Reverse DNS is different than static IP.

But yes for outbound email, if you can’t control reverse DNS you will have pain. (Inbound is totally fine) You can in theory just use whatever hostname the ISP’s reverse DNS resolves to however you will get some spam score (or be rejected) as it doesn’t match your “from” domain.

Outbound email is a huge pain really no matter what. Unless you have a long-term lease on the IP and it isn’t in a bad network you really have to pay someone else if you want reliable delivery.

Its a problem but it isn’t a major problem. I am using rspamd without any sort of exotic configuration (basically just enabling things that are provided, not my own rules) and I only get a few spam messages leaking through a week. Maybe slightly worse than GMail but not considerably slow.

IMHO the only real missing thing out of the box is contacts checking. Which is a huge thing because it is great to have reliable delivery from contacts. But my false-positive ratio is so low anyways that it isn’t a big issue and things like the known_senders module mostly mitigates it.

Yes, blocking port 25 outbound is incredibly common by default. Even on some server connections. It is probably better overall for exactly the reasons that you mentioned.

Or just don’t self-host email

IMHO this is a bit overblown. Hosting inbound is fairly easy. Mail senders (probably for the worst) are very forgiving even if your TLS cert is expired you will probably get mail. Plus senders are supposed to retry for days if you have downtime.

However it is unfortunately true that due to spam sending is a huge pain because IPv4 reputation is a huge component. Sure you can get GMail to trust your domain after a month or so of sending if you have decent volume. But other providers who you may mail once a year are just going to go off of IP reputation. However email was basically designed for forwarding and you can use a service like AWS SES to forward your email from a trusted IP pretty easily. If you are low volume (like personal mail) there are tons of services that will do this for free.

The owner of the domain owns DKIM. It offers no protection against that.

The only actual protection would be PGP because it provides your key as an identity rather than the domain itself.

The purchaser of that domain will be able to send and receive email from your addresses.

The biggest concerns here are probably:

1. The new owner taking over accounts that use the old email (either via password reset or email or by contacting support).
2. Sensitive personal information intended for you being sent to the new owner.
3. Someone spearphishing people you know from your old email address.

Yeah mp4s with h264 will play basically anywhere if the audio format is a common one. Must be the most supported setup.

I’m pretty surprised that all of the audio formats work. I’m not so surprised that the TV has h265, although maybe a bit surprised that it is exposed to the browser. The container support is also pretty surprising. Unless your MKVs are so simple that they are effectively WEBM.

Or maybe it pops the link out of the browser into a dedicated media player which has decent codec support.

iDevices do expose h265 in the browser, but the container support is still a bit surprising. But then again WEBM is basically MKV, so maybe that is why it tends to work.

There are a handful of common reasons.

1. The client doesn’t support the formats. Browser clients are notoriously picky not supporting some common video (for example few browsers support h265 and it isn’t generally considered web-safe) and audio formats. But embedded devices may also cause trouble if they don’t have enough CPU to do non-accelerated playback and don’t have hardware support for the codec used.
2. Playing at a lower bitrate. In that case you can transcode at the fly.
3. Remuxing. This is things like the moov atom where the actual codecs are supported but not the container or exact packaging of the file.

But yeah, especially if you are using a player with wide format support you may not need it.

IMHO for 2 drives you don’t want redundancy. (I assume that is what you want RAID for, mirroring?). The per-drive failure rate is so low that you are unlikely to encounter it and nothing you are running seems particularly availability sensitive. Having a bit of downtime to rebuild in the very rare case of a drive failure is fine. The extra storage space is way more valuable.

lol, I assume he means 1000 Mbps aka 1 Gbps which is reasonable. Maybe even a little low as transferring files around fast is nice.

IMHO this isn’t really worth it.

1. x264 is very fast at lower profiles. Especially if you aren’t streaming across the internet often the size hit from the fast profiles is fine. Even if you are streaming over the internet it is probably fine. Getting a slightly faster CPU will also get you super far and is more useful to have lying around than a GPU as it will benefit most things that you do on the server. And worst-worst case a bit of CPU usage isn’t going to hurt much of the things that he is running (except maybe a game server if people are playing at the same time and you are really maxing out all of your cores).
2. Integrated GPUs are fine for a handful of concurrent streams. Especially the Intel ones which have amazing media engines.
3. Even if you are going for a dedicated GPU I would go with an Intel ARC. They are way better at media encoding and cost less.
4. You can always add a GPU later. Wait until you have a need and are seeing problems without.

I’ve been using nginx forever. It works, I can do almost everything I want, even if more complex things sometimes require some contortions. I’m not sure I would pick it again if starting from scratch, but I have no problems that are worth switching for.

#1 items should be backups. (Well maybe #2 so that you have something to back up, but don’t delete the source data until the backups are running.)

You need offsite backups, and ideally multiple locations.

