Ah yes that makes sense. I was taken aback by my latest install of freepbx. I feel it wasn’t as aggressive during the Digium days but it definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.

I heard good things about free switch, although it seems like a paradigm change. I’ll have to check it out.

Interesting - why avoid asterisk?

I looked into fusion to play with but I’ve been using asterisk casually since like the 00s with no issues.

Excellent! Nice work.

I don’t know what dns rebind is but once DNS A records are pointed to the right place then it’s just a matter of setting up the rest of your stuff.

Is that expected? Otherwise check to make sure DNS settings for the domain are correct (eg ns records dig NS example.com IIRC).

First off - you don’t explicitly say so I just want to double check - you’re not using example.com as the actually domain correct?

If not the next thing to do would be to check out what DNS is doing. You can use the dig command to see what IP address is being returned for the domains you’re trying to hit.

dig +trace may be useful as well.

When you copy /home make sure you get the “hidden” files. They start with a “.” and some programs ignore them by default. That’s also where most configuration files are.

Check out rsync -avz

Not who you asked but I have a smartish home. There is no real need. It just affords convenience and for me lands pretty squarely in “hobby” territory.

My lights turn on prior to sunset, and turn off after I go to bed. My porch lights dim at 10pm so I don’t disturb my neighbors as much. I have additional states of lights that are predicated on various scenarios. In short, I never touch a light switch, I never walk into a dark house, and my energy usage is reduced.

My vehicle mileage and tire pressures are reported on a dashboard for me to monitor.

My network statistics are monitored and graphed.

Energy usage of electronics of interest to me are monitored and graphed.

I have a software defined radio that I’m able to use remotely. Using a smart outlet I’m able to turn it on and off remotely as well instead of leaving it on 24/7.

Unfortunately I have a camera that is cloud based my SO uses to monitor pets. Using a smart outlet I turn it on only when we are not home.

Some of this can be accomplished with less smart means, some of it can’t, but it’s been fun to get it all setup.

I like monit. It’s simple to setup and pretty flexible.

https://mmonit.com/monit/

Not a particularly helpful comment but I struggled with this kinda thing until switching to Node Red. It made complex things much easier to get working.

There’s nothing really bad with PiHole but I moved from it to AdGuard, both on proxmox. The UI brought me in, makes management a bit easier. It also supports DoH right out of the box.

Try em both. See what you think.

Can you use json_attributes instead of the state for the value?

Give this a read for some ideas:

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/rest-sensor-state-max-length-is-255-characters/31807/20

Someone replied to me that you can run a bridge and never even know. I’m definitely trying it out now. Sick of all the nitro ads.

That’s great to hear. Somehow everyone and everything is on discord now and I really am not a fan of it what with all the pop ups and flashing shiny things to buy lol.

I’ll try to get my smaller groups on matrix

As far as self hosted I’ve heard a lot about matrix but haven’t tried it. Maybe I’ll give it a shot this weekend.

https://matrix.org/

There’s also telegram, slack, etc if you want something else commercial.

Auditing is nothing more than reading the code. Give it a read and make sure you understand everything it’s doing.

This is a great lesson on trust as well. I can tell you I did an audit and it all looks good but does that really have any value?

The few times I wasn’t sure I did the same search in google and got similar results so I’m 100% happy.

They even have some nice features like location aware searching, instant answer results (eg a box to convert currency), etc.

Additionally you can weight or even blacklist domains so you can completely remove results from Instagram.

At the risk of sounding like a shill sure! (I’m not, just a happy user)

Kagi is a paid search engine. They just introduced a 10/month plan that made the news which led me to their trial. I signed up a day later.

Because I’m paying money I have the feeling that I’m not the product unlike other free search engines. There’s likely no nefarious manipulation of search results and it’s refreshing to see new features rolling out.

It’s not all roses tho. Your searches are now tied to you and who really knows what’s going on with your data behind the scenes. Everyone needs to make their own decisions based on their priorities.

This is what led me to Kagi. It’s been so liberating.

It’s well suited for anything where you’re seated, eg racing sims, flight sims, euro truck sim etc.

If you’ve got any interest at all in those genres give it another try and it’ll be hard if not possible to go back. Digital Combat Sim in VR is a whole nother game.

Other than that I agree. Just a gimmick and I don’t see the way forward.

This is a good post.

As for why people don’t like systemd, it follows the kitchen-sink approach to software and does a lot of things at once.

For people new to Linux I just want to point out - for better or for worse this goes against the Unix philosophy.

Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.