Oh for sure, do what you want to do. I’m just saying, while everyone has their opinions, some people like to follow the crowd of popular opinion, and the crowd is moving away from Ubuntu. Maybe not everyone knows that 🤷‍♂️

Ubuntu has kind of fallen out of favor with a lot of people, myself included. It used to be my go to, then I went mint, now I run fedora Bluefin.

Exactly this.

I am likewise a long time Debian user, different flavors, on and off. Played with Arch a little. Never touched fedora.

Installed Bluefin on my main laptop almost a year ago, haven’t looked back. The stability is exactly what I was looking for. It just works, and protects me from myself.

But still my proxmox is full of mostly Debian servers, I still value a traditional install.

But you better believe that when my buddy asked for help with Windows 10 EOL, one of the options I gave him was Linux. He was curious, we went over pros and cons, now he’s running Bluefin too.

That’s extremely frustrating. Like, it’s literally your job to get that number correct…

People frustrate me

Makes sense. I work at a different type of repair shop, we just had a brand new $400 battery go up in smoke on first power up. Ridiculous.

They got away with it. I bought the part months ago after bodging a fix on the stock connector. By time the bodge failed, the return window closed. It was $5 so unfortunately not worth my time fighting it.

My headlight connector got a little melty, just enough to get loose and stop working, just wore out I suppose.

I bought one on Amazon, along with new bulbs, installed it, and within an hour the new connector had catastrophically melted and shorted out enough to blow the fuse.

I should’ve known, the wire felt cheap, copper clad aluminum. But I thought it would be fine, it’s just a headlight 🤷‍♂️

Now I’ve got a replacement from the local auto parts. So far so good.

Like this one?

Or this one?

Ah yes winmodems, what garbage. That’s dumb. I probably should’ve dug deeper when I got it. Honestly I hate printers. I asked the printer community on Reddit to recommend me a cheap printer that used cheap toner. I gave them my requirements and they even found a Craigslist listing for me. I think I’m only in 20 or 40 bucks, can’t remember, but I guess I can’t complain too hard.

Can you get modern laser printers that work that way?

I recently tried setting up my hp p1102w to print from openwrt using p910nd, but can’t because it’s a “host based” printer, whatever that means.

Even in cups, it needs a special driver to get it to behave. Doesn’t even work out of the box on my Fedora install.

I bought it a couple years ago, second hand, because the toner is cheap, and if I don’t update the firmware, I can keep using aftermarket toner.

It has Wi-Fi, but sometimes it refuses to print from Linux or my phone, just randomly. Always works on Windows though 🤦‍♂️

My plan is to kill the Wi-Fi because I don’t trust it being so out of date anymore, and either plug it into my server or slap a rpi on the back with cups on the network. But it’s proving to be a painful experience.

Gotcha! No worries. Networking gets more and more like sorcery the deeper you go.

Networking and printers are my two least favorite computer things.

That makes sense. I haven’t used an ISP configured router in over a decade. At my parents house, their modem/router combo didn’t support bridge mode so I put it in a DMZ and slapped that to the WAN port on my router. Worked well.

Oh you mean DNS server, yes ok that makes sense. Yeah I totally understand running your own.

If I understand correctly, DHCP servers just assign local IPs on initial connection, and configure other stuff like pointing devices to the right DNS server, gateway, etc

Question, what’s the benefit of running a separate DHCP server?

I run openwrt, and the built in server seems fine? Why add complexity?

I’m sure there’s a good reason I’m just curious.

Same

This is an example of what an Internet service providers network might look like.

They use many different types of specialized computers and devices to connect your house (one of the grey rectangles) to the greater Internet (the yellow rectangle in the middle).

One person is arguing that instead of the Internet service provider owning all of the red green and blue computers… Other people would own them. And maybe the red computer for your neighborhood would physically be inside your neighbor’s house, instead of in a small building or box on the side of the road somewhere nearby.

Functionally, it’s the same Internet, regardless of who owns the red box. Though theoretically, it could be less safe to give random people, potentially bad actors, access to the physical computer that is the red box, because they could do something malicious with it. But the point is, if the technology is working correctly, it doesn’t matter who owns it, everyone’s private home networks (everything downstream of your grey rectangle), are kept separate.

