she/her

  • 2 Posts
  • 48 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • I can’t really comment on the preconfigured packages; I learned way back in the 90s before things like that existed. Definitely recommend learning the editor before going crazy with customization, though, and the tutor is also where I started. There is an enormity of config options, as you’d expect for software that has almost 50 years of history, so just start with what you want / fixing what annoys you.



  • I set up my own email on a bsd.amterdam VPS and have had no problems whatsoever. No one drops my mail. I don’t know what slash_nick is talking about regarding maintenance. The only maintenance I have is rotating Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates, and that’s only because I haven’t automated it yet. Domi has good points that can be summarized as “actually do it right”. I got my setup working in about 100 lines of config. Granted, that’s OpenBSD rather than Linux, which is significantly more terse, but it’s still not hard and I wish more people would realize that. That 100 lines includes firewall and network config, to give an idea of how little work there actually is.


  • conduit is a lightweight Matrix homeserver. If you tried running synapse and found it to be an utter mess, conduit is much better!

    mpd is a music server daemon with many clients. It scans your music (either stored locally or on a network) and creates a database (either stored locally or accessed from another mpd server on the network).

    minidlna is a DLNAReadyMedia server which is a plug and play media server. Many hardware devices (e.g. AVRs) which don’t support anything else do support DLNA, so you can e.g. serve music or video directly to your AVR instead of needing a set top box like an Apple TV or Roku.

    If you have a problem with collecting machines like I do, set up DNS with dnsmasq. It’s pretty easy to get started, all you need to do is write your /etc/hosts file (and, likely, disable the DHCP server). Additionally, if you have a problem with collecting machines like I do, invest in some kind of config management so it’s easy to handle all the different things you’re running.

    Also, if you want to actually learn, I would strongly recommend against using Docker containers for everything. Besides being stuck with what the developers prefer, all the work of installing things is already done. Build things from source (optional), configure all the pieces yourself, work out all the dependencies and actually learn how things work. That’s the fun, at least in my opinion. That’s why I have yet another SBC with no OS to fiddle with this weekend: I’m looking to migrate from OpenWRT to real Linux so I can do everything myself instead of relying on OpenWRT’s scripts.