Can you explain this DNS thing further, please?

I start with what I understand. DNS stands for domains name system, which means a huge database of domain names and their IP addresses. When I ask for a website, DNS tells my computer / browser which IP addresses to look for, to reach the website.

At home, I have Pi-Hole and Unbound. The first one censors DNS addresses by not including domains that serve advertisements. It can work with various DNS providers, including those from Google or Cloudflare. Unbound allows me to self-host DNS database, periodically fetching it from somewhere. That way my ISP may not see … here I’m not sure what, DNS lookups? It sees which IPs I reach, so I assume there’s no big difference, if they’d want to know which resources I reach for. Frankly, I don’t understand this solution entirely, perhaps unbound is for something different. I used Pi-Hole without it for years, only recently I added unbound, because it was quite easy to do with DietPi distro.

Cloudflare actively promotes their WARP service, for people to use their DNS servers. They have three options, four ones, three ones and two, three ones and three. My guess is they theoretically can analyse these DNS lookups for some reason. (E.g. by partnering with three letter agencies, doing some service for them.)

What is DNS in the context of my website being registered with them? When I reach to my website, or any other website registered with them, what would happen? Isn’t the record everywhere already? I cannot understand what this means in this (different, isn’t it?) context.

The rug pull scheme ‘now you pay us for DNS too!’ seems unlikely, for some reason. If it’s no different from what they provide as a free service. If it’s something else, I assume you can migrate to any other registrar, unless you’re too heavy into their ecosystem.

On a personal note, I’m not too heavy into their ecosystem, I hope. I have a couple of static websites hosted for free with Cloudflare Pages. Plus I have a bare metal file server with images which is shared to the internet with Cloudflare Tunnel. I’m nobody with a few readers, tens of posts and hundreds of images, and I chose this architecture because I don’t understand how to properly self-host my blog on a residential connection (meaning dynamic IP behind a CG-NAT or what it’s called). When I do, I may drop them in favour of a simpler architecture. But also I was curious how it works.

So, saying all this, I still don’t understand what this them being an authoritative registrar means in this context. Perhaps I lack some web dev skills to understand that properly. When I had my domain with Squarespace, they allowed more than Cloudflare, but I lack understanding to properly formulate that, to even understand what it was. I think I could host my top level domain with Cloudflare Pages only when they are my registrar, while having those Pages on a subdomain was trivial even with a different registrar. If I remember that correctly now, I might’ve been confusing some things here.

Thanks for your previous explanation, it was quite informative.

Thanks! I haven’t thought of com as being the real TLD, actually!

Thanks! It’s a bit more clear now.

To contribute to the discussion, I remembered that with Squarespace (my previous registrar), I had unlimited redirects, which I used heavily. I am not really sure about the unlimited part, perhaps that was hidden somewhere in the interface, and they have limits, and I just never saw them. But I remember Cloudflare communicated I have like 10, so I decided to not use it for nice-to-have but not really needed things. E.g. I used a subdomain for a blog, and created redirects for typical misprints in my name. Was handy, but not really needed. I should have document this, but I was too busy at the time, and now, almost a year later, I don’t really remember. There were differences with Cloudflare and Squarespace.

My first registrar was Google domains. As always, they killed the business. And sold it to Squarespace. I’ve been their customer for a year or two, nothing bad I can say, except the price was about 1.5 or even 2x of that from Cloudflare for com domain, so I migrated there. I have no deep understanding of the nuances, so I cannot say whether Cloudflare is a bad actor. At least I trust them to not elevate the price, as it’s not their primary business, sell domains.

I see that, but what does it mean in practice?

I have my domain with Cloudflare too, and at this point, I’m not aware of these DNS servers. Can someone explain it a bit? I know what DNS is, but I don’t understand what’s the use case for having them elsewhere. I’m not to argue, just didn’t know where to register a domain, so I went with them. I’m concerned with the future of the domain either, but don’t understand the issues at this early point.

It’s even worse than advertisement. As it’s useless.

Neo, wake up!

