NaibofTabr

Perfect explanation.

Thank you, I try. It’s always tricky to keep network infrastructure explanations concise and readable - the Internet is such a complicated mess.

People like paying for convenience.

Well, I would simplify that to people like convenience. Infrastructure of any type is basically someone else solving convenience problems for you. People don’t really like paying, but they will if it’s the most convenient option.

Syncthing is doing this for you for free, I assume mostly because the developers wanted the infrastructure to work that way and didn’t want it to be dependent on DNS, and decided to make it available to users at large. It’s very convenient, but it also obscures a lot of the technical side of network services which can make learning harder.

This kind of thing shows why tech giants are giants and why selfhosted is a niche.

There’s also always the “why reinvent the wheel?” question, and consider that the guy who is selling wheels works on making wheels as a full-time occupation and has been doing so long enough to build a business on it, whereas you are a hobbyist. There are things that guy knows about wheelmaking that would take you ten years to learn, and he also has a properly equipped workshop for it - you have some YouTube videos, your garage and a handful of tools from Harbor Freight.

Sometimes there is good reason to do so (e.g. privacy from cloud service data gathering) but this is a real balancing act between cost (time and money, both up-front and long-term), risk (privacy exposure, data loss, failure tolerance), and convenience. If you’re going to do something yourself, you should have a specific answer to the question, and probably do a little cost-benefit checking.

But if I’m reading the materials correctly, I’ll need to set up a domain and pay some upfront costs to make my library accessible outside my home.

Why is that?

So when your mobile device is on the public internet it can’t reach directly into your private home network. The IP addresses of the servers on your private network are not routable outside of it, so your mobile device can’t talk to them directly. From the perspective of the public internet, the only piece of your private network that is visible is your ISP gateway device.

When you try to reach your Syncthing service from the public internet, none of the routers know where your private Syncthing instance is or how to reach it. To solve this, the Syncthing developers provide discovery servers on the public internet which contain the directions for the Syncthing app on your device to find your Syncthing service on your private network (assuming you have registered your Syncthing server with the discovery service).

This is a whole level of network infrastructure that is just being done for you to make using Syncthing more convenient. It saves you from having to deal with the details of network routing across network boundaries.

Funkwhale does not provide an equivalent service. To reach your Funkwhale service on your private network from the public internet you have to solve the cross-boundary routing problem for yourself. The most reliable way to do this is to use the DNS infrastructure that already exists on the public internet, which means getting a domain name and linking it to your ISP gateway address.

If your ISP gateway had a static address you could skip this and configure whatever app accesses your Funkwhale service to always point to your ISP gateway address, but residential IP addresses are typically dynamic, so you can’t rely on it being the same long-term. Setting up DynamicDNS solves this problem by updating a DNS record any time your ISP gateway address changes.

There are several DynDNS providers listed at the bottom of that last article, some of which provide domain names. Some of them are free services (like afraid.org) but those typically have some strings attached (afraid.org requires you to log in regularly to confirm that your address is still active, otherwise it will be disabled).

They should be powered on if you want to retain data on them long-term. The controller should automatically check physical integrity and disable bad sections as needed.

I’m not sure if just connecting them to power would be enough for the controller to run error correction, or if they need to be connected to a computer. That might be model specific.

What server OS are you using? Are you already using some SSDs for cache drives?

Any backup is better than no backup, but SSDs are really not a good choice for long-term cold storage. You’ll probably get tired of manually plugging them in to check integrity and update the backups pretty fast.

OK, so what is a VPN?

A Virtual Private Network is a virtual network that lives on top of a physical network. In the case of the Internet, basically what happens is that your network traffic goes into the VPN on one side and comes out of the VPN provider’s network somewhere else, rather than out of your ISP’s network. All this really does is move any privacy concerns from your ISP to your VPN, which may or may not protect you from any legal inquiries.

For a more thorough explanation look here: https://www.howtogeek.com/133680/htg-explains-what-is-a-vpn/

Is it possible to use torrent without a VPN?

Certainly, however your torrent traffic will be visible to and inspectable by your ISP. If a copyright holder chooses to, they may sue your ISP for the personal information of the person whose IP address matches the illegal traffic that they found. After they have your personal information they can prosecute you directly. A VPN might shield against this by changing the apparent IP address associated with your torrent traffic, but then you are at the mercy of the VPN provider and the government of whichever country they operate in.

It should be noted that if you are not paying the bill for the Internet, and you use it for illegal activity, then the person you are putting at risk is the person who pays the bill. It’s their name attached to the ISP records.

