I’ve used Seafile for years just for this. I haven’t ran that on pi, but on virtual machine it runs pretty smoothly and android client is pretty hassle free.

Think a large office space or industrial application with several hundred (or thousands) of hosts connected to the network. Some of them need to be isolated from the internet and/or rest of the network, some need only access to the internet, some need internet and local services and so on.

With that kind of setup you could just run separate cables and unmanaged switches for every different type of network you have and have the router manage where each of those can talk to. However, that would be pretty difficult to change or expand while being pretty expensive as you need a ton of hardware and cabling to do it. Instead you use VLANs which kinda-sorta split your single hardware switch into multiple virtual ones and you can still manage their access from a single router.

If you replace all the switches with routers they’re quite a bit more expensive and there’s not too many routers with 24 or 48 ports around. And additonally router configuration is more complex than just telling the switch that ‘ports 1-10 are on vlan id 5 and ports 15-20 are on id 8’. With dozens of switches that adds up pretty fast. And while you could run most routers as a switch you’ll just waste your money with that.

VLANs can be pretty useful in home environment too, but they’re mostly used in bigger environments.

I don’t know about homeassistant, but there’s plenty of open source software to interact with odb2 at least for linux. With some tinkering it should be possible to have bluetooth enabled odb2 adapter where you can dump even raw data out and feed it to some other system of your choise, homeassistant included.

If you want live data from the drive itself you of course need to have some kind of recording device with you (raspberry pi comes to mind) but if you’re happy just to log whatever is available when parking the car you could set up a computer with bluetooth nearby the parking spot on your yard and pull data from that. It may require that you keep the car powered on for a while after arrival to keep bus active, but some cars give at least some data via odb even when without the key being in ignition lock.

Most, but not all, do. So it might be as simple as setting a static address, or it may overlap in the future.

You could ask from ISP (or try it out yourself) if you can use some addresses outside of DHCP pool, my ISP router had /24 subnet with .0.1 as gateway but DHCP pool started from .0.101 so there would’ve been plenty of addresses to use. Mine had a ‘end user’ account too from wehere I could’ve changed LAN IP’s, SSID and other basic stuff, but I replaced the whole thing with my own.

If I remember correctly, 1000Base-T standard has a requirement that device has to negotiate pinout on the fly. No matter which pin is connected to which. Obvioiusly just randomly wiring a cable up has other problems, like signal-to-noise, but in theory it should work even if you make a cable that’s as unstandard as you can make it.

I’d first recommend that you think about what you need.

This is the absolutely correct option. I’ve set up way too many things without a use case and lost interest shortly after. If you have a real world use case for your project, even if it’s just for yourself, you’ll have the incentive to keep it going. If you’re just setting things up for the sake of it the hobby loses it’s appeal pretty quickly. Of course you’ll learn a thing or two on the way but without a real world use case the things you set up will either become a burden to keep up with or they’re eventually just deleted.

Personally, tinkering with things that are just removed after a while gave me skills which landed me on my current job, but it’s affected myself enough that I don’t enjoy setting things up just for the sake of it anymore. Of course time plays a part on this, I’ve been doing this long enough that when I started a basic LAMP server was a pretty neat thing to have around, so take this with a grain of oldtimer salt, but my experience is that setting up things that are actually useful on a long term is way more rewarding than spinning up something which gets deleted in a month and it’ll keep the spark going on for much longer.

Hashing is one-way encryption. So, while you’re techcnically correct that they’re not encrypted in the traditional sense (encryption is reversible), for many it’s easier to understand the concept of encryption instead of hashing and terms are often used interchangeable.

Logging depends on the instance. Many admins choose to not log any data which could be used to identify any individual, but verifying their claims (without a doubt) as a single user is pretty much impossible and there’s nothing stopping an instance admin of gathering all the data (s)he wants to.

Like are they protected or encrypted so the hackers can’t use them ?

Passwords are encrypted, but in case of a security breach on an instance they are still vulnerable, like with any other password leak. Majority of the systems today use one way encryption with their passwords, but still millions and millions of user accounts are leaked almost daily.

Also what is stoping the instance owners from abusing or selling these behind our back ?

Nothing.

or running a modded version of lemmy are they detectable ?

If done properly, no, you can’t detect them.

But that’s not any different from any of the services around the net. Companies like Meta and Google make their money by selling user data, advertisers track you and all the other things you’re most likely already aware of.

Administrator of my instance said that they don’t gather IP addresses or any other data they don’t need to keep the servers running and I trust them on that, but your mileage may vary. And then there’s different legal systems around the world where an admin might be forced to give out information about individual user, but where I live that’s not a thing.

Seafile. I’ve used it for years, but I’m moving over to nextcloud as I could use other features it provides. They have paid options too, but unless you need LDAP or something more sophisticated for user management the community edition works just fine.

I personally like mikrotik routers. They have all the features you could wish for and then some and they’re relatively cheap for the things they can do. I have RB4011iGS+ (I don’t think that exaxt model is available anymore) and it’s been rock solid. As I have fiber I just pulled the SPF-module from ISP’s box and plugged it in on my own hardware, so the router ISP provided is just gathering dust right now.

But it depends on what you’re really after. If you just need basic firewall/NAT/DHCP functionality and your connection speed is below 1Gbit pretty much any router will do. If you have fast connection and/or need for totally separate networks/VLAN/something else it’s a whole another matter.

have seen some people have networking issues with them.

