“What is your favorite self-hosted application?” had what looks to be about 15 matrix responses.

Would potentially be interesting to see Matrix/XMPP/etc prevalence in future surveys, maybe replacing ‘what activitypub apps’ with a more generic ‘what federated apps do you self-host’

Solid Explorer

I think shared hosting there is more meant to refer to the older “upload your files in webmin and we’ll shove them in /cgi-bin/ with everybody else’s”-style hosting where multiple users sites are running on a single instance of a webserver versus a VPS giving you a VM with SSH access?

What part were you getting hung up on?

what does industry do when they need to automate provisioning of thousands of devices for POS, retail, barcode scanning, delivery drivers, etc.

MDM doesn’t help with the kind of stuff OP is trying to automate, but it does usually cover most business use cases and if you need more than that, you generally either have a contract to get the manufacturer to do it for you or just put what you need into the org-specific superapp you already have to have.

Oh nice a nicely-formatted list of reasons I don’t switch phones more frequently than once every 5 years: I loathe setting them up as specifically as I want them to behave

I’ve read many many discussions about why manufacturers would list such a pessimistic number on their datasheets over the years and haven’t really come any closer to understanding why it would be listed that way, when you can trivially prove how pessimistic it is by repeatedly running badblocks on a dozen of large (20TB+) enterprise drives that will nearly all dutifully accept hundreds of TBs written to and read from with no issues when the URE rate suggests that would result in a dozen UREs on average.

I conjecture, without any specific evidence, that it might be an accurate value with respect to some inherent physical property of the platters themselves that manufactures can and do measure that hasn’t improved considerably, but has long been abstracted away by increaed redundancy and error correction at the sector level that result in much more reliable effective performance, but the raw quantity is still used for some internal historical/comparative reason rather than being replaced by the effective value that matters more directly to users.

If the actual error rate were anywhere near that high, modern enterprise hard drives wouldn’t be usable as a storage medium at all.

A 65% filled array of 10x20TB drives would average at least 1 bit failure on every single scrub (which is full read of all data present in the array), but that doesn’t actually happen with any real degree of regularity.

I think it’s worth pointing out that this article is 11 years old, so that 1TB rule-of-thumb probably probably needs to be adjusted for modern disks.

If you have 2 full backups (18TB drives being more than sufficient) of the array, especially if one of those is offsite, then I’d say you’re really not at a high enough risk of losing data during a rebuild to justify proactively rebuilding the array until you have at least 2 or more disks to add.

Very similar heuristic here, insofar as when to use passphrases and how long.

LUKS and Bitlocker volumes get 8 words, computer logins usually get 4 words (potentially more depending on frequency/criticality of system).

Smartcards and mobile devices do have numeric pins due to frequency of use and relative difficulty in copying those for offline attacks.

Websites that are filled in w/ password manager get passwords get the random symbol-laden strings that ‘meet requirements’

Still a few Ubuntu Server stragglers here and there, but it works quite well as long as you keep your base config fairly lean and push the complexity into the containers.

Documentation tends to be either good or nonexistent depending on what you’re doing, so for anything beyond standard configuration but it can usually be pieced together from ArchWiki and the systemd docs.

All in all, powerful and repeatable (and a lot less tedious than Ansible, etc), but perhaps not super beginner-friendly once you start getting into the weeds. Ubuntu Server is just better documented and supported if you need something super quick and easy.

NextCloud main use is file synchronization

Is it? Interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever even considered using it for that purpose.

I mostly use it as an easily web-accessible interface for a variety of unified productivity and organization software (file upload/download, office suite, notes, calendar, etc), with easy ability to do stuff like create a password-protected shared folders of pictures/documents I can easily share with friends and family who don’t have accounts so they can upload/download/organize/edit files with me and each other from a browser without having to install additional software on client devices.

Which I’m not sure I get the popular mentioning of since it seems to serve a very different purpose than NextCloud does, like not even similar niches.

Nothing against it, of course, it just doesn’t feel like an ‘alternative’ to NC.

I would strongly suggest not using 900GB 10kRPM drives (and especially not 10 of them) in [current year] when brand-new 8TB hard drives cost $120, and 14+TB recertified drives aren’t much more than that. The power costs of 7 more drives than you need for the capacity definitely add up over several years of runtime.

If that is the threat model then Signal is not and never was fit for purpose at all.

Because every time I’ve complained about not wanting to give my phone number to sign up for Signal I’ve been lectured about how Signal is “all about privacy, not anonymity and those are not the same thing” and how that is good for the average Joe even if it isn’t useful for journalists and activists, and what you’re saying goes completely against that by suggesting that the police are somehow unable to get the phone number out of the thing that uses the phone number as the user id.

You’re describing how a real privacy-focused app like Briar functions, but definitely not how Signal does.

Washing machine is a threshold sensor in Home Assistant on the power draw entity on a sonoff s31 smart outlet flashed w/ ESPHome.

Dryer is another threshold sensor on a current clamp connected to an ESP32 running ESPHome.

We’ve both got a software dev background, so it wasn’t a particularly difficult solution to sell, as soon as we came up with it it was very much a “oh duh, why didn’t one of us think of that way earlier”

My partner and I use a git repository on our self-hosted gitea instance for household management.

Issue tracker and kanban boards for task management, wiki for documentation, and some infrastructure components are version controlled in the repo itself.

Home Assistant (also self-hosted) provides the ability to easily and automatically create issues based on schedules and sensor data, like creating a git issue when when weather conditions tomorrow may necessitate checking this afternoon that nothing gets left out in the rain.

Matrix (also self-hosted) lets Gitea and Home Assistant bully us into remembering to do things we might have forgotten. (Send a second notification if the washer finished 15 minutes ago, but the dryer never started)

It’s been fantsstic being able to create git issues for honey-dos as well as having the automations for creating issues for recurring tasks. “Hey we need to take X to the vet for Y sometime next week” “Oh yeah, can you go ahead and put in a ticket?” And vice versa.

I have looked at the ROI for getting more efficient kit and ended up discovering that going for something like a low-idle-power-draw system like a NUC or thin client and a disk enclosure has a return period on the order of multiple years.

Based on that information, I’ve instead put that money towards lower hanging fruit in the form of upgrading older inefficient appliances and adding multi-zone temperature control for power savings.

The energy savings I’ve been able to make based on long-term energy use data collected via Home Assistant has more than offset all of the electricity I’ve ever used to power the system itself.

~120W with an old server motherboard and 6 spinning drives (42TB of storage overall).

Currently running Nextcloud, Home Assistant, Gitea, Matrix, Jellyfin, Lemmy, Mastodon, Vaultwarden, and a bunch of other smaller stuff alongside storing a few months worth of surveillance footage, so ~$12/month in power certainly ain’t a bad deal versus paying for hosted versions of even a fraction of those services.