As always, I got the username wrong…

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2025

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  • Depending on how you define “self-hosting”, I may qualify at that.

    I’ve hosted my email on a remote VPS myself. I have not hosted the machine in my apartment.

    I used postfix + dovecot + mysql stack, I have to admit it was the hardest thing I’ve ever configured and I’ve hosted a lot of services in my life.

    In the end I ended up switching to the free service that came with the domain became no matter what I did and how compliant I was to dkim and SMARC and tkip (I’m probably butchering the name here, it’s been a long time) outlook accounts kept sending my emails to spam, everything else worked fine, even gmail, but DAMN Microsoft and how much I hate that company managed to fuck over me one final time even after years after I switch to Linux. I tried everything even the form to remove my email from spam.

    Tl;Dr hosted email on a vps but couldn’t get past outlook spam filters










  • Like many said, signal is centralised and requires a phone number.

    Meaning it’s not anonymous and the server owners can technically sell your metadata, not the content of the messages but who talks to who, what time, the length of the chat/call etc.

    Either-way having to use a phone number to register an account, for me is not acceptable for several reasons besides privacy and metadata.

    On top of that, the server side of signal isn’t free software (as in freedom), which means that the whole program requires non-free (as in freedom not beer) network services in order to work. Which isn’t acceptable for free software advocates.

    Alternatives:

    Simplex: If you don’t require voice calls there are more options available there are many text messages, but very few support calls, which for me is a critical feature.

    In theory Simplex is the best, it’s e2ee, quantum resistant, each chat (message queue) is it’s own “account”, each “account” is just a private key, and you can switch servers with the tap of a bottom, it also supports private routing, which from what I understand is like some sort of onion routing between simplex servers.

    Hosting your own server is also extremely easy, (tho note that running your own server can actually be detrimental to privacy depending on your threat model), supports calls, group chats and all the features I would ever need.

    Unfortunately at least for me and my contacts, SimpleX it’s terribly buggy, specially on phone, literally tonight I missed the opportunity to be with a friend because I only saw the message one hour late.

    Very often messages just stop being received until the app is restarted, usually I have my friend send me a message via other (centralised) app in order to warn me that he messaged me, I also do the same for him. After restarting the app it usually works fine for a while until it does it again. And needs restarting again.

    On top of it, it’s taking more and more time to get the first message when in background even during normal operation, tho I blame Samsung for this one and not Simplex, and understand that Simplex doesn’t use push notifications for improved privacy, but it has become a real problem, what used to take 5 minutes now sometimes takes more than half an hour. Maybe my phone is overloaded, idk.

    Calls could be improved too, takes several tries for it to actually work, and it doesn’t help when the other person calls me back and I call them at the same time.

    On top of it, the volume of a call seems very quiet compared to a normal phone call and it’s very hard to hear the other person, I’m guessing a simple compressor DSP could fix this.

    Unfortunately also has been news of Simplex planning to enshittify the app with cryptocurrency, something that I politically and morally oppose.

    Session:

    I’ve used it for a month years ago, before I knew about SimpleX, whatever technical merits it may or may not have, (and from what I understand it’s privacy is still below SimpleX) it relies on some cryptocurrency network in the background, so I won’t use it. Self-hosting it also seemed to me no easy task, but I could be wrong.

    Jami:

    Never got it to work.

    Matrix:

    I haven’t tried Matrix yet, I think I read long ago that calls aren’t e2ee tho that may have changed now. I also read that Matrix leaks a lot of metadata which can be a problem. Maybe not if you self-host, but self-hosting comes with it’s own privacy problems. Maybe I should research it again and try to self-host it and see how it goes.

    So as bad as Signal is, I can’t give you a working alternative, I put all with Simplex despite all the bugs but I don’t think most people are willing to go though it, however if you (and your contacts) have a high end phones maybe it works better. But it’s not something I can recommend.


  • This sounds really cool. Does that actually work, did you do a comparison? I would have expected that most RAM usage comes from rendering the frame and not sending it, or does waypipe somehow outsource that as well?

