskyy could die from a sudden mortar strike or a sniper any time he is visiting the troops. But every possible precaution is taken to ensure that doesn’t happen.

Which gets back to the reality of it. This is, and always has been, theater. Sometimes it is a politician trying to show that they care about the troops. Other times it is a strongman trying to show that they are a warrior and might makes right so support them.

But all fixating on this does is lead to photo ops and stupidity where fascists (like netanyahu) portray themselves as warriors and veterans so that people will support them.

Because, bare minimum: Being good at ending some lives doesn’t make you a good leader.

See: Propaganda by strongman fascists

But also? Nobility would not be part of the spearwall. Or, to be more precise, they would not be part of the first spearwall and may only be part of a formation that comes in to mop up when the battle is all but won. Or they would be mounted tanks in the form of plate armor (more richard than alexander). They key being that they would be able to get their blade wet but would be in little to no danger.

I loathe to compare the two as I think Zelenskyy is actually a genuinely good leader who is focusing on his role as a political leader, but he is actually a really good example of this. When things are comparatively safe he’ll walk the front(-ish) lines and get face time with the soldiers to maintain morale and get photo ops. But mostly he is a politician in camo pants who is making sure that the people who actually are fighting for Ukraine’s survival have guns and ammo. A more “strongman” style leader might argue that as being “he is on the frontlines fighting alongside the heroic men and women of our army” but he is never in any meaningful danger.

I mean… they are to the extent they would be.

The idea of the heroic king fighting on the frontlines is a giant load of bullshit that was (and still is) used to manipulate the masses. Even back when we were walls of spears smashing our pointing bits into each other, officers (so nobility and government) would hang back. Because you need someone who can coordinate the battle (to the limited extent they could) and sound a retreat (or flee).

Even modern day middle manager officers are pretty safe either back in the command tent or off to the side so that they can hear the radio and coordinate support.

And if even the Colonels are on the front line? Something has gone HORRIBLY wrong.

This “member when our leaders would actually fight for us” is the kind of bullshit that leads to strongman fascists… like netanyahu.

In fairness, the US government doesn’t care if American children get shot while singing the wheels on the bus in kindergarten.

More drives is always better. But you need to understand how you are making it better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels is a good breakdown of the different RAID levels. Those are slightly different depending on if you are doing “real”/hardware RAID or software raid (e.g. ZFS) but the principle holds true and the rest is just googling the translation (for example, Unraid is effectively RAID4 with some extra magic to better support mismatched drive sizes)

That actually IS an important thing to understand early on. Because, depending on the RAID model you use, it might not be as easy as adding another drive. Have three 8 TB and want to add a 10? That last 2 TB won’t be used until EVERY drive has at least 10 TB. There are ways to set this up in ZFS and Ceph and the like but it can be a headache.

And the issue isn’t the cloudflare tunnel. The issue is that you would have a publicly accessible service running on your network. If you use the cloudflare access control thing (login page before you can access the site) you mitigate a lot of that (while making it obnoxious for anything that uses an app…) but are still at the mercy of cloudflare.

And understand that these are all very popular tools for a reason. So they are also things hackers REALLY care about getting access to. Just look up all the MANY MANY MANY ransomware attacks that QNAP had (and the hilarity of QNAP silently re-enabling online services with firmware updates…). Because using a botnet to just scan a list of domains and subdomains is pretty trivial and more than pays for itself after one person pays the ransom.

As for paying for that? I would NEVER pay for nextcloud. It is fairly shit software that is overkill for what people use it for (file syncing and document server) and dogshit for what it pretends to be (google docs+drive). If I am going that route, I’ll just use Google Docs or might even check out the Proton Docs I pay for alongside my email and VPN.

But for something self hosted where the only data that matters is backed up to a completely different storage setup? I still don’t like it being “exposed” but it is REALLY nice to have a working shopping list and the like when I head to the store.

A LOT of questions there.

Unraid vs Truenas vs Proxmox+Ceph vs Proxmox+ZFS for NAS: I am not sure if Unraid is ONLY a subscription these days (I think it was going that way?) but for a single machine NAS with a hodgepodge of drives, it is pretty much unbeatable.

That said, it sounds like you are buying dedicated drives. There are a lot of arguments for not having large spinning disk drives (I think general wisdom is 12 TB is the biggest you should go for speed reasons?), but at 3x18 you aren’t going to really be upgrading any time soon. So Truenas or just a ZFS pool in Proxmox seems reasonable. Although, with only three drives you are in a weird spot regarding “raid” options. Seeing as I am already going to antagonize enough people by having an opinion, I’ll let someone else wage the holy war of RAID levels.

