I personally would advise against gsuite and office356 as well as it’s currently debated whether they can be used in accordance to the GDPR. That’s not stopping institutions and organizations… Both are very popular products, but I’d be cautious and not put any sensitive stuff or personal stuff or pictures there. And not hand out logins to other people, especially not minors.

I don’t think the BSA compare to the major German scouting associations. Different organization structure and substantially different ideology and activities. Also none of the big controversies surrounding the BSA. But I suppose idiots are everywhere, at least that’s my general life experience 😅 It is very unfortunate once they start to ruin things.

Idk. Really depends on what you put there. And Nextcloud does file sync. Even if the server becomes unavailable, you’d still have your directories and calendar on your devices. Just collaborating and uploading stuff won’t work.

And creativity and problem-solving are core scout skills, so I guess bulding that thing for no money would be an interesting exercise in that. Though you’re right. At some point you’ll have to think about maintainability and reliability. I guess that wouldn’t stop me from starting the project, but everyone has to decide for themselves.

(And yes, a proper VPS would be a preferrable solution for a multitude of reasons.)

Asking for a discount is a great idea. Some companies do this. And in rare occurences the boss is an old boy scout themselves and they’ll give you a 100% discount on some smaller things…

Good luck, though. I believe first-hand experience with living a self-determined life - including online services - aligns nicely with scout ideals. And trying to convey the media-literacy that allows people to make informed choices.

And I can see some benefits with having documents available to everyone, templates, and collaborate on the paperwork…

Glad to hear other groups in the area have success with Nextcloud… Another idea would be to somehow unite and share the hosting bill for a slightly bigger Nextcloud… But I still think the old laptop idea might be promising to get started… depending on the network situation in the building and whether you can configure port forwards and all the things that need to be done. Just make sure to have some kind of backup strategy if you put documents there. Can’t be too hard, as Nextcloud is made for syncing data… And I wouldn’t put personal information about kids there unless the admin knows what they’re doing. But there’s plenty other stuff to put there.

Given someone already pays for electricity and internet at the location, I’d say the cheapest option would be to ask all the members if someone has an old laptop to donate, maybe even with a broken display or whatever, main thing is it still somehow runs. Rip out the battery, Install Linux, Nextcloud (maybe Yunohost), and put it somewhere without public access. That’d be entirely for free, minus the work to set it up and maintain it.

My smaller VPS costs somewhere around 70€ a year, guess that could be worth it as well as long as it contributes something meaningful.

And be prepared to be disappointed, 99% of my scout group never used the selfhosted services I tried. I guess that’s somehow okay. They were focused on the real life activities and no one had any interest to do office work or remember logins… Was always the same 2 people who did paperwork and they didn’t need a cloud, so I scrapped it. Your story could be different, I’m not saying it needs to turn out that way.

And I think what people really want to avoid is the pre-installed operating system. That has all kinds of stuff in it and no one except the manufacturer knows what’s inside. And Google’s Play services are deeply embedded into the system and will leak lots of personal data and metadata or outright copy them to Google’s servers. For the regular user that means Google has all your pictures, 24/7 location data, your contacts… None of that is E2EE either. We don’t know what happens wit the data from all your contactless payments… It’s really a privacy nightmare. And I’d say security isn’t great either if 2 parties already have pretty much complete access to the device out of the box. They can wipe it, remote install or remove apps… Everything. They do offer secure boot, though…

I think you’ll want to factor in the exact use case at that scale. Does speed matter? Is “a ton” really a ton? Last regular computer mainboard I bought has 6 SATA ports. And I think that’s a fairly common amount. If I look at current harddrives, best price per gigabyte should be somewhere around 14TB drives. So given a RAID5, that’s 70TB of storage, or 80TB if you go for 16TB hdds.

I think once you go considerably beyond that, and you don’t want to lose your data, you should think about buying proper hardware. I mean people do all kinds of crazy stuff, and at some point I extended my storage by simply plugging in 2 large external USB disks. And that worked surprisingly well… But these solutions aren’t super reliable. And neither are the cheap port expanders from Amazon.

I know. Guess I mainly wanted to say your given solution isn’t the entire story and the potential tool should decode the parameters as well, they might or might not be important. I’m often at the computer and I regularly do one-off tasks this way… But I’m aware it might not be an one-off task to you and you might not have a Linux terminal open 24/7 either 😉 Hope some of the other people have what you need. And btw… since I clicked on a few of the suggestions: I think the thing called URL encoding is a something different, that’s with all the percent signs and not base64 like here.

