Fail2ban config can get fairly involved in my experience. I’m probably not doing it the right way, as I wrote a bunch of web server ban rules — anyone trying to access wpadmin gets banned, for instance (I don’t use WordPress, and if I did, it wouldn’t be accessible from my public facing reverse proxy).

I just skimmed my nginx logs and looked for anything funky and put that in a ban rule, basically.

Newer macOS is not Unix certified.

It’s UNIX 03 compliant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification

One or two Linux distros were (are?) UNIX certified, though.

Haha yeah that was the counter example I was thinking of. I agree completely — you could make a Gentoo from source beginner distro, and I think you could make it reasonably “idiot proof,” but it would still be a bad user experience most likely (too much time spent compiling).

If your distro can’t be forked into a “beginner distro” then it’s fundamentally flawed IMHO.

To be clear, I’ve used Arch as my daily drivers for a while, and while it’s not the best fit for my needs (I use Debian mostly), there’s nothing that I experienced that was incompatible with a “beginner” distro.

You can also drop cache for debugging by running something like echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop-caches

But remember that the kernel knows best — this RAM will automatically be freed up when needed and you should never run this except for debugging (or maybe benchmarking).

I switched from raspberry pi and orange pi to a cheap Intel NUC, and I think it’s just a much nicer experience.

The pi is great fun, but the HW transcoding on a NUC “just works,” and the SSD and 16GB RAM opens a lot of doors. My N100 NUC was less than $150, and it included everything (case, power supply, 500GB SSD).

My pi found new life as an off-site backup: attach a big HDD, set up WireGuard, and have a cronjob do daily rsync and snapshots. I have it set up at in-laws, and it works great.

I’ve been super happy with it. Knock on wood it’s been super reliable. I have a single ZFS drive, take snapshots with various retention policies, nothing fancy.

Another fun thing is to set up a reverse proxy on it as an endpoint for services on your local (home) network which can only be accessed by VPN. For example, my Jellyfin service isn’t public facing, but I didn’t want e.g. my parents to need to set up WireGuard. So instead they can point their TV to a raspberry pi on their network to access the service — even a first gen RPI can handle Jellyfin reverse proxy over WireGuard for moderate bitrates!

WireGuard, and an external HDD. Run at a remote location for off-site backup.

I do this with a raspberry pi 3 at the in-laws. I copied the data over locally before setting it up, and after that it’s just nightly incremental rsync, which is fine even over my slow (35Mbps) upload.

Not sure why you’re saying Python forces everything to be object oriented…?

For very simple tasks you can usually blindly log in and run commands. I’ve done this with very simple tasks, e.g., rebooting or bringing up a network interface. It’s maybe not the smartest, but basically, just type root, the root password, and dhclient eth0 or whatever magic you need. No display required, unless you make a typo…

In your specific case, you could have a shell script that stops VMs and disables passthrough, so you just log in and invoke that script. Bonus points if you create a dedicated user with that script set as their shell (or just put in the appropriate dot rc file).

Ok so it is fully qualified then? I’m just confused because it sounded like you were saying I wasn’t using the term correctly in your other comment.

Hmm, my understanding was that FQDN means that anyone will resolve the domain to e.g. the same IP address? Which is the case here (unless DNS rebinding mitigations or similar are employed) — but it doesn’t resolve to the same physical host in this case since it’s a private IP. Wikipedia:

A fully qualified domain name is distinguished by its lack of ambiguity in terms of DNS zone location in the hierarchy of DNS labels: it can be interpreted only in one way.

In my example, I can run nslookup jellyfin.myexample.com 8.8.8.8 and it resolves to what I expect (a local IP address).

But IANA network professional by any means, so maybe I’m misusing the term?

TIL, thanks. I use namecheap and haven’t had any problems (mikrorik router).

If you have your own domain name+control over the DNS entries, a cute trick you can use for Jellyfin is to set up a fully qualified DNS entry to point to your local (private) IP address.

So, you can have jellyfin.example.com point to 192.168.0.100 or similar. Inaccessible to the outside world (assuming you have your servers set up securely, no port forwarding), but local devices can access.

This is useful if you want to play on e.g. Chromecast/Google TV dongle but don’t want your traffic going over the Internet.

It’s a silly trick to work around the fact that these devices don’t always query the local DNS server (e.g., your router), so you need something fully qualified — but a private IP on a public DNS record works just fine!

EulerOS, a Linux distro, was certified UNIX.

But OS X, macOS, and at least one Linux distro are/were UNIX certified.

Add to that photo editing (as much as GIMP is great…). I would guess DAW and video editing would fall under that category, too…and good luck finding many AAA open source games.

IIRC Torvalds uses Fedora.

(Debian for me.)

Remote backup server would be my suggestion.

Configure it with a VPN to talk to your home network and set it up at a trusted friend’s or family’s place.

I do this with a raspberry pi and an external HDD that takes daily/weekly/monthly snapshots, with daily rsync. Works nicely for me.