• 9 posts
  • 23 comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 26th, 2024
  • I mean, it seems like Pihole is generally talked about first as a “ad filter” when it’s discussed online and second as a dns resolver. But either way, just saying that the use for that is pretty much overblown and not worth actually trying for a smart tv, for example, where you can’t normally block ads anyway. (Might be nice for preventing software updates, though.)

  • Depends on how you do it and what you need from it. I’ve actually moved on from my Pihole instance, for reasons I’ll get into later.

    The broad appeal of using Pihole for DNS in a homelab is the ability to route services from domain names on the local host. This can be really useful, especially for “hacking” service availability onto other unintended devices. Additionally, it can be nice for less tech-savvy users who might not be comfortable editing /etc/hosts or just want to check out a service on their phone web browser.

    I would generally recommend using an isolated device for Pihole needs; If you’re doing work on your home server, you’ll probably want all users on your service to keep their internet connection working to not be a burden to others living in your household (if you have others). A raspberry pi is a really good target for a pihole, and even a cheap old/used one from the interwebs can serve you well (I was using one recently on a pi3b and it was no issue.) Keep in mind that you can’t really do fallback dns configuration unless you’re ok with losing the key feature of pihole (blocking ads and redirecting domains). Notably, I’m actually not a proponent of running all services on individual compute units generally, I just think DNS is special and you don’t really want to tie it into docker services to keep a separation between the services and the server, so to speak.

    This brings me to the second feature: adblocking. This one is really a mixed bag. Ultimately, I turned this feature off only because it doesn’t work for the websites that have arguably the most ad content (youtube, twitch) and really only serves to hurt the smaller players. Sometimes it’s great for blocking things like SmartTV advertisements or data encroachments, but it’s very hard to block ads from a web domain in a way that doesn’t outright block the service itself (so blocking youtube ads without blocking youtube is, seemingly, a fools errand.) I’m willing to hear other people’s opinion on this, I just couldn’t get this working to a satisfactory degree.

    I’ve abandoned Pihole as a local dns resolver. This is because Tailscale suits my needs and also allows me out-of-house connectivity to things like my music or personal data so my phone never goes out of communication with my home network. When you use tailscale at home, it’s generally really good about routing that through your local network instead of the relay, so there shouldn’t be that many downsides. Note, I say generally, because there have been times where it goes through a relay unexpectedly which I haven’t solved yet (this is likely a local router configuration issue, anyway…)

    I notice that you’re already familiar with Pihole, but just thought that it would be best to “explain” my thoughts on it in the form of a recommendation/editorial form.

  • Never heard of this having a unique version for programming or development. These days, I suppose most “user names” are kind of like this for programmers and the necessity to not use the “same identity” in order to use most websites with a login service basically means you’re SOL with coming up with a name that multiple people can adopt.

    The closest we have is the hacker-worlds “Anonymous” or similar hacking groups where it’s always unclear if it’s one person or multiple in actuality.

Does anyone have a no-nonsense way of cross posting between Mastodon and Bluesky?

I’m hoping for a solution that is relatively simple to set up and manage, but also possibly supports multiple users for cross posting needs.

Ideally, I wouldn’t have to do this, but in a world where I might have to manage both, it would be really awesome to have this set up on my own computer with simple API access to both platforms.

I should note that I looked into n8n which seems like it might be OK for this use case, but I’m highly skeptical of all the AI stuff mentioned in the various Youtube videos. Is it possible to completely ignore the AI stuff or is it entirely engrained in the system? Also, are there presets that are friendly for lemmy, mastodon and bluesky?

  • Centralization is a weakness

    While I agree with the basic premise of this, I think this is all-the-more a good reason for design solutions around this problem to be discussed so that more competitors can exist. If the fediverse is to expand, there needs to be easy non-technical ways for users to start up a multitude of instances. More of these types of services actually reduces centralization, in that sense.

This is all basically hypothetical, but it’s something I want a better idea about to improve my concept of networking, service providing, and etc. Additionally, I think services like Mastohost are healthy for the growth of the fediverse as it eases concerns for business use, enterprise use or even broader “community” use. I think it will be important for the future of a federated internet that many of these types of services exist.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: You’d probably need a lot of hardware to achieve this type of service. We’re talking about either having a micro datacenter or renting a datacenter from someone else. You’re probably not going to get away with doing this on a bog-standard VPS regardless of how much storage you buy (though, if I’m wrong, feel free to correct me.)

I understand how virtualization via proxmox works (kind of, on a surface level) and I imagine that it would work similarly to that but with a preconfigured docker image, but how exactly does someone integrate virtual machine creation with client requests?

Normally I think about services running in a docker which would communicate with other docker containers or the host server – so, for example, you can configure your Jellyfin to be visible to other containers that might be interested in sharing data between the two. But when it comes to requests for hosting new docker images that need persistent space, how would you manage such a task? Additionally, if we’re talking about a multi-computer environment, how do you funnel a request for a new instance to one-of-many machines?

This seems like a basic, fundamental server hosting question and may not be appropriate for “self hosting” as it’s probably beyond the scale of what most of us are willing to do – but humor a man who simply wants to understand a bit more about modern enterprise compute problems.

Feel free to share any literature or online documentation that talks about solving these types of tasks.