thibaultamartin

Author here, thanks for the warning! I'm all too familiar with this kind of situation! This homelab is for fun and learning.

I wrote about why I don't (want to) self-host services for others: https://ergaster.org/posts/2023/08/09-i-dont-want-to-host-se...

I'm not too familiar with it. Why do you want or need ECC RAM for your homelab?

Oh lord of the rings, that's embarrassing. Thanks for reporting the typo!

Author here, I completely agree. In fact, I even wrote about it: https://ergaster.org/posts/2023/08/09-i-dont-want-to-host-se...

My homelab is my hobby. I maintain it for my pleasure and to learn new skills. We have an infra nerds club with a few colleagues and we're having a lot of fun comparing our approaches!

Author here, indeed I didn't install a UPS. I've tried to keep my setup fairly minimal, and I'm consciously accepting that if there's a power outage my services will be down. I self-host exclusively for myself, not for others.

What I don't want though is a power outage putting my server offline while I'm on holidays, and not be able to access my services at all.

My ISP-provided router supports Wireguard, so I can use that to connect to my KVM and send the Wake on LAN packages.

Author here, indeed I bought a JetKVM. A colleague had one and recommended it warmly! I'm Very happy with it so far, but my usage has been rather basic.

I've heard that it might be difficult to get one in the US though.

https://jetkvm.com/

That's right, I've added an errata to clarify. Thanks for the heads up!

Thanks for pointing it out! I've added an errata to the blog post

I've had similar thoughts and decided not to embed comments on my blog, but to link to social media where people can still give me feedback.

One of the most positive things I've done though is to generate "Comment by email" links at the end of each post. People who reach out directly and only to me behave much differently than people who do performative commenting on social media.

The overall rationale for not having comments on my blog is here https://ergaster.org/posts/2024/03/06-welcoming-feedback/

Do you have specific books to recommend?

Fair questions.

For the first one, the main benefits of Astro over static html and css (for my use cases) are the ability to include components and enforce the properties that must be passed. A typical example would be [here][0] where I define a layout for the whole website, and then [on each page that uses it](https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-conf-website/blob/main/...) I have to pass the right properties. Doable by hand, but it's great to have tooling that can yell at me if I forgot to do it.

Content Collections also let me grab content from e.g. markdown or json and build pages automatically from it. The [Content Collections docs][1] are fairly straightforward.

As for performance issues, I've spent quite a bit of time on the countryside where connectivity was an issue and every extra request was definitely noticeable, hence the value of inlining it (you load one html file that has the css embedded, instead of loading an html file that then tells your browser to load an extra css file). The same can be true in some malls where I live.

[0]: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-conf-website/blob/main/... [1]: https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/content-collections/

I can only approve. To me Astro started as "it's just html and css but with includes."

I used it for my personal website, and recently used it when reimplementing the Matrix Conference website. It's really a no-fuss framework that is a joy to use.

Among the things I love about Astro:

- It's still html and css centric - Once built, it doesn't require js by default - You can still opt-into adding js for interactivity here and there - Content collections are neat and tidy - Astro massively optimizes for speed, and the maintainers know how to do it - It had a very helpful devbar to help you visually figure out what easy fix can make your website snappier (like lazily loading images if it detects them below the fold)

For the "optimize for speed" bit, an example is that the css minifier cleverly inlines some CSS to avoid additional queries. The Image component they provide will set the width and height attribute of an image to avoid content layout shifts. It will also generate responsive images for you.

Author here, that's a great question. I only host a handful of services on the VPS, including Nextcloud. I was mostly interested in storage, not so much in compute power.

Netcup offered VPS with 1 TB of storage for €30 / month back when I subscribed. The server has always been oversized for my needs, but that was the most financially interesting back then.

I recently switched to another ISP at home that gives me a fixed IP. I decided to move my services at home to shave off the VPS costs. Since I already had a Raspberry Pi 4, I only had to buy a SSD and an enclosure.

This is absolutely right, thanks for pointing it out! The post has been updated to reflect that.

Author here, thanks for pointing out the mistake! The USB controller speed is indeed 4 Gbps and not 4 GB/s, I have updated the post accordingly.

> I believe the USB controller still shares a bus with the NIC, which means maxing out the network connection will affect disk rw performance. You could confirm this by observing a concurrent iperf affecting fio results.

Thanks for the pointers, I didn't know about iperf! That's something I'll likely try at some point for the sake of completeness, although I have other projects competing for my attention.

> Well, that's specifically AES precompiles. Just like for kopia, you can benchmark and change LUKS algo for something more suitable for the platform like xchacha20: https://rr-developer.github.io/LUKS-on-Raspberry-Pi/

Absolutely, that disk was encrypted using xchacha20. I used the excellent sdm project (https://github.com/gitbls/sdm) to make my Raspi boot from an encrypted disk. They have great documentation pointing out that xchacha20 should be used on the Pi 4 and earlier (https://github.com/gitbls/sdm/blob/master/Docs/Disk-Encrypti...)

I second this wholeheartedly. Atuin is a joy to use and makes it so easier to find past commands. Thanks a lot atuin, and thanks to the colleague who recommended it!

