Hacker News: jdoss

New comment by jdoss in "WireGuard topologies for self-hosting at home"

jdoss — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 03:46:20 +0000

I use defined.net (managed Nebula) for my homelab and side project overlay networks, and it works great. They have a very generous free tier and I automate enrollment with a set of systemd units that I wrote. Configuration is very easy and the Nebula android app does what I need so I can access everything over my phone. A few friends use wg-easy to manage their wireguard setups, and they sing its praise.

I still use wireguard for simple point to point tunnels into my datacenter rack but anything important I use Nebula.

https://github.com/quickvm/defined-systemd-units

New comment by jdoss in "N8n added native persistent storage with DataTables"

jdoss — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 20:34:53 +0000

I got hit by the Minio admin change in the console when I upgraded my installation recently, and I found https://github.com/huncrys/minio-console which adds it all back in. It works as expected so far.

I find this kind of rug pull behavior so hostile I will be looking to replace Minio as soon as possible in my homelab. To be clear, I would pay for a license if the prices weren't impossible to afford as an invidual who uses Minio for non-business reasons.

New comment by jdoss in "Tailscale has raised $160M"

jdoss — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 18:24:03 +0000

Jason Donenfeld is listed as a Technical Advisor on https://tailscale.com/company. Most companies pay their advisors something, so I assume something monetary is going on here for him.

New comment by jdoss in "I ditched my Pi-hole but still block ads with NextDNS"

jdoss — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 21:59:51 +0000

I just learned about ControlD today and It seems their $2/mo per endpoint is pretty pricey. Do you just set it on your home router and that's it? I use my NextDNS with many different profiles and many unique devices. Are the ControlD features that much better?

Edit: I totally missed they have a Personal tab at the top that has different pricing. It is still more expensive for their full control plan.

New comment by jdoss in "So you want to build your own data center"

jdoss — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 23:16:19 +0000

This is a pretty decent write up. One thing that comes to mind is why would you write your own internal tooling for managing a rack when Netbox exists? Netbox is fantastic and I wish I had this back in the mid 2000s when I was managing 50+ racks.

https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox

New comment by jdoss in "Bypassing disk encryption on systems with automatic TPM2 unlock"

jdoss — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 17:26:57 +0000

Hah, my gist from 2022 is on this post as a "broken guide". I'd disagree in saying it is broken. It works just fine and I flat out say at the top to not use it if you are worried about a cold boot attack on your hardware.

New comment by jdoss in "CLI tool to insert spacers when command output stops"

jdoss — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 20:21:22 +0000

Woah! Thanks for pointing this feature out. This will be super handy to skip large amounts of output.

New comment by jdoss in "Researchers have built server prototypes that re-use old components"

jdoss — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 07:41:15 +0000

I have a rack in a datacenter with mostly 5 year old Supermicro servers. We bought them all off of Ebay for no more than $400 each. They work great and we have more compute and bandwidth for our workloads for less than $1000 a month. If we used one of the could providers it would be many thousands of dollars per month. I understand not everyone has the skills to run their own rack but the value of doing so is totally worth it.

New comment by jdoss in "Steam releases new built-in recording feature"

jdoss — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 06:42:58 +0000

The big question I have is how well does it work on Linux. I'd assume pretty well considering all of their work on making gaming on Linux a great experience, but if I stream on Discord my FPS tanks hard with an NVIDIA card and X11. I look forward to seeing how well does in comparison.

New comment by jdoss in "Busy Status Bar"

jdoss — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 19:54:26 +0000

This looks exactly what I have been looking for to put outside of my home office to keep my family from interrupting me during work meetings. Thanks for sharing it!

New comment by jdoss in "Helping wikis move away from Fandom"

jdoss — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 14:07:14 +0000

I play a lot of Path of Exile and one of the best quality of life improvements I did this summer was adding the Fandom Path of Exile wiki URL to my Kagi deny list so it never shows up in search. The official one that is maintained and kept up to date by the game developer poewiki.net/wiki/Path_of_Exile_Wiki was always third or forth on my searches.

New comment by jdoss in "Ask HN: What indoor CO2 monitor do you recommend?"

jdoss — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 15:47:47 +0000

This python code looks fantastic. Worked right out of the gate. Thanks!

Also I was not aware of the Aranet Radiation sensor. There goes some of my fun budget towards picking one of these up.