I personally run Proxmox+Ceph across three machines (with one specifically set up to use Proxmox+ZFS+Ceph so I can take my essential data with me in an evacuation). It is overkill and Proxmox+ZFS is probably sufficient for your needs. The main difference is that your “NAS” is actually a mount that you expose via SMB and something like Cockpit. Apalrd did a REALLY good video on this that goes step by step and explains everything and it is well worth checking out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu3t8pcq8O0.

Ceph is always the wrong decision. It is too slow for enterprise and too finicky for home use. That said, I use ceph and love it. Proxmox abstracts away most of the chaos but you still need to understand enough to set up pools and cephfs (at which point it is exactly like the zfs examples above). And I love that I can set redundancy settings for different pools (folders) of data. So my blu ray rips are pretty much YOLO with minimal redundancy. My personal documents have multiple full backups (and then get backed up to a different storage setup entirely). Just understand that you really need at least three nodes (“servers”) for that to make sense. But also? If you are expanding it is very possible to set up the ceph in parallel to your initial ZFS pool (using separate drives/OSDs), copy stuff over, and then cannibalize the old OSDs. Just understand that makes that initial upgrade more expensive because you need to be able to duplicate all of the data you care about.

I know some people want really fancy NASes with twenty million access methods. I want an SMB share that I can see when I am on my local network. So… barebones cockpit exposing an SMB share is nice. And I have syncthing set up to access the same share for the purpose of saves for video games and so forth.

Unraid vs Truenas vs Proxmox for Services: Personally? I prefer to just use Proxmox to set up a crapton of containers/vms. I used Unraid for years but the vast majority of tutorials and wisdom out there are just setting things up via something closer to proxmox. And it is often a struggle to replicate that in the Unraid gui (although I think level1techs have good resources on how to access the real interface which is REALLY good?).

And my general experience is that truenas is mostly a worst of all worlds in every aspect and is really just there if you want something but are afraid of/smart enough not to use proxmox like a sicko.

Processor and Graphics: it really depends on what you are doing. For what you listed? Only frigate will really take advantage and I just bought a Coral accelerator which is a lot cheaper than a GPU and tends to outperform them for the kind of inference that Frigate does. There is an argument for having a proper GPU for transcoding in Plex but… I’ve never seen a point in that.

That said: A buddy of mine does the whole vlogger thing and some day soon we are going to set up a contract for me to sit down and set her up an exporting box (with likely use as a streaming box). But I need to do more research on what she actually needs and how best to handle that and she needs to figure out her budget for both materials and my time (the latter likely just being another case where she pays for my vacation and I am her camera guy for like half of it). But we probably will grab a cheap intel gpu for that.

External access: Don’t do it, that is a great way to get hacked.

That out of the way. My nextcloud is exposed to the outside world via a cloudflare tunnel. It fills me with anxiety but as long as you regularly update everything it is “fine”.

My plex? I have a lifetime plex pass so I just use their services to access it remotely. And I think I pay an annual fee for homeassistant because I genuinely want to support that project.

Everything else? I used to use wireguard (and openvpn before it) but actually switched to tailscale. I like the control that the former provided but much prefer the model where I expose individual services (well, VMs). Because it is nice to have access to my cockpit share when I want to grab a file in a hotel room. There is zero reason that anything needs access to my qbitorrent or calibre or opnsense setup. Let alone even seeing my desktop that I totally forgot to turn off.

But the general idea I use for all my selfhosted services is: The vast majority of interactions should happen when I am at home on my home network. It is a special case if I ever need to access anything remotely and that is where tailscale comes in.

Theoretically you can also do the same via wireguard and subnetting and vlans but I always found that to be a mess to provide access both locally and remotely and the end result is I get lazy. Also, Tailscale is just an app on basically any machine whereas wireguard tends to involve some commands or weird phone interactions.

I am genuinely curious how those shake out against a near peer. Because the big advantages of stealth technology is that you never know where an attack or surveillance craft is coming from.

But when you are up against a foe who has satellites pointed at the nearby carrier group and basically all of your larger bases in the region? They likely do know when they are coming and where they came from. And have a good idea of where they are going.

Because stealth technology is not Predator (well… it kind of IS once this ramble is done but role with me). There is still a tiny amount of signal return and just general “distortion” in the area. It is obviously a LOT more complicated but it is the idea of seeing a cabinet slightly ajar and assuming you must have not closed it correctly rather than grabbing a hatchet and calling 911. Because it is just not feasible to go on full alert the moment you see a slight “weirdness” on the radar.

Unless you know that the USS Jimmy Carter just fired a bunch of missiles in your direction. Missiles that IMMEDIATELY disappeared from your radar outside of a small bit of periodic noise that may or may not be on the way to a power plant.

