Mikelius

Yeah, in my example, I have various genres of music I listen to and some days I’m in the mood for one and not another. Some of those might have subgenres I am in the mood to listen to. For example: Metal might break into subfolders called black metal, thrash metal, melodic metal, etc. Based on where I feel they belong the most. If I’m in the mood for some melodic metal today, I’ll go there. Or EDM, I’ll have a folder for Psytrance, another for House, etc…

Rather than trying to edit the metadata on thousands and thousands of files every time I change media systems as I’ve done over these years, it’s 100x simpler for me to just navigate to the folders directly and not care about how the system “wants” to organize it. Every media system wants to organize differently and I’m kind of tired of having to spend hours editing all my music just to get it to organize the way that works for me, so that’s where I’ve gotten to the point of just using folder structures.

I could never get Plex to work the way I wanted it to, so I’m actually someone who moved to Kodi and then to Emby. Once I got into Emby, I’ve yet to leave it. My biggest problem now is that I want to leave it for Jellyfin, but the lack of many things I love about Emby have never been moved to Jellyfin.

For example, I have a very specific organization of my music libraries I use to navigate what I want to listen to much quicker, since I’m into all kinds of genres of music. Emby allows me to navigate by folder structure, so if I’m in the mood for heavy metal one day, go to that folder. If classical another day, go there. Jellyfin on the other hand didn’t have folder structure view and even though it’s one of the top requested features for the past few years when I last checked, it’s never been added…

I think the day Jellyfin does fill in these gaps, assuming new ones aren’t introduced due to Emby also improving, I’ll finally jump over.

I guess to the original topic, I do think Jellyfin exceeds Plex though lol.

Plus 1 to Venstar. Got myself the T7900 and even though it offers internet access, I just blocked it at my router and connected it to the network, controlling it through home assistant. No need for third party access and whatnot with it since it’s completely local.

“Texas Data Privacy and Security Act”… This is a thing? lol

Raid 1 has saved my server a couple of times over from disaster. I make weekly cold backups, but I didn’t have to worry about it when my alert came in notifying me which drive went dead - just swap, rebuild, move along. So yeah I’d say it’s definitely worth it. Just don’t treat raid as a backup solution - and yes, continue to use an external cold storage backup solution as you mentioned. Fires, exploding power supplies, ransomware, etc don’t care if you’re using raid or not.

Actually, there are some apps and even phone level things that do try to call to custom DNS, ignoring all the phone settings, including those defined in the global settings. Termux nslookup is one I can think of at the top of my head that ignores the phone’s settings and instead tries to call to Google DNS. I’ve got DNS default blocked in a custom script for AFWall on my phone, excluding calling my custom DNS, and see the block frequently hit. Just now checking, I see 54 blocks on 8.8.8.8:53, 2 blocks on 1.1.1.1:53, and 16 on “other” port 53 (catch all block).

Think the best solution is either a router firewall setup if always on the wifi, or a phone firewall app that can act as a VPN and just default block everything, or something like that. If rooted, AFWall does wonders.

I’d say anyone wanting to go this deep into a home monitoring setup will likely go with what works best for them instead of reading and following the entirety of this guide… I’m one of those people…

Wrote my own log parsing software to put into a database, display and alert through grafana, which is alerting through a homemade webhook that sends a notification to ntfy based on severity… And I also use uptime Kuma like mentioned, but my notifications channel is ntfy. No cloudflare for my internal services, only wireguard to connect home and use everything. And definitely no telegram.

Plenty of other stuff setup, but my security alerts and monitoring rely heavily on the syslog/grafana server which helps me monitor everything.

I converted my gaming machine into a server as well. I actually took the graphics card out as I couldn’t find a major use for it, but kept the 12 core Ryzen and upped it to 128gb memory. It now self host way too many things, including a few game servers my friends and I play… But even with all this, CPU carries along nicely and not even at half memory consumption (yet).

But as others have asked, what’s your goal? Don’t overkill it if you’re only hosting one service or something. If you’re doing a lot like I do, then up the RAM. And seriously consider whether the GPU is even useful or needed if you’re not using a desktop environment.

I’ve had this issue many times as well. I’ve found changing the MTU would help since it seems some filter specific ranges. Doesn’t always work but I’ve had more success than failure doing so

This thread has provided genius ideas I somehow never thought of, and I’m totally stealing them for my sites lol.

