Meanwhile, “~x” is drooling on itself over in the corner.

Isn’t it wonderful when your VPN client refuses to connect repeatedly until you realize you need to reboot your PC or restart the VPN service… and then go change your underwear.

There are really two reasons ECC is a “must-have” for me.

• I’ve had some variant of a “homelab” for probably 15 years, maybe more. For a long time, I was plagued with crashes, random errors, etc. Once I stopped using consumer-grade parts and switched over to actual server hardware, these problems went away completely. I can actually use my homelab as the core of my home network instead of just something fun to play with. Some of this improvement is probably due to better power supplies, storage, server CPUs, etc, but ECC memory could very well play a part. This is just anecdotal, though.
• ECC memory has saved me before. One of the memory modules in my NAS went bad; ECC detected the error, corrected it, and TrueNAS sent me an alert. Since most of the RAM in my NAS is used for a ZFS cache, this likely would have caused data loss had I been using non-error-corrected memory. Because I had ECC, I was able to shut down the server, pull the bad module, and start it back up with maybe 10 minutes of downtime as the worst result of the failed module.

I don’t care about ECC in my desktop PCs, but for anything “mission-critical,” which is basically everything in my server rack, I don’t feel safe without it. Pfsense is probably the most critical service, so whatever machine is running it had better have ECC.

I switched from bare-metal to a VM for largely the same reason you did. I was running Pfsense on an old-ish Supermicro server, and it was pushing my UPS too close to its power limit. It’s crazy to me that yours only pulled 40 watts, though; I think I saved about 150-175W by switching it to a VM. My entire rack contains a NAS, a Proxmox server, a few switches, and a couple of other miscellaneous things. Total power draw is about 600-650W, and jumps over 700W under a heavy load (file transfers, video encoding, etc). I still don’t like the idea of having Pfsense on a VM, though; I’d really like to be able to make changes to my Proxmox server without dropping connectivity to the entire property. My UPS tops out at 800W, though, so if I do switch back to bare-metal, I only have realistically 50-75W to spare.

I have a few services running on Proxmox that I’d like to switch over to bare metal. Pfsense for one. No need for an entire 1U server, but running on a dedicated machine would be great.

Every mini PC I find is always lacking in some regard. ECC memory is non-negotiable, as is an SFP+ port or the ability to add a low-profile PCIe NIC, and I’m done buying off-brand Chinese crop on Amazon.

If someone with a good reputation makes a reasonably-priced mini PC with ECC memory and at least some way to accept a 10Gb DAC, I’ll probably buy two.

I appreciate the suggestion, but that looks like a Java library. Interpreted languages make me feel dirty. Java makes me feel even dirtier. If it’s not C, C++, or ASM, is it really worth using?

I’m okay with the “human-readability,” but I’ve never been happy with the “machine-readibility” of XML. Usually I just want to pull a few values from an API return, yet every XML library assumes I want the entire file in a data structure that I can iterate through. It’s a waste of resources and a pain in the ass.

Even though it’s not the “right” way, most of the time I just use regex to grab whatever exists between an opening and closing tag. If I’m saving/loading data from my own software, I just use a serialization library.

I think I’m misunderstanding how LDAP works. It’s probably obvious, but I’ve never used it.

If my switch is expecting a username and password for login, how does it go from expecting a web login to “the LDAP server recognizes this person, and they have permissions to access network devices, so I’ll let them in.”?

Also, to be clear, I’m referring to the process of logging in and configuring the switch itself, not L2 switching or L3 routing.

Like several people here, I’ve also been interested in setting up an SSO solution for my home network, but I’m struggling to understand how it would actually work.

Lets say I set up an LDAP server. I log into my PC, and now my PC “knows” my identity from the LDAP server. Then I navigate to the web UI for one of my network switches. How does SSO work in this case? The way I see it, there are two possible solutions.

• The switch has some built-in authentication mechanism that can authenticate with the LDAP server or something like Keycloak. I don’t see how this would work as it relies upon every single device on the network supporting a particular authentication mechanism.
• I log into and authenticate with an HTTP forwarding server that then supplies the username/password to the switch. This seems clunky but could be reasonably secure as long as the username/password is sufficiently complex.

I generally understand how SSO works within a curated ecosystem like a Windows-based corporate network that uses primarily Microsoft software for everything. I have various Linux systems, Windows, a bunch of random software that needs authentication, and probably 10 different brands of networking equipment. What’s the solution here?

I’m a big fan of ZFS, and I use it extensively. For a single hard drive, though, wouldn’t ext4 and a few NFS shares make a lot more sense?

In the US at least, most equipment (unless you get into high-and datacenter stuff) runs on 120V. We also use 240V power, but a 240V connection is actually two 120V phases 180-degrees out of sync. The main feed coming into your home is 240V, so your breaker panel splits the circuits evenly between the two phases. Running dual-phase power to a server rack is as simple as just running two 120V circuits from the panel.

My rack only receives a single 120V circuit, but it’s backed up by a dual-conversion UPS and a generator on a transfer switch. That was enough for me. For redundancy, though, dual phases, each with its own UPS, and dual-PSU servers are hard ro beat.

Yes, a lot of my movies are 50GB or so. Not everything has a 4k repack available, though. I’d say the vast majority are around 20GB.

1080p would just not be acceptable for me. There’s a clear difference between 1080p and 4k on a 4k screen, especially if the screen is large.

