Brickfrog

they want to setup a server to host a simple “contact” website

Not sure what sort of uptime/reliability your friends are expecting out of a self hosted solution but for something like that you wouldn’t need much processing power, even a Raspberry Pi can host a simple website. Not sure what to recommend offhand but there are definitely vendors in that space that sell simple DIY “contact us” form software, or I guess if you wanted to roll your own that’s an option too. I’d be more concerned about keeping it locked down/secure.

Keep in mind for the internet your friends would likely need business class internet with multiple static IPs so you can give your little DIY box its own public IP address. Many (most?) residential internet service providers do not allow self hosting websites on their network and they’d be dynamic IP anyway though you could work around that somewhat with dynamic DNS since you’re going to need to purchase a domain name and point it to somewhere anyway.

run an e-mail service (about 10 accounts for now but with possibilities of expanding it to support more)

Like others said you really don’t want to go that route unless you’re well versed in that area. It would be annoying for a business especially a new one, those emails will likely keep going into other provider’s spam folders for a good period of time. All the big mainstream email providers are notorious for not trusting new email domains / new IP addresses.

Seems easier to just go to Google Workspace / Microsoft 365 / whatever other provider you like to use, presumably the business has a business use case for reliable email among other things.

Bonus: Those cloud services can easily host simple contact forms for you so maybe that’s your all in one solution. Look into Google Forms and similar.

and to store and remote access documents.

That sounds like the above commercial cloud solutions again :)

But sure technically you could go through the extra step hosting that yourself. Depends on how the business wants to use/access this stuff, it’s really a question for them. Could be as simple as a Windows server with RDP (if they’re Windows people & just want to log into something “windows” to browse/open files) or maybe multi-user Linux with VNC (the geeks might like, maybe not so much the general Windows/Mac users). Or if you’re trying to do something web oriented maybe something like Nextcloud if you want to do all this in a web browser.

You should triple check what exactly they are expecting when it comes to remote access documents… you really don’t want to spend the time setting up something that they totally weren’t expecting and end up hating.

I don’t think it’s possible, or at least not in the way you’re thinking. Encoding a video with lossless flags usually results in a file size bigger or about the same as the source, and on top of that it takes a long time to actually do the encode.

Video is already highly compressed.

But for sure you can tinker around with ffmpeg (FOSS) & see how it goes for you. I’ve done it in the past just for kicks since some of the common video codec encoders do have lossless flags but it really wasn’t worth the effort.

EDIT: That’s just the video in the file, you also have to contend with the audio. That’s a bit easier if you just want to use ffmpeg to dump everything into FLAC but again, I don’t think you’re saving much hard drive space if any.

Jellyfin should work fine for what you’re looking for. I haven’t run it on a Pi but it should work on that. You’ll be able to play music using the web ui as well as mobile apps if that’s your thing. It can also transcode on the fly so if your current browser/device/whatever can’t play .flac directly it’ll automatically transcode the playback to .mp3 or whatever it needs to be.

There are some other self hosted music/streaming projects you could take a look at that are much more built out for music playback specifically. Look into Airsonic-Advanced or Navidrome for example - I’ve been meaning to check them out myself but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Should be fine, just don’t cheap out on the external drive / cable you will be using. And when you’re using something like smartctl you’ll know right away if SMART info is passing through your USB for proper testing.

I’ve done a lot of these type of scans via USB drives, honestly the more annoying part is that some USB drives do wonky things like go into sleep mode within 1-5 minutes which will disrupt any sort of scanning you had going. So with USB drive scanning I usually implement something to keep the drive alive and awake e.g. a simple infinite loop script to write a file every x seconds, or if you’re on windows you can also use KeepAliveHD.

is there anything you would recommend?

You’d need to donate via whatever means they accept donations, it’s not something you get to choose yourself. Unless you meant that you are going to keep contacting FOSS projects to ask them to set up new donation methods?

Personally I donate via crypto or other means that they allow donations via credit card (Liberapay / Ko-Fi work well IMO) . No Paypal/Venmo since I can’t use those services - some FOSS projects I don’t donate at all if they only accept Paypal.

True, wouldn’t be too different vs just using a VPN. You’re choosing to trust the Tribler tech and the Tribler exit node operator vs choosing to trust the VPN provider. Granted most VPN connections are going to have much better performance vs anything Tribler related.

There is a nice side effect of running an *arr stack against Tribler, even in 1 hop mode - Your Tribler node is much more easily pulling in new content into the Tribler network for other users to access afterwards without needing an exit node. Ideally it’s just one Tribler node/user needing to pull data through the exit nodes while the rest would just pull it from you and share with other nodes in-network.

