I use defined.net (managed Nebula) for my homelab and side project overlay networks, and it works great. They have a very generous free tier and I automate enrollment with a set of systemd units that I wrote. Configuration is very easy and the Nebula android app does what I need so I can access everything over my phone. A few friends use wg-easy to manage their wireguard setups, and they sing its praise.
I still use wireguard for simple point to point tunnels into my datacenter rack but anything important I use Nebula.
I got hit by the Minio admin change in the console when I upgraded my installation recently, and I found https://github.com/huncrys/minio-console which adds it all back in. It works as expected so far.
I find this kind of rug pull behavior so hostile I will be looking to replace Minio as soon as possible in my homelab. To be clear, I would pay for a license if the prices weren't impossible to afford as an invidual who uses Minio for non-business reasons.
Rug-pull is a good description of how I feel also.
And the most annoying thing for me is that I, like you, actually WOULD be happy to pay a REASONABLE price. But all the patterns nowadays are bi-modal. Stripped-down community edition to get open-source and community credit (and hopefully free coding contributions) on one end.And on the other end; enterprise pricing, with per-user or other complex pricing rules and restrictions. And only after "Let's talk" and "Contact sales" waste of time.
What about a reasonable, low recurring fee with no limits on what I can do with it if I self-host? Or a modest one time price for one version of the software? It doesn't cost the creator any more whether I have 2 users or 200 if I self-host.
I used to disagree a lot with Richard Stallman, but now when I ask AI to help search for software alternatives, I always specify "Only TRUE FOSS alternatives, with no enterprise option or paywalled features." Not because I don't want to pay a fair price, but to avoid being flogged AND the unnecessary complexity of setting up a damn equation to figure out how much it will cost.
Jason Donenfeld is listed as a Technical Advisor on https://tailscale.com/company. Most companies pay their advisors something, so I assume something monetary is going on here for him.
I just learned about ControlD today and It seems their $2/mo per endpoint is pretty pricey. Do you just set it on your home router and that's it? I use my NextDNS with many different profiles and many unique devices. Are the ControlD features that much better?
Edit: I totally missed they have a Personal tab at the top that has different pricing. It is still more expensive for their full control plan.
NextDNS is very much alive, although progress is measured and calm¹ as compared to Control D. But it's also been rock-solid for me for years, where Control D seems to be less so².
This is a pretty decent write up. One thing that comes to mind is why would you write your own internal tooling for managing a rack when Netbox exists? Netbox is fantastic and I wish I had this back in the mid 2000s when I was managing 50+ racks.
we evaluated a lot of commercial and oss offerings before we decided do go build it ourselves - we still have a deploy of netbox somewhere. But our custom tool (Railyard) works so well because it integrates deeply into the our full software, hardware and orchestration stack. The problem with the OSS stuff is that it's almost too generic - you shape the problem to fit its data model vs. solve the problem. We're likely going to fold our tool into Railway itself eventually - want to go on-prem; button click hardware design, commission, deploy and devex. Sorta like what Oxide is doing, but approaching the problem from the opposite side.
Note how they want to be "NetBox functions as the source of truth for your network infrastructure."
Your individual situation dictates what is important, but had netbox targeted being a central repository vs insisting on not allow other systems to be truthful for certain items it could be a different story.
We have learned that trying to centralize complexity and control doesn't work, heck we knew that almost immediately after the Clinger Cohen Act passed and even ITIL and TOGAF fully call this out now and I expect this to be targeted by consultants over the next few years.
You need a central constant way to find state, to remove any questions or doubt regarding where to find the authoritative information, but generally if you aspire to scale and grow or adapt to new changes you really need to avoid having some centralized, god-box, and prescriptive system like this.
It is not that difficult to build it into your app, if you're already storing information about hosts, networking etc. All you're really doing is expanding the scope, netbox is a fine starting point if you're willing to start there and build your systems around it, but if you've already got a system (or you need to do anything that doesn't fit netbox logic) you're probably better off just extending it.
In this case railway will need to care about a lot of extra information beyond just racks, IP addresses and physical servers.
correct; I think the first version of our tool sprung up in the space of a couple of weekends. It wasn't planned, my colleague Pierre who wrote it just had a lot of fun building it.
