Redundancy. I have two independent firewalls, each separately routing traffic out through two totally independent multi-homed network connections (one cable, one DSL, please god somebody give me fiber someday) that both firewalls have access to. For awhile was thinking of replacing the DSL with starlink until Elon turned out to be such a pile of nazi garbage, so for now DSL remains the backup link.

To make things as transparent as possible, the firewalls manage their IPs with CARP. Obviously there’s no way to have a single public IP that ports itself magically from one ISP to another, but on the LAN side it works great and on the WAN side it at least smooths out a lot of possible failure scenarios. Some useful discussions of this setup are here.

You’re absolutely incorrect about IRC. Would you like to learn? Open IRC federation is basically never used anymore and the few networks that exist are very stable (if not completely calcified), but it is a core feature of the design, and in the old days, massive interconnected networks of IRC servers like EFnet and Undernet spanned the globe, there were even some servers that allowed open federation (EFnet is actually named for it – eris-free-net referring to the last server “eris” that supported free federation), and at some points Netsplits were a frustratingly daily occurrence. Like with any federation, abuse is the reason we can’t really have nice things anymore, but IRC absolutely supports federation. Not very well from a modern standpoint since it didn’t really keep up with the abuse arms race, but when it was first conceived it was way ahead of its time.

IRC and XMPP are infinitely less painful, honestly, and both were designed around federation from the ground up, long before it was cool.

I’ve always felt like this is an area with a huge gap. I’ve got my own fragile, cobbled-together bullshit that works for me, but it’s far from ideal or reliable if I’m being honest. I do love Ansible’s general idea of relying on standard, always-ish available protocols like ssh as a universal connection method, and I think it could work well as the bulletproof lower layer when you want to use direct control over the CLI tools and configuration files, like what git provides for anything requiring version control, but ansible needs a slick management interface like github/forgejo provides on top of git, to fill in the higher level UI for when you need a wider scope to get an overview of what’s going on or to make general configuration changes without needing to get your hands dirty. Ideally it would look a lot like Proxmox itself does, just, not specific to Proxmox. Like if I want to add my Steam Deck, and I’ve got ssh enabled on it and it’s not asleep, it should be able to ansible its way in there somehow to at least get whatever basic details it can. Maybe that’s only basic system information at first, but from there I could work on customizing it. That’s what I would consider the ideal, for me at least.

Yes, all three are supported configurations. Technically all four, since “I don’t know” is apparently a completely valid and functional configuration too.

Yeah but now they suck 30% more.

I’ll add a vote to all the people suggesting Yunohost. Yunohost is a perfect place to get your feet wet with basically no experience required. I’ve played with it myself and it does a good job of simplifying and holding your hand without oversimplifying or keeping you on a strict, tight leash. It even helps you deal with common newbie issues like dynamic IPs so you can become more reliably available on the internet, something that a lot of other guides just assume you’re going to have a static IP assigned by your ISP or VPS and handwave away the complexity of what you’ll have to do if you have a dynamic IP like most home connections. (Experienced self-hosters gradually discover that having access to a static IP somewhere, anywhere, makes life a lot easier, but don’t worry, you’ll get there too eventually, it’s not important when getting started)

You can get started by working your way through the process here.

The worst part is how much we’ve normalized getting lied to and gaslighted by companies, and we just accept it and expect it. We don’t even complain about it anymore. We’ve run out of motivation to protest it.

I’d recommend using conductive filament if you can or even just coating it with conductive paint before it touches anything electrically sensitive might do the trick. It doesn’t have to be a great conductor, just a tiny bit of conductivity will prevent any significant static charges from building up.

Ok that’s actually fucking funny.

Oh I highly doubt it’s anywhere near over yet. This may be the first bubble to pop but the frothing frenzy is still accelerating and with all the trillion dollar tech giants still attempting to boil the oceans with the massive resources they’re putting into this it’s not going to collapse anytime too soon, unfortunately. It will inevitably though, small comfort though that may be. As the saying goes, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, and the market is highly, highly irrational for AI right now.