I make a partition on my main drive which I load any .iso on to it. Usually I keep a Linux Mint .iso there in case I need a basic set of tools outside of my main Operating System for when I mess up my main OS. I can load that .iso partition at boot through the BIOS menu.

I’m sure you can do the same with an NVME drive. You may need to check the BIOS boot order to make sure you start your preferred OS when booting your system.

Further down this comment chain I explain why I feel AI is causing so many issues.

The blog post linked but the user lepire does an even better job explaining how AI destroys online communities.

Personal convenience should not come at such a deep and destructive cost.

I’ve been on the internet since 1998 and I’ve watched slowly as big money and bigger tech companies slowly destroy everything that made the internet inclusive and weird. I’m sure people who have had access to the Internet for longer than myself would have even more to say about the current state of the internet.

I use Alpine Linux as a daily desktop. I use swaywm and foot, sometimes LibreWolf for browsing. I’m mostly using the command line with some TUI’s so it’s a very minimal system.

I found out I really enjoy POSIX scripting so that’s how I choose to spend my spare time. I try to make scripts that make using the CLI environment easier to use.

If you are interested, I have a script that can setup Alpine on a desktop with full disk encryption. I didn’t figure out how to do it, I just made the script easier to use. https://codeberg.org/taters/Alpine-Linux-Install_Full-Disk-Encryption_LVM

I also use it for two Raspberry Pi devices. I think the minimal environment is good for a server. Less complexity and attack surface to think about.

I’ve learned a lot about computers and the operating system with Alpine, it’s been a fun experience.

It’s completely overwhelming how many new projects there are that are full of AI/LLM code and documentation. AI has also crept into existing projects, including those that deal with security or encryption. It’s even in Linux now. This is all incredibly troubling from an outside perspective.

It’s dangerous to live on top of so many layers of abstraction. If we don’t understand our tools and machinery, they will not be useful to us when they eventually break. And all things eventually break. Just because it exists and is available, does not mean it is good, acceptable or safe to use.

It’s very saddening that the ethical issues about the use of AI is constantly being pushed to the side of every conversation. It’s frustrating to deal with people who are Pro-AI that are consistently rude and condescending. It’s frustrating for Pro-AI people to consistently ignore a person’s question to aggressively push more AI products on other people. This behaviour has killed any sense or feeling of community.

This technology didn’t always exist. This technology doesn’t need to have such complete control over our future. It is completely acceptable for people to seek AI free alternatives and not be treat like they are troublesome idiots.

All the rage and insecurities in the world won’t erase people’s desire to feel community and express their humanity. It’s a shame that the few who are angry and insecure are also incredibly fucking loud.

I’ve lost all motivation to continue any sort of self-hosting. AI/LLM has crept into every corner of the internet. It’s killed the community vibe I once grew up with. There’s a certain lifelessness with these projects and the internet as a whole that’s hard to describe but it’s just not fun anymore.

I’m in the progress of changing my hobby to be more offline. Writing my own code for my own purpose and entertainment. I’ll still host my code on Codeberg. Codeberg, this Lemmy account and that one bash focused discord server will be my entire online presence going forward. Whatever happens, happens and I won’t feel a loss about losing access to any of those things.

Capitalism and the forces that promote or enable capitalism just exploits everything until there is no life, fun or joy left…

I use Alpine Linux so yeah, I am using something by Linux

It’s not ideal but I don’t have the time to find alternatives for everything all at once, just one thing at a time which is the pace I am going. I’ll deal with it when the time comes but it’s in the back of my mind

I don’t expect perfection out of anyone. I would not make friends if I held them to such high standards or expectations. Everyone learns, adapts and grows at their own pace and I would do better to support them along the way through their journey

Myself and the people around me are doing our best in this situation we are in with the tools that are currently available to us

I don’t believe trying to reduce the complex human experience to 100% right or 100% wrong will lead to any useful discussion when there’s so much in the middle we could be discussing

That’s true, it CertBot seems to be quite mature

It was a bit overwhelming for me when I first started into self hosting, there were a lot of concepts that I had to wrap my head around first before I could look into using CertBot itself

Awesome, thanks so much, this is a big head start for me

I have a good idea how I want to organize things now

I definitely expect this path to be a bit of a challenge

I was looking at lighttpd as well. That was the only one on the list that sounded familiar to me. I may check it out and see if it can fit me needs. I do run a very minimal setup so I might just be enough.

I also make use of Caddy’s built in file server to serve static pages so this is good to know about HAProxy

Thank you, I’ll have a look at lego-acme, it looks interestingly. I prefer to use cron so this is could be something I would consider using.

This is great, thank you for taking the time for this write up :) The provided scripts are a huge help to me

So far my only question I have is about the directories you use. I was wondering if you could provide the directories you use or even just an example so I could better understand the file tree. I’m very particular with my files and have a whole system dedicated to maintaining neat and organized files

I agree about not using /etc for server related stuff. I keep all my server/container related stuff in /srv so it’s easier for me to manage

I’ve used NPM before and it is quite simple and easy to use, however I do have a preference for CLI tools

Impossible? There are people who still write code by hand. There are people who oppose AI, some more actively (or destructively) than others.

Harder to avoid seems like a more reasonable take.

However I am coping, by actively seeking, talking about and supporting alternatives with the hope of spreading that knowledge to those who would like to avoid the use of AI or enable those who support AI.

Human creativity has a much longer and far more interesting history when compared to AI or machine learning. AI hasn’t always existed and does not need to have complete influence over our future.

I personally feel like taking money from an AI sponsor is enabling behaviour. From that perspective, I do not want to support that type of behaviour.

I don’t think you are in the wrong here. You clearly stated your wants and so many replies here have simply ignored what you have said. The response to your post has been strange

How would trace the echo reply in the output chain? I tried adding meta nftrace set 1 directly to the ICMPv4 rule as well as making a chain postrouting rule but I can’t seem to figure it out.

The default policy for output is accept so I’m assuming I don’t need to explicitly add ICMPv4 rules to the output chain. As a test I did add the ICMPv4 rules to the output chain and I still have the same results as before.

I can confirm that the server is receiving the ping requests but my computer sending the pings loses the ping packets.

Aah you did mention that, my eyes just decided to skip that when I read your post.

This reminds me of another issue I ran into but I use Alpine Linux so I don’t know if it’s a distribution specific issue. I’ll share the issue and workaround solution anyways as something to consider.

Networking on Alpine Linux is controlled by a process called networking and for reasons I don’t understand and can’t see by any logs, it just stops working. I can’t ssh or access the reverse proxy port. I don’t remember if ping was working or not as it’s been a while since I dealt with it now.

My work around was to have a script on my server ping a known location and restart networking if it couldn’t ping out. If a second ping after restarting the process failed, it would then restart the device. This script would run every 15 minutes.

It’s a bandage solution that doesn’t solve the problem but it does keep my server running. However it seems like pings still work with your server so you might need to get creative in how you test your server’s connectivity.