For the last 10 days tailscale clocked 1% battery on my phone. I honestly didn’t even consider turning it off for battery savings.

If tailscale inside a container allows you to talk to it via “direct” connection and not a derp proxy, then it will offer you better service isolation (can set the tailscale ACLs for this specific service) without sacrificing performance.

Tailscale pushes for it because it just ties you in more. It allows to to utilize the ACLs better, to see your thing in their service mesh, and every service will count against the free node limit.

In practice, I often do both. E.g. I’ll have my http ingress exposed to tailscale and route a bunch of different services through it at a single tailscale node, where the access control is done by services individually. But I’ll also run a pod-to-pod tailscale between two k8s clusters because tailscale ACL is just convenient.

I don’t think your question relates to the language as much as to the platform. The language of choice is somewhat irrelevant and what you care about is what actually happens under the hood.

For the likes of java and go you want to have some understanding of what runtime does for the memory allocations and how their GCs work. For python you sometimes end up in the spots where you need to understand what limitations the GIL imposes (even more important now that they are trying to get rid of it). When you run C (or C++ or Rust) on the embedded hardware it really helps to understand what exactly bit flipping does in specific registers and what DMA means for how you write your code.

You don’t really have to know it all. You can absolutely write code without caring about anything of that and I know plenty software engineers that do. Some people write amazing functional things in java without ever questioning what it does to the machines and what resources you need to run it.

If you start questioning it, that will only expand your understanding. It’s not a lateral move from e.g. C to Rust where you need to learn a lot to write your code in a memory-safe way, it’s a movement deeper into the stack and what you learn there will be applicable to any language you use for this stack.

Answering your question: I always feel bad about not understanding some low-level concept. I have stacks of MCU reference docs lying around, printed, highlighted; I have archives with sample code, and hand-annotated CMSIS reversing notes. Embedded world is hard because you can’t just know C and be done with it. You have to know the hardware, too.

Here’s my advice for you. Make notes of things that you learn from people smarter than you. Create a web of those notes and see where your gaps are. Then, work on learning something in those gaps in particular and see if you can make a blog post or something of your own. When you share what you learn you become one of those people with deep understanding that others look up to. There’s always someone struggling with something that you either know or know how to figure it out.

ECC is slightly more required for ZFS because its ARC is generally more aggressive than the usual linux caching subsystem. That said, it’s not a hard requirement. My curent NAS was converted from my old windows box (which apparently worked for years with bad ram). Zfs uncovered the problem in the first 2 days by reporting the (recoverable) data corruption in the pool. When I fixed the ram issue and hash-checked against the old backup all the data was good. So, effectively, ZFS uncovered memory corruption and remained resilient against it.

TIL, thanks!

I had exactly the same use case and I ended up with a 40G DAC fiber for that case. It ended up cheaper than converting the whole lan to 10G.

That said, it feels like used 10G equipment is easier to come by than 2.5G for now, and if you have 2G fiber uplink and only 1G past the router then it’s a waste.

Garage is trivial to get up and running and it’s more lightweight than minio nowadays.

Actual public services run there, yeah. In case if any is compromised they can only access limited internal resources, and they’d have to fully compromise the cluster to get the secrets to access those in the first place.

I really like garage. I remember when minio was straightforward and easy to work with. Garage is that thing now. I use it because it’s just co much easier to handle file serving where you have s3-compatible uploads even when you don’t do any real clustering.

Between homebrew and nix, the amount of foss macs can run out of the box is pretty close to some generic Ubuntu (nixpkgs is technically the largest repo out there, but not all of the nixpkgs are available on mac).

I’ve dealt with exactly the same dilemma in my homelab. I used to have 3 clusters, because you’d always want to have an “infra” cluster which others can talk to (for monitoring, logs, docker registry, etc. workloads). In the end, I decided it’s not worth it.

