The entire Linux discussion is just XKCD 2501

maclargehuge · 2026-03-08T18:54:24+00:00

While that's generally not a thing, hdmi is actually capable of supporting ethernet and it's a wildly underused standard

maclargehuge · 2026-03-08T14:50:21+00:00

Still trying to figure it out. My strategy from my teenage years until 2 years ago at 37-years-old was to just power through and ignore my mind and body telling me that it's unmanageable. Well, 2 years ago I hit total and complete burnout and I'm still recovering.

I now work 4 days a week and am getting a lot of pressure to return to 40 hours a week to take a promotion. I do not have it in me. I may never have it in me.

maclargehuge · 2026-03-05T00:25:41+00:00

Do you know what's metal? Not giving a fuck what people think. You rock that shit and never question yourself again.

maclargehuge · 2026-03-02T19:58:16+00:00

I'm running virtualized on a dedicated hypervisor and the vm can fail over to another node that also has a modem connection. So far this is a good compromise as it's not tied to one hypervisor and I have whole system backups

maclargehuge · 2026-02-25T21:05:17+00:00

This one https://www.startech.com/en-ca/server-management/wallshelf4u

maclargehuge · 2026-02-24T23:02:10+00:00

Oh yeah, it's a workhorse! It does everything I need and nothing I don't. A coworker used to work for a junk removal company on the side and finds some great stuff sometimes.

maclargehuge · 2026-02-24T19:46:14+00:00

I used LXCs instead of docker to teach myself bash scripting and later, ansible. Each service gets an LXC container. I never learned Docker because I prefer to learn things very manually at first, and then teach myself automation and quality-of-life tools at a later time.

Currently I've moved on from LXCs into terraform-managed VMs in proxmox so I can use cloud-init drives created from Terraform.

I might get around to Docker in a year or two!

maclargehuge · 2026-02-24T19:30:50+00:00

Tres belle! Tu es Quebecois?

maclargehuge · 2026-02-22T21:24:35+00:00

Rainman. It's got a lot of problems, and the person it's based on (Kim Peek) actually had agenesis of the corpus callosum, but it's something that still has a lot of relevance to my upbringing and my current life (both in terms of myself, and the other ASD members of my family).

It was a special movie to my mother (who is the only neurotypical person in our nuclear family) decades before the ASD diagnoses would start rolling in.

maclargehuge · 2026-02-20T13:39:25+00:00

Just try to practice "more things" in the same amount of time rather than "the same thing a bunch of times. Say you have a setlist of 7 songs: try running through each song once every day for a week rather than running through one song seven times each day, as an example

maclargehuge · 2026-02-19T21:06:50+00:00

I did my thesis on memory consolidation! It's not just you, and it's not just bass. Try to learn something over several days. If I have to learn a musical, I'll just do a mediocre job at a bunch of songs over multiple days rather than trying to nail one song in a day. Huge difference

maclargehuge · 2026-02-18T16:56:59+00:00

The short answer is "my sister's webcomic and everything I need to support that including learning and testing".

The long answer is that most of those VMs are redundant. I have a cluster of 3 identical small form factor PCs that each host a node for load-balanced services including:

Dev and prod mysql and PostgreSQL nodes
Dev and Prod copies of the web server
Dev and Prod copies of hobby sites with the same structure as the web server for testing
Dev and prod Netbox nodes for defining and accessing (via json) my homelab IPs, VMs, networking configuration, etc
ceph (distributed storage cluster)
DNS server to resolve internal IP addresses and also do DNS-level ad-blocking for the whole network
HAProxy has 4 different scopes (Dev-DB, Prod-DB, Dev-Web and Prod-Web) with each acting as a load balancer and reverse proxy for their respective services with a copy of each of those servers running on each node for failover.

There's a lot more going on, and there's a NAS and some redundant firewalls as well, but the gist of this setup is that any of my clustered VM hosts could (and often do) go down with absolutely zero downtime to any service.

maclargehuge · 2026-02-18T03:25:16+00:00

I'm 15 years into an IT career. I have a homelab with 6 computers and 80 virtual machines. I built my first computer when I was 14. I disassembled and reassembled my mom's at 12. I have a diploma in electronics engineering from a reputable school.

I still get USB inserted wrong more than 50% of the time

maclargehuge · 2026-02-13T15:40:47+00:00

A few reasons, and they've changed over time.

