mbirth

If you want to learn about VLANs and spend some time setting everything up (and more time each time a new device joins your network) then you should go for it.

I for myself decided it’s not worth it for my little home network and instead just use a /16 net and group devices into different ranges. E.g. computers are xxx.xxx.1.yyy, phones are .2.yyy, etc. All unknown devices get a .99.yyy from the DHCP, so they are easily identified.

All public facing stuff is in some Docker container, so there’s at least a small hurdle should something/someone get access.

Cameras are mirrored into Apple HomeKit via Home Assistant, so I can use Apple Home to watch them from afar. Or VPN into my home network.

Just don’t use public and free services like GitHub or GitLab. Setup your own webspace with a trusty provider, install Gitea/Forgejo and host the code yourself. It’s that easy!

Does your provider not give you access to the webserver log files?

I’m using Zabbix to monitor the most important bits.

My geeky web hoster provides AWStats and GoAccess. Both work by analysing Apache logfiles, so no JavaScript needs to be injected to the pages. Should be more than sufficient to get easy page tracking. (And also catches those visitors that have JavaScript disabled or tracking stuff blocked.)

But at least I can tell non-technical people to download Element from the App stores and they will have a consistently-not-great-but-acceptable-and-improving experience.

Conversations on Android looks and feels like any other modern messenger and supports basically all the XMPP features there are. And I found Monal on iOS to be pretty usable as well, when I tested it 3 years ago.

I prefer RSS for this to not clutter my feed with these things and keep it "people-y" instead. For taking part in the discussion you need to head over to HN anyways. I'm using Leonid Shevtsov's Hacker News Frontpage Digest Feed as it shows the first paragraph of the linked website and the top 3 comments at a glance. Then I can decide to go the website or directly to the comments on HN.

And if you don't like this, there's also Hacker News RSS.

Haiku

ssmtp is also my go-to for this. Or dma (DragonFly Mail Agent) - if available - which provides a queue in case the delivery to the smarthost fails. But as it's not running as a daemon (saving resources), so you have to setup a regular cronjob to process the queued messages.

I've never noticed any issues or long delays. My Raspberrys come up either way. Might take a bit longer if the NAS isn't accessible - but they still come up. Only without the mounted shares, of course.

As an alternative, you could do the same using systemd.

Yep, pretty accurate.

NFS is fantastic from a practical standpoint.

Only if you don't care about the NAS'es file permission management and have the same uid on all your systems mounting the same shares via NFS. Not sure if it's different with other NAS implementations, but on my Synology DS415+ all files put on there via NFS get the UID from the source system. Which isn't the UID of my user on the Synology.

E.g. on my Raspberrys, my user usually is uid 1000 / gid 1000. But on my Synology, my user is uid 1026 / gid 100. So the integrated management tools (e.g. File Station) show mangled permissions as the user with uid 1000 is not known.

And the only real solution to this is to use a Kerberos server - which I think is a bit overkill in a 1 user environment. idmap doesn't really work on my NAS.