Good that those things are taught in some places. I can only speak from my own experience in high school - we were required to have laptops for school but were never taught how to be safe online.

Some people put their whole lives on the internet and never once stop to think if it’s a good idea. Then again, online safety and security are never taught or communicated, at least in the west, maybe by design.

Between basically every process being done on paper, and most of the civil servants having no idea what an operating system is, I’m sure this will go great.

It’s kinda standard but Pihole is how I got into the general realm of home labbing.

Political means more than just parties and institutions of government. Society and economy is inherently political. Who owns what is produced and the tools used to produce it is inherently political. Therefore software development, just like any other type or work or other economic interaction, is political.

VPN server on one, client on another.

A matrix bot on each end would work too but seems unnecessarily complicated.

I like btop. It’s pretty. I just use it for checking resource usage, I rarely have the need to kill a process or anything else one may do with a system monitor.

Hugo with a simple theme like book or paper should do it. Alternatively Jekyll or Docusaurus, in principle they’re all the same in that they process markdown files and dump out a static site.

Astro for a more feature rich “development” experience.

The switch to Forgejo is super easy, if you don’t mind everything being called “Gitea” you can just switch out the Docker image and carry on.

I just switched recently, maybe around version 1.19.

Forgejo is also working on federation which will give the system an advantage moving forwards. They’re also sticking with Gitea as an upstream source so reasonable changes Gitea makes should make their way to Forgejo pretty quickly.

Without more info it’ll be hard to help.

I got it working in principle, but the Raspberry Pi I wanted to host it on isn’t powerful enough to handle the necessary computing.

That’s interesting, Hugo is the only SSG I’ve had luck with so far. I’m kind of stuck on Docusaurus at work and it’s a disaster.

On the face of things they’re all so simple, but aren’t documented well for users new to SSGs, and the build often spits out something unexpected with no way to figure out why.

I know I’m not part of the target audience for pretty sites, but the average user gets frustrated with poor design choices and outright broken websites as well.

Just as one recent and therefore present example, I was on a pretty site the other day and nothing happened when I clicked on “About Us”. The next thing I did was close the tab. As you say, first impressions mean a lot.

I hear complaints about these kind of things at work constantly as well. As an internal product owner of sorts users think I and the devs make poor design choices on our own, but all we can do is manage the best we can with the UX garbage Microsoft comes up with.

I really like what Mikrotik offers. Their gigabit routers start at maybe €40 and have the incredibly powerful Router OS installed.

A mini-PC with pfSense would offer similar features with more processing power, but with a homelab already you don’t need to do much processing on the router itself.

Pretty sites are cool and all, but in my experience super simple things often just don’t work. I’m not patient anymore when it comes to stuff like that, so I’ll close the tab real quick and find the information elsewhere or move on to the next thing.

Forgejo is a git server, forked by Codeberg from Gitea after Gitea got bought up by a for-profit corporation.

Codeberg is a non-profit organization which runs a public instance of the Forgejo git server.

You can make an account on Codeberg.org, save repos there, and contribute to other repos, like on Github. Or you can run your own Forgejo instance to use either privately or open up to public use.

You could rsync with directories shared on the local network, like a samba share or similar. It’s a bit slower than ssh but for regular incremental backups you probably won’t notice any difference, especially when it’s supposed to run in the background on a schedule.

Alternatively use a non-password protected ssh key, as already suggested.

You can also write rsync commands or at least a shell script that copies all of your desired directories with one command rather than one per file.

I’m not familiar with how VLC manages LAN streaming, but smb (samba) is a filesharing server you have to set up. Just search “set up samba share ubuntu”.

I tried migrating my personal services to Docker Swarm a while back. I have a Raspberry Pi as a 24/7 machine but some services could use a bit more power so I thought I’d try Swarm. The idea being that additional machines which are on sometimes could pick up some of the load.

Two weeks later I gave up and rolled everything back to running specific services or instances on specific machines. Making sure the right data is available on all machines all the time, plus the networking between dependencies and in some cases specifying which service should prefer which machine was far too complex and messy.

That said, if you want to learn Docker Swarm or Kubernetes and distributed filesystems, I can’t think of a better way.

I’d run it with Docker. The official documentation looks sufficient to get it up and running. I’d add a database backup to the stack as well, and save those backups to a separate machine.

A Pi 4 draws maybe 5W of electricity most of the time. 24/7 operation at 5W will be your cost (approx 44 kWh per year), not including cost of the Pi, your internet connection, and any time you spend on maintenance.

I didn’t even look to see if the one I linked was a fork. I’m glad it works!

A cool thing about Dockerfiles is that they’re usually architecture agnostic. I think the one I linked is as well, meaning that the architecture is only locked in when the image is built for a specific one. In this case the repo owner probably only built it for arm machines, but a build for x86_64 should work as well.