IMHO Arch is actually a great choice. They do have a minimum update frequency you need to maintain (I don’t recall exactly, I think it is somewhere between 1 and 3 months) but if you do, and read the news before updates (and you are usually fine if you don’t, usually the update will just refuse to run until you intervene) things are pretty seamless. I had many arch machines running for >5 years with no issues and no reason to expect that it would change. This is many major version updates for other distros which are often not as seamless.

That being said I am on NixOS now which takes this to the next level, I am running nixos-unstable but thanks to the way NixOS is structured I don’t need to worry about any legacy cruft accumulating from the many years of updates.

And after all of that I don’t think it really matters. I think any major distro you pick, weather stable, release-based or LTS will be fine. They all have some sort of update path these days. (unlike in the past where some distros just recommended a re-install for major updates).

That’s true. And I’m not saying B2 is bad, it is just something that you should be aware of.

Their automatic replication isn’t quite as seamless as GCS or S3 though. For example deletes aren’t replicated so you will need a cleanup strategy. Plus once you 2x or 3x the price B2 isn’t as competitive on price. My point is that it is very easy to compare apples to oranges looking at cloud storage providers and it is important to be aware.

For me B2 is a great fit and I am happy with it, but I don’t wan to mislead peope.

I think it depends on your needs. IIUC their storage is “single location”. Like a very significant natural disaster could take it offline or maybe even lose it. Something like S3 or Google Cloud Storage (depending on which durability you select) is multi-location (as in significantly distinct geographical regions). So still very likely that you will never lose any data, but in the extreme cases potentially you could.

If I was storing my only copy of something it would matter a lot more (although even then you are best to store with multiple providers for social reasons, not just technical) but for a backup it is fine.

I’ve been using Restic to Backblaze B2.

I don’t really trust B2 that much (I think it is mostly a single-DC kind of storage) but it is reasonably priced and easy to use. Plus as long as their failures aren’t correlated with mine it should be fine.

I switched to Immich recently and am very happy.

1. Immich’s face detection is much better, very rarely fails. Especially for non-white faces. But even for white faces PhotoPrisim regularly needed me reviewing the unmatched faces. I also needed to really turn up the “what is a face” threshold because otherwise it would miss a ton of clear faces. (Then it only missed some, but also has tons of false positives). On the other hand Immich just works.
2. Immich’s UI is much nicer overall. Lots of small affordances. For example the menu item to “view in timeline” is worth switching alone. Also good riddance to PhotoPrism’s persistent and buggy selection. Someone must have worked really hard on implementing this but it was really just a bad idea.
3. Immich has an app with uploading, and it allows you to view local and uploaded photos in one interface which is a huge UX win. I couldn’t find a good Android app for uploading to photoprism. You could set up import delays and stuff but you would still regularly get partially uploaded files imported and have to clean it up manually.
4. Immich’s search by content is much better. For example searching for “cat with red and yellow ball” was useless on PhotoPrism, but I found tons of the results I was looking for on Immich.

The bad:

1. There is currently a terrible jank in the Immich app which makes videos unusable and everything painful. Apparently this is due to some Album sync process running in the main thread. They are working on it. I can’t fathom how a few hundred albums causes this much lag but 🤷 There is also even worse lag on the location view page, but at least that is just one page.
2. The Immich app has a lot less features than the website. But the website works very well on mobile so even just using the website (and the app for uploading) is better than PhotoPrism here. The fundamentals are good but it just needs more work.
3. I liked PhotoPrism’s advanced filters. They were very limited but at least they were there.
4. Not being able to sort search results by date is a huge usability issue. I often know roughly when the photo I want to find was taken and being able to order by date would be hugely helpful.
5. You have to eagerly transcode all videos. There is no way to clean up old transcodes and re-transcode on the fly. To be fair the PhotoPrism story also wasn’t great because you had to wait for the full video to be transcoded before starting, leading to a huge delay for videos more than a few seconds, but at least I could save a few hundred gigs of disk space.

Honestly a lot of stuff in PhotoPrism feels like one developer has a weird workflow and they optimized it for that. Most of them are counter to what I actually want to do (like automatic title and description generation, or the review stuff, or auto quality rating). Immich is very clearly inspired by Google Photos and takes a lot of things directly from it, but that matches my use case way better. (I was pretty happy with Google Photos until they started refusing to give access to the originals.)

Most Intel GPUs are great at transcoding. Reliable, widely supported and quite a bit of transcoding power for very little electrical power.

I think the main thing I would check is what formats are supported. If the other GPU can support newer formats like AV1 it may be worth it (if you want to store your videos in these more efficient formats or you have clients who can consume these formats and will appreciate the reduced bandwidth).

But overall I would say if you aren’t having any problems no need to bother. The onboard graphics are simple and efficient.

Yet another service to maintain. If the server is crashing you can’t log in, so you need backup UNIX users anyways.