I've used Rongta thermal printers a fair bit, I've found them to be cost effective and easy to use. I mostly use them via WebUSB and some random JS ESC/POS lib.
Though I have never bought directly from Rongta.
I self host a lot, including some business related infrastructure for my home office (some employees also work from here).
However services designed to be accessed by a wider public audience (eg; websites, emails, Nextcloud) are hosted on a rented dedi.
As other comments have pointed out, kids suck up every minute of your life, and when the internet or Plex don't work I'll know about it real quick (DAAAAD!).
The important question for me is; how fast can I rebuild all of this if all the drives were wiped?
* Rundeck container for various infrastructure based automation jobs
* Zabbix + Grafana containers for monitoring
* PacketFence VM for NAC
* Shinobi container for NVR
* Snapcast container for multi-room audio
I also have plenty of containers and VM's for various testing apps, or dev projects.
All of my non-critical containers (eg; Plex) self update daily at early morning hours.
For the critical stuff, I have tried to automate updates as much as possible.
The majority of things can be recreated from ansible, docker compose, or Nomad scripts, all of which are backed up to an offsite Nextcloud instance.
I use a lot of services on Opnsense, but I think one of the most important for me is the Traffic Shaper, allowing for bandwidth control.
I have about 14 VLAN's, and am in the process of setting up VXLAN's for further isolation.
I use restic for encrypted backups, stored in Wasabisys.com (no cost to download, unlike Backblaze).
I will admit there is still one design flaw that I'm yet to spend time overcoming; if everything is powered on at the same time, there is a chance some devices won't get an IP because OpnSense is not yet ready.
My current flawless work-around is to boot Opnsense 30 seconds before everything else.
I can cope with it during the day by keeping my mind active along with background noises, it has really turned me into a workaholic.
I too used to listen to loud music when I was younger, I never noticed it cause issues for me at the time.
The original cause was a hit on the head by a falling metal beam - nothing noise related - this caused the occasional distortion of sound but was a minor inconvenience really, it didn't affect my sleep or day-to-day life.
After a few years of it like that, I found myself at a music festival which did make it worse. It turned into a high pitched alternating tone which is now there 100% of the time.
Imagine this, you're laying in bed at night, it's quiet outside just as it should be when sleeping, except for the constant ringing of your tinnitus.
You roll over, maybe you cover your ears or put a pillow over them, but the ringing sound doesn't change. In fact you realise nothing you do has any effect on the ringing sound - it's coming from within your head/ears, how do you block out a sound which is emanating from within?
You're tired, you just want to sleep, you have an early business meeting tomorrow, but throughout the perfect silence of the night, this ringing sound is relentless.
You know you just need to ignore it and focus on something else, which might be easier if you weren't also trying to clear your mind so you could sleep.
So you decide to get back up out of bed and take something, anything, that will knock you out.
Now that you're drugged up you get back into bed, laying there waiting for the drugs to put you to sleep, waiting while listening to that torturous sound, waiting while thinking about how easy it used to be to sleep, thinking about how you'll never know true peace and silence ever again.
At some point you fall asleep, only to wake up in the morning feeling like shit from the drugs and lack of sleep.
I would give anything to be able to sleep in peace again.
I've generally considered an SSH tunnel as a poor man's VPN.
If you're going to the effort to spinup a machine, and use SSH anyway, i find it much easier to use `ssh [email protected] -D 4444` then I can set my browser's proxy settings to use localhost:4444 as a SOCKS5 proxy.
For those apps that don't have native proxy support, I use proxychains to force them over a proxy connection.
Ofcourse this is only useful for a single user, and for devices that can use ssh and proxies.
I was recently looking for an email forwarding service to use for a few months, initially I was searching Github for a decent OSS project that could do this for me, which is when I found your repo for Forward Email.
The repo code was exactly what I was looking for, but after browsing your site and noticing how open and transparent it all was, I was instantly sold and bought the Enhanced package.
So ultimately, your open source code and business transparency[0] is what convinced me to pay instead of self-host.
For those out there using S3 to store their personal backups, I'd like to recommend Wasabi [0] as either a replacement or addition to AWS S3.
Wasabi offers object storage in multiple regions, compatible with AWS S3 API and therefore is a drop-in replacement. The storage cost is $6 per TB p/m, with no bandwidth costs.
I'm not affiliated with them, just a happy customer enjoying massive cost savings.
Also checkout secured.gg [0], I recently discovered them while researching DDoS solutions used by other popular game servers (for Minecraft, and GTA5).
I haven't used them but their pricing seemed reasonable to me.
This essentially echos my experience anytime I have had to deal with Microsoft support.
It's unfathomable how bad their support is and the difficulty to get anything done even when presenting clear evidence/facts.
For me, I don't define any variables via the cli, i put them all in the docker-compose.yml or accompanying .env file, that way it's a simple `docker-compose up` to deploy.
Then I can track these files via git, and deploy to remote docker hosts using docker-machine, which effectively sets the DOCKER_HOST env var.
While I haven't used it personally, there is [0] Watchtower which aims to automate updating docker containers.
Far too often I build a project, only to get ready to deploy it, then struggle to think of a name/domain for it.
Then coupled with the thought of struggling to market the project, I end up fizzling out at that stage.
If I already have users of the project, then I'll deploy it as a subdomain and forget about it until a user complains.