I’ve acknowledged that, while convenient, my (small) setup is still a burden that I would be asking someone to take. If your friends don’t already share your passion or knowledge for Linux/Docker/the intricacies of <whatever you may be running>, I doubt they’d be willing to take on what you leave them.

My friends had a family member who had a giant setup of Raspberry Pi’s that did Pi-hole, Home Assistant, F@H, among many other services and machines (there were like 6 Pi s!). They passed some time ago, and there’s just no one in the family who was willing to take on the responsibility to learn how to manage everything that was going on—services have been slowly degrading/going down since then.

Those who rely on your services will just go back to using Google Drive, watch-anime-free.org.ru, and pressing “Open LAN world” in the Minecraft client. I don’t think it’s okay, but if you’re out of the game, you won’t be there to object.

That is to say, if you DO have friends that are knowing and willing, you need to leave plenty of good documentation. I haven’t been one to write much of anything, and I’ve already fucked up my shell profiles again because of no documentation, but I can give some general pointers:

• What runs where?
• Why are things configured in certain ways? (ie “$GameServer gets 4gb because going over creates GC stutters”, “$IP is blocked because of telemetry”, “$File is symlinked to /dev/null to effectively delete/override a rule from $SomewhereElse”)
• List rules and their exceptions. (ie “Service ports are numbered this way because it looks nice”, “Except $Port because it conflicts with $SystemService”)
• List things even if they’re from personal preference (ie “Service ports are numbered this way because it looks nice”, tells user that these are effectively meaningless and things shouldn’t break by changing these, barring common sense)

Basically, leave meaningful comments that explain why something is the way that it is. You should be able to use this documentation yourself as reference material. Keep this documentation updated regularly, as frequently quoted “bad documentation is worse than no documentation” (or something like that)

(sorry if this last section in particular doesn’t make much sense, I haven’t slept in $hours. feel free to ask for clarification!)

if your sister’s by your server in-person, maybe you could guide them to graphically install something like Rustdesk (edit: graphical remote access, wayland isn’t well supported so make sure it’s running over Xorg), give you the access code & have them manually accept the connection so you can get back in.

You’ll be stuck streaming your terminal window and sending laggy keystrokes though whatever connection you have now (until you can get ssh running), but it’s better than nothing.

Teams works for me as long as I’m not taking calls, just have to switch the user agent to pretend to be Chrome (but only sometimes)

I’ve never heard of AWT being incompatible with Wayland, I’d love to read more on that if you have any!

Office won’t run on Linux or through Wine (AFAIK), I’ve converted to using LibreOffice on both Linux and Windows, which has yet to give me any issues.

Teams, as part of O365, also doesn’t have a Linux app, however… with the (paid) Thunderbird addon Owl for Exchange, you can read+send Outlook emails; it also adds a Teams icon to your Thunderbird sidebar that acts as a link to the web client.

Thunderbird, by default, can only read from Exchange mailboxes, but can’t send from them. If you don’t want to pay, the developers are working to add full Exchange support as stock. (There are also less legitimate ways to get Exchange support, like cracking Owl, but out of respect for the addon dev, you’ll have to find it yourself)

Edit:

If you’re new to Linux as a whole, I’ve seen many recommendations for Mint (a Debian and Ubuntu derivative), but I’ve never tried it myself. I started with Debian since I wanted a stable system that wouldn’t break down by itself or something. It’s rock solid on my Framework 13 Ryzen.

As for a Desktop Environment (DE), you can’t go wrong with GNOME or KDE. I prefer KDE since I don’t like the “look” of GNOME and it’s more “Windows-like” (but still it’s own thing), but it’s really just personal preference.

*.c files are C source files, you can’t run these directly. Run the makefile with sudo make or sudo make install (assuming you have make installed) to build (or build and install) the driver.

edit: Oops didn’t read far enough into your post, you’ve already tried make. What error does it give you?

Big fan of running cat file.json | ConvertFrom-Json and just being able to do things quickly!

Decided to buy another drive instead of doing any more harm than I needed to, no worries

unfortunately I was, lol

I’ve already bought another drive to avoid this funky shuffling, so I should be fine now

What’s the advantage in btrfs over ext4? I’ve kept hearing about it since I started with Linux but the only advantage I can see with it is the snapshot rollback feature, which while useful looking, I don’t think would be something I would use

Yep, I’ve just ordered another 8tb to copy to and avoid the headache that could be a drive failure. And it’ll certainly be faster, gparted is still giving a 13 hour ETA for the first resize! Thanks for the help!

The docs say jellyfin-ffmpeg is only needed on Debian distros, like Debian itself or Ubuntu, other distros like Fedora should be able to use their respective ffmpeg packages. https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/installation/linux#ffmpeg-installation

Is there a reason you can’t have root on your VPS? Maybe you could ask to have Jellyfin and ffmpeg installed by an admin?

If your willing to try it, you could unpack the .deb file with dpkg -x and stick the resulting directory (directories?) in Jellyfin’s PATH, but I’ve never tried this myself and I don’t know how well this could work.

TLDR; No

It hasn’t been necessary in a long time, unless you’re a developer who frequently needs to type in filenames in everywhere (since the command line needs extra protection against spaces and other symbols)

The OS (Windows, Mac, Android, etc) handles thar all for you so you don’t have to worry about it (unless you happen to use a badly-written program that doesn’t understand spaces, but this is super rare to begin with, and more protected against as time goes on)

2013 is generous.

I don’t think sites can request attestation yet, for vpn ips it’s usually that the ip/ip block has shown “suspicious” behavior & got reported either manually or picked up by bot sensors.

(Now of course it’s also bad to let Google and friends be the arbitrator of good and bad IPs, famous for the destruction of truly self-hosted email (among other things))

Basically, the idea is that a server can refuse to serve you (or degrade your experience with captchas/heavier restrictions) unless you (your device) complete a “challenge”. This could be something like the browser (through a system API) checking some device details like

• root/admin
• unlocked bootloader
• extensions (either bad extensions or something like an Adblock)
• VPN (potentially “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear”)
• installed apps (Adblock via DNS like blokada,
• device emulation
• TPM (generate secure key to make sure device is “real”)
• OS state (heavily modified?, untrusted OS?)

etc. Basically making sure the “environment” is clean and not tampered with (trusted).

The problem is with what defines a “trusted” environment. It could start at just making sure the device isn’t rooted (like Android’s Safetynet/Play Integrity check; most people don’t root their device & don’t/won’t care, also easily justifiable since it can be a security vulnerability because the device is “wide open”).

Then, like the article mentions, the device makers (Google (phones, chromebooks), Microsoft (Windows, Xbox), Apple (macOS, iOS, visionOS, etc), Meta/Facebook (Oculus), etc) could change their terms for attestation and deny approval on stricter, potentially anti-consumer criteria such as device age (forcing you to buy more things).

Not always; I have a rooted+unlocked LG v60 with Universal Safetynet Fix 2.2.1 (2 y.o. version) and MagiskHide Props Config 6.1.2.137 from just as long ago and my Google Wallet works perfectly fine.

Not to defend musk, but it’s not from one specific font. The logo is just Unicode char 1D54F, a blackboard bold X/“MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL X”

I wouldn’t call it a “fiasco”, but they’re disabling port-forwarding for everyone on July 1st. They say it’s because people are hosting “unfavorable” content and it’s getting their IPs banned. Their article