Torrents over I2P work the same way. If the torrent data isn’t found within I2P and you have outproxies configured you could pull torrents from the clearnet & afterwards other I2P users just share amongst the I2P network.

That’s pretty cool, thanks for sharing! Been a while since I tried it out but last I looked Tribler’s own automation features were quite lacking so something like this helps a lot.

I was not able to download anything with more than 1 hops in between - ie it does hide your real IP address, but only uses one relay in between.

Hmm I don’t think there’s any relays at all in that configuration, unless you’re counting the exit node itself?

https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/issues/3067#issuecomment-325367047

One thing to keep in mind is that to download torrents from outside Tribler’s own network you would need to download through an exit node… not sure on the exact stats but last I tested exit nodes were only like 5-10% of the Tribler user base. For a while I tried volunteering my own VPN connection as an exit node for Tribler just to see how it went but the Tribler client kept locking up/crashing after a few days so the experiment did not go well… hopefully works better nowadays.

But, regardless, blocking any registrars that size the way you’re describing would break way more businesses and hurt the recipient provider’s own reputation.

Yeah I thought that too but when speaking with the email admin that was blocking Namecheap while figuring this out they had already decided it wasn’t worth trying to allow the 1% of valid emails vs the 99% spam emails they felt they received via Namecheap domains.

This honestly starting to sound more and more like a smear campaign

Smear against whom? I’m a Namecheap customer, just relaying my own experiences using them. Besides that quirk I like them fine as a registrar… I know it sounds dumb but I even renewed my domains there even after those email issues.

It’s fine, you don’t need to believe me as I said it’s just my own experience using Namecheap domains for emails. But you could just google around, you’ll see plenty of people discussing Namecheap & looking for solutions to block them (or solutions to successfully send emails with hem)… it’s not something I randomly made up if that’s what you’re implying.

e.g.

https://community.spiceworks.com/t/blocking-emails-based-on-registrar/816565

https://tacit.livejournal.com/608386.html

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/05/why-do-scammers-love-namecheap/

https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/13t6fvm/namecheaps_private_email_is_blacklisted_by/

https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/wlb6vp/namecheap_making_it_too_easy_to_register_domains/

https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/tz4mkb/my_emails_are_always_going_in_the_spam_folder_of/

https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/ye358x/i_am_getting_a_ton_of_spam_scams_from_namecheap/

etc.

If you’re using Google Workspace, Google will give you the appropriate DMARC, DKIM and SPF records to add to your DNS. The NS themselves should resolve the records and provide the recipient server with the values you’ve entered, thereby ensuring delivery.

Sure. But why would that matter when you’re dealing with hostile 3rd party email providers that intentionally want to blackhole all email domains at Namecheap? But yes, just to clarify I do configure DMARC/DKIM/SPF and that works great for most cases.

I’m just describing what worked for me though in truth I don’t know exactly how these hostile email providers actually determine the domain is hosted at Namecheap. My hunch is that they are using a lookup & finding the nameserver for the domain & have already blacklisted Namecheap’s default free nameserver IP addresses. For whatever reason those same hostile email providers don’t seem to be blacklisting Namecheap’s paid nameserver but I think that sort of makes sense…

The larger issue is that Namecheap is known for cheap domains that scammers/spammers tend to buy in bulk & then use to spam with. Those same scammers/spammers aren’t trying to spend extra money so they only ever use the default free Namecheap nameservers.

If you use Namecheap for email domain(s) you may want to consider also splurging for their PremiumDNS to keep your domain(s) off spam blocks at other email providers.

I help maintain some emails at Gmail/Google Workspace but the domains themselves are at Namecheap. For a while there were complaints that some emails never landed in other people’s inboxes… this led me to talk about the issue with one of the email provider recipients based in the UK & apparently they were null routing anything coming from Namecheap since they felt a lot of spam came from them. But after some experimenting I figured out their system (& probably others) were figuring out they were Namecheap domains via the default FreeDNS they use. On a hunch I switched those domains over to PremiumDNS and after that all our emails were landing in other inboxes correctly. I guess maybe it makes sense, a typical spammer buying a cheap domain at Namecheap isn’t going to splurge for the higher end DNS service for it.

I’m not saying all email providers treat Namecheap domains as spam but just be warned there definitely ones out there that do.

Bummer, the formfactor / specs look okay but it’s kind of a dead end if I can’t just install & use a vanilla Debian OS or similar.

