Initial Thoughts

Hello friends!

This is something that's been muddling around in my mind for a bit, in part because I now have a decent collection of DVDs, and I am starting get a digital collection of shows that are a bit hard to find. I'm also interested in the fact that there's a TubeArchivist plugin for Jellyfin, as media archival interests me and YouTube is starting to suck with Google's position on ad-blocking. It would be nice to be able to access this stuff anywhere as well, so creating a media/Jellyfin server seems like a good solution.

Thing is I'd rather have a physical server than pay a bunch of monthly fees for VPS hosting. Not knocking it of course, but on top of monthly fees I also have my skepticism about VPS hosts and if they're sharing data with people regarding my use of their service.

Completely wishful thinking setup

I'm not so much of a hardware guy as I am a software guy, funnily enough, but to give you an idea of what I would like here's my admittedly wishful thinking of what I'd like for a setup:

• DragonflyBSD as the server OS, utilizing it's HAMMER2 filesystem and swapcache as I've heard great things about those.
• Jellyfin, obviously.
• NVMe SSD storage with some level of RAID.
• Intel GPU, as I've heard they're very good at video decoding, but I've not looked into evidence of this.
• Whatever CPU and RAM I can get good performance out of without wasting money.
• Add it to the Wireguard network so I can watch stuff anywhere.

A few things with this:

1. I don't know how up-to-date DragonflyBSD's dport of Jellyfin is, but maybe this is something worth contributing to.
2. God only knows if the new Intel graphics card drivers work well on the BSDs. I know all of the BSDs basically just pull from the official Linux firmware for graphics (I think?).
3. I'd have to figure out if any other hardware would not play well with DragonflyBSD, probably not too big of an issue but it's still something to look out for.
4. Cost of hardware.

Wrap up

Overall it probably be just me and my wife who would use the server, mostly me. Maybe some immediate family, a few friends, maybe down the line use it for kids when we have them.

What are your recommendations?

Hello friends!

For awhile now I've wanted to delve into self-hosting and the first thing I thought of was ditching my VPN Provider for my own VPN solution.

I wanted to ask about the cost/benefit of each option with those of you who are more experienced.

Option One: Stick with my VPN Provider:

This is a funky case, as my VPN Provider is with Proton, and my email and VPN accounts are linked together. Since I've been with them for awhile, I have over a gigabyte of storage for emails. I rarely ever get past 400MB. The VPN is fine, occasionally I have some hiccups with speed but it overall works. I pay roughly $19.20/month for both a paid email account and the VPN service, so it's likely the second cheapest. When it comes to privacy, though, I'm not 100% sold Proton wouldn't just sell my data for no reason. Yes, they are Swiss, but that doesn't entirely reassure me.

The weird thing about this is my PiHole is decoupled from the VPN. At least in the mobile app, I see no option to use your own DNS. There's also no provided way nor really an obvious way for me to connect to all of my devices if they're all on ProtonVPN, as opposed to the other two options.

Option Two: Just use Tailscale

Personally I'd like to mess with the ACLs so probably I'd wind up with the $6/month plan. For the $18/month plan I don't really know what "Tailscale SSH" even means, as I don't know what magic they do to wrap SSH into something worth paying for. I've heard mixed things about "Tailscale Funnel."

I hear Tailscale is easy to install and there's no real extra fidgeting you'd have to do for your home network. Tailscale will also let me use my PiHole as my DNS, getting me ad-blocking from PiHole on all devices on Tailscale.

Option Three: Self-Hosted Headscale

This is one I'm interested in, but I don't know the feasibility of it. The initial idea was to get a VPS and install OpenBSD on it and make it my Headscale instance. I've installed OpenBSD before, I mostly know my way around it and I like how lightweight it is and how security focused it is. There would be more setup initially, but I don't really mind that. I do a lot of fidgeting on my Linux desktop anyway.

The main thing for this is cost. I don't really know what performance specs for a VPS I would need to reasonably have good network performance with ~10 devices, though I'm guessing I'll have to have something =<10Gbsp. So maybe $25-$30/month depending on who I buy a VPS through?

The other thing is updating stuff. I can just SSH and do all of that manually and since the VPS will be dedicated specifically to being a Headscale server, but that is still time I have to spend.

Lastly, I wouldn't have the international selection of VPN locations like with a VPN provider, just one, but it's not like I'm trying to bounce my connection from country and that's not advisable anyway.

Other options

Setting up a VPS with Wireguard myself. While I wouldn't mind it too much, Tailscale exists for a reason and it can traverse firewalls without me having to configure a bunch of devices so that's a big plus.

Running Headscale in a container on my Linux desktop, but this means my desktop would have to be on almost 24/7 and I don't know how I feel about having my VPN stuff to be sitting directly inside my home network.

What are your opinions?

Intro

Hello friends,

I've been hearing mixed things about Starfield, so I thought I'd try experiencing it myself. Before you ask "why aren't you running Starfield with Steam's Proton Experimental or Proton-GE" let's say I went out sailing yesterday and met a fellow legitimate sailor who was giving many people a great discount on the game. Getting back to port, the sea was rough were quite a few torrents crashing against the cliff faces that evening.