Its similar to all the questions about whether stealth fighters actually make sense. But the reality of THAT is that fighters themselves don’t really make sense and haven’t for decades and those are mostly long range missile platforms and interceptors. But… everyone wants to be a fighter pilot because Top Gun.

I respect those who engage in a conversation.

I don’t respect people who actively ignore that the person they are “responding” to already addressed the point because you can’t get a “gotcha” any other way.

But hey, good talk… not really but.

For Ukraine, russia IS near peer.

Yes? And, as a result, Russia had to fire off 127 missiles to get 20 through. Which raises the question of if this is even a good use of resources/funds/material. Not sure how you missed that when I said it above.

Who else besides nuclear powers do you know are operating a fleet of strategic ballistic missiles?

Powers that spend a lot of money buying those from those nuclear powers? So… basically the same as it has been since the 1950s or so?

Again, you seem to have missed where I addressed this exact point. So I’ll just repeat it

and mostly only applies when two nuclear powers are going up against each other which we already avoid for countless other reasons (yay proxy wars). Unless there is irrefutable evidence that it is an ICBM going a couple hundred kilometers into Ukraine AND Zelensky et al can get on TV in time? “Oh no. Whoever could have seen this coming? Hey putin, this is your last warning”.

But hey, maybe that was confusing. If Russia launches a bunch of non-nuclear ICBMs at the US? We probably already started World War 3 when Russia shot up Alaska or whatever happened during this apocalypse timeline.

If Russia fires a bunch of ICBMs at Ukraine? Common sense is that they aren’t nuclear (because of how close they are) but it is in NATO’s best interest to “wait and see” in the exact same way we did a wait and see when russia invaded Ukraine the past couple times. We only act if we have no other choice because nuclear powers engaging in direct war is already an endstate.

That is where the near peer aspect comes in.

The US LOVES cruise missiles because we, basically since Vietnam, have consistently gone up against groups with significantly lesser technology (often the stuff that even russia doesn’t want anymore). It is the same logic behind how nightvision goggles used to provide an insurmountable advantage and are now basically normal kit against a near peer. Or how tanks were amazing for like… World War 1 and a few weeks of World War 2? And these days are ATGM magnets where a comparatively low cost infantry weapon can take out state of the art equipment.

And that is kind of what we have here. russia needed to launch 127 missiles to get 20 though. That is when you start doing the math on whether the significantly lower costs make it “worth it” relative to a short-ish range ballistic missile. Same with any other technology in war.

As for “if it is any bigger people will think it is a nuke”. That is nonsense and mostly only applies when two nuclear powers are going up against each other which we already avoid for countless other reasons (yay proxy wars). Unless there is irrefutable evidence that it is an ICBM going a couple hundred kilometers into Ukraine AND Zelensky et al can get on TV in time? “Oh no. Whoever could have seen this coming? Hey putin, this is your last warning”.

Fair enough. I think anything short of a ballistic missile against a “near peer” IS outdated tech at this point, but doing rough napkin math gives about an hour from launch to impact. I still suspect the f-16s were more about anti-drone operations but, reasonable.

I think human operators are more to prevent shooting down non-combatant aircraft like commercial airline and civilian planes neither of which are broadcasting Friend or Foe signals to air defense operators.

That is the on paper reason. I would take a look at how much friendly fire we and our allies have done and… yeah, it is liability and being able to say a human is involved for the purposes of an audit/

Its russia so it is probably shitty WW2 tech at this point but:

Very curious on the anti-missile capabilities. My understanding is that anything newer than a V2 rocket is just too fast for a jet pilot to actively engage. That is why the “meta” is countermeasures and computerized systems (e.g. patriot missiles) where the human involvement is to approve launch for liability/Geneva Convention purposes.

Drones make perfect sense. But curious if this was a mistranslation, reference to attacking launch sites, or what.

All it does is make it look like a “bitch eating crackers” scenario. With the added benefit of making it sound like people are pro-russia.

I mean… I am also all for degoogling. But considering they are dealing with illegal attacks by russia because they stood up to war criminals… maybe this is not the best time to campaign against them?

The same reason most of NATO have been very hesitant and the like:

Supporting a defensive war is one thing. Supporting an offensive war, against a nuclear power that threatens to nuke people on days ending in ‘y’, is another. And while it is incredibly unlikely that putin would actually attack anyone (since they can’t even handle a Ukraine with one arm tied behind its back), it will still lead to political turmoil as people insist the world is about to end.

But now? This is a REAL good way to distract people from the other, much less defensive, war that we are financing.