Its not for everyone but I use Cisco Aironet APs with a virtual wireless LAN controller. Ubiquiti is popular among the community. They’re cost effective and work well in a home/small business environment. Aruba InstantOn are decent as well from my experience, but they’re cloud managed and this is self-hosted after all :)

I’ve extensively used Cisco, Meraki, Fortinet, Cambium, Aruba, Ubiquiti and Juniper in a professional setting. Avoid Fortinet and Cambium APs if you can, my experience is that they can be pretty unstable.

Generally speaking if you’re going to have multiple APs, you’ll want something that’s centrally managed so the APs are able to be aware of each other and manage clients effectively.

Zabbix can do everything you’re asking and can be connected to Grafana if you want custom visualisations. Most importantly, it contextualises what you need to know on the dashboard, as in it only tells you about things that require your attention.

You’re of course able to dive into the data and look at raw values or graphs if you wish, and can build custom dashboards too.

I’ve used it in both home lab and production scenarios monitoring small to mid size private clouds, including windows and linux hosts, docker, backups, SAN arrays, switches, VMware vSphere, firewalls, the lot. It’s extremely powerful and not terribly manual to set up.

If metrics is all you want and aren’t too fussed on the proactive monitoring focus, Netdata is a great option for getting up and running quickly.

Makes me wonder if anyone out there is maintaining a list of (I can’t believe I’m about to say this) privacy-respecting cars

I need this on a t-shirt

Can’t argue with you there :P but I guess what I mean is from a service standpoint, Gmail is mail, ISPs provide internet.

For me personally, Google is not my friend and I run my own mail server on my own domain and have for years. It’s quite involved though if you want good deliverability.

I think Proton is probably the happiest medium between privacy-respecting and all-out DIY mail server. Though I’m sure there are many others too :)

Well it’s just an example of course 😂 but to be fair, mail is the core business of Gmail.

Mail is a value-add for ISPs. You could argue any mail provider could up and change things and the only true way to get around that is hosting your own mail server, but I was trying to be semi-realistic.

Whilst I agree and sympathise with people on how difficult it is to change your primary email address (been there), the outcome will be better for them. They are no longer wedded to an ISP purely because all their mail goes there.

To liken it to something more tangible; when you move house, you need to change your mailing address. For renters, that can be often and is just as painful. Or when your phone number changes and you have to update your contacts. The difference here is who is pulling the trigger; the end user vs the provider.

Gmail is a great option, as is Proton Mail for the security conscious and tech savvy.

This isn’t to excuse the ISPs; it’s a shitty move on their part and the people using these mail accounts will likely be older technically challenged folks, but it is a logical one from a technical perspective. They may have also inadvertently taken the only thing away that’s creating stickiness between them and their customer and driven them into the arms of another ISP.

This dude kernel panics

Yep, sure do. I’ve no real benefit for the features it adds, or I’m completely ignorant to the benefits is probably more accurate :)

For the things you’ve mentioned it is useful. I think the main thing I’ve been warned to never do with BTRFS is use it for RAID and to use md under it instead. That said, that could be old info and it may be fixed now.

Sure, I’ve used it both in Server and NAS scenarios. The NAS was where we had most issues. If the maintenance tasks for BTRFS weren’t scheduled to run (balance, defrag, scrub and another one i can’t recall), the disk could become “full” without actually being full. If I recall correctly it’s to do with how it handles metadata. There’s space, but you can’t save, delete or modify anything.

On a VM, its easy enough to buy time by growing the disk and running the maintenance. On a NAS or physical machine however, you’re royally screwed without adding more disks (if its even an option). This “need to have space to make space” thing was pretty suboptimal.

Granted now I know better and am aware of the maintenance tasks, I simply schedule them (with cron or similar). But I still have a bit of a sour taste from it, lol. Overall I don’t think it’s a bad FS as long as you look after it.

This for sure. As a general rule of thumb, I use XFS for RPM-based distros like Red Hat and SuSE, EXT4 for Debian-based.

I use ZFS if I need to do software RAID and I avoid BTRFS like the plague. BTRFS requires a lot of hand holding in the form of maintenance which is far from intuitive and I expect better from a modern filesystem (especially when there are others that do the same job hassle free). I have had FS-related issues on BTRFS systems more than any other purely because of issues with how it handles data and metadata.

In saying all that, if your data is valuable then ensure you do back it up and you won’t need to worry about failures so much.

Don’t have an answer for you but just wanted to say thanks for highlighting the existence of this software, it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for

Same here lol. I’m keen to keep this instance going even if I end up being the only user. I’ve toyed with the idea of what I might do if I did end up with a bunch of users (would i cap at a certain amount of usrrs, how would I put the feelers out to get mods, etc).

The “niche” I’m going for is no reliance on public cloud. I run everything on my own hardware, back it up myself, scale it as needed and maintain it myself. That won’t appeal to everyone, but I’m not trying to be the biggest instance.

It doesn’t say how to decline it in that article, will it just pop up after the shutdown date?

Sweet, count me in! Thanks for creating it

Oh and by the way, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed starting out in this. My advice is to set yourself small, achievable goals to help break it up. Start by doing your hardware upgrade, then work out what your host OS will be and install it. Then work out how you want to use it, what you want to containerise, what you want to run in VMs.

be prepared to knock it all over and start again. Everyone rebuilds their environment, usually after learning how they could do it better. And most of all, have fun!

I’m the admin of krabb.org, honestly I’m loving it. There is a learning curve, particularly for non-technical folks, but that will get easier as time goes on.

As an admin, it is far easier to “jump start” an empty Lemmy instance with content from other instances than it is to do with Mastodon and Pixelfed.

Where we need to improve is the mobile apps, documentation and providing ways to make it easier for small instances to get new users. These are all very much in the spotlight and improving every day (especially the apps), so I’m confident we can get there

Tldr: it good, do like

I hope it’s not inappropriate to comment this here, but if anyone’s looking for another space to join, I’m in the process of building Krab Borg. It would be lovely to have people to help fill it out and diversify the communities, as well as suggest what the local ones should look like as I have no idea.

I’m trying to balance not reinventing the wheel/duplicating existing communities 100 times but also still supporting the idea of decentralisation and creating some duplicates (though this isn’t hard and fast, I’m open to feedback).

I’ve seeded it with some communities from other servers (including a bunch from lemmy.ml) to get things moving a bit as well.