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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • I switched to Technitium and I’ve been pretty happy. Seems very robust, and as a bonus was easy to use it to stop DNS leaks (each upstream has a static route through a different Mullvad VPN, and since they’re queried in parallel, a VPN connection can go down without losing any DNS…maybe this is how pihole would have handled it too though).

    And of course, wildcards supported no problem.




  • I’ve been pleased with it. Family is very relaxed about projects like this, but yeah it’s low power draw. I don’t think I have anything special set up but the right thing to do for power would be to spin down drive when not in use, as power is dominated by the spinning rust.

    Uptime is great. Only hiccups are that it can choke when compiling the ZFS kernel modules, triggered on kernel updates. It’s an rpi 3/1GB RAM (I keep failing at forcing dkms to use only 1 thread, which would probably fix these hiccups 🤷).

    That said, it is managed by me, so sometimes errors go unnoticed. I had recent issues where I missed a week of rsync because I switched from pihole to technitium on my home server and forgot to point the remote rpi there. This would all have been fixed with proper cron email setup…I’m clearly not a professional :)










  • Maybe not a service in the typical sense, but setting up your router+server to route your home network traffic through a VPN is a fun project.

    My router (MikroTik) supports WireGuard, so I can use it with Mullvad for the whole house—but wg is demanding and it’s a slow router, so while it can NAT at ~1Gbps, it can’t do WireGuard at more than ~90Mbps. So, I set up WireGuard/Mullvad on a little SBC with a fast processor, and have my router use that instead. Using policy based routing and/or mangling, I can have different VLANs/subnets/individual hosts selectively routed through the VPN.

    It’s a fun exercise, not sure I implemented it in a smart way, but it works :)




  • VPS+VPN, this is what I do.

    VPS has public IP and runs WireGuard “server”* and a reverse proxy (and fail2ban…). Reverse proxy points to my home computer over the WireGuard link. No open ports on my home router.

    For private facing/LAN-only services I just don’t have an entry in the VPS reverse proxy. DNS on the router points everything to my local server, so if at home I access everything directly. To access internal services remotely requires VPN (i.e., WireGuard to the VPS).

    Works well; I have a tiny free tier VPS but even so, no complaints.

    *Yes I know there are no wg clients or servers, only peers, but it plays a server-likr role.


  • In a VHCOL area, $100k with one child is extremely tough/you’re likely dipping into savings. Our daycare alone is over $40k/yr per kid, and only $5k ($7500 next year) is fully tax exempt.

    Median 2 bedroom in my area is over $50k/yr.

    $100k doesn’t cut it. “Just move to a cheaper area” is IMHO not a proper response to this—anyone who works in my city should be able to afford to raise a family here, with a high quality of life/standard of living, but that’s not really the case.