CTDummy

Worth pointing out our feds recently dismantled a criminal syndicate centred around an encrypted comms app. Stuff like that is on their radar and has been for a minute for imo, pretty obvious reasons.

Ideally a Bluetooth dongle/maybe a speaker. Looks like an old problem from a quick google. So there we go don’t need VMs!

I have seen Nix come up quite a bit and have been tempted to try it. I’ve rolled with Arch before so I was considering going back to it but maybe something new be go.

The OS itself I don't back up outside of mirroring. I run an immutable OS (every reboot is like a fresh install). I can redeploy from git so no need to backup. I have some persistent BTRFS volumes mounted where logs, caches, and state go. Don't backup, but I swap the volume every boot and keep the last 30 days of volumes or a min of at least 10 for debugging.

Something like this has always interested me. I remember reading about doing similar with Windows. Not so much it being immutable so much as having a decent starting image that you load on any device you want with all your programs ready to go.

Runs Arrs, Jellyfin, Monero node, Tor entry node, wireguard VPN (to get into network from remote), I2C, Mullvad VPN (default), Proton VPN (torrents with port forwarding use this), DNS (forced over VPN using DoT), PiHole in front of that, three of my WiFi vlans route through either Mulvad, I2C, or Tor. I'll use TailsOS for anything sensitive. WiFi is just to get to I2C or Onion sites where I'm not worried about my device possibly leaking identity.

Do you have a guide or ten you used for all this perchance? Unraid has stuff like trashguides and space invader one. Especially the DNS part onwards? If not it’s cool I have Mullvad set up and Pihole with my current setup so I’ll be able to work it out. This is all very compelling for me to try out (I should really have learned about wireguard by now). Thanks a lot for such an interesting and informative write up!

Arch btw

Like I needed even more temptation. Cheers for confirming my suspicion that rolling a Linux distro is likely the go. I don’t really need a VM, just hassio doesn’t (didn’t?) have pass through without it.

For entry homelab stuff I still think it’s great. Literally just smacked it into an old HP server (now my cannibalised gaming builds) and it was good to go. However I was pretty inexperienced then (hence why I think I may have borked something fundamentally). Now days I’m more comfortable which getting under the hood hence looking for alternative. Definitely would still suggest Unraid to some though.

I was tempted to do something like an Ubuntu server. I figured all my NAS stuff is run through docker anyway. Cheers I’ll check out dockge

Good tips, thanks!! I’ll definitely check it out.

Oh fuck buying Nvidia new, I was going to see if it depressed 40xx prices or even further for 3090 but I’m not sure it would.

Neat didn’t know that about rope, as you can guess largely due to having fuck all memory to work with. Is AMD viable with LLMs now? Honestly if I can make it work with an AMD GPU I just may because I agree screw Nvidia.

Last I tried was a fimbul merge for 10.4b with rope for creative writing which was great but yeah 3.1 is where I’ve landed lately. I’ll have to check out nemo! Like you mentioned I was sitting on money to grab a 3090 but I think I’ll wait for rtx50xx to drive down prices or just for dedicated hardware. I’ll be sure to keep an eye the AI subs though, clearly there’s a community for it here that’s interested in discussion.

Really into local hosting and open LLM’s I’ve largely stepped back due to ‘fatigue’. I’ve downloaded tweaked and reshuffle models and programs then a couple months will pass and it’s lept forward again. Which is good but I figured I’d wait until it slowed a bit.

I will say the fact I can run a decent 7b and even 10b models and get decent responses and times with a 3070 is impressive. AnythingLLM has been a really handy program for me. Still in development but it’s been neat working with RAG. I also moved from textgen to LMStudio and am really liking it. I like textgen but I felt it got a bit side tracked. A lot of good suggestions in here so cheers OP.

Why not back up your win 7 installation and try a different Linux variant? Or even just fuck around with Linux in dual boot/vm before transitioning? I’d have to imagine that’d be preferable to either not using the internet or risking every device on the same network it’s connected to. I swear I read an article where fresh win10 installs were getting infected within minutes of connecting to the net. Let alone 7.

There’s a channel called Lemmimo that did a pretty interesting documentary on it that explains it. Also explains a lot of the reasoning behind popular conspiracies and why some of them are obvious bunk. Dude is very talented only came across the video a couple days ago due to his music he made for the video.

Yeah no. If that was all you managed to get from my reply then it isn’t worth continuing this discussion.