Mm I also got probes for WordPress a month or so ago, but after I switched from Cloudflare to Mythic Beasts. Have you switched off the setting that says Cloudflare will allow known AI bots to trawl your domains?

Aha, I disabled the LEDs by unplugging them from the motherboard, you could do the same with the power sw plugs

A lot of folk decry Cloudflare as a terrible corp (and their AI push now involves the login page shunted to the side while 70% of the screen is a relatively blank section with some sentence about using their AI), but what is the non-3rd party alternative? Does one rely on sharing the IP instead? It is impossible to have public (non-family) traffic without a Cloudflare/Google DNS resolver right?

Being on a standard ISP I cannot use a higher-level rDNS.

I’m more criminal. I protest government laws I don’t like, commit anti-gov acts when disrespected or dehumanised by said gov, and I vehemently oppose corporate exploitation to the point that, in political terminology, I “don’t recognise” their authority. More so, my penchant for privacy will likely be criminalised before the decade is out.

Ya my thighs thicc so they just won’t stay up

Nice that’s similar to my setup! As for a website hub yours looks neat, mine is plain as hell unless you’re a family member, thanks to Authelia – but making public info is on my todo list – I tried custom-building a website many years back and adapted that. (If anyone discovers security flaws please lmk, but I’m preeetty sure I did good)

Gonna share mine :3

• i3 6100 (2 cores, 4 threads), iGPU passthrough to a LibreELEC VM so I could finally replace the Google CCwGTV 4K*)
• 24GB of RAM (16GB+8GB, mobo is ITX so that’s it)
• RTX 3060 12GB (handles GPU-accelerated processing with GPU passthrough to Emby and LLM LXC’s)
• 256GB Samsung 850 Evo SATA SSD for everything but media
• SATA HDDs for media:

1. Shucked Barracuda Pro 10TB
2. Ironwolf Pro 20TB
3. Ironwolf Pro 24TB

• Proxmox 9.2.3, kernel 7.0.6-2 (not quite sure why it’s not using .14)

Once I can upgrade my 2017 flagship to a 2027 midrange I’ll be transferring the i7-7700K and the other half of the 2x16 RAM, and I’m in dire need of more storage so a 30TB Ironwolf is in my sights (but fuck, it’s 2x its pre AI-pocalypse price (aka Sep 2025).

Interesting, I figured people would use MySQL instead if possible.

Maybe they stopped needing a PC

Sorry for being broad, I refer to completely unnecessary and unused programs as bloat. Like the AI component and cloud connectivity in Windows’ Notepad, or the Start menu’s adware and the fact that it is an inefficient React app, or the big one, Internet Explorer. Last I checked in the files (which was 6 years ago now) that was still installed alongside Edge. On Linux, the easy to install-and-start distros are full of potential bloat - I mean software that was never asked for, and may not be wanted, such as LibreOffice Suite, NVidia proprietary graphics drivers, or the big one - a Desktop Environment that mimics Windows.

But circling back to AI, the fact that it is a “link to a cloud service” doesn’t take away it’s pointlessness, and using their models is far, far worse than using a local or even decentralised one.

I would be interested in a few other points, were they not absolutely untrue. For one, Linux was literally created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 on a budget, non-ECC 386 desktop PC. And Windows, or any software, cannot “fix” bit flips – but turning it off and on again can.

As for any potential actual issues, I recommend trying Linux again - but a maintained distro; avoid the distros which are heavy on the preinstalled apps, because like you say, a lot of the frequently recommended ones are “just works” distros with every app one might need; and format a storage drive to a Linux friendly filesystem. I mean, Windows’ NTFS usually runs fine in Linux, but ext4 or ZFS puts the system in a more level playing field.

Crikey. Yeah before I used Linux I had Windows, and I’m not a casual user. I know what I’m talking about… My first self-hosted services were on Windows: Emby and Home Assistant OS. With those two (VERY minimal) services, and of course Microsoft’s antivirus program MsMpEng.exe, as well as a pretty constant NTFS error scanner on my hard drive, the system would regularly run out of memory, have I/O delay and crash at least twice a week. The reason? Microsoft’s programs.

I switched to Proxmox, based on Linux with exclusively Linux containers and VMs, and now have near flawless (months-long) uptime, minimal resource and power usage… And I now have nearly 30 services full-time.

But I’m sure that user is referring to a PC experience, not a server. With which I can also disagree, on account of a very easy control over what is and isn’t installed, what does and doesn’t leave files and Registry settings after uninstalling, and what has the most freedom. Plus, I’d hazard, any current and maintained stock Linux distro has no issues whatsoever running VLC.

A lot of it is a genuine increase in package content (oi, oi), including extra tools to run 64bit programs, higher resolution textures, more features means more code, and as time goes on standards change and so do dependency requirements… Take Minecraft, V1.0.0 is (because you can still download it and yes it’s legal) ~50MB after asset downloads, and version 1.21.11 is ~1.2GB. The RAM increased in unison. That’s because of everything I mentioned before it.

But Windows is a different matter. I’d say probably more than half is bloat, but at least they let you choose to download some things like a hypervisor or IIS server tools. Copilot should’ve been a Windows Feature off by default. “Please, please put it behind a paywall!”

As it stands my Linux OS runs on <2GB and it’s not affected by the amount of programs I have installed… The only OS that’s sustainable on the RAM that Microsoft, Google and Apple are selling, is Linux.

Yeah I used to have a ROM game from a series called Galaxy of Games. And then Good Old Games (now gog.com) the game distributor. Maybe another GoG site, unless I’m remembering a Good Old Games mirror

The only thing I know about apparmour is that it breaks some permissions for a couple of my machines, and I have to disable them in the container config in order for the containers to boot

Sorry Ada – I was referring to myself! I originally lived on blåhaj but was banned for promoting violence against bigots and generally making hate-fuelled comments. It was not okay to be so extreme.

Why thank you aha! I never remember which a it goes above - I’m not too good with Swedish aha~

We see where you’re coming from, and also it is unhealthy to be extremely sensitive to every single hint of bigotry, from malicious or innocent sources, from your instance or others’. Take it from me - it destroys you to focus on the negative so much that you start to miss the positive.

I know you put so much effort into taking care of others, particularly transfolk (who don’t get themselves kicked out, like I did 😉) on blåhaj.zone. Remember to care for yourself also!

Edited the ° 😅

It’s a huge step in the right direction when a seller offers Linux preinstalled. Maybe the EU regulators can go after Microsoft, citing “anticompetitive actions”, for ensuring every manufacturer include Windows OS. That’ll open the gate for forcing options for the consumer

And Windows 10 Pro has more steps than Linux Mint. The argument has been moot for a while, but some folk need a little encouragement to unlearn what’s been parroted for decades.

Welcome to the club! It looks like the other recommended solutions have a UI for browsing as well, which is cool. As it is my ytdl-sub feeds into a library for Emby so I personally don’t need another UI, but it is tempting. Only issue I could see is the same one I had to fix: Some videos only had AV1 available, and support for AV1 encoding only begins at the very recent Intel Core Ultra and AMD 7040 CPUs. Without those even 720p playback is laggy af… I have an RTX 3060 at my disposal for HW transcoding but who knows if those YouTube archiver/players support it

Edit: Just did some research, it seems that the other services don’t have support for HW transcoding or multiple users. And they are much more resource-intensive than ytdl-sub + Emby

Somewhat accurate for me, but I dabbled with Ubuntu, Debian and Alpine for my server so idk if that counts, otherwise my first distro was Arch but the distro I recommend to everyone as their first is Mint+Cinnamon, especially if they’re used to Windows