Reverse proxy + DNS-challenge wildcard cert for your domain. The end. Super easy to set up and zero maintenance. Adding a new service is just a couple clicks in your reverse proxy and you’re done.

Yes at a cursory glance that’s true. AI generated images don’t involve the abuse of children, that’s great. The problem is what the follow-on effects of this is. What’s to stop actual child abusers from just photoshopping a 6th finger onto their images and then claiming that it’s AI generated?

AI image generation is getting absurdly good now, nearly indistinguishable from actual pictures. By the end of the year I suspect they will be truly indistinguishable. When that happens, how do you tell which images are AI generated and which are real? How do you know who is peddling real CP and who isn’t if AI-generated CP is legal?

It wouldn’t matter. The public doesn’t listen directly to politicians, it gets filtered through the media first, and the media picks and chooses which parts they actually report. The people who would actually hear this already know. The people who would need to hear it never will because Fox won’t show it to them.

I don’t understand why everything isn’t just rated in Wh or mWh. It gives them a bigger number to advertise and it’s voltage-independent. Sure there are load-dependent conversion efficiencies that complicate things a bit, but nobody is going to get up in arms about a 5% deviation from the advertised spec due to less than ideal conversion efficiency. Compared to trying to figure out how many recharge cycles I’ll get on my 5000mAh laptop battery from my 20000mAh power bank (what voltage is that laptop battery running at again?) a 5% efficiency drop is a big nothing burger.

Yes, and Bitwarden+SimpleLogin. Bitwarden to keep track of login info including the alias that is used for that site. SimpleLogin is where the aliasing is actually handled, they have a decent UI for enabling/disabling or generating reverse aliases (for outgoing emails) when needed.

It does take a little more effort to manage it, but it’s worth the payoff. I’ve been using this setup for about 9 months now and I finally got my first spam email a week ago. I looked at the address it was sent to, it was an alias I used at a site I ordered something from about 6 months ago. I sent them a message letting them know that either someone at their company is selling customer info to scammers or their database has been leaked, then I shut off the alias. No more spam.

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it gives people the option to use an alternate app store if they want but it doesn’t force anyone to.

That argument sounds great in theory, but would break down after a month or less, when companies start moving their apps off of Apple’s App Store and onto a 3rd party store that allows all the spyware Apple has forced them to remove if they want to have an iOS market. This move DOES force people to use alternate app stores when companies start moving (not copying, moving) their apps over to said stores to take advantage of the drop in oversight.

Same, I don’t let Docker manage volumes for anything. If I need it to be persistent I bind mount it to a subdirectory of the container itself. It makes backups so much easier as well since you can just stop all containers, backup everything in ~/docker or wherever you put all of your compose files and volumes, and then restart them all.

It also means you can go hog wild with docker system prune -af --volumes and there’s no risk of losing any of your data.

Mint is basically Ubuntu with all of Canonical’s BS removed. This definitely counts as Canonical BS, so I’d be surprised if it made its way into Mint.

I would separate the media and the Jellyfin image into different pools. Media would be a normal ZFS pool full of media files that gets mounted into any VM that needs it, like Jellyfin, sonarr, radarr, qbittorrent, etc. (preferably read-only mounted in Jellyfin if you’re going to expose Jellyfin to the internet).

As far as networking, from what I could see the only real change casaos was doing was mapping its dashboard to port 80, but not much more. Is there anything more I should be aware in general?

It depends on how you have things set up. If you’re just doing normal docker compose networking with port forwards then there shouldn’t be much to change, but if you’re doing anything more advanced like macvlan then you might have to set up taps on the host to be able to communicate with the container (not sure if CasaOS handles that automatically).

The nice thing about docker is all you need to do is backup your compose file, .env file, and mapped volumes, and you can easily restore on any other system. I don’t know much about CasaOS, but presumably you have the ability to stop your containers and access the filesystem to copy their config and mapped volumes elsewhere? If so this should be pretty easy. You might have some networking stuff to work out, but I suspect the rest should go smoothly and IMO would be a good move.

When self-hosting, the more you know about how things actually work, the easier it is to fix when something is acting up, and the easier it is to make known good backups and restore them.

