I run Debian on most of my systems and run all of my services in docker (with rare exceptions for node_exporter or stable core tools). My base systems get automatic security upgrades, and then I’ll manually check in every few weeks whenever I feel like it.

My services in docker are version locked to a specific major version (when there’s a tag available) so I can usually re-pull to get minor version updates freely without breaking issues. My few more finnickey services get manual upgrades from me every 6 months or so only.

I usually stick to an OS version for as long as I can, and to that aim I stick to LTS versions with long support windows.

4 major versions in 12mo is…a lot. Especially if those include breaking changes for you. Yikes

Many registrars let you buy a domain and set up dynamic DNS for it within their system so you can own a domain and get dyndns on it.

Otherwise you could accomplish it with a VPS but you’d only need the smallest one available because it would just need to run nginx to forward to your home ip (and a small tool to update that IP when it changes). So you could probably get something for less than $5/mo.

It really isnt bad. I do most of my computer at home so I really only need a small cloud box to pipe things through when needed.

And I could reduce the B2 price a lot with some deduping of my data, but that’s an ongoing and painfully slow process since I was too reckless with my local backups in the past, so $7 to avoid that process is worth it.

And for electric I suspect it’s pretty low. I’m running 3 raspberry pi, a 4 bay NAS, and one micro PC and I live in an area with pretty cheap electric already. I think my gaming machine probably takes more power in a few hours than the rest of the system does in a day.

I largely run raspberry pis so my electric costs are likely minimal (I’ve never calculated it). Besides that:

• PIA VPN: ~$4/mo

• Digital Ocean Droplet + Backup snapshots: $7/mo

• Domains: ~$25/year

• Backblaze B2 backups: $7/mo

How long are folks planning to wait before migrating to something new? I suspect this is still safe for at least a few months before things fall out of date, right?

Or I guess it allows wire guard to update freely so it’s probably safe until something specifically breaks.

Just be careful you don’t get their “smarthome” line, at least for cameras. It doesn’t require Internet to operate, but it requires Internet for configuration and management.

I’m not sure if that’s the same with their doorbells, but it was true of their wifi cameras.

I wonder if you could copy (or buy used) some crypto mining rigs for this. I’m not sure if there’s some kind of bottleneck im not aware of though.

That’s a shame. I didn’t realize it was that locked down. Ive had a lot of terrible routers but all the ones I remember allowed me at least a port forward.

I think OP can accomplish some of the same result if he can get a cheap VPS to connect through (have the laptop Wireguard to the VPS, then have a proxy on the VPS forward to the laptop over the VPN, but that’s probably not worth the hassle for a starter project unfortunately.

With a comment on the test detailing why it matters so people don’t just assume the test is out of date when it fails.

And ideally test the underlying result of x before y, not the fact that x is called before y.

And while we’re at it, assert in Y that X has been called, and again comment the reason for the preconditions.

With most consumer wifi networks you can usually enable port forwarding. That would let you access services from anywhere.

Personally I would set up a Wireguard VPN server on the laptop and enable port forwarding only for the Wireguard port. This will let you access your laptop from anywhere, and it will protect you by limiting your attack surface (basically you only need to have a device Wireguard connection and you don’t need to worry as much about securing every other service you want to run).

Then I’d set up dynamic DNS with any DNS provider so you don’t need to keep track of a changing IP.

Then you can install whatever services you want on the laptop and you’ll be able to access them from anywhere by connecting to the Wireguard VPN. It does mean you can’t easily let a friend access a service on your laptop, but the tradeoff is you don’t have to worry as much about security while you’re learning.

Code comments for "why"s that persist. Commits for why’s that are temporary.

If you need to run X before Y, add a comment. If you added X before why because it was easier, leave it in a commit

Don’t just summarize the content though, summarize the rationale or how things connect. I can read your diff myself to see what changed, I want to know the logical connections, the reason you did X and not Y, etc.

Or just say “stuff” and provide that context in the PR description separately, no need to overdo the commit log on a feature branch if you’re using squash merges from your PR.

“stuff”

Sourcetree is still best by far for history browsing, and I’ll die on that hill.

Personally I like to keep my data on a separate system because it helps me keep it stable and secure compared to my more “fun” servers.

That said, being able to run compute on the same server as storage removes a bit of hassle.

While you’re getting started, put anything effemeral in Docker and keep anything meant to be persistent on the host directly.

Docker is great, but the number of times I’ve accidentally blown away data before I learned what I was doing… Just give it some practice before you put anything out there that you can’t remake quickly.

I haven’t. I was hoping for something that could be standalone and not attached to a specific repo. But maybe this will work. I’ll look at it more.

This might be the best option honestly, though self hosted would be a bit better of course.

Thank you, I got tunnel vision to selfhosted options.

Does gitea let you have issues that do t belong to a specific project?

My smarthome isn’t backed by a git repo, and having a phantom placeholder project isn’t super appealing to me to force things to work. (though Ill take a look, may be worth the fuss, especially since I could use a gitea instance anyway…)

Same here. My only complaint was the slow adoption of hardware MFA tokens, and the limited DNSSEC support on some TLDs but that’s mostly resolved now.