HA isn’t the only option. I think there’s two other open source smarthome solutions out there(?) And you could probably do with just an MQTT broker and a Python script, or something like that…

But HA isn’t a bad choice. They’re doing a phenomenal job. And related projects like ESPHome make it really easy to integrate microcontrollers. And if you want to do more smarthome stuff, it has a plethora of features, integrations, an app…

Extra hardware isn’t absolutely necessary. I have one server at home which does NAS, and I use 4GB of it’s RAM to run a virtual machine with Home Assistant. That’s enough for it, including a bunch of Addons.

You could try to debug the permission issue… Like take a note of the current permissions, chmod the certificates to 666 and the parent directories to 777 and see if that works. Then progressively cut them down again and see when it fails. And/or give caddy all the group permissions ssl, acme, certwarden… and then check which one makes it fail or work.

Kind of the reason why I quit Netflix. For once it got more expensive each year. And at some point there was less and less of my favorite shows on there, so I’d need to subscribe to a second service for Star Trek… then a third one for all the good stuff that’s Disney… And I don’t even watch that much TV. So instead, I just quit. Maybe one day I’m gonna read a book on a Friday evening 😆 Or the stuff the government forces me to pay for.

Puh, ziemlich fokussiert auf Video. Ich ersetze damit mehr meinen Chat, Cloud-Office, Social Media… Aber der Return of Investment ist da weniger die Abo-Gebühr 😅

No worries. Your post was well-written. And I’m glad people could offer some advice. Not even the proficient Lemmy users get all of this right all the time. I just figured I’d drop you a comment in case the mods take action, to spare you the effort to also learn about the modlog and how to look up their note… But seems it wasn’t necessary 😄

Sorry, I don’t have an answer to your question, but two other communities that would fit: !homelab@lemmy.world and !homelab@selfhosted.forum

They’re both not really active, though. And someone asked about OpenSense hardware before and didn’t get any answers…

Just writing this so you have some other places to look up, in case your post gets deleted, I think you’re technically in the wrong community here. As per rule 3 in the sidebar, this community isn’t about hardware questions.

Sorry, I’m not not able to help with that. Maybe there’s a limit how many old messages your server or client syncs?

I suppose it’s old drama by now. And I didn’t check if there’s new one in the meantime. As of now, both projects are active. Both have a userbase. Judging by the lasst commits, it’s still the case that Tuwunel is a one-man-show and Continuwuity is a community project.

I think whether you do closed source software is a personal choice. Based on considerations of your application. Like money, of if you want to rely on a company and how well they do their job, if it’s still gonna be around in 7 years. If you can customize it enough to suit your needs. Or you base the decision on ideology.

I’ve been using Yunohost on the NAS. And it’s simple, works well and is pretty reliable, I didn’t get any major issues for many years now. (And in general, community maintained open-source software has served me well. So that’s what I do.)

Downsides as a proficient Linux user are: You can’t just mess with the config while the automatic scripts also mess with the config. You need to learn how they’re set up and work around that. Hope software has a config.d or overrides directory and put your customizations there. Or something will get messed up eventually. And you can’t just change arbitrary things. The mailserver or SSO or reverse proxy and a few other components are tightly integrated and you’re never gonna be able to switch from postfix to stalwart or something like that. Or retrofit a more modern authentication solution. It is a limiting factor.
And YunoHost doesn’t do containers, so I doubt it’s what you’re looking for anyway.

I’m a bit split on the entire promise of turnkey selfhosting solutions. Some of them work really well. And they’re badly needed to enable regular people to emancipate themselves from big tech. Whether you as an expert want to use them is an entirely different question. I think that just depends on application. If you have a good setup, that might be better suited to your needs. And if done right might be very low maintenance as well. So switching to a turnkey solution would be extra work and it might not pay off. Or it does pay off, I think that really depends on the specifics.

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Sure. Sadly I don’t have the proper tools around to do that. And in my case I wasn’t too sad. These devices had 100mbps ethernet and a slow wifi standard. Now they’re on e-waste and I got an upgrade to Gigabit ethernet and 5GHz wifi 😆

Not sure if I get your point. Abstraction is a concept used by IT people to deal with complexity. You’ll use Docker containers in order not to have 200 very specific problems and learn about the intricate details of all of them. Or use a turnkey solution because a working day has a finite amount of hours and you can just not care and have somebody else set the XY value of Postgres to 128 because that’s somehow needed for software M on python x.xx… Of course you’re then not going to learn about these things. It is not “bad”, though, in itself to abstract these issues away from you. Same for the other things I mentioned, networking, virtualization. Abstraction there allows to swap out complex things, do things once and in a clean way because it’s easy to miss things without abstraction and you always need to pay attention to a bazillion of specifics. Also helps with backups, deal with issues because things should break within confined layers, punch above one’s weight, security, do something once and roll it out several times…

I think what you want to avoid is poorly designed or written software. Or poorly done setups. Or not learn about important things. Abstraction is generally something you want, especially with complex things.

Maybe try something like YunoHost. That’s a web server Linux distribution. And it’s supposed to take care of the set up and come with somewhat safe/secure defaults. You’d need some kind of server, though. Or run it in a VM to isolate it from your home services. They have PeerTube, Lemmy, PieFed installable with a few clicks. (There are other projects as well, Yunohost isn’t the only option to help with the set up.)

But yes, some kind of isolation is probably nice with web services. Also from the home network, and from storage with personal data on it.

