helpimnotdrowning.net (eternally unfinished)

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  • 53 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • This might also become a hassle since basically all residential connections (likely of OPs friends) have dynamic IPs - if someone wants to join while OP is away, but their IP has changed since their last connection, now they have to wait on OP to update the firewall rules.

    Apart from getting your MSA token stolen, there’s not really much that can get around server login (yet). All online-mode logins pass through Microsoft (part of the reason why Xbox service outages seem to affect Minecraft so much).

    If your friends all individually seem to stay within some certain IP ranges (ex, first handful digits always stay the same, 12.34.56.xx), then I’d say go ahead with whitelisting them fully (ex, 12.34.56.xx --> 12.34.56.0/24, CIDR notation). If they jump around unpredictability, I would stick with the username-based whitelisting and online-mode-only.



  • as long you are only forwarding Minecraft’s 25565 port from your router to your server machine, it should be fine. Just make sure to keep Online mode on, use the whitelist, and get your plugins from trusted sources. Otherwise I wouldn’t worry too much.

    I see others recommending VPN solutions like zerotier for your friends to connect to; I don’t personally feel like this is necessary, and (in my experience), making your friends do more technical setup than just connecting to the server is often a big turn-off.

    Bonus: If you ever take a peek at your server logs while it’s running (and exposed to the Internet, if you avoid said VPN solutions), you might notice a lot of weird connections from IPs and usernames you don’t recognize. These are server scanners and threat scanners that look for vulnerable servers to connect to and exploit. This is normal and you’ll be fine as long as you keep that whitelist and stay up-to-date on developments in the server admin space.


  • I’ve acknowledged that, while convenient, my (small) setup is still a burden that I would be asking someone to take. If your friends don’t already share your passion or knowledge for Linux/Docker/the intricacies of <whatever you may be running>, I doubt they’d be willing to take on what you leave them.

    My friends had a family member who had a giant setup of Raspberry Pi’s that did Pi-hole, Home Assistant, F@H, among many other services and machines (there were like 6 Pi s!). They passed some time ago, and there’s just no one in the family who was willing to take on the responsibility to learn how to manage everything that was going on—services have been slowly degrading/going down since then.

    Those who rely on your services will just go back to using Google Drive, watch-anime-free.org.ru, and pressing “Open LAN world” in the Minecraft client. I don’t think it’s okay, but if you’re out of the game, you won’t be there to object.


    That is to say, if you DO have friends that are knowing and willing, you need to leave plenty of good documentation. I haven’t been one to write much of anything, and I’ve already fucked up my shell profiles again because of no documentation, but I can give some general pointers:

    • What runs where?
    • Why are things configured in certain ways? (ie “$GameServer gets 4gb because going over creates GC stutters”, “$IP is blocked because of telemetry”, “$File is symlinked to /dev/null to effectively delete/override a rule from $SomewhereElse”)
    • List rules and their exceptions. (ie “Service ports are numbered this way because it looks nice”, “Except $Port because it conflicts with $SystemService”)
    • List things even if they’re from personal preference (ie “Service ports are numbered this way because it looks nice”, tells user that these are effectively meaningless and things shouldn’t break by changing these, barring common sense)

    Basically, leave meaningful comments that explain why something is the way that it is. You should be able to use this documentation yourself as reference material. Keep this documentation updated regularly, as frequently quoted “bad documentation is worse than no documentation” (or something like that)

    (sorry if this last section in particular doesn’t make much sense, I haven’t slept in $hours. feel free to ask for clarification!)


  • if your sister’s by your server in-person, maybe you could guide them to graphically install something like Rustdesk (edit: graphical remote access, wayland isn’t well supported so make sure it’s running over Xorg), give you the access code & have them manually accept the connection so you can get back in.

    You’ll be stuck streaming your terminal window and sending laggy keystrokes though whatever connection you have now (until you can get ssh running), but it’s better than nothing.




  • Office won’t run on Linux or through Wine (AFAIK), I’ve converted to using LibreOffice on both Linux and Windows, which has yet to give me any issues.

    Teams, as part of O365, also doesn’t have a Linux app, however… with the (paid) Thunderbird addon Owl for Exchange, you can read+send Outlook emails; it also adds a Teams icon to your Thunderbird sidebar that acts as a link to the web client.

    Thunderbird, by default, can only read from Exchange mailboxes, but can’t send from them. If you don’t want to pay, the developers are working to add full Exchange support as stock. (There are also less legitimate ways to get Exchange support, like cracking Owl, but out of respect for the addon dev, you’ll have to find it yourself)

    Edit:

    If you’re new to Linux as a whole, I’ve seen many recommendations for Mint (a Debian and Ubuntu derivative), but I’ve never tried it myself. I started with Debian since I wanted a stable system that wouldn’t break down by itself or something. It’s rock solid on my Framework 13 Ryzen.

    As for a Desktop Environment (DE), you can’t go wrong with GNOME or KDE. I prefer KDE since I don’t like the “look” of GNOME and it’s more “Windows-like” (but still it’s own thing), but it’s really just personal preference.










  • I started about September or October 2021, when clips of Myth and Pikamee began showing up in my YouTube Shorts feed when I was trying that out. I would watch a stream or clips here and there, but I would really only consider myself a casual fan.

    That was until late February when it was announced Rushia’s channel would be deleted at the end of March '22 after her “graduation”. As someone who would have considered themselves a novice “datahoarder”, I felt the need to save her channel. This consisted of waiting to buy a 4tb hard drive and getting it about mid-March, the next week-ish mainly fine-tuning my downloader, then the last week purely downloading for days on end.

    And throughout all this, I would watch clips of her or pick a VOD that had downloaded; this was where I really fell down the rabbit hole. People from Hololive, Phase Connect, (then) WACTOR, idol, indies, etc. were popping up and I gleefully watched along.

    Strangely also, it seems that most of my oshis have graduated at some time (Rushia, Vesper, WACTOR ES’ Luna Rurine and Neon Kuroyuri, VOMS’ Pikamee) but I still watch them now in their new forms.

    (And the Archive grows.)


  • TLDR; No

    It hasn’t been necessary in a long time, unless you’re a developer who frequently needs to type in filenames in everywhere (since the command line needs extra protection against spaces and other symbols)

    The OS (Windows, Mac, Android, etc) handles thar all for you so you don’t have to worry about it (unless you happen to use a badly-written program that doesn’t understand spaces, but this is super rare to begin with, and more protected against as time goes on)