My current server is just my previous desktop PC hardware. $0 when you repurpose while upgrading your desktop.

It’s the “Plex Remote Watch Pass”. A new charge for something that used to be free. https://www.plex.tv/plans/

They won’t even get to the login screen.

All my relatives seem to have Hisense VIDAA TVs. There’s a plex app on the store. Jellyfin would require an external device like a Chromecast or HTPC to use it.

But now telling then it’s $3/month to watch my pirated movies? No bueno.

And on topic, I develop a commercial app and there is no way I am dropping a rating or review on it.

I have a job, and the office is 35km away. I get a locker in my office.

I have two backup drives, and every month or so, I will rotate them by taking one into the office and bringing the other home. I do this immediately after running a backup.

The drives are LUKS encrypted btrfs. Btrfs allows snapshots and compression. LUKS enables me to securely password protect the drive. My backup job is just a btrfs snapshot followed by an rsync command.

I don’t trust cloud backups. There was an event at work where Google Cloud accidentally deleted an entire company just as I was about to start a project there.

Almost all of selfhosting is editing config files, setting permissions and starting/stopping services.

Setting it up so you can administer a server by desktop is probably as hard as learning how to edit config files from a terminal. Maybe harder.

I’ve got 3 subnets on an L2 switch. You will have clashes over DHCP if you have both broadcasting on the same L2 switch without VLANs.

My guest wifi is on a vlan, but the switch is L2 and it’s fine. The router has separate physical ports for each subnet. The “guest” subnet is only accessible over Wifi, and the access points are configured so that the guest VLAN is mapped to a separate SSID.

My third subnet has no VLAN. It’s IPv6-only and all devices have a static IP address. It’s only used for security cameras. I did this so they don’t transmit on the same physical cables as my primary subnet. It is otherwise insecure, as I can join the subnet by simply assigning myself a static address in the same range.

Note: There is a bug in Windows where it will join an IPv6 subnet on a different VLAN. I had to tweak my DHCPv6 / radvd so that Windows would ignore it. Yes, Windows is this dumb.

Server (big iron): Bender

Desktop (main character): Fry

Laptop (for accounting): Hermes

Netbook (small and dumb): Nibbler

Phone (held to my head): BrainSlug

HTPC (one big viewport): Leela

The owners closed the restaurant and started a new one so I let the domain lapse.

OK, here’s how it happened.

I was hungry, and I wanted to see the menu for my local pizza joint. I couldn’t find it anywhere.

I discovered that all their socials linked to a website that wouldn’t load. When I checked, the domain had lapsed.

Out of frustration, I purchased the domain and pulled the last snapshot of their website off archive.org. It had their full menu as a PDF.

6 months later and it’s still getting visitors from their facebook page, who are viewing the menu. They haven’t even realised.

Host all the things!

Wordpress, SMTP/IMAP, tor, bittorrent, Nextcloud, Plex, NTP, photo galleries, DoT…

I even started hosting the website for my local Italian restaurant and they haven’t even realised it yet.