Have you thought about not trying to drag meshtastic down to try and prop ham up?

I get it, you spent a bunch of time studying for your ham and you don’t want it to feel like a waste, but lets be perfectly frank here- most people aren’t going to get a HAM license. It IS, however, VERY accessible for someone to buy a cheap gadget on sale to try out.

I never understand why ham radio people always try to sabotage every other communication method, but you guys do it every time.

Let other people communicate how they want.

This is, specifically, the workflow for changing graphics cards manufacturers on windows, e.g. nVidia to AMD. If you’re just going from one AMD card to another, or vice versa, generally you can just toss it in and reboot a few times, yes.

GPU manufacturers are fucking awful about actually uninstalling their bloatware shit on windows, and it often (potentially intentionally) interferes with other manufacturer’s drivers (and sometimes their own, though that’s less common these days.)

It’s a fucking infection is what it is.

Even HomeAssistant, which is literally meant to be the open source alternative to all the big tech megacorp enshittification, is now vibe coding their server core and most major plugins, as I found out recently.

They’re also censoring discussion about it on their forums, when I tried bringing it up- everything hidden as ‘off topic.’

A complete betrayal of their users, imo.

It’s actually worse than that- amtrak was a reagan thing, which was meant to intentionally fail so they could give the passenger rail lines to big freight companies as well.

It was literally meant to fail so they could privatize it, but Amtrak pulled off a miracle. Amtrak is actually really, really good in places they can own their own rail- it’s why they’re really not allowed to build or own their own rail anymore.

Other democratic countries all manage to have perfectly fine rail systems, it’s not solely the domain of totalitarian governments- just functioning governments.

Much like healthcare, it’s literally just the US government that fucks it up.

Ahhh, you’re talking about economically, not politically.

You’re pretty naive if you think the US is the source, lol.

You do realize your DNS MX records can point to both IPs, and your primary connection just has a higher priority number, right? This is 2025, dns is outright expected to have multiple IPs behind it in varying levels of priority and availability. Just because the cell IP isn’t the active route for LAN-to-WAN traffic doesn’t mean it’s not connected or available for WAN-to-LAN traffic.

As for DDNS constantly rolling things, I’ve got, as I said, spectrum residential and my IP address has changed once in half a decade, and even then it was extenuating circumstances (I literally moved).

Finally, I literally mentioned that there were other ways around this, like an external proxy server on a static IP. Throw it on DO or something.

This is entirely viable for a email server. Would it be better to have two hardwire connections load balanced instead of a primary and failover that’s metered? Sure, if that’s an option in your area, then you just round-robin your DNS. But it still works just fine with a primary and failover.

Regardless, having two IPs for you email server is absolutely a complete non-issue. That was a solved problem ages ago.

That is, in fact, exactly the opposite of what I just said.

I would actually disagree- it doesn’t take much budget at all, or even a quality server setup, to have a decent uptime. A consumer router with a sim card slot is possibly something you already have. If not, a cell modem can be as cheap as $30. You could stick your email server on a old shitty raspberry pi. A data sim is $6/mo. If all you’re running is a cable modem, a router, and a rpi, you don’t even need a big fancy UPS, you can just get a DC battery UPS for like $40. And all this is assuming you’re buying stuff new instead of used.

You don’t need a lot of budget, quality stuff, or even a ton of hours in the week for self hosting- once you get this stuff set up it should stay working other than the standard upgrades/maint your email server will need.

Everything past that, like setting things up so your mail server is reachable on two IP addresses, is just… skill.

So this sort of a setup is called Dual-WAN, and yes, it allows it all to work. Basically, my router has two connections to the internet- a cable modem on one port, which connects to Spectrum, and a cell modem on another port, which has my sim card on it. Both provide internet access simultaneously, and at that point, internet is internet- it doesn’t matter if it’s over data or through cable, you’re part of the net. My router is then configured to reach the internet via what it decides is the ‘best’ internet. In my case, because my cell connection is metered, I have it configured so that it prefers the spectrum connection, and only falls back to the cell connection if the spectrum connection is losing traffic, and only for as long as that connection is losing traffic.

Note that a dedicated cell modem is not necessarily required- some routers have sim card slots themselves, for exactly this reason, and tend to make this sort of configuration very simple to do. I’m personally using a small computer running OPNSense, which is again, probably overkill for the average homelabber, but you don’t need something that complicated.

As a result, my server always has access to the internet, and should you configure your firewalls appropriately (remember, I don’t personally run my own email- I have a custom dns name I point towards tutamail), the internet will then always have access to your server. There’s some details here and there about IP address caching, dns resolution, and the like which have various solutions from DDNS to an external proxy/loadbalancer/etc, but those are more implementation details.

I mean, my use case is abnormal and generally has more beef behind it than most people would have, yes, but a simpler, cheaper version of what I have set up is kind of a no-brainer if you want to self-host.

e.g. I don’t think a simple cyberpower/APC ups on your home server is any kind of a weird ‘specialty’ thing, and it should definitely run your server for 2-3 hours during an outage for like $100-150 if you grab it on sale (which, you know, why wouldn’t you?) As for the generator, I don’t have that for my network stack, I have that for my fridge/deep freeze lol. It can just also recharge my UPS if it’s really that big of a deal.

As for cell backup, that’s definitely less a ‘common’ homeserver thing, but I’m only paying like $10/mo for my cell backup connection from tello for 5gb of 5G. Hardly breaking the bank, and honestly probably overkill, you could likely get away with their $6/mo 2gb plan. No complaints with it either, I use them for my regular cell plan too. if you were interesting in self-hosting your own email server and wanted better uptime than 99.9%, you probably don’t even need that if your ISP only sucks slightly instead of mostly, but it allows you to just not care about your ISP having extended downtime and potentially timing out any retry mechanisms.