I wonder what are peanuts in this context. It sounds like a great server!

Oh, thanks, I missed it. It’s a very long thread. I’ve read only the first 40 messages so far, so I cannot really comment on that. But here is a nice advice from there:

FWIW It is possible to run Syncthing via Termux — it’s not as integrated but it runs fine.

What is wrong with the fork from F-Droid? I use it. I see no difference with the original, I’d say it’s even better. If you don’t trust them for some reason, why discard Syncthing as a project? I assume it can be built then. But I have no idea how.

By the way, I’m happy to use Sushi Train on iPhone. Works very well, and is lovingly polished. Now Syncthing is a centrepiece of my workflow to sync my files.

Have you tried a non-tech solution, like putting the drives into some noise absorbing materials, or isolating the sound with the hard case, things like that? That may sound not really obvious, but my guess is that you can at least get some noise off with a solution like this.

I won’t go with SSDs for a NAS as it’s very expensive. But if money of no concern, that Beelink thing looks impressive.

Definitely overkill. Depends on your use case though. I have the same computer that I use for HTPC. It’s running Kodi + Transmission. The OS is Fedora, but I could get away with LibreELEC. It’s just that I had Fedora already and didn’t bother to reinstall.

What I don’t like about this computer is that it’s very power hungry if compared to a less powerful one. I have a separate Orange Pi Zero and I’m super happy about it. It serves two functions: downloads torrents and shares them via UPnP (with miniDLNA package). So it’s turned on 24/7, while this big computer is on only when I want to play something.

Immich, I don’t know. I’m yet to discover how it works. I think maybe I’d turn it on when I need it, so that may be an option. This potential computer of yours, if you could turn it on via Wake on LAN, that could help tremendously, if you care about power consumption. Most of the computers I saw have this feature in their bios.

If you don’t care about power consumption, I think that’s a decent computer. It can run everything, or almost everything no problem. I think you can run a lot of services with it.

All the computers in my infra are super cheap used devices, the first one was hands me down computer some people wanted to throw away, so they asked me to utilise, if I could. I took it, and only later I realised it can be utilised this way. That computer is mostly off, as it’s even more power hungry.

To learn, you can restore literally any computer. To run something long-run, best is N100 or similar mini computers. They are cheap, run cold, some have no active coolers (so, silent), and sip power. That’s what I plan to implement to my home, once I’d settle on what I need.

Thanks for not much, I have never heard of it before.

Did anyone try CLI clients, like (neo)mutt for that? I expect it can be set up on a server (if we consider self-hosting) and do this job automatically. While all the AI thingy feels like magic, my practical experience shows that there are just some keywords or even just the sender, with which mails can be sorted.

I’d love to learn more, never really worked with them. Is Tailwind much of improvement with these frameworks?

I wonder, just another rename, X → XXX, would do well, wouldn’t it?

That sounds too loud, what’s the actual meaning behind what they’re saying? To me, that looks like maybe they hired too many people assuming their business would only grow. That’s the delusion some Silicon Valley folks have, with the sort of VC culture. Perhaps they shouldn’t grow in employees (why are there employees in the first place?) and try to be sustainable instead. The whole project looks so flashy, but does it even need to grow?

And, forgot to add: what is 75% of employees? Were they tens? Were they a hundred? (Sounds absurd to me, but who knows.)

Edit: according to this HN comment, they fired 3 developers out of 4.

On a personal note, I’m not a fan. I used it in a couple of projects, and wasn’t sold on the idea of never ever learning CSS and make your classes not semantic at all. However, I think there might be cases where this approach makes sense. I just haven’t found it so far.

While I agree, I’d like Apple (and others) to make repairability better (or even exist), but as an owner of quite a lot of Apple tech, it’s very well made, usually. Until it breaks, obviously, but it breaks less than a random cheap brand. At least for me. Any other computer maker is rather unable to lock down the devices the same way. I bet they’d happily do so, if given the opportunity. Plenty of modern laptops with non-swappable memory and even SSDs.

And those are…