I think a lot of companies view their free plan as recruiting/advertising — if you use TailScale personally and have a great experience then you’ll bring in business by advocating for it at work.
Of course it could go either way, and I don’t rely on TailScale (it’s my “backup” VPN to my home network)… we’ll see, I guess.
Hopefully you can publish in an open-access journal — if not it would be great if you could share an arXiv preprint :)
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.
— Richard P. Feynman
I think the same is true for a lot of folks and self hosting. Sure, having data in our own hands is great, and yes avoiding vendor lock-in is nice. But at the end of the day, it’s nice to have computers seem “fun” again.
At least, that’s my perspective.
Whatever you decide for your laptop, I’m a proponent of a barebones off-site setup if you’re trying for 3-2-1 backup or similar.
I use a raspberry pi 3 with a single HD (ZFS) retaining some number of daily/weekly/monthly snapshots. Daily rsync, everything over WireGuard+VPS (TailScale would work too).
From our experience in the US, the birth is nothing compared to the financial drain of the other expenses. And at this age, childcare dwarfs all the other child-related expenses.
We have great insurance and don’t rely on family for childcare though, so the math is very very different for someone with “free” familial childcare and no/lousy insurance…
Same — rsync to a pi 3 with a (single) ZFS drive at family’s house. Retain some daily/weekly/monthly snapshots.
I have a (free) VPS with static IPv4 which is how I connect everything.
Both the VPS and the remote site have limited network speed (I think 50Mbps for VPS), so the initial sync was done sneakernet (well…“airplane net”). Nightly rsync is no problem bandwidth-wise, and is mostly just any new videos I’ve uploaded to my local Immich instance.
Fail2ban config can get fairly involved in my experience. I’m probably not doing it the right way, as I wrote a bunch of web server ban rules — anyone trying to access wpadmin gets banned, for instance (I don’t use WordPress, and if I did, it wouldn’t be accessible from my public facing reverse proxy).
I just skimmed my nginx logs and looked for anything funky and put that in a ban rule, basically.
It’s on https://www.thefarside.com/ today as one of the “Selections of classic The Far Side comics.” Comic says ©1984, but doesn’t give a specific date (an image on reddit suggests 4/6/84).
50kW class laser.
Another source claims 1um wavelength with individual 1.5kW lasers in a hex pattern — unclear if it’s a phased array (would be awesome) or just trained on the same target (source mentions they are “combined using a mirror” so probably the latter).
Sounds like maybe high power YAG?
“South Korea as a nation dodged a bullet, but President Yoon may have shot himself in the foot,” said Danny Russel, vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute think tank in the United States.
I bet my man Danny came up with that line in the shower. I dig it.
UN-Verified
Unfortunate abbreviation…
Kids, this is why dimensional analysis matters.
It’s mostly so that I can have SSL handled by nginx (and not per-service), and also for ease of hosting multiple services accessible via subdomains. So every service is its own subdomain.
Additionally, my internal network (as in, my physical LAN) does not have any port forwarding enabled — everything is over WireGuard to my VPS.
My method:
VPS with reverse proxy to my public facing services. This holds SSL certs, and communicates with home network through WireGuard link configured on my router.
Local computer with reverse proxy for all services. This also has SSL certs, and handles the same services as the VPS, so I can have local/LAN speeds. Additionally, it serves as a reverse proxy for all my private services, such as my router/switches/access point config pages, Jellyfin, etc.
No complaints, it mostly just works. I also have my router override DNS entries for my FQDN to resolve locally, so I use the same URL for accessing public services on my LAN.
Getting TLS certs will be complicated
I just use Let’s Encrypt with a wildcard domain — same certs for public and private facing domains. I’m sure this isn’t best practice, but it’s mostly just for me so I’m not too worried :)
Yeah I don’t expose Jellyfin over the Internet, so it doesn’t matter for me, and wouldn’t work at all over WAN (unless VPN’d to home network).
Also, it’s all reverse proxied, and there’s nothing preventing having two Jellyfin hostnames, e.g., jf-local.mydomain.com and jf-public.mydomain.com.
Another fun trick you can play is to use a private IP on your public DNS records. This is useful for Jellyfin on Chromecast for instance — it uses 8.8.8.8 for DNS lookup (and ignores your router settings), so it wants a fully qualified domain name. But it has no problem accessing local hosts, so long as it’s from 8.8.8.8’s record.
I have set up local DNS entries (with Pi-Hole) to point to my srrver, but I don’t know if it possible to get certs for that, since it is not a real domain.
So long as your certs are for your fully qualified domain there’s no problem. I do this, as do many people — mydoman.com is fully qualified, but on my own network I override the DNS to the local address. Not a problem at all — DNS is tied to the hostname, not the IP.
Any chance you have a DMZ set up on your router?
On your router, are there any settings specific to any host (other than the server maybe)? For example, a static IP or a port forwarded rule.
Do you have a VPN on the phones? Can you traceroute from your phone to the server and post that? (I like PingTools for Android.) You should have 1 hop (you -> server, nothing in between).
Can you verify that you are on the same wifi including same wifi channel? Phone on 5GHz but Linux box on 2.4GHz, for example.
I’ve been happy with the SMLIGHT SLZB-06M. You can easily flash firmware, and it has PoE which was important for me. I believe it also supports Thread, but I haven’t tried this yet (and I’m not sure if it supports it at the same time as Zigbee).
Zigbee smart plugs from Third Reality have been pretty solid in my experience, and they report power usage.
For circuit breaker level monitoring, I have an Emporia Vue2. I have it running esphome, completely local — unfortunately this requires some simple soldering and flashing, so it’s not turnkey. But it’s been rock solid ever since flashing it. (Process is well documented online.)
I’ve had decent luck with cheap wifi Matter bulbs, but provisioning them is finicky, and sometimes they just crap out and need to be power cycled; Zigbee bulbs (e.g., Ikea) have generally been reliable, though sometimes I’ve had difficulty pairing them initially. After power cycling a Matter WiFi bulb, it takes a while for it to respond to Home Assistant; Zigbee bulbs generally respond as soon as you power them on.
I have a wired smart light switch from TP-Link/Kasa (KS205), and it’s been completely hassle free (and totally local — Matter over wifi). The Kasa smart switch dongles I have work flawlessly but need proprietary pairing, and I’m afraid to update firmware in case they lose local support.
Good luck! Fun adventure :)