• 3 Posts
  • 121 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Where I am there’s a smallish internet provider, Sonic, that advertises almost-too-good-to-be-true service. As a former subscriber…nope, it’s pretty much what they say it is. It was gigabit fiber and I could iperf to a university server and get 900Mbps+ (depending on time of day). Fast.com would say 1Gbps.

    My only complaint was that iirc the advertised price was for service, with an extra charge for router. BYO router meant you were charged slightly more for service (this is my recollection, not positive though).

    They are a pretty vocal net neutrality advocate, and from what the tech told me they offer “best effort” service, meaning while ATT fiber may support gigabit, they’ll throttle it and upcharge you for the extra speed; Sonic, afaik, didn’t do that. They now offer 10Gbps Internet for I think the same price as the gigabit, but I think you need to BYO network gear to take advantage of it.

    Unfortunately our new place doesn’t offer them, otherwise I would still be a subscriber.

    Point being…too good to be true usually is just that, but sometimes it’s not 🤷




  • I love my orange pi (5+, 16GB, 256GB eMMC, 2TB NVME). New, with case and eMMC (excluding NVME) was about $200.

    Smart switch says it idles at about 2.9W, transcoding 1080p with Jellyfin draws about 5W (at several hundred FPS with HW transcoding — so it presumably won’t draw that much for the entire duration of the media). Not sure how reliable smart switch is at those powers but I’m guessing it’s ballpark accurate.

    Works flawlessly for Immich of course.

    The duel 2.5G NICs are underutilized by me but kinda fun to have I guess.

    For me, idle power is important, so the ARM SBC route is pretty appealing. A new x64 NUC at same price might offer comparable performance I suppose, and something used could be beefier at the expense of more power usage. But to each their own!



  • Immich! It’s an amazing self hosted Google Photos replacement.

    Zigbee definitely fun with HomeAssistant. I have an SLZB-06M adapter which has PoE (important for me) and is a fairly “open” product (don’t need to jump through hoops to flash firmware). I read somewhere that it may offer Thread support at some point but wouldn’t count on that.



  • Not a lawyer; would this likely stand up in court? Obviously I wouldn’t risk it were I the dev, but just curious.

    It’s pathetic that I’ll happily recommend my Emporia Vue2 energy monitor to folks running HA — not because it works out of the box, but because the company is aware of the community integration projects and seems ok with it, even if they don’t actually support it. (ESPHome Firmware flash gives you local control — It’s been pretty great!)



  • As others have said, I’d play with routing/IP forwarding such that being VPN’d to one machine gives you access to everything — basically I would set it up as a “road warrior” VPN (but possibly split tunnel on the client [yes I know, WireGuard doesn’t have servers or clients but you know what I mean]).

    Alternately, I think you could do some reverse proxy magic such that everything goes through the WireGuard box — a.lan goes to service A, b.lan to service B, etc., but if you have non-http services this may be a little more cumbersome.






  • Does budget include storage? Tight budget without storage, even tighter with…

    If power usage not a concern then used x86/x64 gear is probably the way to go. Surplus gear (corporate, university…) possibly an option for you. That’s a very tight budget though, so I don’t think it really gives you the luxury of choosing specs unfortunately. That said: I might go fot the best bones/least RAM/storage if you think you might upgrade it down the road. 4GB RAM with an upgrade path to 32 is preferable to 8GB non-upgradable IMHO. Likewise, 500GB spinny disk with extra bays and an NVME slot is nicer than 500GB SSD with no upgrade path. Again… really tight budget so this may all be out of the question.

    I’m a fan of low power gear, so I’d recommend something like a Raspberry Pi 5 8GB, or another SBC (I just grabbed an Orange Pi 5 Plus and I like it so far — NVME, 16GB RAM, dual NIC). However these will be out of your budget, especially once you add case, power supply, and storage.

    Good luck!