Thanks, mate! I’ll take all I can get.

Yes, I did get the processor off of eBay for 75 bucks and the motherboard for 150. That I figured was a score and it shipped from Taiwan so it didn’t quite take forever to get here. The drives, case, RAM, and low-end GPU I got from the flea markets.

It’s a Proxmox server that’s well under subscribed and utilized. I currently use it as a remote back-up for my brother’s business computer and the family’s various machines. It has one Arch Linux VM for that purpose. Another Arch Linux VM has two docker containers for running Mastodon and Lemmy.

I want to do more with it but right now it’s time for me to buckle down and actually take some steps toward bettering my career because I am sick of being a senior Windows desktop support technician. I really want to do Linux/BSD systems administration or DevOps stuff. I hate feeling like I have to learn under the gun but, at this point, thinking about work on Monday is making me physically ill. The only relief will be knowing that there is an end to this tunnel.

A lot of the components I actually bought at computer swap meets/flea markets. Some vendors had corporate cast-off hard drives and all kinds of good deals.

Nice! I built my server with a brand new tower case and bunch of second hand components. It has a 2016-era Xeon E5-2690 with 128GB of ECC RAM and 12 TB of storage in a RAID z1 config. I built for less than 500 bucks.

Hey that’s a pretty good setup! It’s a lot better than mine! LOL.

You’ve got Pixelfed which is similar to Instagram.

Nextcloud works well for general files. Immich is the way to go specifically for photo storing. It’s got a whole lot of added features.

If your requirements don’t need federation, then look into nextcloud.

I have to admit I like the concept of rootless containers very much.

Thank you for the recommendation. I am checking it out now.

The only DDoS that I can half-way tolerate is ones that go against corporations/governments that do evil shit. And even then, those attacks had better not effect people’s health and welfare needs. Yes, assholes abound.

I would consider myself a very beginning docker user so I’ve a long way to go but I can see, given that I am a beginner, it might make sense to pivot now to Podman.

I hate assholes that do this. Why? I mean really why?

What about Void are you liking?

I have a Dell OptiPlex 7050 micro with 16GB of RAM and 256GB SSD. All it’s doing is running OpenBSD as my firewall and router. But it is doing some complex routing and traffic shaping and queueing. It’s also a VPN termination point for the WireGuard tunnel between my cloud VPS and home network. My cloud VPS is, in this case, a reverse proxy.

NGINX Proxy Manager makes things even easier! All you have to do is make certain that you have websockets enabled for the proxy settings to go to your Mastodon instance and don’t forward via SSL because NPM is your SSL termination point. On your Mastodon instance’s NGINX configuration, change the port to listen on port 80, comment out all of the SSL related options, and in the @proxy section change the proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme; to proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https; This is just telling Mastodon a small lie so it thinks the traffic is encrypted. This is necessary to prevent a redirection loop which will break things.

I get the appeal of the single board computer but it never held much interest for me. That could possibly be because my manual dexterity isn’t that good and I found the assembly side of the SBC to be daunting. I’ve been more interested in using the tiny form factor Dell Wyse and Lenovo micro machines.

It’s actually not hard to get Mastodon running behind an existing reverse proxy. It’s also not hard to run it in a docker container. I run mine in a docker container with no issues. When version 4.1.4 was released, I just ran a docker-compose pull, and voila, my instant was upgraded. I can share my configs with you if you want. What is your existing reverse proxy server?

Shout out to fellow Arch person!