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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Round here it’s all government run. The city runs power, water, sewer, phone, internet, trash/recycle/compost.

    We’ve got the second fastest internet in the country (and it’s free for low income people), our power gets an American Public Power Diamond rating for reliability, we’re (mostly) on track for being 100% renewable power by 2030, the city captures and liquifies the methane from the sewage treatment process and uses it to run the garbage trucks (that say “Powered by You” on them) and our rates for all of that are cheaper than commercial providers.

    Amazingly we still run into people who live here, know all that and still believe that the government is incapable of running anything well… it’s kind of startling.

    Still, that makes a bit more sense for why you have a generator and that then pretty much requires you have a UPS - so i get it.


  • Yeah that seems kinda crazy to me too. I’ve lived in my current house for 8 years and the only time the power has gone out was when a vehicle crashed into one of the distribution boxes by the road. Our power and internet come from the same provider so it was a double whammy for several hours.

    But I suppose it depends where you are - i worked at a place that had two independent power feeds from two different cities, massive UPSs to run the datacenter for 10 minutes and then two redundant diesel generators with several months of fuel on site. I still saw that go down twice in my time there.


  • Sure - but you’ve got to start somewhere. There are a lot of people who aren’t experienced sys admins who are buying raspberry pis or arduinos and they are probably really good candidates for self-hosting some of their services. I was surprised to find my neighbor (who’s a PM with a physical security system company) trying to do something with chatGPT, at first I was a little dismissive because i figured she was just typing prompts into the website, but in reality she was having issues with the python bindings and getting her virtual environments straight. If you can get to that point, you can surely self host stuff.

    I run git locally for some of my projects and that was trivial to set up - I think anyone who’s used github would have comparable skills to self host gogs or gitea.

    Certainly it’s somewhat expensive, but people spend a lot of cloud hosted services too. I’m sure in my house we’re dropping over $100/month on dropbox, chatgpt, google, adobe and probably a half-dozen smaller ones.



  • But the cool thing about open standards is that there’s a clear pathway to creating an everything app. Especially if decentralized ids gain some traction, then we could have an app that combines mastodon and pixelfed but presents the different posts in a sensible way.

    I can’t really wrap my head around what such an app could look like, but it’s much more feasible to build one than it would be with closed services. I’m hopeful that freedom to experiment without lockin will lead to some really neat ideas






  • If you want to keep it wired then you’ll need to put it on a separate VLAN from your other devices. A VLAN effectively allows you to create separate ethernet networks over the same physical network. We use them at work to keep factory hardware separate from office hardware and I use them at home to keep a vpn open for streaming geolocked content from another country. Traffic between the two VLANs has to be routed just like it would if they were separate physical networks.

    I have an Edgerouter POE which has a small built in switch and supports VLANs so I can easily dedicate a port on the switch to a particular VLAN. In my case I route that traffic through wireguard, but in your case all you really need is setting up NAT for internet access and not route it with your other VLAN.

    Any commercial grade routers support VLANs, i’ve seen it on unifi, aruba and fortigate and have never heard of it not being supported.

    As others have pointed out, if you have a switch between your TV and Router then that’ll need to be a managed switch that can trunk the vlan code back to the router, otherwise all the traffic will be comingled.

    Other thoughts:

    You might be able to arrange your IPs to sort of fake it. If your router is 192.168.1.1 and you make the TV be 192.168.1.2. Then you could give your TV a static IP configuration and tell it that it’s subnet mask is 255.255.255.252. Then it’d only consider the IPs 192.168.1.1-192.168.1.2 as being in it’s local network and if it tries to access something else on the LAN then it’ll send it to the router for forwarding.

    I’m not sure what your router would do in that situation, but it seems unlikely it’d manage to forward that packet. You’d have to avoid putting any device on 192.168.1.3 (as that’d be the routers broadcast address) but I think you could probably make that work. It’s not really secure (as anyone that compromises the TV could change the subnet) and it’d still be possible for devices on your network to send UDP packets (but not get replies from) the TV. It’s also not really extendable and you probably can’t get a second TV to work like that (and definitely not three), but it wouldn’t require switching to commercial routers.