and allow Suricata to do its IPS work.

Pretty much this. I have several VLANS set up to segrigate traffic. For instance, one VLAN services the ‘smart’ TVs and gives access for my lady friend when she comes to visit. She apparently likes ads and crap hogging her screen’s real estate. I have tried to get her to listen to reason, but as soon as there is an issue, it becomes an exercise in figuring out what is blocking her unfettered access. So I want that totally separate from traffic destined in and out of my server. Then I have a VLAN for some 25 security cameras, and a VLAN for server and lab operations. I make no Guest accommodations for Wi-Fi tho. You are either trusted, or not.

It might be overly complicated, but I like to 'keep ‘em separated’, and it seems to work just jammy, so there’s that.

parents and their friends telling me Internet will never take

As a septuagenarian, I have tried to distance myself from that way of thinking. It’s a very isolationist type of mentality and it does not fit into my ‘wide eyed, boyish, enthusiasm’ for technology.

Do they have some sort of speed degradation forced by the firmware?

That’s a technical level that is beyond my realm of experience. I have not noticed any real world degradation of speed. However, My Book units are usually WD Green SMR consumer grade HDDs or high capacity drives that have lower sustained write performance than desktop CMR drives, so it may impact sustained/random small write workloads, but I have no data to support that either way.

I wasn’t degrading. There are many nice , well equipped racks and there are smaller form factor setups, of which if they serve a good purpose and perform as expected, that’s all that matters. It’s always interesting to me the ingenious ways selfhosters will come up with to solve certain constraints, or maybe problems. With 3d printing we can make our own racks, and pieces parts for field expedient modifications or repairs.

When I was a wee lad, I could have never dreamed how far technology has brought us. I’ve watched a fad called the internet completely envelope the planet. It’s pretty wild man.

My Beelink now looks like some Frankenstein creation

Reminds me of what I did to my CoolerMaster Cosmos case. I was getting high temps on my two CPUs even at idle. So I took two 4’/300 cfm box fans, 3d printed a scoop, cut the door to the case with a dremel, mounted the two fans right over each CPU, mounted the scoop on the outside of the case door. Worked like a charm. I even dropped one in the drive bay. Temps run about 98 deg F per CPU on average.

but from what I see there’s no way to have both commercial VPN and my local network WG active at the same time

Does you commercial VPN have a Kill Switch? I had trouble getting both Tailscale and commercial VPN to play nice together until I turned of the Kill Switch.

After seeing some of you guy’s set ups, I don’t feel so bad. LOL

Nice!! I love seeing ‘field expedient modifications.’ I have an old CoolerMaster Cosmos case. The thing is a monster. I didn’t like the way the fan cooling was operating so I took two 4"/300 cfm fans and mounted them to blow over the two processors of my mobo. Then I printed a scoop for the case and used that as the intake. Works well, better than the OEM configuration and keeps my processors running at a cool 98 deg +/-.

You need to make a ‘I’ve been busy’ post.

OK you’ll be able to tell I haven’t bought a graphics card in a while, so…wtf kind of graphics card is that? It’s manly for sure…almost phallic in nature. What do you do with it besides ‘Any ting you wan’.

Very nice. You guys with all the toys. I bet she’s fun tho.

Man, GTFO with that hot mess… I’m jealous really. I’m getting a chub just thinking about it.

booooo! /s looks awesome bro. It’s too clean tho.

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accomplished with a cheap aquarium light timer.

Love it man. Nice use of non relational equipment.

Some other higher end selfhosters may not approve of them, but I’ll tell you that shucked WD externals are mostly what I run on my computers/servers.

When I built mine, I purposefully spent the $$ for a long term service machine and stocked it with all the cutting edge tech of the day in it like SLI which was wildly popular then, maxed out the mobo with RAM to 96 GB, etc. It’s no modern gaming machine, but it will handle most anything you throw at it.

Sorry, COVID is a sore spot for me. My lady friend was a nurse of 40 years who’s career was cut short by it. She now has long COVID, and will for the rest of her life. Not because we thought COVID was bullshit, but because 70 million other dumfuck rednecks thought it was.

Kimi K2

Kimi K2 & Claude both want to tie your account to a phone number and I really don’t like that.

Trust no one, always wear your tinfoil hat and don’t take vaccines.

I’d say ‘Never Trust/Always Verify’, however I wouldn’t say that was tinfoil hat territory. More just common sense. As far as never getting vaccines, all one has to do is go to Reddit and look up the ‘Herman Cain Award’ subredit to read about people who didn’t get vaccines because DumbFuck Donny told them there was nothing to worry about. We are almost to the point of a measles pandemic in the US now and COVID rages on in it’s new form of Cicada.