Not very common…? It’s fine to learn a new word, but don’t go pretending that’s the word’s fault.

Meta is a word that has meaning.

Right. And nor does Jason have enough info on OP.

So it comes across, as I said, as a “gatekeeper-ass” thing to say in the context of OPs journey to self hosting.

Where they are is in no way “sad”. Except if you’re being an adversarial gatekeeper dick about purity.

I think your life is sad.

Let me know how you took that.

Welcoming? Adversarial?

I’m not out here to Stan for cloudflare. It’s just a totally valid tool for the job, there are valid reasons to use it, and as we agree, it’s not productive to tell a newcomer that their choice of meeting their needs is “sad”

In fact, it’s an unwelcoming thing to say. If we want folks to stop using cloud services, we can’t shame the valid paths to get there.

this is sad

They literally led by throwing shame unto OP.

That’s how they opened their response.

It is not sad. Suggesting it is sad is a “gatekeeper-ass thing” to say.

I think you missed my point. You are mistaking your preferred architecture with moral superiority.

Cloudflare is not “gatekeeping” someone from self-hosting. It is an optional tool. A person choosing to use it because they are new, budget-conscious, or not ready to expose services directly is not sad, fake self-hosting, or somehow philosophically impure.

You can absolutely argue that Cloudflare has tradeoffs. That is fair. It adds dependency, abstraction, and vendor-specific knowledge. It is not magic security dust. No disagreement there.

But telling a beginner “this is sad” because they are using a mainstream protective layer while learning is exactly the kind of gatekeeping that makes self-hosting communities hostile to newcomers.

Also, “just use a VPN” is not a universal answer. VPNs are great for private admin access. They are not always the right solution when someone wants family members to access media or services without managing VPN clients, device support, troubleshooting, and onboarding. Different threat models, different usability needs.

The helpful response would have been: “Cloudflare can be useful, but understand what it does and does not protect you from. Don’t expose admin panels. Use MFA, strong auth, least privilege, good backups, updates, reverse proxy rules, and keep anything sensitive behind a VPN.”

That is useful advice.

“This is sad” is just self-hosting purity signaling.

I have tagged you as “selfhosting gatekeeper” for future reference.

There’s plenty wrong with shaming people en route to that path for not being 100% there.

That is all I said.

That’s a gatekeeper-ass take. It isnt sad in any way shape or form. What an elitist proclamation.

If you build your own infra internally and want a billion dollar industry to be your point of entry because you’re not confident in hardening a vps or don’t wanna pay for that on top of everything else (yet), so the fuck what?

REEEE YOU MUST OWN ALL OF YOUR INFRA

🙄

Get bent. If cloudflare goes down again (for another whole handful of minutes, the horror!!) they are clearly ramping to make the jump to a VPS when the finances and/or cybersecurity chops feel ready and the needs arise. “Sad”? Please. Get off your high horse. You make the rest of self hosters look bad.

Every AI logo is a butthole.

It tells me my job is safe, which is nice.

To assume the creator of rsync is vibe coding because they used AI is ridiculous.

I mean if it describes what you do accurately then they won’t be able to say much other than yes.

So oddly tier iii is just tier 2. Most places don’t have a tier 2.

1 years experience as sysadmin is great. Here’s the neat little trick no one tells you: what you say your job is on your resume should reflect WHAT YOU DO. Not the title of what you were hired for

Are you doing dev ops at a small outfit as a support engineer? Your resume should not say “support engineer.” It should say what your tasks reflect to the market. Not what some dude said your position is.

I’m sure the job postings will say, but many dev ops roles are looking for someone with senior experience. Like 8-10 years or the resume is ignored.

Id say the way to beat this is look for tier iii roles for folks that don’t know what they need is dev ops. Explain the value of what you want to do as a sysadmin to bring value. Then just write dev ops on your resume when you wind up doing dev ops.

Holy fucking pretentious douche, batman! Catch my block list.

100% building a home lab and being able to talk about it openly, from memory, in your own words, from experience, is invaluable for interviews.

I might update this. I might not. I have a lot to say but In out drinking.

All I will say now is save this list. You’ll look back at it in 5 years and wonder what half of those things are.

…

Okay a bit more from the bar:

If you want dev sec ops, grafana, elk, build dashboards, get your agents setup in your fleet, get it all secure locally. That alone will impress any interviewer who knows anything.

Dev ops specifically? Focus on building a local GitLab instance. Use grafana to monitor it. Run some app that has a busy db. Grafana dashboards on that. Oh my goodness, what a HOG you are GitLab! Tune it for your env. Purposely misconfigure something to watch, idk, the RAM keep growing because you didn’t setup redis or some shit.

The sea is vast. You’re hungry. Employers will see that once you land interviews.

If you want a ton of dev sec ops ideas, I am a good sounding board. Regular dev ops isn’t my daily grind so I know a bit less. What I do know is if you’re not ready to rebuild a multi node cluster some night after hours, you’re not quite a boss (doesn’t mean you’re not ready). So, emulate that nightmare.

Back to drinking 🍻

Edit: double check your *arr ideas bc afaik most of those were abandoned after a few major vulns were uncovered. That was months ago so that may be old hat.

Woah, soulseek

I haven’t used soulseek in literally 20 years… Is it still a relevant place to get music?

Thanks! I hope it helped.

I’m actually literally in the process of reaching out to my old Computability and Complexity professor who is now cs chair and cyber security lead for my alma mater. Wanna pitch him some ideas for me doing an adjunct in a cyber warfare lab 🤓

If it’s a Linux box, everything over 1023 just needs root.

For Debian flavors,

/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range

At least for those I use. Idk for rhel etc.

I can check my boxes with system ctl:

sysctl net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range

And tested on a VM, this wide s your ephemeral range:

sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range=“1024 65535”

Manage persistence in /etc/sysctl.conf

I’ll be honest here, I asked Claude for the windows equiv of that. I haven’t tested. Proceed with caution:

To check:

netsh int ipv4 show dynamicport tcp

To expand ephemeral range:

netsh int ipv4 set dynamicport tcp start=10000 num=55535

Syntax makes enough sense to me, but I repeat I have not vetted this.

HOWEVER,

all moot. You have 65k ports PER CONNECTION, holmes. Sorry I’m drunk now my tones changes and typos = more :)

So you at 10.0.0.1 connect to Google at 8.8.8.8 and cloudflare at 1.1.1.1, you can use 130k connections between the two. So this isn’t as useful as you may think you need it to be (idk what you’re doing lol, load balancer?)

If you’re churning through tons of short connections, you can “run out” of ports even though you have plenty… they’re all just cooling down.

net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse=1

lets the kernel grab them sooner.

Claude says Windows would be

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\TcpTimedWaitDelay

That’s a registry change. Proceed with extreme caution. Use a VM or throw away machine. I have absolutely not vetted the windows version here and registry edits are inherently dangerous. I usually yell at an AI that tells me to use regedit. Probably don’t do this unless the system is backed up and those backups are tested.

Hope this helps your crazy load balancer or whatever :)