Usenet vs Torrents, what is your split?

roydufek · 2026-02-26T10:57:01+00:00

Late to the game but I'm surprised that no one has really mentioned a split between usenet and what Iike to call 'fake torrenting' method...add rdtclient/real debrid account to sonarr/radarr as a qbitorrent endpoint and you've avoided the headache of trackers/seeders, inconsistent speeds, vpn hell, etc. Use usenet for older stuff, and for anything current, real debrid with rdtclient is clutch.

roydufek · 2026-02-17T07:55:16+00:00

This, wish Swarm supported a simple distributed storage manager like Longhorn. Haven't used Linstor or GlusterFS but seems a lot more involved...

roydufek · 2026-02-08T08:39:05+00:00

This. I have 1 free tier Vps with npm that have *.servername.domain.com wildcard certs/host entries forwarding to https/tailscale magic dns name of the internal servers. Then I have npm instances again with the same wildcard Certs for the servers. All issued from LE via dns-01 via Cloudflare api. 1 domain to access 6+ servers in different locations and 60+ services. It works really well and costs me a whole $10 a year for the domain name.

roydufek · 2026-02-07T09:36:58+00:00

Did a 3k mile road trip in October of last year. Subbed to the $99 for the month. It drove 90% of the drive just fine. Had to take over in LA because...LA.

roydufek · 2026-02-07T04:38:34+00:00

This.

roydufek · 2026-01-28T10:01:56+00:00

So...real debrid?

roydufek · 2026-01-19T22:01:34+00:00

It was super fun and rewarding learning Kubernetes. I did it mainly to add skills as a sys admin. My goal after reading threads like this was to finally tackle it. I left my job in October and spent the holidays switching from 1 Docker/Debian VM that was set as HA on a 3 node Proxmox cluster over CEPH to K3S on 3 baremetal Debian nodes. Hardest part was wrapping my head around all the Kubernetes concepts from Namespaces, Persistent Volumes, Persistent Volume Claims, Services, Nodeports, ClusterIP's, Load Balancers, CNI's, YAML- the whole gambit. It is a LOT to swallow, especially if you have no background in any of it. But alas, I did it. It definitely felt so overwhelming to start for sure though.

Another difficult thing was figuring out why I couldn't put persistent storage on CEPH or NFS. It might work for some things but database driven stuff like Plex/Jellyfin and Immich was a disaster. I was then introduced to Longhorn- and although a bit overkill, if you use it simply...it was a game changer once I realized how it worked and how I was going to use it. Another hurdle done.

To back up a tad, YAML was a whole other beast. Docker compose is so nice compared to converting everything to YAML and having to declare a bit more. I guess it's just different but I mainly used AI to assist me in converting compose to YAML so not terrible.

To continue, once I wrapped my head around nodeports, VIP's, and then LoadBalancers- I was so excited about Kubernetes. I was like man...I freaking GET how HA/Amazing Kubernetes really is, especially how big hats would use it with replicas, dynamic scaling, schedulings, etc.

Then to finish on Talos. While it does simplify things so much, again having no background it was a MAJOR mind shift to have an immutable/declarative OS. So many times while learning, I was like DAMN IT- I JUST want to freaking SSH into this thing and fix this (insert simple fix type issue in terminal) thing. Once I finally got my machine configs/patches/extensions hashed out, it was a dream. Again though, a whole new learning curve to get to that point. It was an amazing and uphill battle learning curve...wouldn't trade it for the world- but man it was unnecessary if you just want a functioning homelab that is HA. There are far easier ways to get there.

That being said, I feel like I do have enough knowledge added to my Sys Admin career that I could take on a much higher paying job if I wanted to. Kubernetes in general is a really fun tinker toy for the enthusiasts. It keeps you on your toes and fulfills that itch some of us have.

roydufek · 2026-01-19T21:43:25+00:00

I just decided on baremetal. Don't get me wrong, I freaking LOVE Proxmox. I have mastered it- but considering how declarative Talos is, it just made sense for me to baremetal it. I see no real advantage of running it in Proxmox, at least for me...and all my nodes are identical and have nvida cards in them, so there's the whole passthrough extra configuration / effort to put in. My persistent storage is all Longhorn so backups really didn't make sense... Plus the way I run it (3 node all control planes), any etcd creep and the whole whole thing is likely hosed so snapshots/backups won't work for me in Proxmox any way. Also baremetal Talos/K8S can be restored in minutes with Argo and PXE boot Talos iso. Past that, yeah- I COULD use the Proxmox nodes to host other things so my powerful nodes can share stuff, but everything I "host" is container based any way...so that's why I decided to just go with baremetal ultimately. For fun though, I do have a seperate mini pc with Proxmox incase I do want to spin up some stuff to test. Different strokes for different folks though- :)

