SleepyBear

One way is to run Pi-hole’s admin interface on a different port. That’s configured in:

/etc/lighttpd/external.conf

Set:

server.port := 8000

Then your URL is http://IP:8000/admin

This is more complex than you’d think because the USB spec has changed many times over the years, with updates in the connectors used, along with other sub-category changes to cables too. So there’s USB versions 1, 2, 3, and 4 (and sub-versions too), along with different types of connector, eg. USB-A comes in regular and V3 (blue inside), and USB-C which is the later. Newer specs can transfer much larger amounts of data. Power Delivery (PD) is another sub-set of specification, which currently allows up to 240W of power with USB4, that’s a lot, enough to charge multiple laptops at once, vastly more then the 2.5W allowed for USB 3. For more confusion there is also USB Power Delivery Programmable Power Supply, which is a sub-set to help devices negotiate charging speeds.

Another challenge - USB-C connectors can also support Thunderbolt, which gives it a whole other set of capabilities. This depends on both the cable and the port.

This explains that mess that is USB-C: https://www.androidauthority.com/state-of-usb-c-870996/

Key part:

The latest USB data speed protocols are split into several standards. There are legacy USB 1.0 and 2.0, USB 3.0, USB 3.1, USB 3.2, and the latest USB 4.0, all of which can be supported over USB-C. Confusing enough, but these have since been revised and updated to include various sub-standards, which have encompassed USB 3.1 Gen 1, USB 3.1 Gen 2, and USB 3.2 Gen 2, along with the more recent USB 3.2 Gen 1×1, USB 3.2 Gen 1×2, and USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 revisions. Good luck deciphering the differences without a handbook. Hopefully, the graph below helps.

You’d hope USB4 fixes it, but no. USB4 already boasts Gen 2×1, Gen 2×2, Gen 3×1, Gen 3×2, and Gen 4 variations, with data speeds ranging from 10 to 80 Gbps.

Cable lengths can also have an impact. The spec only allows for a specific length after which you need active cables, which include chips in them to strengthen the signal.

Several years ago a Google engineer started buying USB-C cables from Amazon and reviewing them in a lot of detail: https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AFLICGQRF6BRJGH2RRD4VGMB47ZA

If you read some you’ll see there are plenty of manufacturers who just don’t even stick by the rules, so it’s not always clear what you’ll actually get. It doesn’t help either that some products also don’t play by the rules and have custom sockets that need specific vendor cables. I’ve had keyboards, for example, that only work with their specific vendor cables, not general USB-C ones.

This means you need to stick to a reputable set of brands, or the cables that came with the product. Decide if you need to charge something serious with it - eg. laptop, vs just a phone, watch, or small device, or whether you need data connectivity.

As another poster mentioned, just buy Anker, they’re well made come with a reputable warranty, and aren’t actually that expensive. Don’t buy the cables you find by the supermarket/CVS checkout, or some ultra-cheap site. They might work, they might not.

Oh, and the Google engineer had his laptop fried by bad cables: https://www.engadget.com/2016-02-03-benson-leung-chromebook-pixel-usb-type-c-test.html

Given this is !privacy and the advertise as front page features both “works will all your messaging apps” and “end to end encryption”, it seems important to flag currently those aren’t mutually compatible.

It’s not their fault the apps don’t have e2e APIs, it’s a tough problem, but the secrecy and privacy guarantee is just “trust us to stick to our policy”. And they’re a start-up, tooling isn’t perfect (or even exist), mistakes happen, etc

Their self-hosting looks interesting, but then it said to use your own clients too, which took the fun out of that.

“For example, if you send a message from Beeper to a friend on WhatsApp, the message is encrypted on your Beeper client, sent to the Beeper web service, which decrypts and re-encrypts the message with WhatsApp’s proprietary encryption protocol.”

So, not really end to end for most common use-cases.

Many years ago working for a monitoring software company someone had found a bug in the uptime monitoring rules where they reset after a year.

It was patched and I upgraded one client and their whole Solaris plant immediately went red and alerted. They told me to double it to two years and some stuff was still alerting.

They just said they’d try to get around to rebooting it, but it was all stable.

Everywhere else I’ve worked enforces regular reboots.

If you want a reliable provider try Fastmail. Used them for years, very rare outages. I have my local postfix set to relay to them for locally sent mail. Great web UI.

I really don’t like the “but otherwise we’d need a warrant” approach.

Yes, of course you should need a warrant. That’s the bit that’s the safeguard and actually is the checks and balance against abuse. It’s not a problem to be optimized away.

Most towers will fit 4 drives.

If you’re out of SATA ports or M2s you can buy PCI adapters.

If you’re buying SSDs they’re small and don’t care about orientation, can but plugged into the cables and stuffed anywhere in the case that doesn’t impede airflow.

Where do you want your drives? What sort of drives? I’ve also found it more performant to stuff them in the case and 4 drives isn’t a stretch unless you’re also running a ton in the target server.

Fastmail.

But, it’s not the cheapest. $5 a month gets what you need though.

Really quick WebUI, great features, including hosting your own domains and smtp rewriting.

Very smart helpful support team.

Great for degoogling.

The major email providers will only handle email from know good and trusted IPs. If you’ve been hosting on the same IP for 15 years you’re trusted. If you started it last night your IP is still untrusted. It takes a long time to gain trust.

SendGrid has a good explanation here: https://sendgrid.com/resource/email-guide-ip-warm-up/

That’s cool. I’ve used crafty for years, but mainly because I outgrew my scripts to manage each server instance and my kids need instance responses to restarting servers. So I went looking for something Minecraft specific to give them restart and reset commands.

Moving to Caseta for lighting from the random mix of bulbs which never quite work was amazing. It’s also much cheaper to put in one controllable switch than replace the 6 bulbs in the light fittings connected to the wall switch. Those bulbs always fail in weird and non-debuggable ways.

I use Crafty Controller (https://craftycontrol.com/) to manage the minecraft servers. It runs in a docker instance and gives you a nice web UI to manage each minecraft server. I use it to delegate control to my kids to create and manage servers as necessary.

Finally, if you’re not using a config mgmt tool, I’d start looking, so you can make everything easily re-doable. Personally I’m using Ansible, but puppet, chef, salt, etc all work too. Ansible is easiest given it does need it’s own infra. I like it so if something dies I can redeploy everything onto a different server.

I’ve had a lot of success with a QOTOM box from aliexpress.

They’re little fanless boxes running basic intel Core chips, in a variety of configs.

I’ve run OPNSense and PFSense as routers (also doing wireguard, torrents, etc), as well as just standard Ubuntu server.

Very small and low power, and pretty cheap. They come in a variety of configs.

I run ddclient on a local machine and it updates my Cloudflare DNS records if my IP changes.

OPNSense has it built in too, if you use it. So does PFSense, I think. Been a while, might be misremembering.