Mikelius

I’d say anyone wanting to go this deep into a home monitoring setup will likely go with what works best for them instead of reading and following the entirety of this guide… I’m one of those people…

Wrote my own log parsing software to put into a database, display and alert through grafana, which is alerting through a homemade webhook that sends a notification to ntfy based on severity… And I also use uptime Kuma like mentioned, but my notifications channel is ntfy. No cloudflare for my internal services, only wireguard to connect home and use everything. And definitely no telegram.

Plenty of other stuff setup, but my security alerts and monitoring rely heavily on the syslog/grafana server which helps me monitor everything.

Not an opinion, I have an actual situation with my eyes where they twitch uncontrollably when presented with bright lights for a long period of time. I have tried minimum screen brightness, lowered contrast/colors, auto brightness based on the environment, various software solutions to removing blue light 24/7 from the screen - none of it worked. Went permanently dark theme on everything, magically eyes haven’t twitched in years.

Light theme vs dark theme is not just a preference, it’s an actual accessibility need for some of us.

I converted my gaming machine into a server as well. I actually took the graphics card out as I couldn’t find a major use for it, but kept the 12 core Ryzen and upped it to 128gb memory. It now self host way too many things, including a few game servers my friends and I play… But even with all this, CPU carries along nicely and not even at half memory consumption (yet).

But as others have asked, what’s your goal? Don’t overkill it if you’re only hosting one service or something. If you’re doing a lot like I do, then up the RAM. And seriously consider whether the GPU is even useful or needed if you’re not using a desktop environment.

For a hardware response, my go to camera company is Amcrest, in case you’re looking for someone reliable and trustworthy (cameras don’t require dedicated apps or internet and work perfectly with a regular PoE to an unmanaged PoE switch)

I’ve had this issue many times as well. I’ve found changing the MTU would help since it seems some filter specific ranges. Doesn’t always work but I’ve had more success than failure doing so

As a Gentoo user, I can confirm I started from sticks and rocks. I’m now in the space age though because of the customizability and performance boosts, so image is a little dated.

Glad I looked at this thread. The fact they’re cheap and have what sound like reliable PoE hats… Tempted to replace a few old Pis lol. Maybe. But can at least say no future devices will be Pis at this point.

Note: only using them for simple things. Wireguard VPN (no I don’t have a fast internet so I don’t need more than the 1gb connection speed), pi hole, and a touch panel I installed that connects to home assistant on the wall.

Thanks for clarifying! Took a deeper look on my computer and I guess I learned that NoScript was misidentifying due to the cors or something. Just had to call it out before, as one can never be too careful these days :D

I use iperf3 with Speedtest’s servers, personally. But for a browser, yes JavaScript is needed… But needing JavaScript files from like 20 different domains is typically a red flag for me on any site.

My solution to this question a year or so ago was to take my gaming desktop, which was collecting dust after I moved to my gaming laptop, and gut it down to a 4U server rack case. Best decision I’ve ever made. 12 core Ryzen and 128gb memory. Got a 10g adapter in the pci express, 8xHDD for data and then 2 mirrored nvme for the OS itself. Only thing I kept out was the video card since I had no use for it (yet)

An equivalent “server” on the market would probably cost a fortune and cost you a ridiculous amount of electricity.

The NoScript list terrifies me a little though… Not sure what’s going on there, but that’s a lot of JavaScript lol.

I’ve had the opposite experience and was actually referring to this generation in my comment, specifically for the series X.

With Xbox 360 and even some Xbox one games, I was able to come home with the game and put it into the console knowing I could play it right away from the disc (or install for the Xbox one and play). When I buy a game now, referring to physical copies, I’m unable to play without requiring internet. I understand some games have limitations on disc size, but once upon a time, that’s where multi disc came in. Just the other day I forgot to unplug my console from the network to play a game and was hit by a firmware update request that I couldn’t say “later” to. Once that finally finished, I unplugged but I guess the console already got wiff of an update for the game I wanted to play and said I need to be connected to the internet to continue.

This is definitely not something I ran into with older generations, personally. That being said, it sounds like your experience was different, so I suppose mileage may vary

For me, it’s just that I don’t want to have to turn the console on with plans to play for 1 hour only to be introduced to mandatory forced updates or show installation times that eat that entire hour away anyway. I just want to play my damn games, not to mention 100% offline if I so choose to.

Lots of comments already mentioning the differences. I have tried these, including the mentioned ipfire, and decided on the end to use opnsense plus openwrt on two different devices.

I chose opnsense at the time many years ago because it supported wireguard out of the box, where as pfsense required some weird install process I didn’t want to deal with. Plus I liked the UI to opnsense more.

My moden has been literally replaced by my firewall so I have the ONT connected to it and then use it to do all the heavy lifting for… Well, firewall stuff. It connects to a VPN so my entire network routes through the VPN. Then my openwrt device is connected to that. It also handles firewall stuff, but more at an internal level (keeping network devices only permitted to communicate with devices I say are okay, blocking internet access, etc) and also hosts my nginx setup to route to various servers.

While I could do everything on one machine with opnsense, I’ve got a particular setup that allows me to have multiple devices at the firewall level, truly isolated from the rest of my internal network (for a couple of internet open port services). And it gives me peace of mind that if someone found a zero day in opnsense, I’m not totally screwed unless they also got one in openwrt.

To answer “which is better to begin with”, I personally find opnsense way more flexible and robust than the other 2 options. Has a lot more capabilities and upgrading is super easy without requiring jumping through weird hoops and such like openwrt does.

Unless it’s my cat. Got heavily filtered water and use it to fill 3 different fountain bowls in different parts of the house (none near the food source, but I did that because if they are, she’ll eat her food over them…) and the cat still demands I turn the sink on instead. Same exact water, and even though I change her water out almost every other day, the sink wins. Just glad she hasn’t figured out how to turn it on yet…

Funny enough the last fountain I got looks like a faucet and she’s like “nah I’m not stupid, turn the sink on.”

I’ll have to check out TrackerControl, that’s a new one to me!

I have seen app manager but currently use AppOps. I didn’t recommend AppOps above because I’m not sure it’s still supported or not, and it’s also not really Foss. It’s treated me well over the years, but I’m definitely interested in finding a better alternative. The last time I checked app manager, it wasn’t as good… But maybe that’s changed as it’s been several years now so I think I might be due for looking at it again!

My wireguard connection on my phone connects to my home network to an pi hosting my internal VPN… But the network is completely covered by a mullvad VPN through opnsense. I’ve got pihole setup using the mullvad anti-trackkng private DNS. With this setup, the only real need I have for root on my phone is because I do some pretty low level automation on it through crond and some backups of core app data that I’d really hate to lose… And the complex firewall rules lol.

This is where rooting the phone is required. I use wireguard without root and have AFWall granted with root at bootup so it doesn’t require acting as a VPN

1. AFWall+ firewall to allow list apps to internet using your preferred method (e.g. VPN, wifi, data, etc)
2. PcapDroid to help monitor and analyze packets, or to just confirm things aren’t communicating unexpectedly
3. AdAway if you’re not using your own dedicated dns over a permanent VPN connection

If not all 3 of these, AFWall is probably the best to go with. Having a way to not only block Apps, but also define your own custom firewall rules is very powerful. For example, I redirect all DNS requests to my own DNS with a custom rule (for apps, like Termux, using hardcoded DNS lookups instead of what the phone is set to)

I totally thought because of how long the equals looked, it was multiple equals characters, not just >>= lol. That’s what got me confused. Don’t think these are things I’d personally use but each to their own preferences right xD

What is that weird >>=== symbol? Looks like a cross breed between C and JavaScript here.