LMAO! I would speculate that conservatively 90% of all my mail is spam that gets either rejected or dropped in the trash bin.

As @eksb@programming.dev said, SpamAssasin and diligent training. Also, pFsense will filter based on rules and criteria in conjunction with Suricata or Snort.

that is the devil talking

It truly is. At my age and with other things combined, I can turn around twice in the lab and my brain will flat line.

In the past, I’ve found a lot of valuable resource at

• https://www.howtoforge.com/
• https://www.simplehomelab.com/
• https://networklessons.com/

One thing you really need to establish right from the start is the habit of taking detailed notes. It’s tedious, bothersome at times, but the ability to backtrack something that may not have deployed quite like you wanted, is invaluable. It will also save your ass in a month when you’ve forgotten everything you did before.

Take notes!

I’ll check it out. I do keep prolific notes on everything I do, however they need to be more structured and searchable. Right now I’m using Trillium but it has it’s limitations for what I want it to do. Nice piece of software tho.

That’s an awesome story. 500 miles…lol

Relevant XKCD

Isn’t there always one? Seems so. LOL

irmadlad showed me https://www.cauldron-vtt.net/

Oh don’t be blaming me damnit. LOL

Note to self: Scan lab for hidden cameras

SnipeIT

I’ve seen the app rolling around in Awesome Lists, but always thought it was for larger operations with a lot of infrastructure and not necessarily a home lab. I might look into it seriously.

I want my suffering to result in something learned so it doesn’t happen again.

Soooo much this. I’m down to learn about technology any day of the week. But when I ‘fix’ something and I don’t know what the ‘fix’ really was, it is a rush of mixed emotions. I am ecstatic relieved the problem is fixed, but left empty not having learned the ‘why it broke’ in the first place. And then I’m always fearful that the problem will gestate in my lab and rear it’s ugly head again at some other inopportune time.

I do use Bitwarden, however to boot any computer in my lab, it requires a system/BIOS password, an encryption passphrase, and and OS password to get to the desktop. LOL So, Bitwarden is of no use in that scenario. I guess I could put everything on a usb key, but then again I want ‘them’ to have to beat me with a pipe wrench until I cough up the passwords.

I want an internet more like it was before I was born

I’m 71, so I was virtually there when they flipped the switch, and I was, to say the least, addicted. I’ve had a lifelong romance with technology. Yes, it was much simpler then, not a whole lot going on really. A few BBS, ASCII porn, then Geocities…lol what was that? However, I look at what we have now, and what we had then, and personally think the things I liked about the olden days are far outweighed by what we have in 2025.

The reason I asked is because it just seemed like such an absolutist thing to say. I’ve rarely found life to be that absolute. Life is a series of concessions and amalgamations of compromise. Unless you’re willing to go live in an isolated cabin in the woods, devoid of any technology, I don’t see how you can avoid those concessions and compromises. One has their core values and beliefs yes, yet one must be flexible lest life snaps you off at the knees.

Congratulations of the local ISP collaboration. I’ve read some on the topic and that is way more capital than I have, and far too many aggravations than I would want to take on. Wish you the best with your endeavors.

NordPass’s annual password trend report confirmed what we all suspected – Gen Z is worse than Boomers when it comes to using insecure passwords (if you’re looking for strong passwords, just use Home Assistant’s hardware names and they’ll be uncrackable)

I believe in long, complex, and complicated passwords. One of the things I’ve taught myself is how to create long, complex, and complicated THAT I CAN REMEMBER! Making long, complex passwords is a snap. Remembering them is where it’s at. Cue relevant xkcd cartoon. At my age, that can be quite the trick.

Thanks for the backup. LOL I get nervous sharing code. Sure it worked for me, but in the back of my head I see some poor guy deploying any code I’ve used and smoke starts coming out of his server, the front cover falls off, and his Ethernet cable is belched out the back. LOL

Cloudflare gives unlimited data

True. I’ve never measured the bandwidth, but staring at ntopng flows for a few minutes and you can kind of get the enormity of ingress/egress, which is sometimes mind blowing to me especially for a little homelab outfit like mine. I was just curious if you had a handle on other venues besides the big guys, for the 'at least it’s not Cloudflare brethren in the group. I mean, I know how I am about Google in that I absolutely deny any access. They aren’t on my ‘I HATE’ list or ‘I wish they’d go tits up’ list, I just don’t use them for anything. Now I’m sure that periodically, during my internet travels, I inadvertently use one of their services. With a vast catalog of services that Google possesses, they’ve got their fingers in everybody’s pie. So I can kind of understand the Anti-Cloudflare coalition.

I did it more for the security aspect, but as @MinFapper@startrek.website points out, there are many advantages. The AI crawlers, the bad actors, et al make even the free tier worth considering. Don’t go in blindly tho. Do some searching and reading and make up your own mind.

More eloquent than anything I could conjure up. In the ‘at least it’s not Cloudflare’ column, how do you feel about https://ngrok.com/ or similar? I’ve never explored those avenues, but from what I hear, ngrok is fairly popular.

https://github.com/beatkind/watchtower/releases/tag/v2.3.1

For that kind of money, I would expect the SSD drive

For that kind of money, I would expect breakfast and a blowie every morning.