sylver_dragon

Have you considered just beige boxing a server yourself? My home server is a mini-ITX board from Asus running a Core i5, 32GB of RAM and a stack of SATA HDDs all stuffed in a smaller case. Nothing fancy, just hardware picked to fulfill my needs.

Limiting yourself to bespoke systems means limiting yourself to what someone else wanted to build. The main downside to building it yourself is ensuring hardware comparability with the OS/software you want to run. If you are willing to take that on, you can tailor your server to just what you want.

I do agree with what you are saying, but for a complete beginner, and a very general overview, I didn’t want to complicate things too much. I personally run my own stuff in containers and am behind CG-NAT (it’s why I gave it a mention).

That said, if you really wanted to give the new user that advice, go for it. Rather than just nit pick and do the “but actshuly” bit, start adding that info and point out how the person should do it and what to consider. Build, instead of just tearing down.

No, but you are the target of bots scanning for known exploits. The time between an exploit being announced and threat actors adding it to commodity bot kits is incredibly short these days. I work in Incident Response and seeing wp-content in the URL of an attack is nearly a daily occurrence. Sure, for whatever random software you have running on your normal PC, it’s probably less of an issue. Once you open a system up to the internet and constant scanning and attack by commodity malware, falling out of date quickly opens your system to exploit.

Short answer: yes, you can self-host on any computer connected to your network.

Longer answer:
You can, but this is probably not the best way to go about things. The first thing to consider is what you are actually hosting. If you are talking about a website, this means that you are running some sort of web server software 24x7 on your main PC. This will be eating up resources (CPU cycles, RAM) which you may want to dedicated to other processes (e.g. gaming). Also, anything you do on that PC may have a negative impact on the server software you are hosting. Reboot and your server software is now offline. Install something new and you might have a conflict bringing your server software down. Lastly, if your website ever gets hacked, then your main PC also just got hacked, and your life may really suck. This is why you often see things like Raspberry Pis being used for self-hosting. It moves the server software on to separate hardware which can be updated/maintained outside a PC which is used for other purposes. And it gives any attacker on that box one more step to cross before owning your main PC. Granted, it’s a small step, but the goal there is to slow them down as much as possible.

That said, the process is generally straight forward. Though, there will be some variations depending on what you are hosting (e.g. webserver, nextcloud, plex, etc.) And, your ISP can throw a massive monkey wrench in the whole thing, if they use CG-NAT. I would also warn you that, once you have a presence on the internet, you will need to consider the security implications to whatever it is you are hosting. With the most important security recommendation being “install your updates”. And not just OS updates, but keeping all software up to date. And, if you host WordPress, you need to stay on top of plugin and theme updates as well. In short, if it’s running on your system, it needs to stay up to date.

The process generally looks something like:

• Install your updates.
• Install the server software.
• Apply updates to the software (the installer may be an outdated version).
• Apply security hardening based on guides from the software vendor.
• Configure your firewall to forward the required ports (and only the required ports) from the WAN side to the server.
• Figure out your external IP address.
• Try accessing the service from the outside.

Optionally, you may want to consider using a Dynamic DNS service (DDNS) (e.g. noip.com) to make reaching your server easier. But, this is technically optional, if you’re willing to just use an IP address and manually update things on the fly.

Good luck, and in case I didn’t mention it, install your updates.

Cleopatra had huge tracts of land. And all of the Romans wanted to plow her fields.
I’m walking about the wheat production of Egypt here, what were you thinking of?

At the time I stood my server up, I was supporting RHEL at work and support for docker seemed a bit spotty. IIRC, it took both setting up the docker yum repo directly, along with the EPEL repo. And every once in a while, you could end up in dependency hell from something which was at different versions between EPEL and the official repos. Ubuntu, on the other hand, had better docker support in the official repos and docker seemed more targeted at .deb distributions. So, I made the choice to go Ubuntu.

I suspect this is long since all sorted. But, I see no compelling reason to change distributions now. The base OS is solid and almost everything the server does is containerized anyway. If I were to rebuild it, I would probably use something more targeted at containerization/virtualization, like Proxmox.

I had dabbled with Linux before, both at home and work. Stood up a server running Ubuntu LTS at home for serving my personal website and Nextcloud. But, gaming kept my main machine on Win10. Then I got a Steam Deck and it opened my eyes to how well games "just worked’ on Linux. I installed Arch on a USB drive and booted off that for a month or so and again, games “just worked”. I finally formatted my main drive and migrated my Arch install to it about a week ago.

I’m so glad that I won’t be running Windows Privacy Invasion Goes to 11.

