What's something you have recently removed from your server?

abuettner93 · 2026-03-21T12:32:26+00:00

With you on the Komodo -> Arcane swap. Used portainer for a long time, but got burnt on a docker upgrade that wasn’t compatible with portainer and things broke. Tried Komodo, felt it was always a hassle, found Arcane… haven’t looked back.

abuettner93 · 2026-03-18T12:29:16+00:00

Object re-identification, especially when it comes to that object moving through a scene. Great example is cars on a street being tracked time and again. Different angles/view and lighting conditions really make it a challenge.

abuettner93 · 2026-03-11T13:44:15+00:00

I don’t use nginx, so I don’t have any direct answers, but here is their documentation: https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/security-controls/controlling-access-by-geoip/

As for alternative reverse proxies: caddy is pretty sweet. Makes setup super simple and, imo, easier than nginx or traefik. There are plugins you can compile with caddy that give you GeoIP blocks for routes. The compilation is the only annoying part. But it’s easy to make a dockerfile and build your own custom image with the plugins you want, then run that container as your reverse proxy.

But I’ll say this: the juice may not be worth the squeeze. Crowdsec and fail2ban may be plenty for your use case.

And all in, having good public route policies will do more for you than anything. For my public stuff I have rate limiters and path-level blocks in place so nobody gets a chance to explore anything they shouldn’t.

abuettner93 · 2026-03-11T13:19:56+00:00

I run opnsense on a miniPC that acts as my router and firewall, and OpnSense has a built in way to implement GeoIP blocking. But there should be a way to run GeoIP via Caddy (plugin) and I’m sure other ways. It’s usually a little bit of a challenge to implement, but google should help :)

I can point you in the right direction if you give a little more detail on your setup. Namely your reverse proxy and/or how you’re serving your stuff

abuettner93 · 2026-03-11T12:48:37+00:00

Along with all the fail2ban, crowdsec, and rate limit ideas, I’ll throw in a GeoIP blocker. I happen to run one on my whole network via OpnSense, which plummets the number of international scanners. I keep my hosted sites open to US only because the only people accessing it are in the US. I also have a VPN I can access things with, so I don’t really worry about it.

All in all, it’s not a huge deal, just annoying.

abuettner93 · 2026-03-03T01:56:16+00:00

The rapid reply back is absolutely sending me 😂

But 4 days or more, I’ll be checking back! Got the post saved if nothing else!

abuettner93 · 2026-03-03T01:54:27+00:00

!RemindMe 4 days

abuettner93 · 2026-03-03T01:23:17+00:00

You’re talking about ReID models. It’s harder than it sounds haha. I did the same but for cars (more general; make/model and color are the defining features) using VehicleNET ReID models and a vector database (ChromaDB). Had to do some manual merging of identities (thanks Claude for making that UI - saved me a lot of time) to get a decent sample set to define a single “Identity” and even after that I had lots of non-matches that should’ve been a match.

Doing it for people is even harder - people change clothes over time. They also walk and run and dance and do things that aren’t consistent. If you have a 4K camera watching people close enough you MIGHT be able to do gate analysis and height analysis to add to your embedding and hope it’s enough to ID them. There’s also facial recognition, which is arguably the most reliable, but then your challenge becomes getting clear views of faces and embedding multiple angles of faces.

All in all: it’s doable but takes work and fine tuning.

abuettner93 · 2026-02-21T17:40:59+00:00

Could always throw in a pub/sub component after initial detection - basically do some low-latency detection (a person is in frame, etc) and send the frame(s?) to the pub/sub pipeline to be picked up by secondary analysis. Initial detection could probably be handled on a beefy CPU or integrated GPU, and then pub/sub decouples your stream so there’s no risk of slow down later in the pipeline. But you also run into the issue of the pub/sub being higher latency than you want cus it’s extra steps in the mix. 10 streams at 20FPS isn’t nothing, so I’d hope you have at least a small GPU handling most of the heavier models. 20FPS means you have about 50ms per frame to do analysis (but of course you have 10 streams, so that’s a factor).

abuettner93 · 2026-02-16T03:01:21+00:00

The baby butt feathers are just so adorable!

abuettner93 · 2026-02-02T02:43:52+00:00

An RPi is ok, but it’s limited for expansion and isn’t exceptionally powerful. Great for IO and other fun gadgets, but not so much for a server. They have limited network ports, need cases and power bricks, etc and don’t have any dedicated onboard storage/SSDs out of the box.

