Per the Linux kernel coding style:

Tabs are 8 characters, and thus indentations are also 8 characters. There are heretic movements that try to make indentations 4 (or even 2!) characters deep, and that is akin to trying to define the value of PI to be 3.

Maybe not a service in the typical sense, but setting up your router+server to route your home network traffic through a VPN is a fun project.

My router (MikroTik) supports WireGuard, so I can use it with Mullvad for the whole house—but wg is demanding and it’s a slow router, so while it can NAT at ~1Gbps, it can’t do WireGuard at more than ~90Mbps. So, I set up WireGuard/Mullvad on a little SBC with a fast processor, and have my router use that instead. Using policy based routing and/or mangling, I can have different VLANs/subnets/individual hosts selectively routed through the VPN.

It’s a fun exercise, not sure I implemented it in a smart way, but it works :)

I know right? What a poser!

/s

Americans had “unity” after 9/11

Uh, no we didn’t. Source: am American, lived through that period.

Yes we had a brief period of unity (and solidarity with NYC) following 9/11, but as soon as the American War Machine woke up, my country was intensely divided.

I used Photoprism years ago, so my knowledge is probably pretty outdated.

My experience of Photoprism was that mobile was not tightly integrated. At the time I used Syncthing to sync photos — it worked ok for me, but I wasn’t going to set it up on my partner’s phone, for example.

Immich Just Works on both mobile and desktop. Multi user is great, sharing is great, and the local ML and face detection work remarkably well.

Whatever works for you is the best of course! Immich fits the bill for me, and it was very much worth it for me to “buy” it.

Regarding DNS servers, what router do you have? Some routers have simple enough DNS capabilities — I have a MikroTik, and have it set up with DNS entries for internal services (including wildcard). Publicly accessible services just use my registrar’s DNS (namecheap — no complaints).

Oracle Free tier, amd64. Only use it because it’s free—limited bandwidth, but given I have slow upload at home it’s never really been a bottleneck. Hate to admit it given it’s Oracle, but I’ve been completely happy with it.

If I switch to a paid VPS I will probably go with racknerd (suggestions welcome though if you have thoughts).

Especially after adding in all the power draw of the automation requires…

What exactly is the incremental power draw for automation? My network gear and server (a little nuc) are sunk power costs as I self host other services.

Idling, my home uses around 100W with the fridge off. One 10W light is an additional 10% of my power budget, and I have a lot more than one light in my house. I also pay about $0.40/kWh.

I can be a bit neurotic about turning off lights when I leave a room, so Home Assistant was a nice way to free up brain space for me. A few motion sensors here and there + some simple automations, and the lights mostly handle themselves. Zigbee sensors and Zigbee or Matter-over-WiFi bulbs, so everything is local. A free VPS+WireGuard setup means I can access them remotely should I need to, with TailScale as a backup.

Cloud failures mean I can’t access remotely, but local control is unaffected—if my smart devices stop working it’s almost certainly my fault :)

There’s an interesting discussion in the comments about the architecture: https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/10/20/banana-pi-bpi-r4-pro-board-offers-2x-10gbe-sfp-cages-6x-10gbe-2-5gbe-gbe-ports-wifi-7-support/

Sounds like there are bottlenecks, and you can’t run all ports at line speed. User TLS says:

Is it just me, or is the MaxLinear MxL86252C switch connected to one of the 10 Gbps PHYs? The MT7988 only has a single 2.5 Gbps MAC and it’s shared with the second 10 Gbps MAC. It seems like they’re routing a 10 Gbps signal to the MxL86252C, which has two 10 Gbps SerDes interfaces, making the second set of 10 Gbps connected via the switch. This suggests that if the 10 Gbps port is running at full speed, you won’t be able to use the 2.5 Gbps ports.

That only appears to apply to hard drives though.

If you want to use M.2 SSDs for your storage pool and cache, then you still need to use a Synology-certified SSD (which doesn’t necessarily mean that it needs to be Synology branded, just tested and certified).

From https://liliputing.com/synology-backtracks-and-adds-3rd-party-hard-drive-support-to-its-2025-nas-lineup-network-attached-storage/

On low end CPUs you can max out the CPU before maxing out network—if you want to get fancy, you can use rsync over an unencrypted remote shell like rsh, but I would only do this if the computers were directly connected to each other by one Ethernet cable.

If you’re running it via docker compose it’s trivial to upgrade, and there are no breaking changes. Pull, down, up, you’re done.

Frigate is pretty good, too. I’ve only been running it for a few months but I’m very happy with it.

I’ve honestly never understood people who feel the need to “replace” Spotify. … Spotify has never made sense for my use-case.

I don’t know how to say this, but…you have extremely uncommon use-cases:

…during those times, my phone is either fully turned off (so I’ll use an MP3 player), or it’s in Airplane Mode.

Many people listen to music on stereos and don’t necessarily want a device plugged in, so

I just download the music I like to my device and listen to it via VLC.

either doesn’t work or is substantially less convenient than e.g. casting from a phone.

Not hating on your setup at all, but it’s very niche, in my experience.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID

Atomicity (something happens in its entirety or not at all), consistency (database is always in a valid state — if the database has constraints, they will always be honored), isolation (transactions don’t step on each other), durability (complete transaction is complete even if there’s a power failure).

Not a database expert, my parenthetical explanations may need work.

I think parent is referring to Merkle trees.

How’s the software support?

I have an Orange Pi 5+ which is better than a raspberry pi in every way…except the software support.

It’s interesting that, with Python, the reference implementation is the implementation — yeah there’s Jython but really, Python means both the language and a particular interpreter.

Many compiled languages aren’t this way at all — C compilers come from Intel, Microsoft, GNU, LLVM, among others. And even some scripting languages have this diversity — there are multiple JavaScript implementations, for example, and JS is…weird, yes, but afaik can be faster than Python in many cases.

I don’t know what my point is exactly, but Python a) is sloooow, and b) doesn’t really have competition of interpreters. Which is interesting, at least, to me.

Did the developer use any version control though? SCCS has been around since the early 70s, RCS and CVS since the 80s. The tools definitely existed.

Also, it was a single dev, which makes SCM significantly simpler!