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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 22nd, 2023

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  • So i had done this (with Adguard rather than pihole) and i think i was getting caching issues. Whether or not i was, though, i removed it and it looks like my router is handling it all just fine without the rewrite on the local DNS server.

    Some folks mentioned “hairpin NAT” - i was reading the wiki on NAT last night but didnt get to hairpin, but that appears to be what is happening.

    The conclusion is - my setup had been doing what i want the whole time without any DNS fiddling. I updated the original post with the speedtests.







  • For a domain name:

    You go to something like NameCheap.org and buy a name (hackers4life.xyz or something cool like that). Then their web interface has a place for you to enter the IP address that you want associated with that name. Whenever someone then types “hackers4life.xyz” there will br a series of computers asking other computers “do you know the IP address for this?” until they do.

    If you have that Pi in your house, there are (at least) two steps for you then: (1) Getting your home IP address (2) Forwarding the port

    (1) Your router admin panel may have this, or else if you search the web for “what is my ip” there are sites that will tell you (basically, you connect to their webpage and they just print out the IP they are sending data back to). There are two concerns here, though.

    (a) Do you have a unique IP? There arent enough IPv4 addresses in the world for all the computers connecting to the internet. To get around this, ISPs will essentially group customers together under the same IP and then they figure out how to get the traffic to the right place. If you dont have a unique IP, you might be screwed (but i havent looked into dealing with that much).

    (b) If you have a unique IP, you still probably dont have a stable IP. Your ISP might reallocate all the addresses in their network every day/week/month/whenever. This is the case for me. Namecheap (or whatever other domain vendor) has a process for you to use a script to send them your IP address, and so you make a script to recheck it and send namecheap updates every hour or something like that.

    (2) Forwarding the port

    Some other machine on the web knows your IP (because it is associated with hackers4life.xyz) and so they try to connect. This comes down the wire from the street into the side of your house/apartment, into the modem, and into your router. If your router isnt expecting it (or prepared to do something with it), itll just ignore it. You want the router to instead send it to your Pi. To do this, you go to your router’s admin settings and forward the messages based on the port they are coming in on. The standard ports for HTTP and HTTPS are 80 and 443, and so you can forward those ports to the Pi. Making sure that then the Pi does the right things with those is outside the scope of me writing right now.



  • I think that that is right that I fundamentally want an archive, not what a normal mail server provides. Part of my thought on looking at mail servers is that those would integrate directly with whatever other front-end/client that I’d normally use, whereas an archive maybe would not.

    And regarding archive-specific stuff, I am seeing some things on a search, but I guess i’m wondering if folks here have any recommendations. When I look at , for example, nothing comes up for email archive, just for email servers. That, plus what I see when searching, makes me think that the archive-specific stuff is either oriented to business or oriented to a CLI (like NotMuch, which was mentioned in the discussion here and does look cool).




  • It sounds like you have a heavy duty door lock to be very secure, but you are essentially trying to backdoor all that security with a new internet-connected thing. An adversary only has to break the weakest link here, rendering the physical door lock obsolete.

    If you are just going to have some digitally-connected device ultimately controlling access to the house, I’d go with just some standard door lock that does that (i haven’t used em but they exist). The physical lock on those is surely less what you have know, but with your proposed solution the physical lock probably isnt what people who crack anyway.



  • Ive got this working with Caddy and Adguard

    I use Caddy as my reverse proxy. It is running on the machine in the basement with all the different docker-container-services on different ports. My registrar is set up so that *.my-domain.com goes to my IP.

    Caddy is then configured for ‘service-a.my-domain.com’ to port 1234, and the others going to their ports. This is just completely standard reverse proxy.

    For some subdomains (i.e. different services) ive whitelisted only the local network. There is some config for that.

    Im pretty sure that I also have to have adguard do a dns rewrite on the local network as well. That is, adguard has a rewrite for ‘*.my-domain.com’ to go to 192.168.0.22 (the local machine with caddy). I think i had to do this to ensure that when the request gets to caddy it is coming from the local whitelisted network rather than my public IP (which changes every couple months, but could be more).


  • When i was doing a headless install, i spend a hour or two trying to figure out how to pre setup configs for the debian installer or how to do it over network or what before i finally lugged the new machine to the other room and plugged it into the monitor and keyboard of the main rig, installed it all (and set up ssh so i can later get into from the main rig), and unplugged it.

    My point is, even if it isnt trivial to have the keyboard and monitor, it may be much easier to get them than to really do an install without them.


  • Ive got some stuff that i think is similar to what you are trying where i have an excel file template and use python to read from the database and populate cells in excel and then save a pdf.

    There are a couple different options for python libraries - openpyxl, xlwings, or pywin32.

    It is annoying and goofy, but works. Excel can be very flexible with getting everything sized just right for what your final output/pdf should look like.