While true, and I have a lot of DRM-free music that I’ve bought from Apple, the difference is that getting music purchased from Apple onto your computer in a usable format is a bit of a pain, and it’s all lossy. Music from Qobuz can be downloaded directly from their site after purchasing, in lossless FLAC format, and many of their albums are available in high-res 24-bit and/or 96 kHz format as well.

Best luck I’ve had with laptops has been Razer, actually. They’re gaming laptops, so a bit warm and loud and the battery life isn’t great, but they’re built like a brick, can be easily opened, all parts are easily replaceable/upgradeable, and since they generally use Intel everything, Linux compatibility is solid as well (except for RGB lighting and stuff, but with OpenRazer and Polychromatic even that usually works except for brand new models).

My last laptop was a Razer Blade 14 which ran great for like 6 years before I just got bored and decided I wanted to upgrade to a newer model with a better display. Over the 6 years I used it I upgraded the RAM, SSD, added a second SSD, upgraded the WiFi card, etc. It ran literally 24/7 during that entire time other than brief moments when I shut it down to throw in a backpack for travel, the only thing I had to replace for maintenance was the battery. I now have a Razer Blade 16 which has been great for the last year, zero issues, also running 24/7.

Before Razer I used Dell, Lenovo, HP, and Asus. None of them lasted more than 2-3 years before either the plastic crap holding it together fell apart, or the monitor, mouse, or keyboard failed, or I wanted/needed to upgrade something that was not user-replaceable (usually RAM or WiFi).

Would you mind if I added this as a discussion (crediting you and this post!) in the github project?

Yeah that would be fine

They didn’t provide an rsync example until later in the post, the comment about not supporting differential backups is in reference to using rsync itself, which is incorrect, because rsync does support differential backups.

I agree with you that not doing differential backups is a problem, I’m simply commenting that this is not a drawback of using rsync, it’s an implementation problem on the user’s part. It would be like somebody saying “I like my Rav4, it’s just problematic because I don’t go to the grocery store with it” and someone else saying “that’s a big drawback, the grocery store has a lot of important items and you need to be able to go to it”. While true, it’s based on a faulty premise, because of course a Rav4 can go to the grocery store like any other car, it’s a non-issue to begin with. OP just needs to fix their backup script to start doing differential backups.

My KVM hosts use “virsh backup begin” to make full backups nightly.

All machines, including the KVM hosts and laptops, use rsync with --link-dest to create daily incremental versioned backups on my main backup server.

The main backup server pushes client-side encrypted backups which include the latest daily snapshot for every system to rsync.net via Borg.

I also have 2 DASs with 2 22TB encrypted drives in each. One of these is plugged into the backup server while the other one sits powered off in a drawer in my desk at work. The main backup server pushes all backups to this DAS weekly and I swap the two DASs ~monthly so the one in my desk at work is never more than a month or so out of date.

It’s not a drawback because rsync has supported incremental versioned backups for over a decade, you just have to use the --link-dest flag and add a couple lines of code around it for management.

But from a grammatical sense it’s the opposite. In a sentence, a comma is a short pause, while a period is a hard stop. That means it makes far more sense for the comma to be the thousands separator and the period to be the stop between integer and fraction.

Sure, it’s a bit hack-and-slash, but not too bad. Honestly the dockcheck portion is already pretty complete, I’m not sure what all you could add to improve it. The custom plugin I’m using does nothing more than dump the array of container names with available updates to a comma-separated list in a file. In addition to that I also have a wrapper for dockcheck which does two things:

1. dockcheck plugins only run when there’s at least one container with available updates, so the wrapper is used to handle cases when there are no available updates.
2. Some containers aren’t handled by dockcheck because they use their own management system, two examples are bitwarden and mailcow. The wrapper script can be modified as needed to support handling those as well, but that has to be one-off since there’s no general-purpose way to handle checking for updates on containers that insist on doing things in their own custom way.