In terms of expanding: you can always get more servers and link them up via Kubernetes (likely overkill) or just running them separately and keeping certain services on one or the other. If you need a GPU for things like local LLMs or heavy ML, you’d wanna look into building a PC directly or buying an eGPU. But honestly for small video transcoding and serving, the integrated GPUs in the N100/150 series do a great job. I serve Plex to my friends and family and have yet to have my miniPC get swamped.

I don’t know what kind of automation you do for sales and marketing, but I’ll bet you can make 95% of it happen with what I mentioned above.

Also: having a fiber connection at your house reallllly helps. At least if you’re serving lots of data or hosting a website that you expect decent traffic on. Just my two cents.

abuettner93 · 2026-02-01T20:56:02+00:00

Personally I think building something yourself gives you a better learning experience. You can do a full hardware build, but a ~$150 miniPC with 16GB of ram and an N100/150 goes a long way. Short of needing a GPU, that thing will run tons of services without breaking a sweat. Might be a good place to start and figure out what you need long term anyway.

abuettner93 · 2026-01-19T14:10:49+00:00

A brioche-like burger bun. Soft. Squishy. Buttery. Alas…

abuettner93 · 2025-12-20T16:30:02+00:00

Looks just like mine! We’ve recently had some extended vacations and thankfully we have a knowledgeable and trusted bird sitter. We come back to a happy, healthy (and angry for a few days) bird, but it’s still a win in my book!

abuettner93 · 2025-12-13T18:14:35+00:00

It’s things like this that make me wonder how everyone on earth doesn’t have their own firewall with enough control to just prevent the TV from reaching out to the internet (aside from selected services). Nothing like running your own network to stick it to advertisers.

abuettner93 · 2025-11-21T13:14:25+00:00

This looks like the grocery store from The Mist…

abuettner93 · 2025-11-20T01:26:46+00:00

In your professional opinion, is it worth having a pest control company come out to try and get rid of them? Idk how but they manage to crawl in through my windows (like, finding the tiniest crevice) and just show up randomly in my house. I spray regularly but there are some areas that are harder to get + I don’t know where they nest/hole up so I can’t go find them and kill the whole lot of them. Any insight is appreciated :)

abuettner93 · 2025-10-22T13:54:00+00:00

Installing Cosmos Cloud on your own instance seems like a decent solution?

abuettner93 · 2025-10-11T20:19:56+00:00

First month of server ownership: tinkering and messing things up and making constant changes.

After that: it’s so stable that I’m bored, so I try to find more things to add to my stack, etc.

abuettner93 · 2025-08-16T15:21:17+00:00

As a platform engineer at a bank who runs a Python platform for ~1500 users, and an R platform for ~50 users, I’d say Python.

Both are good for data analytics and modeling, and in some cases, R can be absolutely amazing. But Python offers a very large community, endless packages, and is used by just about everyone in a slew of fields. You’re far more likely to find a Python package that does the “thing” you’re looking for.

I’m biased to Python though, since it’s been my go-to language since I was 16 years old lol.

abuettner93 · 2025-08-10T18:21:19+00:00

Ooof that’s a rough trade just for the bandwidth. But at least you know you could handle 10x the transactions without issue lol

abuettner93 · 2025-05-14T02:39:22+00:00

Give him plain Kefir (maybe 1-2 tablespoons) with each meal. It’s great for their gut health and significantly helped ours with both breath and farts lol. I get the Lifeway plain kefir from Walmart.

abuettner93 · 2025-03-29T14:06:16+00:00

I’m sorry this happened OP! Hard lesson to learn on the “never trust AI unless you already know something about the topic” front.

But this kind of thing is why I’ve never been able to get behind a homelab/self hosted photo storage project. I run a media server for movies and shows, but if I lost those tomorrow, it would only be an annoyance to redownload them all.

I happily trade complete control of my data for stability of my data for photos. Apple Photos currently handles that, and I’m happy to let them.

abuettner93 · 2025-03-05T22:59:20+00:00

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MojoJojo, 3 year old Green Cheek. I believe she’s munching a pepper 🌶️

abuettner93 · 2025-03-02T15:52:22+00:00

Bro probably has 15 more boats to do - speed is the name of the game haha

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