You don’t mention your throughput requirements. How fast is your internet connection? Will you be a VPN server and/or VPN client? A reverse proxy? All that adds overhead but really not that much compared to other services. It just changes your requirements as to how many years obsolete your hardware can be.

Generally, whatever desktops or laptops businesses are throwing out in the trash will be more than enough.

If you have a managed network switch or one that can do VLANs, a router on a stick will work fine, especially if your Internet connection isn’t more than half the speed of your server’s network card. A repurposed laptop is perfect for this, because it has a built-in UPS and console!

I’ve got a 13-year-old server handling my 300Mbps internet connection, Wireguard, reverse proxy, and other stuff. It used to handle a backup internet connection, too. It’s regrettably on pfSense and I’m trying to migrate it to opnSense but my setup isn’t exactly by the book. I put stuff that’s supposed to go out over VPN on a separate VLAN and I give them a separate OpnSense router running in a VM so there’s much less chance of leakage.

One thing I did learn the hard way is that a lot of consumer “smart” devices wrongly assume to be on the same broadcast domain as any servers, clients, or peers they talk to, so even with avahi handling relaying between VLANs, they won’t work. It’s annoying having to move your dishwasher off the IoT VLAN just to make it work.

I dunno, mailcow dockerized seems to work ok for me. That being said, e-mail is so 20th century.

Depends on the currency and features. If you’re looking for something outside of the 14 eyes that allows port forwarding, your options are extremely limited.

Any momentum on this front gets me excited, even if it doesn’t personally apply.

Since it’s cost-effective to combine gaming requirements with AI server requirements, I have my multi-modal language model stuff running on my (admittedly seldom-used) Windows gaming desktop. That means running most GPU-related tasks (aside from encoding/decoding/simple object recognition, which uses a separate server containing an Arc A380… purchased before A310’s were available) in docker running under Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2). Running stuff as background services just makes one assume that it should be a logical step to just make it multi-user. Easier said than done, I guess, just like multi-user stable diffusion.

Getting Games on Whales running under WSL2 has taken me down the familiar but unwelcome rabbit hole of recompiling Linux Kernel modules, which I’ve experienced is more straightforward on bare metal than WSL2.

The more attention and excitement about this topic, the better.

No more listing dozens of sensors when I ask what the temperature is outside, perhaps?

Funny, every time someone mentions pi-hole, I have to look up why I don’t use it, and I wonder if others do the same.

My combination of pfSense and its pfBlockerNG package does pretty much same thing and more, and once I migrate to opnSense, I have high expectations I should be able to do something similar.

That’s exactly how I searched. If you want security, it’s probably best to follow the Unix philosophy of do one thing and do it well. In other words, don’t trust someone building a media server to handle auth and instead use the OIDC or LDAP plugins.

Basic auth? The insecure authentication method?

Ok, I’ll look it up anyway. Under the jellyfin repository, there were eight results, none of which seemed to describe what you meant, and under the jellyfin-web repository, there were none. Using a web crawler search, I was able to find Issue #123 for jellyfin-android

Is that it?

You’ve piqued my interest. Where can I read about it?

I did a quick search on their github and came up empty. Maybe no one mentioned “htaccess” in the issue.

When you go deep down the rabbit hole, you learn that in versions prior to Zigbee 3.0, there are all sorts of zigbee application profiles (like bluetooth profiles, if you’ve ever wondered why it matters that a bluetooth headset can be connected for calls, music, or both). Two prominent ones are Zigbee Light Link (LL) and Zigbee Home Automation (HA). There’s also Zigbee Smart Energy. and numerous proprietary profiles.

Hubs solely designed for Zigbee LL ecosystems don’t talk to Zigbee HA devices, and hubs designed solely for Zigbee HA ecosystems don’t talk to Zigbee LL devices, to say nothing of any propriety profiles they may also support.

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/927/

Let me introduce you to the lesser known cousin to the axiom “If everything is claimed to be urgent, then nothing is urgent.”

If you are instructed to take a special backup prior to every upgrade, then no upgrade requires a special backup.

I’d rather not sit on an urgent security update.

What brand?

Would the phrase “Never by a household appliance from a cell phone company” apply in this case?

I lucked out and was simply in a relationship with a gal whom I helped purchase a house with a handy switched power outlet near the ceiling which was likely intended for seasonal decorative lights.
I co-oped the outlet once we got married but I need to replace the piece of tape that keeps the light in with one of these multi-button zigbee mains-powered switches that fit in multi-gang decora plates. I refuse to do wifi unless I can run esphome on it, and I will only trust matter when it runs over thread.

My son also has ADHD and my wife and I are that voice for him. I’m not sure where he gets it from. On an unrelated note, the days where I forget to eat are my most productive, so it’s a good thing you don’t need an 'eat God damn it" reminder.

“It’s dark in here” sets a scene where all the lights in our living room are set to bright white.

You are literally looking at the screen where you are two clicks away from changing a lot of major information about the device. If that’s not it, then use whatever add-on presented the device in the first place.

I can sympathize. It’s quite the learning curve, but it’s worth it in the end.

Thank you. Much appreciated. I see your point.

I provided enough information that the relevant source shows up in a search, but here you go:

In no situation did we explicitly instruct any models to blackmail or do any of the other harmful actions we observe. [Lynch, et al., “Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs Could be an Insider Threat”, Anthropic Research, 2025]

I think they use computers for those now.