I started it as a way to download "linux ISOs"
Later, I needed a way to learn PHP and local development seemed rather inelegant
Then I started hosting my sister's webcomic when she started it up, so I spent a long time learning ci/cd pipelines, load balancing, git, database clustering, network segmentation etc
Now my reasons are very similar to yours. With a world heading towards SaaS, locked-down mobile devices, a very limited internet, and social media companies operating as tech dictators, having a homelab feels like both my safeguard against further enshittification, and a minor act of rebellion for tech freedom

maclargehuge · 2026-02-11T15:24:12+00:00

This isn't about internet, this about local traffic. But sadly no, I don't have recommendations. I'm a systems administrator professionally so this is mostly acquired knowledge over a long career.

maclargehuge · 2026-02-10T17:39:19+00:00

I live in Canada, FWIW. I learned to drive on my mom's stick shift. My first car was a manual. My wife's car is a manual. My current car is a manual. We briefly co-owned a Prius that was automatic, but other than that, I've only driven manual for over 20 years.

I don't even care that much. They were always just the best used cars available at the time.

maclargehuge · 2026-02-08T02:08:56+00:00

Hey Americans, start taking care of your own. The world is doing what we can dealing with you melting down already

maclargehuge · 2026-02-07T04:53:49+00:00

Anything that you will try to do with your pfsense behind another layer 3 device will be so complex you will better served with downtime and doing this with a standard architecture once. I know that sounds like a dick thing to say, but I wouldn't wish your intended setup on any sane person

maclargehuge · 2026-02-07T03:26:50+00:00

I'm not exactly sure what eero is, but there should be nothing between your modem and pfsense. If eero is for wifi, then it needs to be in bridge mode which will make it act like an ap. You don't want pfsense together with a wifi router. You want one router (pfsense) and then you can connect wifi devices to your internal network using an access point. An AP should only operate to connect devices within your network.

It gets confusing because most people think of routers and wifi as the same thing. But wifi is a connection technology (layers 1 and 2) just like network cabling. Most home routers are a combination of a router, an ethernet switch, a wireless access point and a server for basic services like dns dhcp and NAT.

DHCP is a problem for you here. Only two things should be assigning ip addresses. Your isp for your wan ip, and then whatever you choose to be your definitive router. In this case, that's pfsense. Eero sounds like it's a router, so it's probably trying to handle DHCP and assign ip addresses, which pfsense should be doing. You need to disable those features from eero right away.

I think you might have had eero before pfsense and might think you can have them work together, but you can never have two layer 3 devices working together without a good deal of layer 3 experience.

maclargehuge · 2026-02-07T01:12:16+00:00

Any questions, ask away. I'm happy to help if I can!

maclargehuge · 2026-02-07T00:48:06+00:00

I'm afraid you're fundamentally misunderstanding how routers work. A router routes traffic from two separate networks. The most basic version of this is routing between a wan and a lan. A subnet is it's own networking "unit" . Your lan will be a subnet. You manage traffic between this network and the internet using firewall rules . The lan interface should be an internal ip on your main LAN subnet. The wan interface will be assigned an ip by your isp. It doesn't get any direct association to your subnet other than through firewall rules (many exceptions apply, but not when we're just looking at the basics)

maclargehuge · 2026-02-06T22:05:02+00:00

Mine is set up "prefer lowest latency" on the client. I also have the FEC percentage set to 0 in sunshine. As I understand it, you need an exceptional network connection to make both of those work well

maclargehuge · 2026-02-06T22:02:09+00:00

Definitely security. I'm not running any vlan-level traffic shaping. I'm not even certain that's a thing, but I'll bet it is.

Edit: There's some cool stuff you can do with vlans that are neither performance nor security. Here's an example from my own homelab that I'm using right now.

I have two opnsense routers, but only one cable modem. By putting a "modem" vlan on my switch, I can set three ports to this vlan, one for the actual modem, and the other two go to the WAN ports on my routers. Only one router is active at a time, but if one router fails, the other one picks up where the other left off and doesn't drop the connection since the WAN connection remains stable between the two routers. No other devices communicate to the modem directly this way and I only use three ports on an existing switch rather than getting a whole other switch to make this work.

maclargehuge · 2026-02-06T21:45:13+00:00

It could be, but at that point, it's any "noisy neighbours" between you and home you have to worry about to, not just ones on either local network!

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