I’ve been a happy customer for hetzner for almost a decade and I haven’t had any issues with their networking. If you’re running virtualization you need to take care of you MAC addresses or they won’t allow traffic and eventually will kick you off from their platform (and they have a good reason to do so). As long as you play by their rules on their hardware it’s rock solid, specially for the price.

I used to have old ThinkStation as a home server. Even older ones like S20 I have couple of laying around is still pretty capable system (I’m typing this on one) and as they’ve been CAD workstations and things like that when they were new many have 12+GB of RAM already. I got mine for free troguh a work contact, but they should be available via ebay or (preferably) your local version of it for pretty cheap.

Then you just need new drives and their prices have dropped too. 100€ is a bit of a stretch, but if you can get a whole computer from someone in the industry it should be possible. I have a few systems laying around I could get rid of for a case of beer or something, but shipping alone from here would eat up majority of your budget (if anyone is interested in x3550 m3 throw me a message, located in Finland, I might remember the model wrong but that’s roughly in the ballpark).

Other than thinkstations I’d say you’ll want a xeon CPU with at least 4 hyperthread cores, 16GB RAM and all the drives your budget has left. SSD for a boot drive(s) is nice to have, but spinning rust will get you there eventually.

Many rack mounted servers only accept SAS-drives which are a bit more expensive. Tower mounts generally use SATA so you can just throw in whatever you have laying around. The main concern is amount of RAM available. For older systems it might be a bit difficult to find suitable components, so more you have already in place the better. For VM server I think 16GB or above is fine for learning and it might be possible to shoehorn most of the stuff in even with 8GB. Performance will definetly take a hit with less RAM, but with that budget some compromises are necessary.

So, in short, with that budget it might be possible if you have a friend who has access to discarded workstations or happen to stumble in a good deal with local companies. It’ll require some compromises and/or actively hunting for parts and with old hardware there’s always possibility of failure so plan accordingly.

Archive.org has a copy too. And ‘a few’ more, with image downloads so you can run them on a emulator (or on a real hardware).

While I agree with @[email protected], this isn’t strictly speaking on-topic for this community, that kind of knee-jerk response is very much out of the topic as well. The first community rule is to be civil and in general I, perhaps optimistically, would like that conversation over fediverse in global would be civil, or at least well argumented, a bit like it used to be (more or less, YMMV) back in the usenet days.

And on the topic of self-hosting, that’s a line drawn in the water. I run various of things by myself (postfix+dovecot, LAMP, bitwarden, seafile, nextcloud…) on a rented servers running linux+kvm. And I get money by doing that, it’s a very much a business case, so I’m a bit reluctant to ask questions about the setup I have in here as I think it wouldn’t be fair to ask for advice from hobbyists in a project where money is directly involved. But for me personally that setup checks both sides of things. I get money by doing it, but at the same time I personally can get out of the walled gardens like M365 or Gsuite.

TL;DR: There’s no need to be rude, you can choose to politely point people in the right direction.

I do wonder about when VPNs started being used as proxies…

About at the same time operators at the US noticed that they could profit from profiling users behaviour. In here that’s very much illegal thing to do and most use cases for VPN is to connect yourself into corporate network. VPNs are of course useful to protect you from MITM attacks at open wifi networks and things like that, but hiding your behavior from your ISP is very much an US thing.

While I think you could techincally spoof your originating IP at the VPN server to match your clients IP it wouldn’t do anything useful. That’s not how IP routing works. What you’re trying to achieve with a setup like that?

Not necessarily. VPN can be used for that, but I’d be that more common use case is to access networks which are otherwise firewalled off from the public internet, like corporate LAN.

And if you’re concenred on data written on sectors since reallocated you should physically destroy the whole drive anyways. With SSDs this is even more complicated, but I like to keep it pretty simple. If the data which has been stored on the drive at any point of it’s life is under any kind of NDA or other higly valuable contract it’s getting physically destroyed. If the drive spent it’s life storing my family photos a single run of zeroes with dd is enough.

At the end the question is that if at any point the drive held bits of anything even remotely near a cost of a new drive. If it did it’s hammer time, if it didn’t, most likely just wiping the partition table is enough. I’ve given away old drives with just ‘dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=100M count=1’. On any system that appears as a blank drive and while it’s possible to recover the files from the drive it’s good enough for the donated drives. Everything else is either drilled trough multiple times or otherwise physically destroyed.

Dd. It writes on disk at a block level and doesn’t care if there’s any kind of filesystem or raid configuration in place, it just writes zeroes (or whatever you ask it to write) to drive and that’s it. Depending on how tight your tin foil hat is, you might want to write couple of runs from /dev/zero and from /dev/urandom to the disk before handing them over, but in general a single full run from /dev/zero to the device makes it pretty much impossible for any Joe Average to get anything out of it.

And if you’re concerned that some three-letter agency is interested of your data you can use DBAN which does pretty much the same than dd, but automates the process and (afaik) does some extra magic to completely erase all the data, but in general if you’re worried enough about that scenario then I’d suggest using an arc furnace and literally melting the drives into a exciting new alloy.

You can’t configure DNS server by name on anything, so you’d need some kind of script/automation to query current IP address of your pihole from google/your ddns provider/someone and update that on your parents router which can be a bit tricky or straight impossible depending on the hardware.

VPN would solve both 1 and 2 from your list as your pihole would be available with static address on both locations. You can’t authenticate on DNS server by MAC as you don’t receive originating MAC at all. Other solution would be to get a static IP address from some provider and tunnel traffic so that your pihole could be reached trough that static address.