There's a fork called nautobot that tries to add-in automation. Most things we wanted to do with either meant we had to go writing django plugins and trying to interface with their APIs (and fight with the libs). Overall just hammering together a small custom service ended up being way faster/simpler.
Netbox is crap unless you are trying to manage a small but very heterogeneous environment. For anything big, very homogeneous etc you really don't want it.
It feels more like an OSS tool for managing university campus scale infra, which is completely fine if that is the problem you have but for commercial scale infrastructure unfortunately there isn't a good OOTB DCIM option right now.
Hah, my gist from 2022 is on this post as a "broken guide". I'd disagree in saying it is broken. It works just fine and I flat out say at the top to not use it if you are worried about a cold boot attack on your hardware.
I have a rack in a datacenter with mostly 5 year old Supermicro servers. We bought them all off of Ebay for no more than $400 each. They work great and we have more compute and bandwidth for our workloads for less than $1000 a month. If we used one of the could providers it would be many thousands of dollars per month. I understand not everyone has the skills to run their own rack but the value of doing so is totally worth it.
I imagine with Linux this might be less of an issue than Windows, but at least with Windows you see that Dell etc stop supporting newer Windows Server versions on older servers.
Regardless, security issues in out of band management systems might also not get patched.
That depend on context. Is it your own rack in your own data center or rented space in someone else data center? A rack in a AC cooled office room? What uptime is required? What redundancy is required? What are the network requirements? Any environmental concerns (power loss, flooding, extreme heat overpowering the ac, travel distance for personal)? How do you want to manage personal during night/weekends/holidays? What is the distance to shops that has spare parts? Access to backup power?
Most of it can be fairly simple to solve or risk manage if the company is small, people are flexible, and the uptime requirements are not that strict or there is sufficient backup solutions. If its just owning your own rack in a rented space in a data center then the difference is fairly minor, as well as the cost savings.
Agreed! And there's this space in the middle there...Because at the dayjob/enterprise side of things there's the concepts of hypervisor vendors, CoLos (co-locating servers in data centers), and full-blown enterprise on-premise...and of course other end of spectrum is homelabbing/that is self-hosting stuff at home either on consumer or old server grade computers...but what if i want to have a single server for my own self-hosting use but in a tiny data center/colo, but which is not outlandish, and i would maintain it myself? I dont know what we'd call that space: mini-CoLo, or self-data centering, or remote-homelabbing? but, i'm sure there's a gap in knowledge there, and would be great to learn more. :-)
The big question I have is how well does it work on Linux. I'd assume pretty well considering all of their work on making gaming on Linux a great experience, but if I stream on Discord my FPS tanks hard with an NVIDIA card and X11. I look forward to seeing how well does in comparison.
May very well be a Discord issue as I have never had problems with either OBS or ffmpeg(1) for RTMP even on modest hardware when streaming on X11 and Linux with both NVIDIA and AMD cards.
One of the frustrating things is the native Linux Discord's lack of ability to stream audio from the program you're currently streaming.
The only way I've gotten it to work is to run a wrapper around the web version of Discord that does some funny things with audio streams to get something that works about 75% of the time (which is 3/4 more times than I worked before, progress!).
I notice that my CPU and GPU get hit much harder than in Windows when I do that.
Pretty poorly unfortunately. You're better off using OBS on linux to record your gaming sessions. Same as how you're better off using sunshine/moonlight to remote stream instead of their remote play feature.
In my experience only NVENC is supported by most video recording tools, and if you are on AMD, it's using the CPU, thus slowing everything to a crawl.
AMD should be using VA-API but it's not a very good system as it fails or breaks if you look at it the wrong way. I use a tool to stream my desktop to my TV (sunshine) which uses it, and every month VA-API fails with a new error so it has to resort to CPU encoding.
This looks exactly what I have been looking for to put outside of my home office to keep my family from interrupting me during work meetings. Thanks for sharing it!
The “Live on air!” sign that triggers with Zoom (or Slack) is a very common usecase.
I wonder why it’s not better addressed. It needs to 1. be out of the office, on the door, 2. therefore bluetooth, 3. always on, and 4. it’s simple on/off light!
I still use wireguard for simple point to point tunnels into my datacenter rack but anything important I use Nebula.
https://github.com/quickvm/defined-systemd-units