I’ve replaced the pads on mine a couple times, the rubber on the thumb rest has a hole worn it it to the plastic, and the braided cable is all frayed and stuff. I’ve had the thing for the past 10 years at least. I know new ones are that cheap and that I should just get a new one at this point but the thing is just a workhorse.

I’m planning to get one at a local datacenter

Ah, never mind then, ignore everything I said.

So my plan is to set up a VPS and configure my own private VPN

Unless I’m misunderstanding, you don’t need a VPS for this. RouterOS supports you enabling a built-in VPN server, which you can then connect to directly, you don’t need to set up a VPS or anything. Then you can just put allow rules in the firewall for traffic from the VPN subnet in to your main subnet, your NASs subnet, your camera subnet, etc. This is how I access my homes resources remotely, the only ports open to the Internet are the VPN ports on my CCR1036.

Mostly privacy. My wife likes to play MP games on her PC, and I don’t want those services to know our IP. I also don’t trust websites generally, so I’d like to hide our IP for most, if not all, traffic. Our current ISP has us behind a NAT (we were assigned a 10.x.x.x static address), but our next ISP may have our IP public facing, and I still don’t want our exact city to be discoverable (we’re in a relatively small city, so easier to doxx).

You do you, I certainly won’t judge your choices or opinions or whatever. I will say that adding a VPN into the mix will add (probably significant amounts of) latency to any connection routed through it. This has the potential to make multiplayer games borderline unplayable depending on the type and its sensitivity to latency in general.

If you’re that worried about being doxxed stand up a site-to-site vpn between your tik and an AWS VPC. Use the right region and you probably won’t have much latency issues, although the transit fees from AWS might bite you.

On the flip side, since the mikrotik can act as a vpn server you could always set up your whole home vpn along with the vpn server, travel overseas to somewhere like Japan, set your upstream vpn’s exit as the same country you’re visiting, VPN in to your house over your phones Japanese cellular carrier data connection, then watch local JP netflix with the knowledge that the traffic is tunneling around the globe to get to you and marvel at the interconnectedness of the modern world. ask me how i know how amazing this is.

MacOS is really the only one I never understood unless you’re really tied to the Apple ecosystem.

I’d argue the “just use Linux” meme is more relevant for Mac users than Windows.

At this point when I’m choosing a computer I’m really just choosing a hypervisor front end.

MacOS gives me all the familiarity and transferred knowledge that I built up with Linux, but with a much more polished desktop experience. I like the Messenger sync, it helps me actually notice texts from my partner when I’m rabbit-holing hard. I like Mail better than Outlook (or Thunderbird or whatever the modern mail client on Linux is now).

I just prefer MacOS as the glue between all my VMs that I work in each day. I’m personally on the desktop pc with Windows for gaming, MBP for all my work/hobby work (using VMs with whatever OS is necessary that day), and headless Debian on any servers train.

Yeah, Usenet servers all have a maximum retention time, usually around 3000 days or something like that. Any articles older than the retention time of your server won’t exist for you to grab, but stuff is usually reuploaded frequently. With torrents a super niche thing requires someone seeding the content all the time for it to be consistently accessible, while Usenet requires someone to reupload it once every 5-10 years (barring takedowns) which imo is more consistently stable, but as the other poster said having both ensures your bases are covered. I personally don’t really torrent anything beyond oddball bbc2+ documentaries at this point though.

It would be cool to see companies start offering homelab licenses for people to play around with and get experience before buying into a whole ecosystem.

Like you said, I think companies should be prohibited from locking security updated behind a license paywall. Features are one thing, and while I would also like free homelab licenses, I understand why companies don’t offer them, especially for products like enterprise firewalls, routers, and switches. A company shouldn’t require you to pay more money to secure something they shipped with a vulnerability. Honestly this kind of shit should take precedence over the squabbling about USB-C, App Store monopolies, or whatever other flavor of the month issue the EU or the US is lambasting tech companies for.

Ah, I had posted this over in [email protected], but I totally forgot to cross-post it over here! It’s going to take me a while to remember the communities on lemmy that are relevant and active.

But yeah, it’s a pre-auth vulnerability, so definitely patch up asap!

Yeah, that’s not optimal. My single-sourced, non-verified quick Google search tells me that brute forcing a 10-char password of lower case letters only would be instant, subbing out one char for an upper-case letter would increase to one month, and subbing out another char for a number raises that to 6 years. Simply allowing for a special char would take 50 years.

That’s assuming the password is truly random. Use a dictionary with some rule sets, and make some assumptions like people will probably just append a number to the end of their password, and you’ll knock those times down drastically.

There’s no excuse for not allowing your users to use safe passwords.

In addition to the clean litter box and marking of territory, my cat used to shit on my bed due to separation anxiety if I was gone for more than a night or so. The only way I stopped it was keeping my bedroom door shut. When I travel now I’ll fold up the comforter and put it in my living room so he can still sleep on something that smells like me, and he’s chill, and he has yet to shit on the comforter. It’s just something about the bed idk.

I’ll strongly voice my support for the suggestion to take your cat to the vet though.

I got a lot of exposure to MikroTik’s route/switch devices when I worked at a WISP and really came to love them.

Wireless: Aruba, Cisco, Meraki

I know what you meant when you said “Wireless”, but I’m going to go with Siklu for their Kilo EtherHaul 70/80GHz radios that can no shit do 10Gbps links up to like 10 miles in ideal conditions.

I’m starting to regret buying all those Mellanox NICs and pulling SM fiber runs through my house now.