Your ISP is kind of dogshit if it’s forcing 15-30m of downtime overnight every few weeks. And power outages are kind of a weird thing to focus on, you should be on a UPS anyway.

In any case, someone interested in self-hosting email very likely has a redundant connection anyway. I’m not even hosting my own email and I have 5gb/mo of cellular backup in dual-WAN, and enough battery capacity to run my entire stack for several hours.

Not to mention a generator to recharge them, if it comes down to that.

Like, I need you to understand that in the networking industry, 99.9% uptime is genuinely laughable. You should be able to hit that by accident. The gold standard is ‘five nines’, or 99.999% uptime, or less than 5 minutes of downtime a year.

8 hours of downtime a year? If a service I was managing had 8 hours of downtime a year I would be laughed out of my job lol.

Unfortunately I haven’t seen one yet- I would like to, so I could provide it to people in situations like this, but none of them have e.g. the now-deleted doubling-down Yen did on the official account, or noting the ‘88’ in his usernames, or even most of the mastodon clusterfuck beyond ‘they left mastodon after backlash.’

I was there reading most of it, but unfortunately I didn’t think to save screenshots of any of it, which is why I know it all happened, but this was also several months ago and I couldn’t recite the exact timeline anymore.

The long and short of it that when Andy Yen posted that, it immediately blew up on mastodon and reddit- along with presumably twitter, but I have that DNS blocked, so I have no further insights to that one, and frankly there’s enough weirdos on there that I don’t even want to know how that went down.

Mastodon, to my knowledge, was fairly bog-standard and I think most of it is still there, because proton’s PR team couldn’t lean on anyone to get it all purged. I suspect that’s the real reason why they left mastodon. Most of their posts involved were edited to be a lot less concerning sounding, however.

Reddit, on the other hand, had (presumably) Yen posting on the Proton official account (example that WAS archived by a very smart person who clearly saw proton for who they were: https://archive.ph/quYyb - that post no longer exists) doubling down for a while before someone else clearly took the reigns and started trying to play damage control, at which point andy yen got on his own reddit account and kept doubling down on it, using a ton of really concerning buzzwords. I remember reading him complaining about ‘the woke’ being ‘triggered’ at one point and just being like ‘What the fuck am I even reading right now.’ All of that was also edited away or deleted, but you can still find user replies to him boggling at him using GOP language that are unedited in the reddit threads that weren’t nuked.

Also revealed during all this is that Andy Yen’s personal reddit account is ‘andy1011000’. For those of you that don’t know, 1011000 is binary for ‘88.’ As in, the very famous nazi dogwhistle. While you can argue it may have another meaning- and I’m sure people will- the simple fact of the matter is that announcing your support for an authoritarian fascist with an encoded nazi dogwhistle in your username is a bad look, especially if you categorically refuse to acknowledge or change it when it’s pointed out to you. I know several people born in 1988 who used to have 88 in their usernames who instantly and comprehensively ditched those usernames the very second they found out what it meant, but Yen still uses it to this day.

I’m so, so tired of seeing that fucking article by ‘ovenplayer’ over and over again. It’s not your fault, mind you, but damn do I wish that abomination would get erased from the internet.

It’s incredibly biased, missing a ton of information, and just frankly outright lies to frame the whole thing as positively towards Proton as possible, and completely skips mentioning Proton’s attempted cleanup job. Even worse, it pretends to sound neutral while doing all that to try and gaslight people into thinking it’s actually a full journalistic dive into the issue.

I’m like 90% sure it’s just Proton’s PR team creating an easy astroturf- an account that was made JUST to post that article, nothing else, created right at the same time as the Proton PR team started working on the whole issue?

The only reason it’s only 90% instead of 100% is because there’s a lot of proton apologists who think Proton supporting this shit is ‘blown out of proportion’ because they have no idea what they’re talking about, but feel personally attacked because someone isn’t supporting ‘their team.’

I mean, their security IS directly impacted by their support of a fascist government. They’ve already happily gave over personal information of an account owner to authorities when asked- the security posture doesn’t matter when they choose to circumvent it.

More to the point- they have a history of deleting proof of misdeeds and pretending they never happened. That is not what you want to see from a company touting its security!

https://lemmy.org/post/1309818

People found AI config files in their public repos. When they were found, Proton deleted all discussion of it and then altered the repository history to pretend the config files were never there.

Shady, scummy behavior. They’ve tried to do the same ‘delete everything and ignore it’ when their CEO publicly praised Trump and the Republican party, and then kept doubling down in reddit and mastodon comments until someone on the PR team wrested the account away from him and started mass-deleting all of it.

Unfortunately news reports- and even people- discussing his praise of Trump and the republican party often do not know that there was more than just the 1 or 2 statements he made, so it seems like it was at least slightly successful in that case.

That website’s pronunciation of ə is super weird. It should be more of an ‘uh’ sound.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid_central_vowel

Anyway, the pronunciation using ə isn’t common even in the US, not sure what merriem webster is smoking, here’s cambridge: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/english/epoch

Nah, this is wrong. In british english, it’s pronounced EE-pock. American it’s generally pronounced eh-pock. In no way is it ever pronounced ‘epic’.

It is indeed, which is why progressives are getting a lot of local wins. At this point the hope seems to be bottom-up change, because top-down isn’t happening.