I've tried various various environment flags to get the game working, but nothing seems to work. I even made sure the installation of lutris-GE-Proton8-14 had the most up-to-date version of VKD3D. I checked the winecfg for that version of wine and it's has the correct Windows version and all of that. Manually running the game with the wine executable in that version of wine with the WINEPREFIX set to where that's install for Lutris gives me a few interesting lines.

As of note, the game does, erm, "launch" in that it creates a new window for Starfield, but it's all black and stays that way.

First interesting lines

01b8:err:setupapi:create_dest_file failed to create L"C:\\windows\\system32\\d3d12.dll" (error=80)
wine: configuration in L"/home/alec/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/lutris-GE-Proton8-14-x86_64" has been updated.

Okay? But the configuration for wine shouldn't be updating, for one, and running the setup script provided by VKD3D-Proton gets me the following:

setup_vkd3d_proton.sh install --symlink
wine: configuration in L"/home/alec/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/lutris-GE-Proton8-14-x86_64" has been updated.
wine: configuration in L"/home/alec/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/lutris-GE-Proton8-14-x86_64" has been updated.
removed '/home/alec/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/lutris-GE-Proton8-14-x86_64/dosdevices/c:/windows/system32/d3d12.dll'
'/home/alec/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/lutris-GE-Proton8-14-x86_64/dosdevices/c:/windows/system32/d3d12.dll' -> '/usr/lib/vkd3d-proton/x64/d3d12.dll'
removed '/home/alec/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/lutris-GE-Proton8-14-x86_64/dosdevices/c:/windows/syswow64/d3d12.dll'
'/home/alec/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/lutris-GE-Proton8-14-x86_64/dosdevices/c:/windows/syswow64/d3d12.dll' -> '/usr/lib/vkd3d-proton/x86/d3d12.dll'
removed '/home/alec/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/lutris-GE-Proton8-14-x86_64/dosdevices/c:/windows/system32/d3d12core.dll'
'/home/alec/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/lutris-GE-Proton8-14-x86_64/dosdevices/c:/windows/system32/d3d12core.dll' -> '/usr/lib/vkd3d-proton/x64/d3d12core.dll'
removed '/home/alec/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/lutris-GE-Proton8-14-x86_64/dosdevices/c:/windows/syswow64/d3d12core.dll'
'/home/alec/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/lutris-GE-Proton8-14-x86_64/dosdevices/c:/windows/syswow64/d3d12core.dll' -> '/usr/lib/vkd3d-proton/x86/d3d12core.dll'

So I don't know why the wine configuration is being updated again.

Next interesting lines

163756.705:01d4:031c:fixme:vkd3d-proton:d3d12_command_signature_create: State template is required for compute, but VKD3D_CONFIG_FLAG_FORCE_COMPUTE_ROOT_PARAMETERS_PUSH_UBO is not enabled.
163756.711:01d4:0314:fixme:vkd3d-proton:d3d12_command_signature_create: State template is required for compute, but VKD3D_CONFIG_FLAG_FORCE_COMPUTE_ROOT_PARAMETERS_PUSH_UBO is not enabled.
163756.755:01d4:031c:fixme:vkd3d-proton:d3d12_command_signature_create: State template is required for compute, but VKD3D_CONFIG_FLAG_FORCE_COMPUTE_ROOT_PARAMETERS_PUSH_UBO is not enabled.
163756.758:01d4:030c:fixme:vkd3d-proton:d3d12_command_signature_create: State template is required for compute, but VKD3D_CONFIG_FLAG_FORCE_COMPUTE_ROOT_PARAMETERS_PUSH_UBO is not enabled.
163756.761:01d4:0334:fixme:vkd3d-proton:d3d12_command_signature_create: State template is required for compute, but VKD3D_CONFIG_FLAG_FORCE_COMPUTE_ROOT_PARAMETERS_PUSH_UBO is not enabled.
163756.762:01d4:0334:fixme:vkd3d-proton:d3d12_command_signature_create: State template is required for compute, but VKD3D_CONFIG_FLAG_FORCE_COMPUTE_ROOT_PARAMETERS_PUSH_UBO is not enabled.
163756.768:01d4:0344:fixme:vkd3d-proton:d3d12_command_signature_create: State template is required for compute, but VKD3D_CONFIG_FLAG_FORCE_COMPUTE_ROOT_PARAMETERS_PUSH_UBO is not enabled.
163756.769:01d4:0334:fixme:vkd3d-proton:d3d12_command_signature_create: State template is required for compute, but VKD3D_CONFIG_FLAG_FORCE_COMPUTE_ROOT_PARAMETERS_PUSH_UBO is not enabled.

I don't know what this means or if it's what would cause my issue, but since it repeated several times I'm assuming it's something worth noting.

Final Thoughts and System Info

I could just be having issues due to getting that discount from my fellow sailor, but I wouldn't know. I'm very skeptical, mainly because "Your drivers are out of date" is so specific.