New comment by jdoss in "Swapping GNU coreutils for uutils coreutils on Gentoo Linux"

jdoss — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 06:15:11 +0000

Gentoo Linux will always have a special place in my heart. I learned so much about Linux doing Stage 1 installs back in 2002. I also learned patience with the long compile times and I heated my apartment during the winter. Pentium 4s kicked off a lot of heat. :)

Leaving the should uutils be used over coreutils debate aside, this was a fun read for me and the urge to install Gentoo one one of my many old Thinkpads is flaring up hard.

New comment by jdoss in "The Case Against Gmail (2020)"

jdoss — Fri, 31 May 2024 18:41:27 +0000

I agree with this post so hard. Email is the foundation for people's life online. In fact I am working on building a better self hosted mail platform in my free time because I believe in having the freedom to move your email to wherever you choose.

Running your own mail server has a bad stigma around it that doesn't have to be true. I understand it is not a task for everyone, but it doesn't have to this don't bother just use Gmail, Fastmail, Protonmail etc etc mentality. I have been running my own since 2002 and I would never consider doing anything else for such an important part of my life.

The big mail providers have built a walled garden to hold your email communications hostage and they want you to believe that you can't send email without them. There are many of us that know that is bullshit and it is time to move the needle back. I am excited to read Run Your Own Mail Server by Michael W Lucas when it comes out in Aug.

https://mwl.io/nonfiction/tools#ryoms

New comment by jdoss in "Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process"

jdoss — Fri, 31 May 2024 15:07:33 +0000

I am pretty bummed that they are discontinuing it and not open sourcing the hardware. I use mine at my desk every day to control my desktop Spotify and it is pretty nice having hardware controls for my music.

Shame on Spotify.

New comment by jdoss in "Codestral: Mistral's Code Model"

jdoss — Wed, 29 May 2024 15:59:17 +0000

I have been using Ollama to run the Llama3 model and I chat with it via Obsidian using https://github.com/logancyang/obsidian-copilot and I hook VSCode into it with https://github.com/ex3ndr/llama-coder

Having the chats in Obsidian lets me save them to reference them later in my notes. When I first started using it in VSCode when programming in Python it felt like a lot of noise at first. It kept generating a lot of useless recommendations, but recently it has been super helpful.

I think my only gripe is I sometimes forget to turn off my ollama systemd unit and I get some noticeable video lag when playing games on my workstation. I think for my next video card upgrade, I am going to build a new home server that can fit my current NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti and use that as a dedicated server for running ollama.

New comment by jdoss in "TTE: Terminal Text Effects"

jdoss — Tue, 28 May 2024 19:37:03 +0000

I was thinking about how fun it would be to add this my Python CLI [0] I made for launching Fedora CoreOS locally with QEMU for testing ignition, but with a flag that is turned off by default. Using the burn effect in TTE when launching a VM with my CLI would be so cool.

This instantly reminded me about Ansible and how it annoyed me that ANSIBLE_NOCOWS had to be enabled to disable the default output of Ansible with cowsay [1].

[0]: https://github.com/quickvm/bupy

[1]: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/10530

New comment by jdoss in "Pyinfra: Automate Infrastructure Using Python"

jdoss — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 21:34:28 +0000

I am aware of the raw module. The stuff I was doing with Ansible and Fedora CoreOS required more than just that module.

New comment by jdoss in "Pyinfra: Automate Infrastructure Using Python"

jdoss — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 17:28:39 +0000

I just started using Pyinfra to wrangle a bunch of servers and it is a breath of fresh air compared to Ansible. I moved all of my server OS installs to Fedora CoreOS which doesn't ship with Python in the OS and since Pyinfra doesn't need Python on the host node I can kick off tasks in bulk to do server things. It is great. I cannot wait to see where the Pyinfra project goes.

On a side note, one of the most hacky things I came up with to get Ansible working on Fedora CoreOS was to bind mount a container rootfs that had python 3 and then symlink it into the right spots. You can of course add Python in with rpm-ostree if you want but I wanted to avoid layering packages at the time. I wasn't proud of it. But it worked.

https://github.com/forem/selfhost/blob/main/playbooks/templa...

New comment by jdoss in "A leadership crisis in the Nix community"

jdoss — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 15:59:52 +0000

The reaction to Anduril sponsoring Nix is very similar to some people's reaction at Kubecon 2018 where the U.S. Air Force gave a talk about how they are using k8s to deploy software on F-16s.

https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubern...