I’ve used Seafile for years just for this. I haven’t ran that on pi, but on virtual machine it runs pretty smoothly and android client is pretty hassle free.

The command in question recursively changes file ownership to account “user” and group “user” for every file and folder in the system. With linux, where many processes are run as root and on various other accounts (like apache or www-data for web server, mysql for MySql database and so on) and after that command none of the services can access the files they need to function. And as the whole system is broken on a very fundamental level changing everything back would be a huge pain in the rear.

On this ubuntu system I’m using right now I have 53 separate user accounts for various things. Some are obsolete and not in use, but majority are used for something and 15 of them are in active use for different services. Different systems have a bit different numbers, but you’d basically need to track down all the millions of files on your computer and fix each of their permission by hand. It can be done, and if you have similar system to copy privileges from you could write a script to fix most of the things, but in vast majority of cases it’s easier to just wipe the drive and reinstall.

I don’t know about homeassistant, but there’s plenty of open source software to interact with odb2 at least for linux. With some tinkering it should be possible to have bluetooth enabled odb2 adapter where you can dump even raw data out and feed it to some other system of your choise, homeassistant included.

If you want live data from the drive itself you of course need to have some kind of recording device with you (raspberry pi comes to mind) but if you’re happy just to log whatever is available when parking the car you could set up a computer with bluetooth nearby the parking spot on your yard and pull data from that. It may require that you keep the car powered on for a while after arrival to keep bus active, but some cars give at least some data via odb even when without the key being in ignition lock.

Most, but not all, do. So it might be as simple as setting a static address, or it may overlap in the future.

You could ask from ISP (or try it out yourself) if you can use some addresses outside of DHCP pool, my ISP router had /24 subnet with .0.1 as gateway but DHCP pool started from .0.101 so there would’ve been plenty of addresses to use. Mine had a ‘end user’ account too from wehere I could’ve changed LAN IP’s, SSID and other basic stuff, but I replaced the whole thing with my own.

If I remember correctly, 1000Base-T standard has a requirement that device has to negotiate pinout on the fly. No matter which pin is connected to which. Obvioiusly just randomly wiring a cable up has other problems, like signal-to-noise, but in theory it should work even if you make a cable that’s as unstandard as you can make it.

I’d first recommend that you think about what you need.

This is the absolutely correct option. I’ve set up way too many things without a use case and lost interest shortly after. If you have a real world use case for your project, even if it’s just for yourself, you’ll have the incentive to keep it going. If you’re just setting things up for the sake of it the hobby loses it’s appeal pretty quickly. Of course you’ll learn a thing or two on the way but without a real world use case the things you set up will either become a burden to keep up with or they’re eventually just deleted.

Personally, tinkering with things that are just removed after a while gave me skills which landed me on my current job, but it’s affected myself enough that I don’t enjoy setting things up just for the sake of it anymore. Of course time plays a part on this, I’ve been doing this long enough that when I started a basic LAMP server was a pretty neat thing to have around, so take this with a grain of oldtimer salt, but my experience is that setting up things that are actually useful on a long term is way more rewarding than spinning up something which gets deleted in a month and it’ll keep the spark going on for much longer.

Seafile. I’ve used it for years, but I’m moving over to nextcloud as I could use other features it provides. They have paid options too, but unless you need LDAP or something more sophisticated for user management the community edition works just fine.

I personally like mikrotik routers. They have all the features you could wish for and then some and they’re relatively cheap for the things they can do. I have RB4011iGS+ (I don’t think that exaxt model is available anymore) and it’s been rock solid. As I have fiber I just pulled the SPF-module from ISP’s box and plugged it in on my own hardware, so the router ISP provided is just gathering dust right now.

But it depends on what you’re really after. If you just need basic firewall/NAT/DHCP functionality and your connection speed is below 1Gbit pretty much any router will do. If you have fast connection and/or need for totally separate networks/VLAN/something else it’s a whole another matter.

Generic answer for this is to get a refurbished corporate laptop. At least in here we have several companies which buy previously leased computers and give them a refurb (new hard drive, good cleaning, things like that) and sell them for pretty good price.

W, T or X series Thinkpads are pretty safe options, my T495 was 300€(ish) on sale. L and carbon are something I’d avoid, L (at least few years back) weren’t built as well as T-series and X1 carbon doesn’t have options to expand/swap out ram.

You can run rsyncd as a service on host you wish to back up and connect to that from your central point directly without ssh. Traffic is unencrypted and I wouldn’t trust on that over public network, but you can bind rsyncd to localhost and open a single ssh tunnel for each host (or even write a small script to keep tunnels open automatically) and then just run rsync over that. That’s how I backup my things, just with backuppc in the mix (I’ve got scripts to open/close ssh tunnels at backuppc configuration). VPN tunnels are also an option to encrypt traffic, but depending on your use case that might be a bit overkill.

Or if you’re not tied to rsync you could use something like BorgBackup or other tools which manage the whole jazz for you out of the box.

Firewall kinda-sorta plays with this idea, but all the tech is pretty stupid (and main focus, if memory serves, isn’t even in the technology). It’s not a bad movie as a hollywood 13-in-a-dozen action category, but it’s a far cry from “Server Down” we have here.

Bing Chat (so ChatGPT) wrote an opening scene (or maybe more like a trailer, prompt was opening scene) too:

The opening scene of “Server Down” begins with a shot of a high-tech skyscraper. The camera then zooms into the basement of the building, where we see Jack Bauer, a nerdy and obsessive system administrator, working on his servers. He is surrounded by racks of blinking machines, tangled cables, and humming fans. Jack is wearing a t-shirt with a witty tech joke printed on it, and he is sipping a cup of coffee from a “World’s Best Sysadmin” mug.

Suddenly, the lights flicker, and the servers go offline. Jack’s face turns pale, and he drops his coffee mug. He frantically tries to reboot the servers, but nothing works. He checks the network connections, the power supply, and the cooling system, but everything seems fine. He then realizes that the problem is not with his servers, but with the building’s infrastructure. He rushes to the security room, where he finds out that the building has been taken over by terrorists.

The camera then cuts to the terrorists, who are holding the employees hostage and demanding a ransom from the government. They have cut off all communication lines, disabled the security cameras, and planted a bomb in the building. They are confident that they can get away with their plan, but they didn’t count on one thing: Jack Bauer.

The scene ends with Jack staring at the security monitors, his eyes burning with determination. He knows that he has to act fast to save his servers, his colleagues, and himself. He takes a deep breath, puts on his backpack, and heads towards the ventilation ducts. The adventure begins!

And I don’t look even slightest like Humphrey Bogart no matter what kind of fedora I’d wear.

have seen some people have networking issues with them.

I’ve been a happy customer for hetzner for almost a decade and I haven’t had any issues with their networking. If you’re running virtualization you need to take care of you MAC addresses or they won’t allow traffic and eventually will kick you off from their platform (and they have a good reason to do so). As long as you play by their rules on their hardware it’s rock solid, specially for the price.

I used to have old ThinkStation as a home server. Even older ones like S20 I have couple of laying around is still pretty capable system (I’m typing this on one) and as they’ve been CAD workstations and things like that when they were new many have 12+GB of RAM already. I got mine for free troguh a work contact, but they should be available via ebay or (preferably) your local version of it for pretty cheap.

Then you just need new drives and their prices have dropped too. 100€ is a bit of a stretch, but if you can get a whole computer from someone in the industry it should be possible. I have a few systems laying around I could get rid of for a case of beer or something, but shipping alone from here would eat up majority of your budget (if anyone is interested in x3550 m3 throw me a message, located in Finland, I might remember the model wrong but that’s roughly in the ballpark).

Other than thinkstations I’d say you’ll want a xeon CPU with at least 4 hyperthread cores, 16GB RAM and all the drives your budget has left. SSD for a boot drive(s) is nice to have, but spinning rust will get you there eventually.

Many rack mounted servers only accept SAS-drives which are a bit more expensive. Tower mounts generally use SATA so you can just throw in whatever you have laying around. The main concern is amount of RAM available. For older systems it might be a bit difficult to find suitable components, so more you have already in place the better. For VM server I think 16GB or above is fine for learning and it might be possible to shoehorn most of the stuff in even with 8GB. Performance will definetly take a hit with less RAM, but with that budget some compromises are necessary.

So, in short, with that budget it might be possible if you have a friend who has access to discarded workstations or happen to stumble in a good deal with local companies. It’ll require some compromises and/or actively hunting for parts and with old hardware there’s always possibility of failure so plan accordingly.

Depends on whom you ask from. For me selfhosting is all about the software and renting hardware is a perfectly fine solution for that. You don’t need to worry about UPS’s, maintaining hardware and all the jazz which comes with your own gear. Sure, then you’re depending on your VPS provider that services actually stay up, but even a small VPS provider has more people working on things than just yourself. And they have power solutions, like industrial scale power solutions with generators, multiple connection points to the internet and things like that which are either impossible or very expensive to set up just for your own hardware.

And then there’s the other side, like home automation, where relying on internet connectivity to get your lights on is, in my opinion, a bit silly thing to do for yourself and running server for that locally makes perfect sense. So, right solution depends on your needs, but if you want to define what counts as self hosting in my opinion it boils down to who has the root/administrator credentials on your server. Other may have different opinions.

While I agree with @rglullis@communick.news, this isn’t strictly speaking on-topic for this community, that kind of knee-jerk response is very much out of the topic as well. The first community rule is to be civil and in general I, perhaps optimistically, would like that conversation over fediverse in global would be civil, or at least well argumented, a bit like it used to be (more or less, YMMV) back in the usenet days.

And on the topic of self-hosting, that’s a line drawn in the water. I run various of things by myself (postfix+dovecot, LAMP, bitwarden, seafile, nextcloud…) on a rented servers running linux+kvm. And I get money by doing that, it’s a very much a business case, so I’m a bit reluctant to ask questions about the setup I have in here as I think it wouldn’t be fair to ask for advice from hobbyists in a project where money is directly involved. But for me personally that setup checks both sides of things. I get money by doing it, but at the same time I personally can get out of the walled gardens like M365 or Gsuite.

TL;DR: There’s no need to be rude, you can choose to politely point people in the right direction.

Not spesifically a tool to put on a USB stick, but Ventoy is worth checking. I’ve had a bit mixed results with it on older hardware but when it works it’s pretty easy to manage your carry-on-tools.

I do wonder about when VPNs started being used as proxies…

About at the same time operators at the US noticed that they could profit from profiling users behaviour. In here that’s very much illegal thing to do and most use cases for VPN is to connect yourself into corporate network. VPNs are of course useful to protect you from MITM attacks at open wifi networks and things like that, but hiding your behavior from your ISP is very much an US thing.

While I think you could techincally spoof your originating IP at the VPN server to match your clients IP it wouldn’t do anything useful. That’s not how IP routing works. What you’re trying to achieve with a setup like that?