First on how to get an ASN: you can buy it for reasonably cheap from a LIR. Some will even toss a free /48 with that. Happy to offer names in private so that there’s no advertising. Expect a budget quoted above.

Once you have an ASN, you need to get an upstream - actually two as RIPE mandates at least two (otherwise why’d you need an ASN). Some LIRs would offer transit with ASN purchase. You can upstream via your ISP, if they allow you to (that’s very rare). Another option is a tunnel (there are free and paid ones) or a VM somewhere (some cloud providers offer to set up bgp with VMs they host). Generally, free ones are enough for basic stuff. Not much bandwidth and oftentimes IPv6 only, but you don’t pay anything either. Besides, you can ask around in various network related chats. Practically, I can offer ip transit with some marginally low burstable bandwidth, and that’s pretty common. You can look/ask around https://discord.gg/ipv6 for example.

For getting ASN to your homelab you’re looking at a tunnel option, most probably. Great if you have static ipv4 - allows you to use more common tunnels, but is still doable with a floating IP (e.g. check bgptunnel).

BGP anycast person here. If you have any presence in the region RIPE operates in then the pricing is within the homelab reach. ASN and a block of /48 would be about 70 EUR/year.

Alternatively, something like route64 would happily tunnel you IPs they announce for about 2 EUR/month.

I’ve used VM in my homelab for a while - it’s genuinely a smaller ram footprint, especially on the ingress path. You can even scale query separately if required.

I’d suggest VictoriaMetrics over pure Prometheus - better ram footprint is pretty useful nowadays.

You probably want to mention that some prominent cryptographers think this just astroturfing?

I actually had lots of fun writing a clojure compiler in rust that would target wasm. This allows to write it all in rust and then get it to self-host bit by bit.

Or you could, idk, have some metrics. That’s a wild idea, of course. Who uses monitoring when you can just ask an LLM?

A second offsite NAS with your friend? That’s what I did when I grew out of my old synology. My new NAS capacity is noticeably impacted by things like frequent local snapshots but I don’t need to back those up remotely and it saves space.

While matter technically requires IPv6 there are non-confirming devices (glares at Hue) that will only do IPv4. It will work with most of the matter controller networks, because in the end it’s a conscious decision to disable IPv4 there.

You really want the ECC ram and the motherboard/cpu combo that supports it.

If your note’s type is JSON (or TW’s native dictionary), you can query it as such in filters.

My search problem is that I rely on metadata a lot. It’s natural for me to want a UI that renders machine readable metadata in a way that my brain can process and that requires rich querying capabilities.

I tried them all and, so far, TW wins for me, with orgmode being second close (I like orgmode in vim, but it had some fatal rendering flaws and I don’t feel like using emacs just for notes).

tiddlywiki has one of the most insane search engines from this list. They have a whole filters syntax that can express pretty much anything imaginable, no? I went back to TW from Obsidian because I was tired from Obsidian’s trivial search functionality.

Slothmud (https://slothmud.org/) is still fun and has that very classic MUD vibe.

Let’s untangle those problems. I have a similar setup so I just want to share some ideas to show that you don’t need to copy keys.

If I’m traveling or I wipe my device or get a new one, I would have to add the new key to many servers as authorized keys

If you oftentimes access ssh from untrusted systems you’re kind of in a bad spot to begin with. The best thing you can have is a yubikey on a keychain. Everything else means you leak secret material (a password or a key) to a machine you don’t inherently trust.

Also, I want a key backed up in case of disaster since all of my devices are in my home most of the time

Again, something that you can easily solve with a hardware key [in a safe]. But realistically, in case of a disaster a local shell password login should be good enough?

I’d recommend you to think about what attacks are you trying to prevent by using a shared private key. I’m not saying it’s a bad concept, inherently having it in your password manager (like 1Password that even has ssh-agent support) is pretty common. The problem with just the keys is that it’s non-trivial to expire them if needed. You might be indeed better off with some web based authentication that you can access from any place which would ask you secret questions/send you a text message or do whatever 2FA you deem sufficient and mint you a short-lived certificate for ssh.

Not an answer, but I’m curious: what’s wrong with just having several ssh keys, one per device?

Next step is discovering atuin! https://atuin.sh/

You can absolutely run your own CA and even get your friends to trust it.

My fear is, that if i don’t document well or not use ansible, I will be hating my life once my server dies and I have to restore my data and also set um my services again in a few years.

I’ve been there plenty of times, you’re not alone. There are two solutions to that problem, really, and it boils down to the classic pet vs cattle.

1. Everything is a pet

Pets mean you care about every server. If it breaks, it’s cheaper for you to fix it than redeploy. The overwhelming majority of your setup will be pets. Why? It’s simpler. Things don’t break that often, and when they do, it’s okay to be low-effort in fixing them.

Write docs for yourself, even if it’s just notes on the sequences of commands to run to redeploy things. You will thank yourself when the server finally dies in two years and you have notes on how to bring everything back.

2. Everything is a cattle

Cattle means there’s no difference between server A and B. Everything is replaceable. Ultimately, whatever you run can run to the same extent in AWS, your basement NAS, or on your desk PC.

Cattle is also a lot of work. You will learn an excruciating amount of things about storage, networking, visualisation, workload scheduling, and such. And it’s easy to be demotivated because of how much there is to learn.

So take it easy. Concur that your hobby world is full of pets, but learn how to do the cattle approach at your leisure. You’ll realise that in every practical cattle setup, there are still pets, and that automating yourself from complexity only means you add layers of it somewhere else.

I don’t think that’s plausible.

I’m in a same boat, honestly.

Matrix has decent clients but managing a matrix instance is a world of pain, especially if you federate. And its resource use is really bad then: a single user instance can easily demand 4gb ram if you are in a couple popular chatrooms. Key propagation is oftentimes broken. Clients all have mixed support of features.

Xmpp is a joy to host, but there are no decent clients for iOS.

IRC is easy to host, but the IRCv3 coverage for clients is also meh.

I was looking for something that I could throw at casual people with relative ease and there’s just not a thing. Even the “techy” chat is in discord nowadays.