If I’m in a situation where I don’t have connectivity to stream from my server, then I can always just start a Handbrake queue the night before and transcode a few videos to smaller size, or just dump a few onto an external drive. I have never been in a situation where I had to do this, though.

Any sort of media, including videos, I always go for the highest possible quality I can. I do have a number of 4k displays, so it makes sense to a certain extent, but a lot if it has to do with future-proofing.

Here’s a good example: When personal video cameras were first starting to support 1080, I purchased a 1080i video camera. At the time, it looked great on my 1920x1080 (maybe 1024x768, not sure) monitor. Fast forward over 15 years later, and it the video I recorded back then looks like absolute garbage on my 4k TV.

I remember watching a TV show when 1080p video first became available, and I was blown away at the quality of what was probably a less-than-1GB file. Now watching the same file even on my phone has a noticeable drop is quality. I’m not surprised you saw little difference between a 670MB and a 570MB file, especially if it was animation, which contains large chunks of solid colors and is thus more easily compressed. The difference between two resolutions, though, can be staggering. At this point, I don’t think you can easily find a 1080p TV; everything is 4k. 8k is still not widespread, but it will be one day. If you ever in your life think you’ll buy a new TV, computer monitor, or mobile device, eventually you’ll want higher quality video.

My recommendation would be to fill your media library with the highest-quality video you can possibly find. If you’re going to re-encode the media to a lower resolution or bitrate, keep a backup of the original. You may find, though, that if you’re re-encoding enough video, it makes more sense to save the time and storage space, and spend a bit of money on a dedicated video card for on-the-fly transcoding.

My solution was to install an RTX A1000 in my server and set it up with my Jellyfin instance. If I’m watching HDR content on a non-HDR screen, it will transcode and tone-map the video. If I’m taking a break at work and I want to watch a video from home, it will transcode it to a lower bitrate that I can stream over (slow) my home internet. Years from now, when I’m trying to stream 8k video over a 10Gb fiber link, I’ll still be able to use most of the media I saved back in 2024 rather than try to find a copy that meets modern standards, if a copy even exists.

Edit: I wanted to point out that I realize not everyone has the time or financial resources to set up huge NAS with enterprise-grade drives. An old motherboard and a stack of cheap consumer-grade drives can still give you a fair amount of backup storage and will be fairly robust as long as the drive array is set up with a sufficient level of redundancy.

C++ is just as “safe” as Rust if you use modern language features (std::unique_ptr, for instance). I would argue that anyone who says Rust provides better memory safety than C++ most likely is not familiar with modern C++ and still sees the language as “C with classes.”

I did some research on this, and it turns out you’re absolutely correct. I was under the impression that ECC was a requirement for a ZFS cache. It does seem like ECC is highly recommended for ZFS, though, due to the large amount of data it Storrs in memory. I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable using non-ECC memory for ZFS, but it is possible.

Anecdotally, I did have one of my memory modules fail in my TrueNAS server. It detected this, corrected itself, and sent me a warning. I don’t know if this would have worked had I been using non-ECC memory.

One thing to keep in mind if you go with an i5 or i7 is that you won’t have the option to use ECC memory. If you’re running TrueNAS, you’ll need ECC memory for the ZFS cache. A Xeon E5 v2 server is old, but still has a more than enough power for your use case, and they’re not particularly expensive.

If you need something more powerful, you can find some decent Xeon Gold systems on eBay, but they’ll be a bit more pricey. The new Xeon W chips are also an option, but at least for me, they’re prohibitively expensive.

I have ReVanced on my phone, STN on my TVs, and uBlock+SponsorBlock on my PCs. I was looking for an alternative that I could run on a server and would replace the various different apps I’m using. TubeArchivist ended up working perfectly for me; your mileage may vary.

I decided to give up on it. Looking through the docs, they recommend that due to “reasons,” it should be restarted at least daily, preferably hourly. I don’t know if they have a memory leak or some other issue, but that was reason enough for me not to use it.

I installed TubeArchivist, and it suits my needs much better. Not only do I get an archive of my favorite channels, but when a new video is released, it gets automatically downloaded to my NAS and I can play it locally without worrying about buffering on my painfully slow internet connection.

Like most of us, I have plenty of pictures and such that I don’t want to lose. The most important to me, though, are some of the documents that I’ve saved or scanned from years passed. While a tax return from 2003 or the title for a car I owned 20 years ago aren’t exactly useful, it’s fun to occasionally look at some of the old stuff and see how far I have come in my life since then.

reinterpret_cast<int*>(&a_nut)

I like to live dangerously.

I’m strongly in favor of keeping things compartmentalized. I have two main servers: One is a Proxmox host with a powerful CPU and a few hard drives set up in a fast but not-so redundant array (I use ZFS, but my setup is similar to RAID10). Then a have second server that runs TrueNAS; the CPU is slower, but it has a large amount of storage (120TB physical) arrayed in an extremely fault-tolerant configuration.

My Proxmox box runs every service on my network, but all that gets stored the hard drives are the main boot disks. It backs up daily, so I’m not so concerned about drive failure. All my data is stored on the NAS, and it’s shared with the VMs via NFS, SMB, or iSCSI, depending on which is more appropriate.

For you, I’d recommend building a NAS, and keep all your important data there. Your NUC can host your services, and they can pull data from the NAS. The 256GB on your NUC will be more than enough to host whatever services you need.