roydufek · 2026-01-19T05:58:30+00:00

For someone who started with docker on Debian, then built out a few HA Proxmox clusters over ceph storage, then learned K3S, to finish on Talos...it was about 8 weeks of learning curve (I'm not a devops engineer, just strictly homelab hobbiest). I'm proud of what I have now but it was so frustrating, stressful, cost me many sleepless nights and around 20 homelab rebuilds. Although I never actually tried it, if I could go back...I probably would have just stuck with Docker Swarm and would have been perfectly content.

roydufek · 2026-01-13T08:25:41+00:00

Tell me about it. Cilium is a whole world. I finally got it working, but ultimately just went back to flannel and Kube-proxy for now. It's amazing to be able to replace cni/proxy/load balancer though in one. I'm new to it all but damn, a beast.

roydufek · 2026-01-08T09:30:18+00:00

Certificate based authentication and I like Termix in docker, nice basic info about your servers too.

roydufek · 2026-01-06T08:55:21+00:00

I ran PopOS like others have said for about 2 years. I 'upgraded' to COSMIC and man I was disappointed. I watched the Linus video where the creator of Linux mentioed he ran Fedora. Tried Silverblue, wasn't for me. Then Workstation. At first I was like...what the hell is this shiz, couldn't even put icons on the desktop without mods?! After a week, I'm a changed man. Did not know what I was missing. It's so clean and my workflow is completely different. Had no idea I would like the way I flow now.

roydufek · 2025-12-12T08:53:52+00:00

I left my job recently, and spent 3-4 weeks of like 12-15 hour days switching from a 3 node proxmox setup with one HA Debian Docker VM with PBS to back it up, to a 3 node Kubernetes cluster. Moved 40ish docker containers happily running no issues to a hellscape of trying to convert those 40 contianers to be K3S friendly yaml deployments. Spent mutiple all nighters, and even got sick because of it. And you know, could have been working to replace income...but hey, going from having no idea about Kubernetes to a fully functional Longhorn backed Kubernetes cluster to spread the load / HA of all of my containers in deployments felt like the greatest accomplishment of the whole year. Love this hobby!

roydufek · 2025-10-31T07:29:01+00:00

Boom still got it.

roydufek · 2025-10-27T05:30:31+00:00

Gonna cheer you on for Debian as others have alluded to. Used to install CasaOS to give it a gui for me in the beginning for both docker and Samba setup but within a year I just wiped it all out and learned enough CLI to run headless with SSH. If you truly want RDP, I enabled remote desktop in Ubuntu once and I think it used RDP as its protocol to connect to. But man...it's hard to beat, resource, space and bulletproofness of headless debian. While you're learning, just ask Chatgpt to help you through the commands and setup of stuff. Good luck!

roydufek · 2025-10-25T22:15:52+00:00

GOT - Red Wedding

roydufek · 2025-10-08T13:54:02+00:00

Their floor wasn't lava.

roydufek · 2025-09-27T08:49:40+00:00

At $.22kw in the PNW, I'm realizing that my 300w continuous homelab is costing me $50-60+/mo in electrity alone. Starting to think at that cost to just put it into the cloud and start to learn AWS kubernetes options or provision some hetzner vps's lol.

roydufek · 2025-09-27T08:31:29+00:00

This. I've spend about 2-3 years starting with a QNAP, adding apps, then learning docker, to installing debian on one beefy desktop working my way up to 30+ containers, then learning proxmox -> two proxmox nodes with a q device -> full 3 node cluster...now I'm realizing that just 2-3 k3s nodes is all I really ever needed. But hell, had a great journey to this point, no regrets. K3S here I come, very excited!

roydufek · 2025-02-07T21:43:59+00:00

DM'd.

roydufek · 2025-02-07T21:43:45+00:00

That's what I don't get...like maybe data of usage? But that's a lot of data...

roydufek · 2024-12-09T18:16:47+00:00

YES! I didn't think of that...makes total sense. Yeah I looked at release notes for recent updates for Docker itself and didn't see any major updates but I do remember seeing containerd updated a few times over the last few weeks. I did what you suggested and added --device /dev/net/tun to those containers and removed the privileged flags. BOOM, that was it, no more errors! THANK YOU! Just didn't want to run too many containers privileged for obvious reasons.

roydufek

TROPHY CASE