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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Eh, I wouldn’t go about ‘the self-hosted admins didn’t do anything!’. There never really was a time when the majority (or even a meaningiful minority) of users hosted their own email.

    In the beginning, you got your email address from your school or your ISP, and it changed whenever you left/changed providers, so the initial “free” email came from the likes of Hotmail (which rapidly became Microsoft), Yahoo (which was uh, Yahoo), and offerings from the big ISPs of the era, like AOL and whatnot.

    You still had school and ISP email, but it just rapidly fell out of fashion because your Hotmail/Yahoo/AOL email never changed regardless of what ISP you used or whatever, so it was legitimately a better solution.

    And then Google came along with Gmail and it was so much better than every other offering that they effectively ate the whole damn market by default because all the people who were providing the free webmail at that time didn’t do a damn thing to improve until after Google had already “won”.

    So if you want to be mad, this is firmly Microsoft and Yahoo’s fault for being lazy fucks.





  • I kinda have two answers to this:

    1. Not yet,

    2. It was more an intent to show that they’re not some shining defender of the ad-free private internet, who would never take action to defend a potential future revenue stream if they thought it might be profitable later.

    Remember everyone, corporations are not your friends, your buddy, your pal, or even slightly gives a shit about you beyond how much money they can extract from your wallet and anything that’s in the way of them doing so they’ll work around, stomp on, and kill by any means necessary.



  • They’re not wrong in that most people aren’t suited to or should be running what is effectively public services for other people from some surplus Dell R410 they found on eBay for $40.

    That said, it’s all a matter of degree: I don’t host critical infra for people (password managers, file sharing, etc.) where the data loss is catastrophic, but more things that if it explodes for an afternoon, everyone can just deal with it. I absolutely do not want to be The Guy who lost important data through an oversight on an upgrade or just plain bad luck.

    But, on the other hand, the SLA on my Plex server is ‘if it works, cool, if not I’ll fix it when I can’ and that’s been wildly popular I haven’t had any real issues, because my friends and family aren’t utter dicks about it and overly entitled, but YMMV.

    TL;DR: self-hosting for others is fine, as long as the other people understand that it’s not always going to be incredibly reliable, and you don’t ever present something that puts them at risk of catastrophic loss, unless you’ve got actual experience in providing those service and can do proper backups, HA, and are willing to sacrifice your Friday evening for no money.


  • The closest thing you’re likely to get is a black and white Brother laser.

    It’s as open as a printer is likely to ever be in terms of driver support, the availability of parts is reasonable, and you plug the thing in via USB and then forget it exists until you need to print something.

    I have a 2300D I’ve had for most of a decade now and the only thing I’ve had to do is put paper in it.









  • The answer for your question is ‘no’.

    You’re never going to reduce power usage substantially by swapping PSUs, because there’s just not enough efficiency gains to be had even if a Pico PSU was more efficient which they really aren’t.

    You say the hardware is ‘nothing too different’ but you mention ddr4 vs 3, which makes me think the Dell is a generation or few older which could easily impact power draw by 10w.



  • I’m probably going to get mega canceled here but I think a good portion of it is that the Holocaust is history.

    A lot of what we don’t talk about is how we treated the Native Americans because we’re STILL shitting on them from on high. For example, the Dakota Access Pipeline is the same old shit, different century.

    Also talking about how we’ve treated people of color, and any discussion around chattel slavery, ends up being “uncomfortable” because an awful lot of people in this country don’t seem to see any problem with it and would be perfectly happy if we could toss out the civil rights acts and go back to having separate water fountains.

    TLDR: it’s ‘history’ in Germany because ya’ll arrest people giving nazi salutes, but in the US wearing a KKK robe is “free speech”.


  • Yeah, I just mentioned it because OCI is kinda wonky and requires some static routing stuff in the iptables on the host to have the platform work as intended (which, as far as I’m aware, no other hyperscaler does), which strikes me as really really lazy engineering, but I’m just a simple computer janitor so maybe I’m wrong there.

    The most infuriating thing at my last job was people sending in a ticket freaked out that their database was stolen and ransomed, and us going ‘Well, we sent you 15 emails over the last 3 months telling you that you had the database open and improperly secured, so what exactly are you wanting us to do now?’


  • That’s not really the right approach on OCI, unfortunately: if you just flush the rules you also break a lot of their management plane.

    You’d want to modify the /etc/iptables/rules.v4 and rules.v6 files to add any rules you want to load on boot (and, of course, if you just flush the rules without saving them, then it won’t persist and a reboot will break things, again).

    It’s an arguable benefit: I’m a fan of having the security policies AND iptables sitting between me and doing something stupid, but I also spent most of the last decade dealing with literally thousands and thousands of compromised hosts that just whoopsie oopsed redis/jenkins/their database/a ftp service in a publicly accessible state, got hacked, then had the customer come crying to us asking why we didn’t keep them from blowing their foot off - which, basically, is what the OCI defaults do.