Basically there are 5 steps to the setup:

1. Enable Prometheus metrics from Docker (this is just needed to get running/stopped counts, if those aren’t needed it can skipped). To do that, add the following to /etc/docker/daemon.json (create it if necessary) and restart Docker:

{
  "metrics-addr": "127.0.0.1:9323"
}

Once running, you should be able to run curl http://localhost:9323/metrics and see a dump of Prometheus metrics

2. Clone dockcheck, and create a custom plugin for it at dockcheck/notify.sh:

send_notification() {
Updates=("$@")
UpdToString=$(printf ", %s" "${Updates[@]}")
UpdToString=${UpdToString:2}

File=updatelist_local.txt

echo -n $UpdToString > $File
}

3. Create a wrapper for dockcheck:

#!/bin/bash

cd $(dirname $0)

./dockcheck/dockcheck.sh -mni

if [[ -f updatelist_local.txt ]]; then
  mv updatelist_local.txt updatelist.txt
else
  echo -n "None" > updatelist.txt
fi

At this point you should be able to run your script, and at the end you’ll have the file “updatelist.txt” which will either contain a comma-separated list of all containers with available updates, or “None” if there are none. Add this script into cron to run on whatever cadence you want, I use 4 hours.

4. The main Python script:

#!/usr/bin/python3

from flask import Flask, jsonify

import os
import time
import requests
import json

app = Flask(__name__)

# Listen addresses for docker metrics
dockerurls = ['http://127.0.0.1:9323/metrics']

# Other dockerstats servers
staturls = []

# File containing list of pending updates
updatefile = '/path/to/updatelist.txt'

@app.route('/metrics', methods=['GET'])
def get_tasks():
  running = 0
  stopped = 0
  updates = ""

  for url in dockerurls:
      response = requests.get(url)

      if (response.status_code == 200):
        for line in response.text.split("\n"):
          if 'engine_daemon_container_states_containers{state="running"}' in line:
            running += int(line.split()[1])
          if 'engine_daemon_container_states_containers{state="paused"}' in line:
            stopped += int(line.split()[1])
          if 'engine_daemon_container_states_containers{state="stopped"}' in line:
            stopped += int(line.split()[1])

  for url in staturls:
      response = requests.get(url)

      if (response.status_code == 200):
        apidata = response.json()
        running += int(apidata['results']['running'])
        stopped += int(apidata['results']['stopped'])
        if (apidata['results']['updates'] != "None"):
          updates += ", " + apidata['results']['updates']

  if (os.path.isfile(updatefile)):
    st = os.stat(updatefile)
    age = (time.time() - st.st_mtime)
    if (age < 86400):
      f = open(updatefile, "r")
      temp = f.readline()
      if (temp != "None"):
        updates += ", " + temp
    else:
      updates += ", Error"
  else:
    updates += ", Error"

  if not updates:
    updates = "None"
  else:
    updates = updates[2:]

  status = {
    'running': running,
    'stopped': stopped,
    'updates': updates
  }
  return jsonify({'results': status})

if __name__ == '__main__':
  app.run(host='0.0.0.0')

The neat thing about this program is it’s nestable, meaning if you run steps 1-4 independently on all of your Docker servers (assuming you have more than one), then you can pick one of the machines to be the “master” and update the “staturls” variable to point to the other ones, allowing it to collect all of the data from other copies of itself into its own output. If the output of this program will only need to be accessed from localhost, you can change the host variable in app.run to 127.0.0.1 to lock it down. Once this is running, you should be able to run curl http://localhost:5000/metrics and see the running and stopped container counts and available updates for the current machine and any other machines you’ve added into “staturls”. You can then turn this program into a service or launch it @reboot in cron or in /etc/rc.local, whatever fits with your management style to start it up on boot. Note that it does verify the age of the updatelist.txt file before using it, if it’s more than a day old it likely means something is wrong with the dockcheck wrapper script or similar, and rather than using the output the REST API will print “Error” to let you know something is wrong.

5. Finally, the Homepage custom API to pull the data into the dashboard:

        widget:
          type: customapi
          url: http://localhost:5000/metrics
          refreshInterval: 2000
          display: list
          mappings:
            - field:
                results: running
              label: Running
              format: number
            - field:
                results: stopped
              label: Stopped
              format: number
            - field:
                results: updates
              label: Updates