I decided that living on a hope and a dream of maybe someday seeing if my Mac Mini still worked I can now gleefully say it is working* if I cannot figure out how to update it further oh well I will just continue on with it as is and harden it the same way I do everything else. But right now it is downloading my music library, which I will promptly backup before trying to update it further.

*I need to figure out how to update it to the last OS version it can handle.

You should really have a good hardware firewall before you do that. Change ports, change ports for everything you can nothing I run is on the standard port I make sure of that other than 80 and 443 for unbound I would if I could but I like having access to the internet I should have mentioned that with pihole.

Thanks for letting me know.

🤣 I am going to guess they are not using windows, or if they are it is pirated the poop out of it.

You got to let us know if they get back to you.

I really want governments and businesses in Canada to go FOSS rather than paying big US tech money to harvest our data.

On all of my raspberry pi’s excluding my HAOS pi I have Docker; (I am thinking of adding something so I can see all my images visually, funny story I was looking on docker to see everything I have running and I guess I do have a service for this).

2 instances of pihole across 2 of my pi’s; (one primary, which has been migrated to docker and a secondary which is still running bare metal I have docker on that pi but just have not got around to migrating it yet maybe that is a today project) highly recommend you start with a linux distro that is right for you and start with docker and pihole (You could probably stick with windows or MacOS if you want but I highly recommend linux, there are other whole LAN ad blockers, pihole is just the one that works for me. Just to be funny I run them on port 31415!) on a device or two you are not afraid to leave running 24/7 that is why my homelab is spread across different 4 different pi’s and a Flint 2 router.

Maybe on two pi’s I have Nebula-sync; to keep my piholes in sync but I know I have it on one of them.

On my pi 5 with the most RAM I have:

Caddy; this could go on prior to pihole, but it is to give everything easy to remember domain names and to allow some to be open to the world while keeping others to the LAN/VPN

After those four things I would suggest searXNG; to replace whatever search engine you use when you go through and pick which engines it uses to do searches please do not select the Google. With searXNG you do not get all that AI crap I hear people get now, or the paid advertisement links at the top of the results, you also get to weigh which engine you want to use more.

Vaultwarden; with that I can use all of bitwarden’s services for free

Immich, because I am not paying a third party to store just my photos

Nextcloud, but I am getting off of that, it does all of the file sharing that I need with my devices that cannot use rsync calendars and contacts but it tries to do to much.

Down detector; to tell me if there are problems with my devices (sends me emails if one of my devices goes off line).

Paperless; to keep important documents in a easier place to find.

On another pi 5 I have:

The arr stack, I should really get jellyseeerr working!

Transmission, the bittorrent client it is running CLI with a web interface. I have it setup to download a copy of the raspberry pi OS every time there is a new release and to host it until the next new release, everything else I have a ratio of 3.

Jellyfin; (I will fight you if you think plex or emby are better), if I wanted to share my media with people I could create another VPN exit that only allows people to Jellyfin.

I guess I have Navidrone; for music streaming? I should probably remove that because I have Jellyfin that I plan on using.

Cowrie, is the honey pot sitting on port 22.

On another pi 5 I have

Ghost; for my blog/web design service, I am considering exploring more options as it is more geared towards people wanting to get money.

I guess I have matomo; to monitor my self hosted blog, did not know that.

On a pi 4 I have

HAOS; I have so many things running in HAOS, but the one service I am most proud of is my reminders. The reminders just started as a reminder for me to take my medication because the app I had purchased decided that the fact that I had purchased it was not good enough and they wanted to charge me a subscription, so I setup Home Assistant to remind me and that quickly became reminders to do other things as well all on my apple watch.

I have a retired ipad running a HA kiosk in my kitchen; it tells me things like what lights are on, how many times I have had bots try to penetrate me, speedtest, transmission stats, and my ecobee settings. I am thinking of setting up an old phone to run as a separate kiosk in my bedroom as a clock/weather screen on my bedside table and I am hoping to get a hand me down old ipad to act as another kiosk in my living room, more to watch for docker containers needing updates, maybe the also the weather and bandwidth monitor.

OpenWRT on a Flint 2 because the firewall my ISP’s firewall/modem like most ISP’s is a joke so I have it set to pass through to my own with 2 static IP’s one of them was originally going to be for mail but I quickly discovered how silly of an idea that was.

Wireguard; I think it is on my firewall, on one of the IPs I was going to host mail on the other but I came so close to ripping out my hair trying to do that so I got a hosted service through easydns it has a wildcard function so I can still get unlimited free trials to whatever instead of going into hosthero’s cpannel and spinning up a new address)

Crowdsec so I get to watch how many bots try to penetrate me in a day, week, month, or ever. It is in the 100’s a day, before I knew I could/should change my SSH port I had port 22 open to the WAN, this was long ago but still it was a bad idea. 22 is now open as a honey pot.

I have Crowdsec-bouncer that stops known bad actors from trying to get in.

I am sure I have other services on my firewall but I cannot tell what is an actual openwrt service and what is something I have added, but it is a vanilla install with all kinds of things added extra. .

Don’t know if you would count CUPS or scanjs as self hosted but those are run for my printer/scanner on a pi.

I have an old mac mini I am thinking of plugging in so that I can download all my music and add it to Jellyfin, than I am debating on if I want to install debian on part of the drive and keep MacOS on part of the drive so that I can actually use the bluray drive I have as far as I know there are no bluray drivers for linux because the big movie producers are scared of piracy, not like they are trying to rape us consumers over the hot coals.

To be fair 1’s and 0’s run all of the internet we currently have.

I love upcycling I do much rather do that then throwing stuff away, I also understand that most plastic cannot be recycled any further than it is. But upcycling plastic waste is a pass for me, sure they are cool looking pieces but out of plastic?

I am sure it is still true for business, and they just put it on the books as something they pay for and do not think twice about it. As the rich keep getting richer because of this little buy line in so many companies books I hope more of your US companies do it. I have no idea how they do it here in Canada but I am sure they have something, wish the world would realize what the French police did when they disliked Windows XP and created a Linux distro for themselves instead of suffering.

Why are you still paying for reddit? I know it is a “free” service, but they are getting money selling you!

If AWS didn’t run most of the Internet I would have said to hell with you Amazon, and never paid Amazon again.

I am more interested in his ribs not much a fan of lung meat.

Yes that is right I think I hear about a TV show as well, I hope it flops horribly and the media decides the IP is worthless now.

I want to reward entrepreneurship, but once you meet a certain dollar amount you should be taxed at 100%, and donating to politicians should be taxed as well. It would encourage more giving donations to non-profits, and help encourage innovation from other investments being made to try and stay under that dollar amount.

Tim Hortons is now dead to me I did enjoy eating the occasional doughnut but that is it no more.

The terf wrote a new book or two on the IP, maybe there was a movie recently or something.

I disagree with this; in places where the two first past the post has been done away with there seems to be more parties, leading to more minorities and more coalitions. Sure more right leaning parties may pop up in the west but also more left leaning parties would pop up to. Right now we have two right leaning conservative parties running the government. I really wish the “true” liberals would say bye bye Carney and go to the NDP, but that may be to much to ask of them.

Saying I am not going to vote if something is not done is saying “here take my vote, I am not going to stand in your way ever again.”

I could name one Communism, you know where the community works together to better the community. I hold a political belief a little further to the right than communism, because I still like the idea of having a country so I fall left of Socialism.

So hey look at that I named two/three political systems that are better than Socialist Democracy vs capitalist democracy, Communist Democracy some would argue that is the same as a socialist democracy, or true stateless Communism.