Yes, OpenWRT lasts way longer. Main thing that ends support is hardware requirements. My old devices with only a few megabytes of memory got dropped eventually. Not because of the chipset, a modern OpenWRT would just not fit any longer. I rarely see other reasons for them to discontinue updates.

If that traffic is going through an encrypted Wireguard tunnel, I don’t see a reason to encrypt it a second time. Judging by your description, it’s already encrypted on transport between the router and VPS. HTTPS would add nothing there. It will however add encryption within your DMZ, if you expect something nefarious going on within your DMZ.

Hehe. I feel a bit “offended” by the …“stopped coding once they saw AI could do it.” Because that’s not my reality. I do a lot of computer hobby stuff, tinkering, electronics… And for me it does shit. Doing the maths for sensor values failed, can’t ever do memory allocation the way it’s done on microcontrollers. Fails with slightly complex regular software projects… I mean it can do some quick and dirty webdesign and code some rudimentary apps and games if you’re into that… Whatever people can do after they read a beginners coding book and a bit of copy-pasta. And it helps look up documentation. But I see zero reason to quit my hobbies with what AI can do as of today 😉

Doesn’t sound good, though. I mean a grandpa will consume a lot of media after he can’t get up and walk around any more. But that’s not how it’s supposed to be at 30yo. It is somehow modern society, though. Social interactions get displaced by para-social relations, like to a favorite streamer or influencer and you’d take part in their world. Combined with resignation we get people like incels. I’m about 10 years older and I still have a lot of friends who do stuff. Go running or whatever. Or they have kids and that takes up their time. I can see however, how things like social media steer attention away from human elements of life.

And what do they do now instead of memes and share stuff on social media? Did they detach and turn to useful hobbies like woodworking, or did they switch to consume only and they’re still on social media?

Interestingly enough, even the simpler things like removing the censoring of certain countries’ videos still look super wonky. I mean removing that mosaic is something I figure quite some people would be interested in. Yet technology doesn’t seem advanced enough to do it properly. And I’ve had a look at what people do with the video generators, and they’ve made quite some advancements. Pulling off clothes kinda works now. But it’s still fairly limited in all other aspects. They do a short clip of one specific thing. And seems they’re limited to one movement type and you’d need the next customized model for the next thing that happens. And then also make sure the people in the video look alike… Do 20 tries until those 5sec look somewhat realistic… And those clips don’t line up well. Fluids don’t seem to work, I have no clue whether they have some control over facial expressions or whatever is important when “acting” like realistic humans… I bet we’re still a bit away from it generating a video of “the act” from start to finish… I’d also predict this is a good use-case for generative AI, though. I mean why not? And it’ll lead to all kinds of issues, like the ability to generate videos of celebrities, other not-okay things… But all the human-made 30s clips aren’t really high quality to begin with either. So it shouldn’t be too hard for AI to get a foot in the door of the porn market.

But if there’s really 2-3 min videos out there like you said, I’d like to see them. Just for research purposes… Because all I’ve seen is longer videos with one thing repeating but nothing really happens. Or people stitching together clips, but they’ll be doing a million cuts to entirely different camera angles or narration to hide how all the clips aren’t really consistent.

Hmm. I think the main damage is done by other factors. I mean even before AI, everything turned into subscriptions and services. We use Office365 these days and the documents are in the cloud. There isn’t much need for Free Software Office Suites or mail clients anymore. Operating systems have less impact because honestly only old people use computers. Everyone else does their stuff on a phone. And then we finally crossed the barrier into a post-privacy world and people don’t care. And on top of that large companies take the nice database projects, libraries etc and monetize products with that. Without caring too much if that’s sustainable. And AI is one negative factor amongst many.

I think educational activities work best once they have some application to someones life. So it’d be something within the realm of a 7yo. And it’s not fun unless there’s a sense of achievement every now and then, along with all the stuff to learn. So probably not too steep of a learning curve.

Sadly they discontinued Lego Mindstorms. I think robotics is a great hands-on topic. People can grasp what they’re currently doing, why they do it, and what it’s good for. It has a tactile aspect, so you’ll train dexterity as well and gently connect the physical realm with the maths.

But other than that, I bet there’s a lot of things you can try. Design a website (and deploy a small webserver). Maybe some easy to use photo gallery if they have a tablet or camera. Maybe a Wordpress for them to write a Blog? They should be familiar with the concept of a diary. Kids love Minecraft, so maybe a Luanti server if you’re into Free Software. But learn how to add NPCs and animals, that is (or used to be?) a complicated process in Luanti and the world feels boring and empty without. A chat server to their loved ones could motivate them to read and write text (messages). Or skip the selfhosting aspect and do the kids games available for Linux. Paint, LibreOffice…

I like the recommendations from other people as well. Sadly I don’t know which kids programming language works best. I think I heard you can just go straight for Python as well. Not sure if that’s true or what age group that applies to. It’s a bit more involved to learn the syntax and why you need brackets around certain things etc but at least they get to learn the real deal and something properly useful. 7 might be a bit young, though. And there might be a language barrier. But that applies to all the computer stuff behind the scenes, unless you’re a native English speaker.

If you just want something simple that does the job, you can try a turnkey solution like YunoHost. There’s several other ones out there. Some with containers, some with more or less pre-packaged software… If you want to learn more during the process, maybe don’t and do it yourself because these things don’t teach you a lot. There’s some resources like the awesome-selfhosted list in the sidebar of this community. But I think for installing services you’d mainly look at the specific documentation of the specific service you’re just about to tackle. And maybe read up on Docker containers etc to judge whether you want to do it that way.