I'm curious what the benefits are of paying for SSL certificates vs using a free provider such as letsencrypt.

What exactly are you trusting a cert provider with and what are the security implications? What attack vectors do you open yourself up to when trusting a certificate authority with your websites' certificates?

In what way could it benefit security and/or privacy to utilize a paid service?

And finally, which paid SSL providers are considered trustworthy?

I know Digicert is a big player, but their prices are insane. Comodo seems like a good affordable option, but is it a trustworthy company?

For those of you that know, I'm trying to find a niche community, forum, chat room, whatever of individuals that could give me some pointers on cracking an OFX plugin. My knowledge ends at simple standalone exes and the communities I know of seem largely focused on game cracking.

If you know of a community that you think would help me on my journey, feel free to share. You can also send me a private message if you need to be discrete.

What do you recommend for an at-a-glance access log dashboard? Kibana and Grafana seem cool but overkill.

All I want is a dashboard that can ingest and parse syslogs from various services and neatly display a list of currently connected IPs and usernames if applicable as well as a IP connection history.

With the EOL of PVEv7 and my need for more storage space, I've decided to migrate my VMs to a larger set of drives.

I have PVE installed baremetal on a dell r720 RAID1 SSDs. I'm a bit nervous about the migration.

I plan on swapping the SSDs, installing PVE8 from scratch, then restoring VMs from backup.

Should I encounter an issue, am I able to swap the old RAID1 SSDs back in, or once I configure the new ones are the old drives done for? I'm managing RAID on a dell RAID controller.

I also have my data hard drives passed directly into a TrueNAS VM which supplies other VMs via NFS. Is there anything I should be concerned about when I've migrated, such as errors re-passing the data drives to the TrueNAS VM. Or should everything just work again?

Is there a master PVE config file I can download before swapping drives that I can reference when configuring the new PVE install?

I was listening to a Bazzell podcast where he mentions his company self hosting and maintaining a database of personal data and credentials for use in OSINT investigations. Some acquired through public sources but others acquired through leaks. Then of course there are data aggregate companies that do the same but are going on to sell this data for a profit.

What is the legality of this? Obviously acquiring publicly available data is legal, but how are these companies able to hold on to leaked usernames, passwords, and other confidential personal information. Especially those that were initially acquired through illegal means?

Is there something like Spotify Downloader or yt-dlp for Lidarr?

I got spotify playlists imported into Lidarr, but the artists I listen to don't seem to have any torrents.

I don't mind the quality hit of something like spotifydownloader which pulls from youtube. Is there anything like that or yt-dlp integrated into Lidarr for automated downloads?

I'll start by stating my threat model is avoiding corporate tracking, profiling, and analytics. For anything beyond that scope I believe tor is ideal.

Correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that Newpipe is a frontend to provide an alternative to the awful YouTube app and/or youtube account. However, your IP along with other device information may still be exposed to google servers. Any ideas as to what info beyond IP is sent to google?

Whereas invidious instances act as a proxy in addition to what is offered by Newpipe, but you are trusting your privacy to the instance owner.

My idea for utilizing these services is the following: Newpipe for managing subscription based YouTube viewing. Google would have my IP, but this IP would be a VPN IP address that periodically changes. Much more reliable than invidious and better quality. App is great.

Invidious for random video searches as well as content I may want to be slightly more cautious about associating with.

I'm looking for feedback on this conceptual setup. I've also been considering making a public invidious instance that I can use but hopefully obfuscates my viewing through its usage by others.

spotify-downloader is great. I already have an arr stack running for movie and shows. It would be cool to add music to the mix.

I have a shared spotify playlist with friends that I pretty much listen to exclusively as of late. What I'd like is to have an arr app that constantly pulls from that playlist and downloads via spotify-downloader, so that I can listen to those songs from my private server and then I don't need to have spotify open so much.

The ideal setup would be a system where songs are pulled from a spotify playlist, downloaded via spotify-downloader, but later once a higher quality version is discovered, downloads that and replaces the youtube quality initial version.

I can't be the first to think of this, so I'm hopeful something like this is already ready to deploy. Thoughts?

I recently acquired a pixel phone and set up gos. Prior to trying gos I was using an iPhone hardened as much as possible based off of recommendations and guides from respected OSINT experts.

It’s only been a week but I’ve found gos extremely frustrating and mostly useless except for web browsing.

I can’t seem to get my Yubikey to work so my 2FA is borked. Works fine on my iPhone.

I’ve previously managed to degoogle my life but now certain apps require me to use sandboxed google apps just to run.

I’m facing the nearly insurmountable task of convincing my friends, family, and colleagues to download and use signal when they are all using encrypted iMessage.

Most of my banking apps just simply do not work. Mobile banking is unfortunately something important that I need in my occupation. A part of the appeal of gos was being able to have an isolated dedicated profile for banking.

There’s also a few features that I’m assuming are iPhone exclusive that it really sucks to have without. Double tapping the bottom of the screen to shift everything down so you can reach the top of the screen with your finger when using one hand. Holding down on the space bar to move the text cursor between characters. Maybe these exist on gos though?

I understand most of the issues lay on the shoulders of the app developers. I’m grateful for the devs for creating and working on this project. I’m not bashing anyone here. I’m simply asking for some guidance on how I can break through the hurdles and make this work for me, from the mouth of those who were once in my position.

I’ve been using invidious for a few years. I recently changed up my morning routine and have been eating breakfast watching YouTube via the TV app versus on my PC.

It made me realize I kind of miss the recommended videos in some circumstances like when I just wanna veg out.