With all the NAS OS options probably Synology has the best one but even there I don’t actually want to get locked into that. I doubt this UGOS software can match Synology’s let alone Debian.

If it’s any consolation it looks like UGREEN is responding to comments about installing other OSes at their kickstarter page https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/urgreen/ugreen-nasync-next-level-storage-limitless-possibilities/comments

Not sure about SIM cards but you can still use cash to buy prepaid phones along with an amount of minutes/text to activate. Like the kind of prepaid phones that you you see the vendors sell x minutes/text/data. e.g. I’ve never been asked for a credit card to buy a Tracfone. Some places like Best Buy will ask you for other information to sell it but none of it needs to be real (ironically Best Buy asks for a phone number to buy a prepaid phone, LOL). You do need to set up a Tracfone account online to actually activate a phone + plan, not sure about the other prepaid vendors.

Interesting, though I suspect that is a false positive, it’s happened before with that software

https://rejetto.com/forum/index.php?topic=9037.0

Most likely because it is a self-contained web server executable? That sort of software would seem suspicious and similar to other sorts of virus/malware.

Granted I have not used it in a while but I’d be surprised if it were true, their forums and github would be full of reports of malware.

https://github.com/rejetto/hfs

That aside you have plenty of other options to use if you prefer to use something else.

Syncthing, Resilio Sync, or one of those browser based p2p file sends e.g. https://file.pizza or similar.

If both p2p ends know how to use torrents then creating a simple torrent to share to the other peer would work fine. But that requires slightly more IT competence especially if someone needs to open a port forward (ideally you would make sure you have your own port forwarded so the other party doesn’t have to worry about this).

If you’re doing this more than once it might be worth setting up a simple server e.g. HFS is a nice open source/free HTTP file server, been a while since I used it but it still seems to be active https://www.rejetto.com/hfs/

Sucks but not surprising. Broadcom has a history of doing things like this, ugh. Even with their paid products they jack up the price so much that the only customers that stick around are the business enterprise types that are locked in & can’t easily migrate for various reasons.

Something like this would seem to make more sense to run over I2P I’d think. But it looks like the devs aren’t interested in trying to go that route

https://github.com/onionshare/onionshare/issues/377

Maybe in the future someone will fork the project to work over I2P eventually.

Misleading, rarbg.to still has the same shutdown message. The owners of rarbg would still have access to their own domain - if they intend to update it with any news they could.

Any other pretend rarbg domain is going to be some copycat site trying to coast on the rarbg brand. Just like the copycat KAT sites that are around now, KAT itself is long gone too.

and opened port 587 in my router

Agreed with the other comment, you definitely don’t need or want to do that on your end. Note that your self hosted instance is trying to establish an outgoing connection with a random port to port 587 at wherever your hosted email is e.g. yourdockeripaddress:randomport --> mydomain.com.au:587

I don’t have Bitwarden self hosted so can’t offer much advice on a solution but…

I’ve also tried to connect with my gmail but no luck. When I try to verify my email I just get “An unhandled server error has occurred”

This makes me think there’s something off with your environment, or the Bitwarden instance itself. Is there a way for you to verify that you can actually use those SMTP servers outside of Bitwarden? This sounds silly but in the past I’ve done a test installation of an email client with ability to connect to 3rd party SMTP servers e.g. Thunderbird just to verify my own internet connection can actually initiate an SMTP connection to an external server. You want to at least rule out that the hosted email server isn’t blocking you and/or have some over-active firewall on your end blocking things.

This is all in the absence of more verbose logging (not sure if Docker or Bitwarden can give you that, something worth checking).

However, the server doesn’t have the best power consumption, so I’d like to use WoL to remotely turn it on.

When you say remotely you mean over the internet, right? Or did you mean remotely within the same LAN e.g. from your living room or wherever.

By default WOL doesn’t work over the internet AFAIK. The wikipedia page mentions it a bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN#Subnet_directed_broadcasts

Like others said you may be able to get that going with a VPN or anything VPN-like that allows broadcasts between connected systems. Or if your motherboard supports IPMI / IMM you should be able to connect to the system & perform power functions that way.

In my case my motherboard doesn’t have those sort of management functions so in the end I settled on logging into my router remotely & initiated WOL through there. That could be another option for you if your network router is capable of sending WOL packets to the LAN.

However, the server doesn’t have the best power consumption, so I’d like to use WoL to remotely turn it on.

You may need to reach out to your VPN provider’s support to check if that is a supported feature. Many VPN providers with port forward support can only do it within their application.