It's exactly that. And I also have come to the realization that I don't have to give up the convenience my smartphone offers. I only need to add friction for what causes distractions.

In particular, the Personal Time mode of iOS has been a game changer for me: https://ergaster.org/til/ask-smartphone-attention/

I've found cal.com to be a more pleasant experience than calendly. The interface looks more polished, it has a ton of integrations and it works really well.

I could in theory self-host it but I'd rather use a service with a proper team to maintain it.

The free tier does everything I need. I'd be more than willing to pay ~€5/month for it to contribute to its sustainability, but there is no paying tier that makes sense to me as an individual an occasional contractor.

Thanks for the feedback. The website is long overdue an update, and the donation page is part of it. I'm factoring it in the requests I'm making to designers.

> What is the narrow set of programs Matrix.org maintains? Is Trust and Safety referring to moderating the Matrix.org homeserver?

Yes, the Foundation is currently:

- Running the matrix.org homeserver from a technical perspective (servers & services costs + SRE) - Keeping the matrix.org homeserver free of spam. That's a notoriously difficult task on a tight budget but we're writing tools and working with contractors to get more efficient. - Maintaining and running several bridges (to Slack, XMPP and several IRC networks) - Maintaining the matrix.org website - Working with the community to promote the most active/interesting projects in our weekly post This Week in Matrix and our YouTube show Matrix Live - Organizing The Matrix Conference, FOSDEM, and contributing to several conferences

The Foundation is not developing server or client software. There is a SDK under the matrix-org/ umbrella for historical reasons but the Foundation doesn't contribute to it.

> Are there strategies that could offload some of the homeserver hosting/moderation burden to community home server operators?

There is already a community effort to help with moderation, and third party tooling funded by NLNet (https://github.com/the-draupnir-project/Draupnir).

We have a post dedicated to our approach to T&S at: https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix

> Are there strategies that could make the Matrix Conf closer to break even or perhaps even revenue positive?

There are two things we can do:

- Either get more sponsors to keep an event of this scale - Or do some cost compression by doing a smaller scale event, being hosted in a university or some sponsors' offices for free, reducing the catering, etc.

It's probably going to be an act of balance. Make the event too modest, and you miss out on potential businesses, make the event too extravagant and you go bankrupt.

> how is the foundation protected and independent of its commercial sponsors?

Can you be more specific of the threats you're envisioning here?

> Currently 1/2 of the foundation's "Guardians", its top governance board, are from a single commercial entity.

Yes, there used to be 5 Guardians before one stepped down. The Guardians are looking for another 5th peer to replace her.

> I really, really hope Matrix succeeds in the long term. I am absolutely rooting for it.

Thank you for your support, and thanks for holding us accountable :)

When I publish something I like not shouting into the void so I want comments , but I also don't want to give a platform to anyone and everyone on my blog.

What works best for me is to add a link to the fediverse, linkedin and sometimes HN threads of comments when I publish a post. It's also a very low tech solution :)

https://ergaster.org/posts/2024/03/06-welcoming-feedback/

Per https://matrix.to/#/!sWpnrYUMmaBrlqfRdn:matrix.org/$xga3TYyV...

> T&S staffing alone is about $360k/yr, and server and SRE costs about $240k/yr

And per https://matrix.to/#/!sWpnrYUMmaBrlqfRdn:matrix.org/$pupglsTX...

> There's a rough cost breakdown available to the Governing Board right now in Discourse, which we'll be polishing and publishing after our first Finance and Fundraising Committee meeting

So the financial report is finally coming together.

We have quite a handful of volunteers and a strong community that is helping us a lot already. But some things cannot be offloaded to volunteers (typically T&S and the SRE team running the matrix.org homeserver).

Can you expand on your doubts for the ability to execute? The Foundation has a narrow set of programs on purpose, and it's not implementing any server or client for example. Most of the budget is going to matrix.org and keeping it safe (which is a lot of invisible and thankless work).

I concur! Several of us also subscribe to your blogs' RSS feeds. If you're one of the nice people who put the full content of their blog posts into their feed, you might not see me as a visitor, but I definitely read and enjoy your blog.

As an occasional blog writer myself, I also like to announce manually on my social platforms I use (Mastodon and LinkedIn) when I blogged, and send a link to those socials post. The [full rationale is here][1]. They make it feel less like shouting in the void, which helps me stay motivated. I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the occasional likes and boosts I get from these, too :)

Simon Willison also has [good advice on how to write more][2], that I must admit I'm struggling to follow myself.

[1]: https://ergaster.org/posts/2024/03/06-welcoming-feedback/

[2]: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3leuudyabks2...

Likewise, I've been happy with Starlight and trust Astro products to be lightweight and efficient. I'm interested in knowing what makes it heavier

Paper is a sturdy tool; it doesn’t run out of battery, it’s interoperable… it beats apps in many aspects.

But as soon as you need automation, it’s a different story. I couldn’t rely only on paper notes to keep track of my work.

Obsidian has been very useful to keep track of my list of tasks and report what I’m doing. I would spend much more time doing all that with paper.

Details of my setup at https://ergaster.org/posts/2024/07/16-obsidian-contractor/