I separated on the public/private boundary and moved everything publicly facing to a separate cluster. It can only talk to my primary cluster via specific endpoints (via tailscale ingress), and I no longer do a multi-cluster mesh (I used to have istio for that, then cilium). This way, the public cluster doesn’t have to be too large capacity-wise, e.g. all the S3 api needs are served by garage from the private cluster, but the public cluster will reverse-proxy into it for specific needs.

any oauth (I use kanidm) and oauth2-proxy solves that and now you can easily use passkeys to log into your intranet resources.

The biggest certainty is that just having an open port for an SMTP server dangling out there means you will 100% be attacked.

True.

Not just sometimes, non-stop.

True

So you don’t want to host on a machine with anything else on it, cuz security.

I don’t think “cuz security” is a proper argument or no one would be ever listening on public internet. Are there risks? Yes.

So you need a dedicated host for that portion

Bullshit. You do not need a dedicated host for smtp ingress. It won’t be attacked that much.

and a very capable and restrictive intrusion detection system (let’s say crowdsec), which is going to take some amount of resources to run, and stop your machine from toppling over.

That’s not part of the mail pipeline the OP asked for.

Here, I brought receipts. There are two spikes of attempted connections in the last month, but it’s all negligible traffic.

Self-hosting mail servers is tricky, same as self-hosting ssh, http, or whatever else. But it’s totally doable even on an aging RPi. No, you don’t need to train expensive spam detection because it’s enough to have very strict rules on where you get mail from and drop 99% of the traffic because it will be compliant. No, you don’t need to run crowdstrike for a server that accepts bytes and stores them for another server (IMAP) to offer them to you. You don’t even need an antivirus, it’s not part of mail hosting, really.

Instead of bickering and posturing, you could have spent your time better educating OP on the best practices, e.g. like this.

I won’t quote the bit of your post again, but no, if you have an open smtp port then you won’t get constantly attacked. Again, I have a fully qualified smtp server and it receives about 40 connections per hour (mostly the spam ones). That’s trivial to process.

It doesn’t matter that I forward emails from another server, because, in the end, mine is still public on the internet.

If you are trying to make a point that it’s tricky to run a corporate-scale smtp and make sure that end users are protected, then it’s clearly not what the OP was looking for.

The biggest certainty is that just having an open port for an SMTP server dangling out there means you will 100% be attacked. Not just sometimes, non-stop. So you don’t want to host on a machine with anything else on it, cuz security. So you need a dedicated host for that portion, and a very capable and restrictive intrusion detection system (let’s say crowdsec), which is going to take some amount of resources to run, and stop your machine from toppling over.

I need to call BS on this. No one cares. I’ve been running a small go-smtp based server that would do some processing on forwarded mail for 2 years now and I don’t see much of “attacks”. Yeah, sometimes I get passersbys trying to figure if this is a mail relay, which it’s not.

You absolutely don’t need a dedicated machine and an IDS. And you definitely need crowdsec.

Yeah, sending mail is somewhat hard lately, but DKIM and DMARC can be figured out. Receiving mail is just straightforward.

I would not recommend unifi for a mature solution. It sure works nice as a glass panel, but it will get limiting if you will have a desire to hack around your network. Their APs are solid, though, it’s just the USG/Dream machine that I wouldn’t recommend.

Mikrotik software is very capable and hackable and you can run it in a vm if you feel like bringing your own hardware.

restic can run append-only, too. It’s more about the remote not allowing deletions.

Apparently traefik might be better if you run docker compose and such, as it does auto-discovery, which reduces the amount of manual configuration required.

and swap Prometheus for VictoriaMertics, or your homelab ram usage becomes Prometheus ram usage.

I’ll second conduit. You can tune up its caching, reducing the ram usage significantly. It does become a bit painful to sync the mobile clients, but at least it’s not gigabytes of ram wasted.

In the context of my comments here, any mention of “S3” means “S3-compatible” in the way that’s implemented by Garage. I hope that clarifies it for you.