System Info

I'm on Gentoo, a hardened profile on Linux Kernel 6.1.46.

I'm currently on Mesa version 23.2.0_rc3.

I'm on the master/main branch for the xf86-video-amdgpu driver.

If there's anything other system info I can provide that will help me fix this, let me know.

EDIT

Add it as a Non-Steam game in Steam and it'll work there with Proton-GE 8.14. Unfortunately, given this is a Bethesda game, your performance will vary likely until 2-3 patches later. I have the following launch options, some probably aren't necessary:

PROTON_LOG=1 DXVK_ASYNC=1 WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR=1 WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR_STRENGTH=1 gamemodeun %command% --skip-launcher

Stay safe, fellow Linux gamers and sailors. 🫡

Hey friends,

I know that this is a difficult issue to have people try and solve due to how many factors there can be, but this is an odd one for me. To start, here's some info

=== Hardware ===

CPU: 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-12600K
GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT (navi22, LLVM 16.0.6, DRM 3.52, 6.4.8-gentoo-dist-hardened)
Memory: DDR5 5200
Monitor  Refresh Rate: 165.00 Hz

=== Software ===

Distro: Gentoo
Kernel Version: 6.4.8-gentoo-dist-hardened
Mesa Version: 23.1.5
Vulkan Version: 1.3.250
GCC Version: 13.2.0
xf86-video-amdgpu Version: Up-to-date with the master branch
Display server: X.Org
  xorg-server version: 21.1.8
  xorg-proto version: 2023.2
  
=== Proton Info ===

Have tried GE-Proton versions 7.53 to 8.11

***
Games and their commonly used Steam Launch Options
***

Enderal: Forgotten Stories (Special Edition), Steam App ID 976620
 
PROTON_LOG=1 PROTON_NO_ESYNC=1 DXVK_ASYNC=1 WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR=1 WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR_STRENGTH=1 WINEDLLOVERRIDES="xaudio2_7=n,b" PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=90 =1  LD_PRELOAD="$LD_PRELOAD:/usr/\$LIB/libgamemode.so.0.0.0" gamemoderun %command%

I've also tried without DXVK_ASYNC and adding PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1

Deep Rock Galatic, Steam App ID 548430

No extra launch options. Runs on Linux, but still the weird framerate issues

This issue with low framerates only started happening recently. The earliest I recall seeing these issues was sometime 2 weeks ago. I thought it was something related to the version of GE-Proton I was using. Last time I had a problem was with using the stable version of Mesa but that was several months ago, about 9-10 months.

When I run glxgears I get around 165-170 fps, so I don't think the physical GPU is the issue. Lower-end graphical games run perfectly fine. Nothing else has been running any slower, and I don't think I've made any notable changes to my system that would cause this. Running btop when nothing is running doesn't show any processes that's taking resources it shouldn't. Neither the GPU nor CPU make more noticeable noise or anything, nor does the CPU run hotter when I first got it and started playing games.

Without doing getting really into the weeds, my best guest is something with versions of Mesa or Vulkan. But I wouldn't exactly know. I'm just basing that on the one issue that I had with an older version of Mesa those 9-10 months ago, so I could be completely wrong. I could try with the git versions of each package. I'll see if I can install those and see if anything is better and report back.

Hello, friends.

So I've had my Pi-Hole setup for awhile now and it's great. I'd like to get Wireguard working with it, too, so I could browse the internet without loads of ads and trackers on the go.

However, small issue. All DNS traffic is forcibly routed to my ISP. If you need some details, I made this post on the Pi-Hole userspace.

I'm in America and my ISP is Spectrum. I was wondering if there's a way I could convince technical support to allow me to use a recursive DNS for privacy/security (more-so the second of the two) purposes, or if it is even possible to convince them to do this. I don't know if there's a specific number I should contact, email I should email to, or if I just have to endure the nightmare of getting passed around by customer service one Saturday. Any recommendations would be great.

An interesting note for anyone who's ISP is Spectrum, their DNS service, at least for me, uses OpenDNS with dnsmasq-2.57. That version of dnsmasq is over 10 years old. You see if this is the case for you with

dig CHAOS TXT version.bind @192.33.4.12 +short
dig CHAOS TXT version.bind @198.97.190.53 +short

Or something similar if those IP addresses are different for you. You can see that running those commands were a part of the steps I was asked to take in that Pi-Hole userspace post.

EDIT 1:

For those interested, here's some Github gist I found that shows how to use unbound + stubby for have a recursive DNS + DNS-over-HTTPS. There's also this from the DNS Privacy Project.

EDIT 2:

I seems that initial answer from the Pi-Hole forums was correct. There's probably something that was set in the firmware for the Netgear router that prevents me from setting up my own DNS servers. However, I notice on the router there's a "router mode" option that's on, which I can probably turn off, plug in my Pi to the Netgear device and have the Pi act as my router, thus letting me be able to use it as my DNS server as well. That or just suck it up and buy only a modem, not a router + modem combo.