With sidekick Yours Truly.

Make sure to take it out of the box, so you know it’s hobby gear and not just a collectible.

Nine months ago, I’d have said the same thing about Medicare, but here we are today with a trillion dollars in Medicare cuts coming, on top of the trillion in Medicaid. And MAGA seems super happy about it.

Overdose.

$170M is such small change. According to my local food bank, that’s barely enough to feed the entire state of Maine for a year.

It is still a logical argument, especially for smaller shops. I mean, you can (as self-hosters know) set up automatic backups, failover systems, and all that, but it takes significant time & resources. Redundant internet connectivity? Redundant power delivery? Spare capacity to handle a 10x demand spike? Those are big expenses for small, even mid-sized business. No one really cares if your dentist’s office is offline for a day, even if they have to cancel appointments because they can’t process payments or records.

Meanwhile, theoretically, reliability is such a core function of cloud providers that they should pay for experts’ experts and platinum standard infrastructure. It makes any problem they do have newsworthy.

I mean,it seems silly for orgs as big and internet-centric as Fortnite, Zoom, or forturne-500 bank to outsource their internet, and maybe this will be a lesson for them.

I’m not a systemd guru, but it turned out pretty easy. https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/using-systemd.html#systemd-multiple-mysql-instances Basically just make [mysqld@copy] sections in my.cnf then systemd start mysqld@copy and systemd is smart enough to pass copy into mysql.

I did it slightly different, using systemctl edit mysql@.service to define different default files for each instance, then [mysqld@copy] sections in each of those files. Seems like the port option for each has to go in a [mysqld] section, but otherwise ok.

Replication because I want to put some live data, read-only, on the VPS, exposed to the world while the ‘real’ database stays safely hidden in my intranet. SSH tunnel so the replica can talk to the real database.

I’m hung up on unrecognized charset #255. Tried rolling everything back to utfmb3; suppose I could go all the way to Latin1. I imagine there’s a lot of depth I could learn, but dropping mariadb for mysql seems like the path of least resistance right now.

eta: got the character set sorted. Had to make a new dump, confirm that everything in the dump was utf8mb3, then re-prime the replica with that data. Wasn’t enough just to change the character sets internally.

I’ve been trying to convince a VPS to run two instances of mariadb - one for local databases, one to replicate the homelab. Got mariadb@server and mariadb@replica sorted out through systemd, but now stuck on replication from mysql to mariadb. Looks like I’ll be ripping out mariadb and putting everything on mysql.

I’ve got all my internet infrastructure on one monitor - 50W for the N100, the cable modem, an ooma VOIP device, and UPS. I’d guess the server, with its WAP, 4x GbE ports, 2x spinning disks, and USB TV tuner, is 35-ish of those watts.

If you have the spare cash, I found the N100 NAS motherboard to be a great source of occasional weekend projects, and now it very definitely looks like I’ve gone overboard.

I started out just wanting a file server to store backups.then…

• DHCP and NAT because my ISP would only allow one user.
• DNS so I could refer to systems by name
• pihole
• mythtv/tvheadend so I could watch OTA tv & archive CDs & DVDs
• hostapd for Wifi
• homeassistant
• immich
• nextcloud
• tandoor recipes
• just added fastenhealth for medical records

It didn’t feel like a lot, because it took years. Among the amazing things has been all the times I’ve been able to upgrade the motherboard by just plugging the HD into the new board. Started out just using old desktop boards; the N100 was the first purpose-bought board, and also the most complicated upgrade, because it added UEFI. There definitely are projects out there that don’t have an arm option, so something x86 is more flexible.

Pi 4 should be plenty to run Jellyfin, homeassistant, pihole and octoprint. Docker setup is pretty straightforward, and I can vouch that HA & pihole containers work great on RPi, if you want to leave the Jellyfin setup as-is and put the others alongside.

If you’re looking for an excuse to expand, my vote is for an N100 type system. I got one with 4 ethernet ports, PCIe for a wifi card, couple of NVME slots, and a half dozen SATA ports for $100-150. That’s a huge step up in potential without much increase in power draw. With the right wifi card, you can even use it to replace your WAP/router.

Newton in English…new town.

Are you sure the ISP will delegate a /56? Mine supports prefix delegation, but will only give a /64, and it seems like subdividing that ¿into /72s? would be questionable.

“God’s plan” is literally whatever is happening right now. Got in a car crash? God’s plan. Narrowly missed a car crash? God’s plan. Cat wakes you at 6am for breakfast? God’s plan. This whole comment? God’s plan.

Fetched it. Started it. Did a really nice job fetching my whole health record from insurance co & has a wide array of compatible providers. Decent presentation of repeated test results. It’s got a bunch of areas “not implemented yet,” but it’s a decent way to visualize the records. Probably even better if you have health records from multiple providers.

Safe deposit box is exactly the right size to hold a 3.5" HDD. Or several. I keep a backup Yubikey there too, because I love the physical token 2FA, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose it.

It’s not that he thinks he’s above the law, he thinks he is the law. He’s “hired” people at the DOJ to do his bidding and picked judges to approve it. Same way he’d hire a painter to paint the walls gold.

Came to say this. I recall especially the books private, paramilitary “marching clubs” being turned into law enforcement, which feels a lot like how the Proud Boys and 3% have fallen out of the media at the same time as ICE has co-opted their tactics.

“We’ll have fascism in [America], but we’ll call it anti-fascism” - Huey Long

The whole of US political commentary 1935-1939 feels very relevant today.

Neil Gaiman makes a reference to that in Neverwhere, using ‘TV tuned to a dead channel’ to describe a cloudless blue sky.