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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: February 15th, 2025

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  • If you have one of those cars that can be used as a boat. And you only ever use it in water and never on land, it doesn’t really make sense to me to exclusively call it a car. Even though it factually is one, it acts as a boat. At least call it carboat.

    If I have a VPN, but it’s sole purpose is to take all the traffic that knocks on it’s network-adapter and shove it down a dev/tun and vice verca, why can we not say (with the goal of clear communication and precise descriptions) that it effectively acts as a proxy ?


  • Hell the ability to access the internet via the tunnel, called Split Tunneling, is also controllable.

    It’s that ability to control where the tunnel terminates that allows consumer VPNs, like Proton, to be used the way they are.

    you can do the same split tunneling via proxy servers

    while private individuals absolutely do use VPNs as an ersatz replacement for Proxy Servers they are nowhere near the whole use case for VPN

    I agree. That also means that for certain usecases they are equivalent. It’s sometimes worth checking all options to find the best one for that specific case.


  • You’re correct.

    Most people only search for “VPN” because thats the term that got marketed for decades.

    But the problem can be solved by using a proxy as well.

    The intent of my comment was just to point to a second term - “proxy” - that can be used to find more valid, alternative solutions to the problem of making your homelab hosted services publicly available. And I think you agree with me, that proxy is the term closer to the usecase, even though we both correctly state that a VPN can be used as a proxy.

    To make a bad analogy (it’s the first thing that came to mind): It’s like people buying a wok, even though they really just need a pan. And so they only search for wok, because every company says wok all the time, even though they will never use the wok as a wok, but just as a normal pan.

    Even by your definition that should be a VPN, right?

    … in my case, I have a homelab, a VPS and a user of a service that runs on my homelab. The VPS is just a proxy for the homelab. The user (client) talks to the homelab (server), through the VPS (proxy) so not, not really a VPN, even if I’d set up openVPN between VPS and homelab. They are not two clients.



  • I think thats up to debate.

    Wikipedia says:

    A virtual private network (VPN) is an overlay network that uses network virtualization to extend a private network across a public network, such as the Internet, via the use of encryption and tunneling protocols. In a VPN, a tunneling protocol is used to transfer network messages from one network host to another. Host-to-network VPNs are commonly used by organisations to allow off-site users secure access to an office network over the Internet. Site-to-site VPNs connect two networks, such as an office network and a datacenter.

    So my argument is, if it is not used for private communication between multiple clients, it’s not really a VPN.

    Lets say, we both connect to the same Proton VPN server - our computers would not see each other and would not be able to connect to each other via that service. It has effectively the same function as a proxy - making your public internet traffic appear to come from the IP of the proxy server instead of your home IP.

    Whereas if you set one up yourself with openVPN for example, we could make it so that we both get a VPN internal IP that we could use to directly connect and idk, play minecraft or something. Instead of connecting through the public internet, we would connect through a virtual network that is private for the two of us.







  • I have 2 powered RAID enclosures from icybox with 2 multi TB HDD in each one. The RAID is set to mirror the drives.

    They are connected via usb 3 to a raspberry pi which runs borgbackup.

    One is in my own place, just next to the main server.

    The other is at my parents place in another city.

    All my desktops, laptops and servers have borgmatic installed with the two pi’s as two targets. So when I create a backup it gets send to both locations. On my PCs I manually do a borg backup like once a month when I feel like it. The server computers are all on a daily schedule.

    Borg has extremely efficient compression and defuplication. So having 20 historical snapshots of the whole file storage of each device takes about 30% less space than the original size on disk.

    For example my desktop currently uses ~800GB but the borgbackup of said desktop takes only ~500GB.

    The only disadvantage I find is that there is no cross system deduplication.

    The super useful advantage is that I was able to just take the HDD enclosure, plug it into my Desktop and restore whatever files I want. I did an rsync to a blank fs once and it restored everything properly. And it’s pretty cheap. like 150$ total per backup location without any significant monthly costs.

    I used hetzners storagebox for a while for borgbackups but restoring from it was SO SLOW. And my internet connection is not stable enough to do that without interruptions for multiple days. Never again, except for using it as an extra last resort “cloud” backup.






  • my 2 old phones (usb c) were both replaced because of hardware issues.

    one has a broken power button that is constantly detected as being randomly spam pressed, so as soon as it gets power if it ever manages to boot it either reboots itself or tries to call emergency services.

    the other has a flaky usb c that constantly connects and disconnects unless you hold it at a specific angle and the battery is like a minute away from meltdown - it can hold charge for a couple minutes.

    I’d be afraid to leave either plugged in.

    I guess the article is for people that buy a new phone yearly out of fashion, not need.