    I haven’t tested yet, it’s something I plan to do this or next week.

    From what I understand, waypipe should use minimal ram, all it basically does is forwarding an image, sound and inputs, all the heavy lifting is done on the server side where the application actually runs.


  • “I have a hammer and I hate it’s not hammering, any cool ideas involving nails?”

    You see, I have the exact same problem as you, I just can’t stand seeing hardware going unused. Specially computer hardware that deprecates. But I think before thinking “what can I do with this hardware” you should think “do I have a need or a problem that can be solved with this hardware?” And if the awnser is “no” then maybe consider selling the GPU or giving it to some friend who needs it.

    My Jellyfin works without a GPU, just my old 2nd generation i3 is enough to realtime transcode video to my phone, maybe I would need upgrade of I had more users, but I’m it’s only user.

    Do you have multiple users on your server where you require GPU acceleration, if not there’s no much reason to use GPU accell anyway (which is usually trickier to setup)?

    Still reporposing the computer to use as a server seems to be a good idea, because I at least can’t stand the nightmare of using USB hard drives, I’ve hard really bad experiences with those lousy cables and connection. But if you do that. That leaves you with another problem. What to do with the raspberry pi?

    Also, I just recently also built a new PC had the same problem of not knowing what to do with my laptop, I came to conclusion that the best thing I can do with it is to run background chat applications on it and maybe web browser via waypipe. So it just looks like a window on my main PC and this way I have ram on my new PC that I may need for some heavy workloads like blender rendering.


  • I have never build a machine like that, so I guess I can’t help you much, but like another comment said, it seems like a pain to maintain, I usually have trouble with sata cables losing contact, with that setup there are many cables keen to lose contact.

    As for ram I wouldn’t worry about it at all, unless you use zfs 4GB should be more than enough, even 2 or less. Ram is expensive now, so you may want to consider using as little as possible unless you already have it laying around. Does truenas use zfs? If so you may want to use other fs like btrfs or test how well zfs works with the ram you have. I’m not sure zfs is worth the trouble. I wouldn’t buy extra ram.

    As for CPU I don’t think it matters much, but like I said, I have never tried your setup. But even an ancient sandy bridge should work fine if it’s just a personal has, with HDDs even with encryption. Works fine on my nas.

    Also, if you have access to free old computers you can try a ghetto setup where each each computer only handles 4 drives and then you join them together on a master computer either via nbd or nvme other Ethernet (works on sata too). But that seems like an even bigger pain to maintain and increases your power consumption by a lot.




  • Well, first while raid is great, it’s not a replacement for backups. Raid is mostly useful if uptime is imperative, but does not protect against user errors, software errors, fs corruption, ransomware or a power surge killing the entire array.

    Since uptime isn’t an issue on my home nas, instead of parity I simply have cold backups which (supposedly) I plug in from time to time to scrub the filesystems.

    If a online drive dies I can simply restore it from backup and accept the downtime. For my anime I have simply one single backup, but or my most important files I have 2 backups just in case one fails. (Unfornately both onsite)

    On the other hand, for a client of mine’s server where uptime is imperative, in addiction to raid I have 2 automatic daily backups (which ideally one should be offsite but isn’t, at least they are in different floors of the same building).



  • Apart from open WRT, there’s also opensense or opn Sense which let’s you turn any old computer into a router as long as it has 2 network cards.

    You may also need a switch and a WiFi AP tho, so at that point you better get an openWRT router. Just leaving this info here in case it’s useful.



  • Please elaborate, sometime ago I got literally CSAM that I would never download on my iknowwhatyoudownload and I got ultra paranoid about it.

    I assumed someone had hacked my router or had a libtorrent 0day and was trying to incriminate me as those torrents would only appear when I had qbittorrent open.

    Caused me quite a lot of stress thinking that the cops would knock my door and take my computers at any moment.

    I don’t use a VPN because that’s not required for torrenting in my country.

    I know that I’m not behind a cgnat coz I can even forward port 80