thirdBreakfast

Has anyone seen a drop in magic DNS performance in the last month?

I'm having this in situations where the DNS would be getting hammered - for example my apt updates ansible script, or Uptime Kuma checks. If I switch to IP addresses it works fine.

I recovered from a small disaster today using the neko dockerised web-browser.

I set up a remote backup with Proxmox running on a HP mini and a Synology a month ago at a friend's house 3000 km away. I thought I'd reserved all the IP addresses, but last night the Synology IP address changed, so the NFS shares to Proxmox and Jellyfin broke. That wasn't to hard to fix remotely, but I don't want it to happen every time the DHCP lease expires.

So now I need to log into their router and reserve the IP addresses...

I can get on the local network there by ssh-ing into one of my entities (via Tailscale), but how do I get to the web interface of the router?

Enter neko. It spins up a browser in a Docker container that can be accessed over a web address. So I created an LXC, installed docker and spun it up, then was able to use that to open the local-only web interface to the router.

neko is intended for watch parties, so multiple people can be logged in to the same browser window at a time - there's a toggle to take control of the window for clicks and typing, but apart from that it's all pretty straight forward. There's a very noticeable lag, but it got the job done.

Perhaps there was an easier lighter-weight way of doing this? In the old old days there was a text browser called Lynx - so perhaps there's some modern iteration that could have done this job?

Edit: There is an easier lighter-weight way of doing this!

Thanks to @SteveTech@programming.dev, @Dewege@feddit.org and others who mentioned 'ssh tunneling' - TIL I could just connect a local port (8080 in my case) to port 80 on the router (192.168.1.1:80 in my case) via the VM I have ssh access to over tailscale (thirdbreakfast@100.126.38.117) with:

ssh -L 8080:192.168.1.1:80 thirdbreakfast@100.126.38.117

ssh -L <local port to use>:<remote machine to access with port> <ssh address of jump machine>

When executed, that looks like I've just ssh'ed into that machine, but until I log out of that connection I can open up 127.0.0.1:8080 in my browser and I'm in the router's web interface - still a tiny bit of lag, but way smoother experience with less carry on.

Amazeballs.

I've had a fitbit wifi bathroom scale for a while. Getting the data out got suddenly more difficult when Google bought them, and I didn't love giving that data to google. It's finally died, and I'm looking at replacement options.

In a perfect world, I could just go to a store and buy a "HomeAssistant Ready" scale. If I can't have that, I'd like a scale that is on my local network and exposes the last x weigh-ins as an API on the device, then I could write something to poll it.

I haven't seen anything like those, but have turned up:

• a project to decode the bluetooth transmissions of a number of scales (after you build an ESP32 device for it)
• the Withings cloud based scale, but with a well documented API

Any other good options?

Last June, fans of Comedy Central – the long-running channel behind beloved programmes such as The Daily Show and South Park – received an unwelcome surprise. Paramount Global, Comedy Central’s parent company, unceremoniously purged the vast repository of video content on the channel’s website, which dated back to the late 1990s.

Has anyone got some experience/advice for choosing between the options? It seems like they are:

• Minio
• Garage
• SeaweedFS

My usecase is just to have a local single instance for testing apps against. I prefer to spin stuff up in Docker on the homelab.

*What rights do you have to the digital movies, TV shows and music you buy online? That question was on the minds of Telstra TV Box Office customers this month after the company announced it would shut down the service in June. Customers were told that unless they moved over to another service, Fetch, they would no longer be able to access the films and TV shows they had bought. *

I've been downloading SSL certificates from my domain provider, using cat to join them together to make the fullchain.pem, uploading them to the server, and myself adding a 90 day calendar reminder. Every time I did this I'd think I should find out about this Certbot thing.

Well, I finally got around to it, and it was one of those jobs which turns out to be so easy you wish you'd done it ages ago.

The install was simple (I'm using nginx/ubuntu).

It scans up your server conf files to see which sites are being served, asks you a couple of questions, obtains the Let's Encrypt certificate for them, installs it, updates your conf files to use it, and sets up a cron job to check if it's time to renew the certificate, which it will also do auto-magically.

I was so pleased with it I made a donation to the EFF for it, then I started to think about how amazingly useful Let's Encrypt is, and gave them one too. It's just a really good time to be in this hobby.

I highly recommend Certbot. If you've been putting this off, or only just hearing about it, make some time for it.

I have an ancient domain that for years has been hosted with a company that allowed wildcard email forwarding - so *@example.com was forwarded to my gmail. So over the years, I've just used a new email address for every signup of anything.

Sadly, the company is getting out of hosting, so I need to move the domain somewhere. The commercial email hosting I've seen seen around is all paid for per mailbox.

Is there a commercial email host that would allow a wildcard like that?

I have low desire to run my own email hosting, but perhaps if it's just a bunch of forwards that might be simpler?

Such a good feeling cancelling my paid tier on Dropbox this week. I've been 'playing' at self hosting for a few months, and now I'm confident in my infrastructure and processes so I can start turning off some of the cloud things I've been paying for.

Dropbox has gone in favor of Syncthing over Tailscale in a hub and spoke arrangement to a VM at home. The main compromise I've had to make is on the iOS experience.

The next subscriptions I'll be cancelling will be Evernote (I have so loved this over the years, but as they've added 'features' the app experience has degraded to the point where it's no longer reliable to add notes from my phone). I'm currently trying Obsidian for this , but thinking about a simpler web markdown editor for mobile.

After that, all my Wordpress blogs will be coming home to my VPS, I imagine with some sort of static site generator.