Just like normal Internet, you can’t print on your neighbor’s network printer, just because you both have the same ISP and share the same red computer upstream somewhere. The red computer won’t let it happen.

Does that make sense?

Now, the concern of the other guy, it seems, comes from not understanding this. Not understanding that the red computers are specially configured by the ISP, or whoever owns it, to keep the grey rectangles separate.

What he might be thinking, is something similar to sharing your Wi-Fi password. Or maybe running an Ethernet cable over the fence and plugging your neighbor’s router into your router. Things start to get complicated here, so I’ll gloss over a lot of things, but essentially… Your home router is not configured like the red computers are. So all of your neighbors data would be going through your home network, and you could very likely see what he’s doing, and he could potentially see what you’re doing (provided there’s no double NAT, but even then I’m not sure, maybe).

Basically, if two or more neighbors want to share Internet, but don’t know how to do it safely, then they can expose their private network activity to each other and open each other up to a decent amount of risk.

The solution, is to configure your router in a similar way to the red computers. It’s complicated, but not that difficult in practice. You could Google VLANs to get an idea of what would need to be done. Honestly you’d need more than that, some good firewall rules, and more things that I’m not qualified to comment on. I’m not a networkologist. But it can be done.

The debate/argument stems from a basic misunderstanding of how these systems work. Or perhaps they both understand how they work, but the guy who doesn’t want to do it is just worried about his neighbors being untrustworthy with the hardware being in their house, worried they’ll be nefarious, but he’s just bad at communicating that idea to the other guy.

At any rate, it doesn’t matter who owns the red computers or the green or blue, if they’re configured correctly, you’re safe. Unless you don’t trust whoever owns the computers 🤷‍♂️

Hopefully that makes sense! Let me know if you have any questions!

This. Though theoretically you could do it without CGNAT, maybe some type of complex vlan arrangement? I’m not sure, I’m not a networkologist.

I do know that I just got fiber down my road from a smaller company, still a big multi state company, but not Comcast or charter big. I called them because I was worried about CGNAT for my self hosting. The salesman didn’t know what I was talking about, which is disappointing but not surprising. But they forwarded me to the tech guys, who also claimed to not know what I was talking about… Which was either a downright lie, or they were idiots, either way it’s very concerning.

The price was right though, $5 cheaper per month, for 10 times faster download, and 30 times faster upload. So I gave it a shot. Thankfully I’m not behind a CGNAT, yet 🤞

Thanks for the update!

I’m not a professional, just some ideas here:

Yes cat6 is copper, but it’s low voltage, so according to a quick Google, you can put it 6 inches under and be ok, depending on what’s on the ground above it.

Fiber sounds good, but more delicate if anything is driving over it, might want it deeper anyway. For what it’s worth they just installed it at my house and only trenched it 2 or 3 inches, so 🤷‍♂️

You mention bonding the buildings together, and that might work, but there might be some code violations there, definitely look into it. IIRC if bonding two buildings, you need to, at a minimum, drive a ground rod 8ft down every so many feet. On every 5 or 10 maybe? Don’t quote me, definitely look it up.

But you might not need to do that anyway, did you try grounding just one side, or the other side? Just making sure the shielding on one side or the other is bonded well to the ground in that one building, and not the other. RF can do some weird stuff. And a wire that long is basically a big antenna, and if not grounded, can be inducing all kinds of voltages and noise where it shouldn’t be.

The RF link did work great, but it’s hard to beat a solid chunk of wire. That REALLY should be working for you, sorry to hear it’s not.

Anyway sorry to butt in with my opinions, please do keep us posted! I’m quite curious now haha

Not op, but sometimes you just do the quick easy thing with the assumption that it should be fine for a good long while. And then it isn’t 🤦‍♂️

Did you ever figure this out? I’m curious. Nobody mentioned the caulk, yes you cleaned it, but if it was silicone then it likely cures with acetic acid, which can corrode the conductors on both sides of the plug.