When I first got licensed the solar cycle was utter trash

Wow…memories come flooding back.

The ionosphere depletion really made an impression on me as a young man. In conjunction with my ham radio, I used to point a telescope at the sun that had a special lens on it to keep you from burning a hole in your head. Then I would turn the eyepiece 180 deg, put a regular lens in and point it onto a white piece of cardboard. You could watch the solar flares and track them across the sun as very dark shadowy spots on the cardboard. When there weren’t a lot of solar flare activity, signals went farther on the bounce. In my memory it was probably the last time that we as a global community banded together to solve the issue of ionosphere depletion because of aerosols.

Many many nights of QSL CQ! CQ!. I still have a trunk full of old QSL cards. Do they still do that now days?

I used to be into Ham radio when I was a younger man. I took a course from NRI I saw in an old popular science mag. Built a 5 watt receiver and xmitter, code only. On a good night with good ionosphere coverage, I could bounce that 5 watts half way around the world. I would have never have imagined communication technologies as we enjoy today.

Precise Pangolin

Dude! I’ve been sitting here for about an hour trying to find an old 32 bit distro that will run on an old Dell Latitude laptop I have. Well guess what? Precise Pangolin works just like it should. Had to go download the torrent, but all is well. Thanks a bunch mate. You cut down my trial and error time by a bunch because I had a stack of them here to try.

It’s a reverse proxy, tunnel like Tailscale, with LetsEncrypt like Caddy, and a few other goodies all rolled into one.

So now I have an inventory (and pictures)

So it will import associated pictures of equipment with a pic of the serial number? Cool

but it’s so portable I have no idea where I left it!

LOL I can feel your pain. I have to force myself to put the tool back in its proper place when done, or I’ll never find it again for years. Put your toys back in the toybox.

LOL me too my brother. However, one thing I do use is Grocy for pantry and other inventory. Homebox seems to be in that inventory genre of apps. I’m somewhat of a prepper, but ‘prepping’ was very common in my generation along with Victory Gardens. I don’t do EOTW scenarios, but I do stock for social or political unrest and upheavals, weather related hazards or catastrophes, food shortages, etc. During the pandemic, I rarely wandered from my compound.

I have a UPC scanner that I scan all groceries and food stuffs into Grocy, and when I use the item, I scan it out. I’m the only one who is authorized to use it which gripes my lady friend when she comes to visit. LOL So, when I am doing my monthly shopping, I can pull up the app and check against the inventory to see if I need to pick up a couple 50 lb sacks of rice that are on sale.

I could see how Homebox would be useful in that you could take inventory of all your household items for perhaps insurance claims reasons. I take pictures of all such items along with their serial numbers and store them just for that purpose. I wonder if Homebox could import such data to securely store.

there’s no reasonable chance of my data ending up in the RIAA/MPAA’s hands

Well, I have had dealings with the RIAA back in the pre-Napster era when audio on the internet had not really come into it’s own and most people associated audio on the internet with GeoCities midis…pretty crappy stuff. I ran a fairly successful, fully liscensed, internet radio station with a company called the IM Radio Networks. They along with Phillips created one of the world’s first bookshelf stereos that could ‘tune in’ internet radio as well as AM/FM. Even went to Washington with others to plead our case before a hearing that included Senator Leahy. Yeah, the RIAA are a bunch of reactive assholes and have never been proactive since AM radio first crackled into people’s homes.

I used to give corporations more benefit of the doubt and think in balance

I’ve always figured that if it was offered for free on the internet, there were always going to be strings and at some point I’d have to do something different to achieve the same results I was looking for.

Crowdsec is a type of WAF you could say that covers a wide variety of attack scenarios and is fed by community input into the system as well. Very nice package imho. I use it.

Other than that, I’m watching this thread because I’ve been reading up on Pangolin and it seems to be quite an inclusive package and covers a lot of ground with just one install. It seems to be along the lines of a Caddy/Tailscale scenario, just in one complete go.

Ok I can understand awareness. This whole time I’ve been thinking, Plex started in 2008 and ‘Plex Hate’ followed about two years into it’s existence and has perpetuated itself for these 15 +/- years now. So I’m wondering, if during this time, anyone’s personal narrator went off in their head with something like:

Hey bro…you know we’re gonna have to dismount.

Awww maaan!

Yeah, I know it’s your little honey hole but we’re going to have to marry it if this keeps up.

Perhaps I misread the tone of the article.

I get all of that. I really do feel ya. However, I find it quite difficult to raise my ire over a free product (Tailscale) that I use in conjunction with my hobby, changing up their game and going IPO. I guess I do not take my network as seriously as others here do.

That’s cool. I don’t like spam either. You are correct in that you should have to opt in instead of opt out.

So, I don’t run the arr stack, or any of it’'s components. In fact, I’ve never even test run Plex. However, I hear that Emby is a better replacement coupled with Symfonium to take the place of PlexAmp. That seems to be the ‘next horse’ everyone is switching to, even tho Emby does seem to have some unresolved issues.

I just find the constant grind against profitability and capitalism to be a bit worn. I guess you could say I am fully ensconced in capitalism as I run three tax paying, for profit businesses. The issues I take with capitalism is unbridled, uncontrolled greed…when we place profit over principal. By all means tho, make yo’ paper son.

These are my opinions. There are many like them, but these ones are mine.

…and what are current Plex users, that don’t like the direction Plex has taken, doing ? Riding the next horse. When Tailscale gets unbearable with their business practices, there are a lot of other options. Tailscale is just easy and it flippin’ works.

Tailscale is a business seeking profit? (clutches pearls gasp)

Hmmm. I run PIA and Tailscale simultaneously on my devices. I did have to tinker around with the settings in PIA such as the VPN & Advanced Kill Switch. So, now Tailscale is for administrating remote servers, and PIA for everything else. DNS leak checks, etc all check out.

yellow flag to me (too many ad emails)

Weird. I’m not saying you’re lying, but besides the registration email, and onboarding welcome email, I can’t think of any others I’ve received from Tailscale. In fact, I just did a search of my email client, and those were the only ones I’ve received.

My commercial VPN has a VPN kill switch and an Advanced Kill switch in case the regular kill switch wasn’t enough…lol. Unchecking both of those allowed Tailscale to connect to my remote server for ssh/sftp/administration, while the commercial VPN covers everything else. The only thing I guess you need to keep in mind is to engage the Kill Switch when downloading your Linux ISOs. Do a leak test beforehand.

Just throwing this out there: Are you using a separate VPN for your PC? For instance, my PC has a commercial VPN and Tailscale. Talescale connects me to the remote server for ssh/sftp etc, while my VPN connects to everything else. I had to do some tinkering to get them to both work simultaneously. Without the tinkering, Tailscale would not connect to the server.

If you are just using Tailscale with no other VPN then disregard this, and take the advice form others here.

I use Backblaze personal/unlimited, and have for quite a while. A lot of the other storage options go by GB/price which is fine, but I have a ton of stuff that is irreplaceable such as my music collection of around 80k songs I converted out to flac, pictures, business docs, etc. I realize it’s not really in the selfhosted arena, but Backblaze works out for me. If you are backing up a lot of data, re-initializing multiple TB backups can be a chore. Backblaze has a program where you buy a 10 TB drive from them, they ship you your data, once transferred you can send the drive back for a full refund.