Well, the URL is a bit weird.

echo "aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaG90ZG9nYmlsbHMuY29tL2hhbWJ1cmdlci1tb2xkcy9idXJnZXItZG9nLW1vbGQ" | base64 -d

gives me “https://www.hotdogbills.com/hamburger-molds/burger-dog-mold”. (Without the ‘s’.) And then there are about 176 characters left. I suppose the underscore is some delimiter. The rest is:

echo "c2lkPTY4MTNkMTljYzM0ZWJjZTE4NDA1ZGVjYSZzcz1QJnN0X3JpZD1udWxsJnV0bV9zb3VyY2U9bmV3c2xldHRlciZ1dG1fbWVkaXVtPWVtYWlsJnV0bV90ZXJtPWJyaWVmaW5nJnV0bV9jYW1wYWlnbj1zZmNfYml0ZWN1cmlvdXM" | base64 -d

“sid=6813d19cc34ebce18405deca&ss=P&st_rid=null&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=briefing&utm_campaign=sfc_bitecurious”

And I suppose the stuff after the last slash is there for some other reason, tracking or some hash or whatever. But the things before that are the URL and the parameters.

But the question remains whether we have some kind of tool to do this automatically and make it a bit easier…

There’s base64 -d on the command line.

I’ve moved my instant messenger onto a VPS and that has a good uptime. And I’m somewhat okay if my Nextcloud and calendars don’t sync. Most important data is synced anyway.

Other than that I’ve called my ISP a bunch of times to give me a new router, they refused, I canceled the subscription and made a new one and got a new router. And that one is better. And in doubt I’ll call a family member.

I think judging something really depends on the requirements. No one said using technology was going to be simple and easy. We should make it as easy as we can do, but no more than that. There’s still a lot of room for improvement. But in the end the commercial services are geared towards convenience. And they’ll always outpace us. We have to set up servers and jump through a few hoops so it’s us in control of the network. There is no other feasible way to do it.

Though I really wish we had some messenger that makes encryption foolproof. And rock solid, and with a resource footprint of IRC when concerned with text messages, but not limited to that.

We’ve had the discussion a while back here in selfhosted. You can find it here: https://awful.systems/post/5029223

Main points: Continued drama around people, and tuwunel is tied to a single, (paid) developer and I figure once there’s anything wrong with that, tuwunel might die instantly. While continuwuity is a community effort and maybe that’s a bit more sustainable. Though I don’t own any crystal ball and I don’t know how things will turn out.

Sure, I believe that is supposed to be uWu or maybe some kind of puppy talk. It’s certainly originally started by June, who turned conduit (which is a sane name) into conduwuit.

I figured I’ve lost all shame anyway, back when we discussed nerd topics in the school bus or the 5 'o clock train, like Linux lore, anime, Star Trek concepts and technobabble. I mean people were staring and I’m aware of that, but I’ve really lost all F*'s to give. And that turns me into the person who I am today, and I’ll happily write sentences like the one above. Or still talk about Star Trek in a crowded train. And these days it’s the mycelial network and that really makes people question my sanity. 🫠

If you want a conduwuit sucessor, I’d choose the continuwuity project over tuwunel. The legitimacy as the sucessor is mainly self-proclaimed, and continuwuity is a community effort. The entire thing is kind of a shitshow, though. If you want to do it like 99% of people, make friends with Synapse.

I think what you describe still holds true. You need a few correct DNS entries and an open port. Once you want VoIP, some more ports and a TURN server will be necessary. And that one took me some effort, but the server itself (including federation) was well within my comfort zone. And I run continuwuity these days because Synapse wastes way too much resources for what I do and their other efforts went nowhere. But I’m not sure about the future of those smaller Matrix server projects.

And if you don’t like Matrix or can’t get it to run, maybe try something like XMPP.

Thanks for the info. Some day I’ll try the shiny modern distros and learn the little peculiarities. I use a weird mix of Debian, NixOS and LMDE and it’s relatively straightforward to add firewall rules to those, both dynamically to nftables and to the persistent config… And I believe Debian didn’t even come with firewalling out of the box… But I understand Debian might not be the best choice for gaming and there is for example some extra work involved to get the latest Nvidia drivers. Neither is it an atomic distro.

Well, I always advocate for using the stuff you have. I don’t think a Discord bot needs four new RasPi 5. That’s likely to run on a single RasPi3. And as long as they’re sitting idle, it doesn’t really matter which model number they have… So go ahead and put something on your hardware, and buy new one once you’ve maxed out your current setup.

I’m not educated on Bazzite. Maybe tools like Distrobox or other container solutions can help running AI workloads on the gaming rig. It’s likely easier to run a dedicated AI server, but I started learning about quantization, tested some models on my main computer with the help of ollama, KoboldCPP and some random Docker/Podman containers. I’m not saying this is the preferrable solution. But definitely enough to get started with AI. And you can always connect the computers within your local network, write some server applications and have them hook into ollama’s API and it doesn’t really matter whether that runs on your gaming pc or a server (as long as the computer in question is turned on…)

I had a quick look and seems there have been some projects packaging the Signal server for Docker… But the projects Google returns as results on the first page all seem to be abandoned. Seems this is a bit niche. Unfortunaltely I don’t have any good advice here. I run a Matrix server, so I don’t have experience with this.

Signal is not a federated protocol, though. I guess you can run that server code. But it won’t connect you to your friends and people on the regular Signal network. (Plus you’d also need to build a custom version of the client/app.) I’m a bit unsure whether OP is aware of that.