dihutenosa

u/dihutenosa@piefed.social
3 posts · 113 comments

Recent posts

Recent comments

on Homelab discussion · c/selfhosted · 4 pts · 3d
  • authoritative DNS for my domain
  • email (Postfix, Dovecot, rspamd)
  • endlessh
  • Matrix chat and video conferencing (nginx, Synapse, MAS, Livekit, coturn, Postgres)
  • Prosody elsewhere for failover if international links go down
  • Nextcloud
  • offsite backups for important data, not the whole OS (rsync)
  • QR scanner on a webpage, for transferring complex passwords locally
  • Syncthing
  • Offsite monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana, AlertManager) - amusingly, on an old ex-Android phone running PostmarketOS (a variant of Alpine). Eats less than a watt of power.
  • Wireguard to hook up the monitoring with minimum fuss

I don't have any handy "start to finish" guides for this. I suppose I should start a blog, or something :)

Basic steps:

  1. get a phone that can run PostmarketOS - https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices --- it does not need to run it perfectly. Camera, cell modem, even screen are completely optional. It must charge and do WiFi, only.
  2. flash PostmarketOS on the phone. Get SSH access - if the screen doesn't work, use USB ethernet emulation (during pmbootstrap init, choose USB mode = "developer"), log in, then nmtui to enter your WiFi password.
  3. optionally, reduce maximum battery charge/voltage, to prolong battery health. https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Battery_Voltage_Reduction
  4. hooray, now you have a server. Proceed setting up as if it were a VPS. It's a variant of Alpine Linux - any Alpine guide will work fine, or you could use Docker or Podman.

Now this is something I haven't done, but you could - hook it up to a solar panel. Rely on solar during the day, and on the phone battery until it lasts. Write a shell script / cronjob / systemd unit to suspend the phone when battery level gets low. It'll get a wakeup event from hardware, when solar comes back (hopefully).

What’s your personal media diet?

Books (mostly sci-fi - Permutation City by Greg Egan) are easy to fit into short slices of time.

Video games (Cataclysm: DDA, Dwarf Fortress) are nice when you have a hour or more to concentrate.

Music (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6rCu2Daeyo) is always nice. Doesn't demand much attention, if you can't spare much, but can absorb any amount of it (more complex stuff like Maurice Ravel).

Movies? I tried movies, but they require dedication (if I'm going to sit for 2 hours in front of my PC, I'd rather do something fun - and movie theaters are a whole new level of hassle), the content is either boring or nerve-wrackingly stressful.

IIRC, the last movie I watched was some Star Wars something - it had spaceships just sitting just above a planet (instead of orbiting - why wasn't it falling down like a stone?), and when one spaceship flew near another, there was audible sound (rumble) in the other one. I suppose they must have played this rumble over speakers, or something. I can suspend my disbelief and imagine the "laser" weapons that shoot slow-moving pink plastic-looking cylindrical things are mislabeled as "laser", and are actually firing some particle beams or something, but I can't forgive sound transmitted through space.

Where I vote, you plop your government-issued smartcard in your PC and cryptographically sign your vote. Of course, this raises a privacy concern.

It should ideally be impossible to determine who you voted for, or if you did, while still allowing you to verify your vote got counted. Last I checked, this was an active (and super interesting) area of research in cryptography.

you can do a lot of learning with basic hardware

So so much.

I'm running video calls (Livekit) for ~50 users (dunno how active) through an ancient laptop that doesn't even have USB3. Among other things - the same lappy is also doing email and TLS termination for a HLS stream.

I'm using an old phone, a Google Pixel 3a (that's 4 GB of RAM) as a monitoring solution (Prometheus, Grafana, AlertManager, ntfy).