Normally you use a separate AP to do that. BSDs don’t normally have good support for WiFi cards. Consumer WiFi cards aren’t really meant for use as APs anyway.
I've been buying these little boxes from AliExpress for years to use as firewalls and routers. My oldest one is almost 9 years old now! OpenBSD installs just fine. Just a BIOS tweak to always boot up after power is restored.
Openwrt works great for gigabit networks with simple firewall rules and no IPS. But used 10-56gbps enterprise equipment is getting pretty cheap, and more complicated firewall configurations need more powerful hardware than the typical openwrt router.
And 56gbps on a home LAN might be overkill, but that’s not important.
I just finished my hour-long interview with Oxford University concerning their study of Mastodon and decentralized social media.
They were especially interested in what we’ve done here at Veganism Social, as we have our own fork with custom features that address common complaints such as content discoverability.
Veganism Social’s use case was exemplary of the benefits of decentralizion. Our moderation is uniquely anti-speciesist, and the community has a clear purpose beyond ‘general’.
My analyses of the technological and sociological benefits of decentralization are extensive. I (currently) have a deep understanding of Mastodon’s code-base, and how to use it. I also worked as a software developer for centralized social media, and now moderate a subreddit with 100k members.
I could not possibly exhaust myself of exhilarating insights to share.
Surely, the Oxford study will broaden awareness of how decentralized social media will benefit society.
Next time my wife asks me to stop info-dumping, I’ll banter that Oxford might think it’s worth listening to. 🤭
They’re sending me an Amazon gift card as compensation, and of course I’m spending it all on candy.
The future of selfhosted services is going to be... Android?
Wait, what?
Think about it. At some point everyone has had an old phone lying around. They are designed to be constantly connected, constantly on... and even have a battery and potentially still a SIM card to survive power outages.
We just need to make it easy to create APK packaged servers that can avoid battery-optimization kills and automatically configure an outbound tunnel like ngrok, zerotrust, etc...
The goal: hosting services like #nextcloud, #syncthing, #mastodon!? should be as easy as installing an APK and leaving an old phone connected to a spare charger / outlet.
It would be tempting to have an optimized ROM, but if self-hosting is meant to become more commonplace, installing an APK should be all that's needed. #Android can do SSH, VPN and other tunnels without the need for root, so there should be no problem in using tunnels to publicly expose a phone/server in a secure manner.
In regards to the suitability of home-grade broadband, I believe that it should not be a huge problem at least in Europe where home connections are most often unmetered: "At the end of June 2021, 70.2% of EU homes were passed by either FTTP or cable DOCSIS
3.1 networks, i.e. those technologies currently capable of supporting gigabit speeds."
PS. syncthing actually already has an APK and is easy to use. Although I had to sort out some battery optimization stuff, it's a good example of what should become much more commonplace.
That’s definitely a good call. Before I even had a NAS, I’d just throw some movies and stuff on my macbook when I had to travel. Problem is that when you’re loading it up, you think you know what you’ll want to watch and then later you just wish you had different choices.
I was going to host pihole on an old android until I noticed it getting quite warm while continuously connected to power. Realised I didn’t know the lifespan of the battery and didn’t want it tp start a fire.
I'm planning on setting up a #rasberrypi music streamer. I'll be throwing headless #plexamp to play my music library and I'll probably use #moodeaudio as the base image to get me bluetooth, airplay and a few other bits. Does anyone know how I can integrate podcasts into the platform? I was thinking of setting up an #audiobookshelf server and clients on my mobile devices but I'm not sure how to stream a podcast to the pi so that it keeps track of my position across all my devices.