Friends and I are in the upper 30s and 40s range so not young not old I guess lol. For the family side, I tend to look for all my closer relatives which range in all ages. While there were many many lines that matched our last names, the entries that were a match didn’t have the right phone numbers or addresses (so couldn’t really validate if they were us or others with the same name). Or it could always be that they were addresses so old that I don’t have a record of them to compare to… Considering a large chunk of the data is apparently old, it’s possible that could be a reason I didn’t see everyone, too? I’ll probably go back and dig a little deeper on the family side since I haven’t deleted the data yet.

Fair enough, I should have left with the mention of mileage may vary. I checked for some more friends per request since my posting, and out of the 20-30 families I’ve now checked, only 1 was compromised… But they were also in a couple of previous ones too. But of course, this doesn’t mean it’s the same case for everyone else.

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The news is kind blowing this up bigger than it really is. But I find this as a good thing because I’ve noticed a few people FINALLY taking the advice I’ve been giving for years now, and that’s to freeze your credit at the big bureaus and some, if not all, of the smaller ones.

That being said, I checked this data dump for my own data as well as a bunch of friends and family. Not a single person I checked was in it… Which is why I’m not finding this breach to be that frightening personally. The ATT breach was way worse. Also Krebs posted on this today… A good read for anyone interested. Main thing I took from it was a large number of these entries belong to people who have passed away already.

The security part is the reason I use NoScript to do this. We’ve all typo squatted sites we visit, I’m sure. But if I typo squat a site I frequently visit and see the JavaScript disabled, it forces me to recheck I’m on the right site. Granted it’s only happened once where I didn’t realize I typo’d until seeing it was disabled, but it only takes 1 time to lose everything…

Not sure the fingerprint concerns are too major for me either. Hopefully most scenarios, I’m flagged as a bot or crawler and out of some data that would otherwise have been collected. Who knows. I imagine that JavaScript makes up for way more fingerprinting though.

I’ve been doing this for a while now with opnsense being what masks the whole network behind the mullvad VPN.

Pros:

• Even fresh new devices that have all that crap junkware installed get routed through the VPN, meaning no tracking to you immediately (unless they sniff the rest of the network and relay your network AP I guess)
• one device instead of many, leaving extra devices available to use for a single mullvad account (limited to 5 devices, at least for wireguard)
• if using wireguard, you honestly won’t be hit with network performance issues. Just don’t choose a server across the world from you. I chose one in the same country as myself and get an average 95-97% of my internet speed, and that’s because I also have IDS/IPS enabled

Cons:

• as others mentioned, increase captcha annoyances
• some banks may lock your account if you try to log in with the VPN
• if the VPN server goes down, the whole network will. This may be a good thing since your don’t want traffic to leak, but just pointing out you now have another single point of failure outside your ISP
• when someone’s hoarding the entire VPN server you’re connected to, you’ll probably witness a slowdown

That all being said, if you’re not very technically savvy on the networking side or haven’t ever setup a custom router/firewall, this will be a pain. But it you want to learn something new and are up for the challenge, eventually it gets down to almost never having to worry about it. I’ve been doing it for a long time now, so for me personally, I’ve gotten to the point of only needing to login to the firewall for a VPN setting update or server change maybe once a month

I personally use mullvad for all outgoing traffic and then airvpn for any let forwarding I require. Basically airvpn is exclusive to incoming traffic, like my self hosted services or game servers, and then anything I do on the internet routes through mullvad. All setup through opnsense since they both support wireguard.

I always had issues with proton’s port forwarding being reliable in the past. That being said, if you need things like video streaming services, mullvad seems to be having a hard time with these recently where as proton worked well for me back when I used it (unsure if that’s still true).

Lots of comments already mentioning the differences. I have tried these, including the mentioned ipfire, and decided on the end to use opnsense plus openwrt on two different devices.

I chose opnsense at the time many years ago because it supported wireguard out of the box, where as pfsense required some weird install process I didn’t want to deal with. Plus I liked the UI to opnsense more.

My moden has been literally replaced by my firewall so I have the ONT connected to it and then use it to do all the heavy lifting for… Well, firewall stuff. It connects to a VPN so my entire network routes through the VPN. Then my openwrt device is connected to that. It also handles firewall stuff, but more at an internal level (keeping network devices only permitted to communicate with devices I say are okay, blocking internet access, etc) and also hosts my nginx setup to route to various servers.

While I could do everything on one machine with opnsense, I’ve got a particular setup that allows me to have multiple devices at the firewall level, truly isolated from the rest of my internal network (for a couple of internet open port services). And it gives me peace of mind that if someone found a zero day in opnsense, I’m not totally screwed unless they also got one in openwrt.

To answer “which is better to begin with”, I personally find opnsense way more flexible and robust than the other 2 options. Has a lot more capabilities and upgrading is super easy without requiring jumping through weird hoops and such like openwrt does.