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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 11th, 2023

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  • It would be remiss of me to not point out that up until somewhat recently they had a gaping wide security hole (for presumably years) that allowed any customer to send email as any other and fully pass their spf and dkim checks (due to shared keys and having no way of ensuring their users could only send mail from domains under their own account).

    When this was disclosed they abused the reporter, kicked him off their service without giving him time to back up his mail, tried to discredit him, lied that their bad practices were commonplace throughout the industry (narrator: they weren’t) before finally going around removing all traces of the discussion. I was lucky(?) enough to see the reddit side of it as it unfolded and I’ve never seen such pseduo-tech bullshit being thrown around and well as nasty attacks on the reporter.

    So yeah, they’re cheap but they also seem pretty poor technically (or at least were) and seem like horrible people. YMMV of course.





  • I don’t self host anything where it would impact me unduly if it went down while I was on holiday to the point where I’d have to break state and go fix stuff.

    I don’t want to have to leave my beer or beach and head off to fix things like an email server, restore a password manager db etc. so anything like that which is critical to the point where an outage would prob have me do so means I pay someone else.







  • I’d go for an ESP8266/ESP32 with a telegram bot and LED (based sign) hanging off it. Just send a msg on telegram to turn it on/off.

    That having been said loads of ways to trigger the sign status - it could poll a website to see what status it should display and you have a mechanism of updating that status yadda yadda yadda.

    Note that those little chips needs wifi so you’d need to be able to connect it to wifi and have it get public internet access (or whatever you decide to control it). Loads of posts/youtube exist about driving WS2812 LEDs, or making your own DIY LED ‘neon’ signs. Cool little projects.




  • ‘Gaming routers’ is pretty much just a branding thing.

    Ultimately best performance will be a decent ‘prosumer’ router that can traffic shape (e.g. implement CAKE) in order to keep ping times down even when the link is under load and then good switching and wifi for the internal side of things (modern wifi standards, gigabit(+) ports).

    opnsense would be fine for the former (as would OpenWRT on a pi4, say), and then you need to plug in some decent access points like tp-link eapxxx range or unifi, ruijie etc. That combo should outperform one of those gaming routers that look like an upside down robot spider thing. Well, it won’t be worse and it’ll be more fliexible at the very least.

    Also remember that your dad’s gaming device should be hardwired for best performance no matter what you end up going with.

    Really this is more a /r/homenetworking thing, they’ll have plenty of advice for you to, inc. hardware recs.


  • Not sure about Roku, that might be asking too much, but Retroarch is the daddy of emulation frontends and I’ve seen people run that on Android boxes with ROMs just read from a NAS via SMB. It’s available on most platforms you can think of.

    There’s also dedicated gaming OSes (which will run on many generic S905ish AndroidTV boxes as well as PCs etc) which serve as prettier wrappers to that and other emus, my personal preference being Batocera if you whole-heartedly wanting those client systems to become ‘retro gaming systems’.

    KODI + IAGL would also be a workable soln on all platforms which have KODI, that can run the games directly from archive.org so negates need for the SMB share.

    There’s also lots of retrogaming-adjunct subs where this will be answered better than by us nerds here too.


  • I’d have the clients connect to the central server in a hub-and-spoke VPN topology using something like WireGuard say.

    Use the central host as either a jumphost or configure your personal devices to also connect to it via VPN and have it handle routing so you can connect directly to the clients once you’re connected to the central server.

    Thid is a somewhat standard topology so no need to reinvent the wheel.


  • Cloudflare Tunnel’s cloudflared links your home to two closest data centres and so should (?) be quicker, but response times would depend on where a user is accessing your service from.

    However, given residential ISP speeds and peering in most parts of the world you’d be unlikely to notice any real difference between the two and other than that ‘last leg’ access tech the processing within Cloudflare’s flow is the same whether you use cloudflared or direct proxying.