I am using the smallest tier VPS from IONOS for 1€/month. Good, reliable and trustworthy as it is a subsidiary of 1&1 telecommunications.

Sure it’s easy to set up, but the same behaviour is what I get with my handrolled solution. I rent a cheap VPS with a fixed IP solely for forwarding all traffic through wireguard. My DNS entries all point to the VPS and my servers connect to the VPS to be reachable. It is absolutely network agnostic and does not require any port shenanigans on the local network nor does it require a fixed IP for the internet connection of my home server.

Data security wise the HTTPS terminates on my own hardware (homeserver with reverse proxy) and the wireguard connection is additionally encrypted. There are no secrets or certificates on the rented VPS beyond the bare minimum for the wireguard tunnel and my public key for SSH access.

Shuttling the packets on the VPS (inet to wireguard) is done by socat because I haven’t had the will or need to get in the weeds with nftables/iptables. I am just happy that it works reliably and am happy to loose some potential bandwidth to the kernelspace/userspace hoops.

There’s prometheus node exporter which can collect such data from several hosts. You can hook it up with Grafana for neat dashboards and I’m almost sure it also integrates with Homeassistant.

Very neat idea!

Yeah that occurred to me as well. Then I immediately think that maybe we need ☆one more language☆ to fix this. And then I remember that one xkcd comic…

Absolutely true, it was more of a joke because Python is being used for pretty much anything today. I really don’t want to mess with correct indentation in my terminal.

The line between configuration is very messy anyways. So many projects abuse YAML as a domain specific language. Looking at you, HomeAssistant and ESPHome!

Python😎

What? I’ve never had the feeling that nextcloud assumes that. Are you using a special all-in-one docker image? Because I am using the regular one and pair it with db, redis etc. containers and am absolutely happy with it.

If you have an AVM Fritz!Box home router you can simply create a new profile that disallows internet access and set the devices you want to “isolate” to that profile. They will be able to access the local network and be accessed by the local network just fine, but they won’t have any outgoing (or incoming) connectivity.

I’ve always been on android, so take this with a grain of salt. In my opinion Samsung phones have come a very long way. They used to be slower and bloated in comparison to other brands, especially while the market was still moving fast. I used to have a Sony, a ZTE, a Motorola, an Umi and a Jiayu - I tried quite a few over the years.

The recent generation are all fast enough and performance wise last 4+ years before they get noticably slow and an upgrade becomes necessary. Software support on Samsung is now phenomenal. I had so many bugs and hitches on other vendors’ phones and they were rarely fixed - the absolute opposite has been the experience on my Samsungs. Updates are frequent, smooth and stable.

I know this reads like an ad, but I was honestly positively suprised after I bought a Samsung tablet a few years back and have slowly switched over to Samsung devices. The same happened with all other members of my family. Samsung simply won.

I suppose the iPhone is very similar in that regard, both simply work and are great for everyday use. It’s almost boring!

I do advice you to look at the upper end though, they simply have more performance reserves. If you are a display menace and battery destroyer though, you won’t notice any significant slow down from the cheaper range in the 2 to 3 years you have before it becomes uneconomical to repair the device anyways.

If only modern kernels weren’t a problem. I wish you could just install new OSs like on PC.

I use Firefox on all my machines and I enjoy having my Sync account available everywhere. If I were to get an iPhone, I’d absolutely choose Firefox again.

But Borg does not work with object storage, it needs a borg process on the receiving side.

Ah, great. Another crypto grab.

Not exactly a charity per se, but many open software projects are in dire need of funding. If there is a piece of software you really like that makes your life easier, consider donating.

Otherwise, stuff like the Trevor Project or similar sound great.

There’s Syncthing and it’s proprietary counterpart Resilio that allow you to sync folders between machines and send individual files over p2p. Very neat software.

I am very happy with mine and have only ever had one hiccup during updating that was due to my Dockerfile removing one dependency to many. I’ve run it bare metal (apache, mariadb) as well as containerized (derived custom image, traefik, mariadb). Both were okay in speed after applying all steps from the documentation.

Having the database on your fastest drive is definitely very important. Whenever I look at htop while making big copies or moves, it’s always mariadb that’s shuffling stuff around.

In my opinion there are 2 things that make nextcloud (appear) slow:

1. Managing the ton of metadata in the db that is used by nextcloud to provide the enhanced functionality

2. It is/was a webpage rendered mostly on the server.

The first issue is hard to tackle, because it is intrinsic and also has different optimums for different deployment scales. Optimizing databases is beyond my skillset and therefore I stick to the recommendations.

The second issue is slowly being worked around, because many applications on nextcloud now resemble SPAs, that are highly interactive and are rendered by your browser. That reduces page reloads and makes it feel more smooth.

All that said, I barely use the webinterface, because I rarely use the collaboration features. If I have to create a share I usually do that on the app because that’s where I send the link to people. Most of my usecase is just syncing files, calendars and contacts.

That might be due to your ISP’s routing and interconnects. They usually have good routes to big services and might lack good connections between home users in different countries or on different continents.

She might even argue for significantly more hours if she wipes out an entire blood line at once.