If you are caught, or if they just don’t like torrent traffic on their network, the ISP may decide that you are simply too much trouble and it’s not worth keeping you as a customer, and just cut off your service (for your whole house).

Umm, but then your VPN leads to a server rented from a web host which you are paying with (presumably) a credit card, and if they’re reputable at all then you had to register with a government ID. The ones that don’t check ID are the ones that host ransomware gangs and CSAM distributors.

A VPN provides no privacy at all if it’s linked to an IP address or domain name and hardware that is registered to you.

Actual Budget is an open-source envelope-style budgeting tool similar to YNAB. It has a self-hostable syncing service so that you can manage your budget across multiple devices.

The reason you might want to do this is that it’s probably easier to do full account review sitting at your computer, but you might want to track expenses/receipts on your smartphone while you’re away from home.

Would this mini pc be a good homeserver

For what purpose?

umm…

Encrypting the connection is good, it means that no one should be able capture the data and read it - but my concern is more about the holes in the network boundary you have to create to establish the connection.

My point of view is, that’s not something you want happening automatically, unless you manually configured it to do that yourself and you know exactly how it works, what it connects to and how it authenticates (and preferably have some kind of inbound/outbound traffic monitoring for that connection).

Ah, just one question - is your current Syncthing use internal to your home network, or does it sync remotely?

Because if you’re just having your mobile devices sync files when they get on your home wifi, it’s reasonably safe for that to be fire-and-forget, but if you’re syncing from public networks into private that really should require some more specific configuration and active control.

My main reasons are sailing the high seas

If this is the goal, then you need to concern yourself with your network first and the computer/server second. You need as much operational control over your home network as you can manage, you need to put this traffic in a separate tunnel from all of your normal network traffic and have it pop up on the public network from a different location. You need to own the modem that links you to your provider’s network, and the router that is the entry/exit point for your network. You need to segregate the thing doing the sailing on its own network segment that doesn’t have direct access to any of your other devices. You can not use the combo modem/router gateway device provided by your ISP. You need to plan your internal network intentionally and understand how, when, and why each device transmits on the network. You should understand your firewall configuration (on your network boundary, not on your PC). You should also get PiHole up and running and start dropping unwanted inbound and outbound traffic.

OpSec first.

VPNs as a technology might not be illegal but circumventing the firewall certainly is.

Unless you are very vocal and high profile person no one will black bag you in a country of billion people, lol.

This is a bit of a misunderstanding about how things work in an authoritarian system. Sure, you might fly under the radar for awhile, but if you call attention to yourself (say, by getting caught trying to bypass the government firewall) and you are not high-profile, then it is very low-effort to make you disappear. Few will notice, and those that do will stay silent out of fear.

If you are more high-profile you still get black-bagged, you just get released after, with your behavior suitably modified.

Naomi Wu no longer uploads to YouTube.

Depends - how many family members do you have that the PRC might use against you? or who would miss you if the PRC black bagged you?

And there are hundreds if not thousands of them, plus a lot of automated tooling.

Beyond your eventual technical solution, keep this in mind: untested backups don’t exist.

I recommend reading some documentation about industry-leading solutions like Veeam… you won’t be able to reproduce all of the enterprise-level functionality, at least not without spending a lot of money, but you can try to reproduce the basic practices of good backup systems.

Whatever system you implement, draft a testing plan. A simpler backup solution that you can test and validate will be worth more than something complex and highly detailed.

I mean… exposed to each other, sure, but they’re all exposed to Syncthing and the public relays.

It is a fantastic idea to start your home server project on some e-waste hardware, and use it until you know specifically what features you’re lacking that you would need better hardware for.

Er, wait, are you using Syncthing for its intended purpose of syncing files across devices on your local network? And then exposing that infrastructure to the internet? Or are you isolating Syncthing instances?

The issue is more that trying to upgrade everything at the same time is a recipe for disaster and a troubleshooting nightmare. Once you have a few interdependent services/VMs/containers/environments/hosts running, what you want to do is upgrade them separately, one at a time, then restart that service and anything that connects to it and make sure everything still works, then move on to updating the next thing.

If you do this shotgun approach for the sake of expediency, what happens is something halfway through the stack of upgrades breaks connectivity with something else, and then you have to go digging through the logs trying to figure out which piece needs a rollback.

Even more fun if two things in the same environment have conflicting dependencies, and one of them upgrades and installs its new dependency version and breaks whatever manual fix you did to get them to play nice together before, and good luck remembering what you did to fix it in that one environment six months ago.

It’s not FUD, it’s experience.

This is also a great way to just break everything you’ve set up.