AWS was recently “having issues” due to the Iran situation — same thing I wonder?

I’ve been pleased with it. Family is very relaxed about projects like this, but yeah it’s low power draw. I don’t think I have anything special set up but the right thing to do for power would be to spin down drive when not in use, as power is dominated by the spinning rust.

Uptime is great. Only hiccups are that it can choke when compiling the ZFS kernel modules, triggered on kernel updates. It’s an rpi 3/1GB RAM (I keep failing at forcing dkms to use only 1 thread, which would probably fix these hiccups 🤷).

That said, it is managed by me, so sometimes errors go unnoticed. I had recent issues where I missed a week of rsync because I switched from pihole to technitium on my home server and forgot to point the remote rpi there. This would all have been fixed with proper cron email setup…I’m clearly not a professional :)

Not the same, but for my Immich backup I have a raspberry pi and an HDD with family (remote).

Backup is rsync, and a simple script to make ZFS snapshots (retaining X daily, Y weekly). Connected via “raw” WireGuard.

Setup works well, although it’s never been needed.

Does you school library lend out laptops for this sort of thing? Or, can you remote into a library/lab computer for this?

I would definitely opt for a dedicated machine, running the recommended OS, no VM, as others in this thread have said. It’s one thing if it’s for a homelab, but for coursework…not what I’d be comfortable with.

If Gentoo can be both Chad and Schizo, Slack should definitely be in the Chad category too.

I mean, it’s Torvalds’ distro of choice iirc, which should count for something.

Yeah, good point. The “app setup” is built into android and iOS as far as I can tell (generating matter credentials, etc.). Better than 3rd party IMHO but not ideal, and a nonstarter for a lot of folks. Hopefully HA will come out with their own onboarding process at some point.

Fair enough; I have a dedicated SSID which is VLAN’d off from the rest of my network with no Internet access. Only my HA server can talk to those devices.

+1 for ThirdReality. They’re a little pricey but I’ve generally had good luck with them.

I’ve also had pretty good luck with cheap Matter-over-wifi bulbs. Pairing them can be a little finicky and needs to go through an Android or iOS process, but after pairing you can block Internet access for them and they work great local-only.

There’s a bug in some wifi matter bulbs where they crash, especially when going from off to a desired brightness/color state (as in, “light on” works but “light to 50%, 3000K” will crash the bulb).

I don’t think you understand what local control of smart devices means…

VNC? You have your choice of servers, and clients are ubiquitous.

A big gotcha is that you need to be careful with encryption/security, as in classic UNIX style VNC does one thing (remote desktops). It’s easy to forward over ssh though.

You can also use VNC to share, which is not what you want; this depends on the type of server/settings. But you can definitely create a new virtual X11 session and access it remotely.

Bookmarked, thanks!

I bought a Rockchip SBC (Orange Pi 5+), and when it worked it was awesome…but man, the software support (mainly kernel space) is just not there. Exercise in frustration to get everything working at the same time.

Currently running armbian. I don’t think HW acceleration is working, and I don’t think HDMI out is even working, but for my use case it’s a stable config…for now.

But once you got that XFree86 config dialed in, life was awesome.

(Ok looks like Xorg has been around for 21 years, so maybe you were running it instead.)

Mac at work. Yabai+sketchybar is no i3wm replacement, but it works ok.

My .zshrc is basically the same as I use on my personal computers, and aside from a few coreutils differences it…kinda just works. I have apt aliased to brew so I can feel more at home.

Stock terminal works fine—I use xterm on Linux, so I’m used to relying on tmux for nice features anyway.

Basically, I miss the window manager, but practically speaking that’s a about it. (I obviously have xscreensaver installed!)

Slack got me through college on an ancient (even at the time) ThinkPad 600e. Good times!

I had a suite of scripts to log in to the university Linux cluster, download the kernel source and out-of-tree modules (required for the PCMCIA WiFi adapter), compile it, and rsync it back to my laptop.

nc is useful. For example: if you have a disk image downloaded on computer A but want to write it to an SD card on computer B, you can run something like

user@B: nc -l 1234 | pv > /dev/$sdcard

And

user@A: nc B.local 1234 < /path/to/image.img

(I may have syntax messed up–also don’t transfer sensitive information this way!)

Similarly, no need to store a compressed file if you’re going to uncompress it as soon as you download it—just pipe wget or curl to tar or xz or whatever.

I once burnt a CD of a Linux ISO by wgeting directly to cdrecord. It was actually kinda useful because it was on a laptop that was running out of HD space. Luckily the University Internet was fast and the CD was successfully burnt :)

I’m a ~/tmp man myself.

Maybe not a service in the typical sense, but setting up your router+server to route your home network traffic through a VPN is a fun project.

My router (MikroTik) supports WireGuard, so I can use it with Mullvad for the whole house—but wg is demanding and it’s a slow router, so while it can NAT at ~1Gbps, it can’t do WireGuard at more than ~90Mbps. So, I set up WireGuard/Mullvad on a little SBC with a fast processor, and have my router use that instead. Using policy based routing and/or mangling, I can have different VLANs/subnets/individual hosts selectively routed through the VPN.

It’s a fun exercise, not sure I implemented it in a smart way, but it works :)

I assume you’re referring to the cuckpdate chair.