Are there any current viable yt front ends that either maintain the algorithm or utilize their own to find you new content?

If you have an outdoor Ethernet port—in my case with a WiFi AP connected—how can you go about protecting your network from somebody jacking in?

Is there a way to bind that port to only an approved device? I figured a firewall rule to only allow traffic to and from the WiFi AP IP address, but would that also prevent traffic from reaching any wireless clients connected to the AP?

Edit: For more context, my router is a Ubiquiti UDM and the AP is also Unifi AP

What is the general consensus on trusting data removal services with the data you provide them?

I’ve spent 5 years telling myself I’ll go through the long lists of data aggregators and one by one manually send removal requests. But it’s such a massive undertaking. I’d like to finally get it done through one of these services, but my gut tells me it feels wrong.

Has anybody used them and how do you feel about it? Is DeleteMe a good choice?

I have a Dell Poweredge r720xd in RAID10. I've had a couple of drives fail since I've bought it and was able to buy cheap replacements on ebay.

I had another drive fail recently and one of the spare ebay drives came up as "blocked". It put me out a few days while I waited for a new one to arrive; also from ebay.

I'd like to avoid getting another dud drive. Are there any reputable resellers of these old drives so I can stock up on some spares?

I’ve made a few posts in the past about my experimentation with connecting various devices and servers over a VPN (hub and spoke configuration) as well as my struggles adapting my setup towards a mesh network.

I recently decided to give a mesh setup another go. My service of choice is Nebula. Very easy to grasp the system and get it up and running.

My newest hurdle is now enabling access to the nebula network at the same time as being connected to my VPN service. At least on iOS, you cannot utilize a mesh network and a VPN simultaneously.

TLDR: Is it a bad or a brilliant idea to connect my iOS device to a nebula mesh network to access for example my security camera server, as well as route all traffic/web requests through another nebula host that has a VPN such as mullvad on it so I can use my phone over a VPN connection while still having access to my mesh network servers?

As the title says, I'm trying to multiboot Fedora 40 and Ubuntu 24. The documentation and guides for this all seems pretty outdated through my searching and troubleshooting.

I currently have ubuntu installed. My drive partition table looks like this:

• sda1 -- EFI (250MB)
• sda2 -- /boot (ext4, 2GB)
• sda3 -- empty (ext4, 2TB) <-- Fedora partition
• sda4 -- Ubuntu 24 (LUKS encrypted, 2TB)

I'm trying to install Fedora now and it's giving me nothing but errors. The most useful guide I found for this specific setup just has you adding sda3 as the installation path (mounted at /) for Fedora and it's supposed to figure out the EFI and boot, but that doesn't happen. In fact, the EFI and /boot partitions show up under an "Unknown" tab in the Fedora custom partition window of the installation. They should be under a tab such as "Ubuntu 24 LTS". Fedora isn't recognizing the ubuntu installation (because it's encrypted?)

Am I wrong in assuming that both OS's should be sharing the EFI and /boot partitions? Maybe that's the issue?

Anybody out there successfully dual booting Linux distros with both distros encrypted?

For years I’ve had a dream of building a rack mounted PC capable of splitting its resources to host multiple GPU intensive VMs:

• a few gaming VMs
• a VM for work that can run Davinci Resolve and Blender renders
• an LLM server
• a Stable Diffusion server
• media server

Just to name a few possibilities…

Everytime I’ve looked into it, it seemed like the technology just wasn’t there yet. I remember a few years ago Linus TT took a shot at it, but in the end suggested the technology (for non-commercial entities) just wasn’t in a comfortable spot yet.

So how far off are we? Obviously AI focused companies seem to make it work, but what possibilities exist for us self-hosters who might also want to run multiple displays in addition to the web gui LLM servers? And without forking out crazy money for GPU virtualization software licenses?

HACS has a problem with hitting the GitHub rate limit when you first install it. It’s not really that big of a deal. You usually just need to wait an hour for the local database to populate.

It used to be optional to link your GitHub to HACS to bypass the rate limiting but now it seems the installation requires it.

I’m not a fan of this as somebody who uses Homeassistant for its privacy values and am kind of frustrated HACS removed the ability to install without a GitHub API key.

Is there a manual way to override the API linking process?

Would this work or would I have problems:

Using dd command to backup an entire SSD containing dual boot Windows/Ubuntu partitions into an .iso file, with the intent to then dd that iso back onto the same size SSD in the case of a drive failure?

I’m solidly leaning towards a Schlage Connect Lock due to its local only Zwave capabilities (which has the benefit of also extending battery life). I was strongly considering the Aqara U100 for its many features, but based on what I’ve seen I can foresee it being a nightmare to get working locally with home assistant and the need for a phone app makes me fear for long term support.

I use the Schlage Encode for other houses and love the way it looks and how easy it is to setup and use. I really wish they would make a Zwave version with the same hardware.

So before I jump in and buy the Schlage Connect, is there anybody who has experience with either of the locks I’ve mentioned? Feel free to chime in if you have a different lock that you think beats out these.

I tried my hand at rigging a proximity sensor to the water meter in my house. Sadly it doesn’t have the spinning magnet for the sensor to pick up.

I looked into other options for pulling data from the meter, but for each method, my very antiquated meter had a complication that would prevent it from working.

TLDR: Any recommendations for a home water meter that’s local and integrates well with home assistant?

I’m going to check with my water company first, but likely will remove the old meter and replumb a new “smart” meter and an automated shut off valve into the water supply. I believe the current meter is leftover from before the utility added new meters further upstream, so I’d rather get rid of the rusty piece of junk anyway.