My experience has been pretty similar. With Windows turning the invasive crap up to 11, I decided to try and jump to Linux. The catch has always been gaming. But, I have a Steam Deck and so have seen first hand how well Proton has been bridging that gap and finally decided to dip my toes back in. I installed Arch on a USB 3 thumbdrive and have been running my primary system that way for about a month now. Most everything has worked well. Though, with the selection of Arch, I accepted some level of slamming my head against a wall to get things how I want them. That’s more on me than Linux. Games have been running well (except for the input bug in Enshrouded with recent major update, that’s fixed now). I’ve had no issues with software, I was already using mostly FOSS anyway. It’s really been a lot of “it just works” all around.

“High Impact” like a body hitting the ground at the bottom of a cliff.

Marketing is far from dead. Larian themselves used it to great effect with BG3. Does no one remember the announcement trailer released for BG3 well in advance of any gameplay footage? That’s marketing, though and through. And yes, it worked plenty well on me. A D&D game based around Mind Flayers, made by the folks behind Divinity Original Sin? Shut up and take my money. Also, when I noticed the outline of a Nautiloid ship in the background, I may have needed a change of shorts.

The difference with BG3 was that Larian didn’t just pull an Edward Bernays style marketing as a con. They delivered a good product, worked with players to fix any issues and have gone above and beyond supporting the game after release. They have done everything right to build long term customer relationships. Maybe they don’t reach the same level of profits some other companies might, by stuffing microtransactions in every orifice. But, I suspect they are profitable and seem to be better built be continue long term and not have to tear the company up and saddle one of those pieces with insane amounts of debt.

While I can’t promise that I’ll buy their next game, I’ll undoubtedly keep an eye out for it. Larian puts out a quality product and doesn’t fuck their customers. That’s what makes their brand of marketing work.

While I’m a fan of Kali, some work environments see anything Kali related and go full “zomg! WTF!” Mode. Even in less restrictive environments, it’s often easier to just go with the flow and avoid making life harder for the security folks, without a good reason.

Try getting old. I used to want 9 or so. These days, I seem to just wake up after about 7 hours. I don’t really use an alarm anymore. I just get up when I am awake and know that getting back to sleep isn’t going to happen. Even nights after a good workout, I pop awake after about 6 1/2 to 7 hours. Never used to be this way. But, I just seem to need less these days.

By hours played, it’s either Valheim or Baldur’s Gate 3. Fallout 76 should get mentioned, as it was a lot of fun until it wasn’t. Falling victim to the story lines sort of running their course and the game turning into a standard MMO grind-fest. I’ll also mention Green Hell, which was a passable survival-crafting game with enough story to make a “play through” actually have a meaning. Even if that meaning had all the subtlety of a tactical nuclear weapon. It’s also still seeing development, so it might be worth going back too. Finally, there was Raft, which was another fun survival-crafting game (is my preference in games obvious?), which also went for the subtlety of a water buffalo rutting. Again, fun while it lasted, but hardly worth playing more than once or twice.

Melee combat is possible on motorcycles.

Oh now this is going to be fun.

Depends on how far ahead he planned the sale. It does sound like he’s getting ready to deploy a golden parachute while the company burns. Clean out his own stock while the price is still high enough and then say, “well shucks, who’d have thought that developers would leave in droves when we instituted micro-transactions for using our engine?” And walk on to overseeing his next disaster.

Seems like it’s planned enshitification. Use lower costs and even free for individuals to get market share, then crank up the price once you have a large audience. It’ll be interesting to see if and where indie developers jump to.

Microsoft tried a mobile version of Windows. And, it was actually not terrible. However, it suffered from a major problem.

If you want to step just a bit further back in gaming history, the old Sierra games were absolutely fantastic for their time. My personal favorite series will always be Quest for Glory. And I still go back and play through the series about once a year or so. For more even more of a puzzle focus, the King’s Quest series or Space Quest series were both very good. Most of these games were DOS based and so run well with DOSBox. The Steam version on Quest for Glory literally just auto-runs the game in DOSBox. If you enjoy any of them, I’d also recommend looking into ScummVM which tends to make running those older games really smooth, at the cost of a tiny bit of setup work.

Seems like MS is trying to run afoul of anti-trust laws, again.

Assuming your partner is breast-feeding, pop that kid on a nipple. We flew several times with young kids and being able to suckle kept the little ones quiet for most flights.

If you’re paying for a new version every year, is all that different than paying for a service? At the very least, with the yearly release model, you can simply decide not to pay for a year and keep playing the old one.