I’m curious about comparing this to say - the white phosphorus scene in Spec Ops: The Line, or the airport scene (“no Russian”) in COD, rescuing Ellie instead of giving humanity the cure in The Last of Us…
All things that are arguably a lot worse than pulling a leg off a stuffed Elephant and all require on-rails player action in a game.
To take the devils advocate position: is conflict not necessary for drama, and effective conflict is one that affects its audience?
interrobang
…
writes banginterrogative symbol
it’s not just one thing though. For a non technical user, it’s nerve-wracking to worry that if you screw up the install, or download the wrong package, or configure the YAML wrong, or open the wrong port, or there’s a port conflict, or you forgot to update the software… now you’re potentially unprotected (even if that’s not the case - many will still worry).
Not to mention even if you - as I did - had to skill up to understand it, three months passes and you’re terrified to touch it because you’ve forgotten all the stuff you learned to set it up.
Same as how the majority of people don’t even change their own oil on their cars - even though it’s fairly easy.
hey Op - I went through the same journey as you recently.
I found the exact same guide you linked - but here’s what I found on my journey from knowing literally nothing to having it work.
firstly that guide is a bit outdated and very terse, in fact most of the guides have at least one thing that’s outdated and several things not explained
Here were my learning steps:
getting confident with the Linux command line enough that “chmod” and “chown”, user:group, rm, nano, and other basic commands weren’t foreign to me
getting confident enough with docker and docker compose that I understand what a container, image, compose file are and how to both manipulate them and exec commands inside them
understanding the basics of what a VPN is and does so the terms proxy, reverse proxy, port forwarding, DNS aren’t alien to me
understanding the basics of Linux file management including dotfiles, fstab, mounting, blkid, and as mentioned chmod and chown
none of this is particularly hard to grasp once you’ve grasped it but most guides you see and people you meet along the way will assume all of the above is second nature to you. at first I would pull my hair out seeing suggestions like “have you shelled into the container to curl your public IP?” like what the fuck does that even mean
I started with VPN as thats the important protective part. I paid for Mullvad because its fairly cheap and stuck with it all the way. First I used their GUI app and then later I switched to Tailscale and ran it as an exit node.
I also found guides like YAMS (Yet Another Media Server), dockSTARTer, Trash Guides and the Servarr wiki and would jump between them, Uninstalling, reinstalling, going down paths that didn’t work and formatting my raspberry pi and starting from scratch several times. It took me about 6 weeks to skill up to the point where I’m confident knowing about all the parts of my setup.
I’m happy to answer all the questions I can (bear in mind I knew nothing about this a few months ago, but my newbie perspective could help because I know what it’s like to not really know what half these terms mean)
PS:to specifically answer “what do these tools do”
thank you that’s very kind - I have done so
how did you get started moving from public to private and what does your average workflow look like?
I just started with a handful of Public trackers and they do okay, but I’d like to do a bit better.
On the other hand I don’t want to have to invest a huge amount of effort buddying up to complete strangers just to get the latest episode of University Challenge.
wouldn’t the second pi have to be linked to the first?
I was trying to test to see how it worked inside and outside of docker.
I fucked something up and installed pihole and adguard at the same time both in a container and bare metal and received a massive load of error messages that after 2 hours of trying to unstick just formatted the SD card and started over. So then, installing and configuring ssh, fstab the external drive, set a static IP address on the pi took up all of my time so far.
Yes, I agree. Do you have any recommendations on courses / sites to look at?
yes - grew up in the 80s so witticisms like “4 bits is a nybble” are stuck in the brain.
Although it doesn’t seem relevant it’s actually pretty illuminating in what IP addresses are and do so thank you for that
that’s a helpful explanation of subnets thank you
In the paradigm of
111.222.3.4:5/22
if “3” is subnet and “5” is port - what are the names of “4”, “222”, “111”, and “22”?
And is there ever a 000.111.222.3.4:5/22 or another add on?
that’s a cool project, thank you for the suggestion
As more of an artist than a techie for the most part — if you have your medium or at least part of it — the more interesting thing about art is what you have to say about it.
As an example, if you want to draw a distinction and comparison between the age of discovery and the age of technology, you could use the hard drives as a canvas on which to paint a portrait of something like Robert Scott / Lawrence Oates, or Jacques Cousteau, or Armstrong and Aldrin etc.
On that last one - if you could tie the size of the drive in comparison to the size of the code used in the moon landing that might also be interesting.
Anyway, all that to say - art is a mix of medium and message
Traefik
I will look into this, thank you.
Check the error logs and see what’s wrong with it instead. How is it crashing? Did you check stdout and stderr (use docker attach or check the compose logs)?
“Crash” is the wrong word. The app is running, it says “Connected” for about 15-20 seconds, then it says “Internet blocked” for about 20 seconds, then it says “Reconnecting” for 30-90 seconds, repeat indefinitely.
Using the CLI for logging, it says something along the lines of “Timeout… Hyper time out”
You should look a bit into how the internet, DNS and IP addresses work on the public internet and private networks.
Do you have any recommendations on how to learn this?
Also, thank you for explaining that “configuring a domain name” is adding an A record. I’ve added TXT records and similar for Google analytics and I’ve added mail records to set up my own domain’s email before - but this is helpful, thanks.
yes, wlan vs eth, right? And then in some providers, tun for the vpn?
Thank you, this was really helpful.
I don’t know if I’ve configured the A records correctly - but someone else I was asking says that all this is against CloudFlare’s TOS so maybe I need to abandon CloudFlare completely.
The NGINX example will help when I start digging into that, thank you.
Yes, perhaps I over-simplified my gluetun example, I know it’s doing something in the container, but when I run the mullvad app it shows in green when it’s connected, and red when it’s not, and when the kill switch is engaged it shows “blocking internet” - how do I understand this same level of protection is active with a docker container? I think I read somewhere that I download something, then I docker pause gluetun and the download rate in qBittorrent should drop to near-zero to show it’s paused? Does that sound correct?
I mean it’s true here.