There’s another community for this: [email protected]
Though we mostly discuss the news and specific questions there, beginner questions are a bit more rare.

I think you already got a lot of good answers here, LMStudio, OpenWebUI, LocalAI…
I’d like to add KoboldCpp that’s kind of made for gaming/dialogue, but it can do everything. And from my experience it’s very easy to set up and bundles everything into one program.

Fair enough. I mean I’d pay about 200€ a year in electricity to run 3 efficient computers. And my VPS is only 73€ and I never have to pay for replacement parts (SSDs, harddisks) which I had to replace at home. And then they have gigabit network, low latency, a proper IP address, it didn’t fail yet so their reliability >99.6% seems to be correct. And that’s all way better than what I have at home. So it’s a no-brainer to go for that. But your calculation might be different.

I mean ultimately there is no harm in trying. If you have 3 old computers laying around, you might as well try setting up a kubernetes cluster. I think it’s going to prove difficult to handle the IP addresses but I’m not an expert on high availability and gaming clients.

But doesn’t that require some software-defined networking or a special network setup? I’m pretty sure with the average home internet connection, you’ll fail over to the replica at your friend’s home. But that has an entirely different IP address and the game client will not handle that gracefully. It’s going to disconnect. And you need to do some DNS as well to always point at the active server and forbid caching. In a datacenter or enterprise setting, sure. you’ll just reroute the traffic and nobody will notice.

I’d rent one (small) VPS for $10 a month and split the bill. As far as I know that’s how most people do it. It’s going to have >99.6% uptime, a fast datacenter internet connection at some central location and runs on enterprise hardware… The Kubernetes approach adds a lot of complexity, you’ll have your games disconnect anyway once it fails over as you can’t migrate the IP addresses. And there will be some additional traffic between the locations to keep everything in sync. And 4x chance of some of the hardware failing and someone needs to fix it. Unless I’m mistaken about how Kubernetes works.

Probably the safe bet. Though I think my 8th gen Intel does AV1 decode as well. But it’s not hardware accelerated, so quite some cpu load and full hd is the limit, it can’t do 4k or anything fancy. And definitely no realtime av1 encoding.

Seems some people here advocate for a VPS, and I do it as well. I pay roughly 7€ a month for a small(ish) server with 4 cpu cores, 8GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. That allows me to host a few services there, for example some websites and matrix chat, which I don’t want to go down if there’s an issue at home. And it allows me to do reverse proxying there, so I have the entire chain under my control. But there’s many ways to do it, and several other tunneling solutions (boringproxy.io, nohost.me, pagekite, ngrok, …) that I heard of.

And a lot of home internet connections allow port-forwarding. Not sure what your provider does, but I can simply open ports in my router and make them accessible from the outside, no VPS or Cloudflare needed. That’d be the direct solution. (And what I use for my personal services on my NAS.) Just mind that discloses your internet connection’s IP address to visitors, so they’ll learn the name of your provider and your rough location.

I’m fairly sure what you mean is, traffic is decrypted in the middle and the re-encrypted before it gets sent your way. Otherwise they couldn’t do proxying or threat detection/mitigation.

Cloudflare is very popular, there should be plenty people around with experience. And Cloudflare is convenient and fairly easy to use. I wouldn’t call them “secure” though. I mean that depends on your definition of the word… But they terminate the encryption for you and handle certificates, so it’s practically a man-in-the-middle, as they process your data transfers in cleartext. But as far as I know their track-record is fine. I have some ethical issues because they centralize the internet and some of their stuff borders on snake-oil… But it’s a common solution if you can’t open ports in your home internet connection, need some caching in front of your services, something to block AI scrapers, or you need a web application firewall as a service.

Yes, I rarely see this being discussed. Cloudflare terminates the encryption, hopefully re-encrypts it on the way upstream, but they have access to all the content in the forwarded traffic. Not sure about the password managers, though. I believe most of them encrypt stuff on the device itself before sending it over the network, and there are no cleartext passwords transferred or stored on the servers.

Sure, email is bad and we don’t have any worthy successor. I can only deal with the most problematic aspects. Keep my inbox stored somewhere where people can’t just easily go through all my stored mails and I guess it’s transport encrypted more often than it’s not… But yeah, it’s only a little bit and “secure” shouldn’t be in one sentence with email, I guess 😟

Thanks for your insight. Reading these stories always makes me feel data should stay on own premises with extra security measures. And yes, on my VPS, imaging the storage is one click and I believe it’s done online without any interruption of service. Not that I do a lot of illegal stuff on the internet. But with the current situation in the US and the general overboarding surveillance, I think i’d like to keep their government and agencies out of my emails and personal stuff… (And maybe even what I do publicly and within legal limits.)

Though I didn’t ask about privacy here, but anonymity. And I guess selfhosting stuff at home isn’t an option either. Everyone can tell my ISP and location to like 30km with that. And link the IP to other activities.

Edit: I found their Transparency Report: https://www.cloudflare.com/transparency/

Though, I don’t know whether those numbers are high or low, considering the large amount of customers they have and the crazy amount of internet traffic they do.

Good suggestion, that’s what I regularly do.

I don’t think you read what I wrote. The debate is if and how cloud office solutions can be used according to law. Obviously that’s about the GDPR because that’s how the law concerned with it is called…

And the second thing: That’s what I wrote?! I could improve a bit on the grammar…

Well, for once you need a commissioned data processing contract with Microsoft to let Microsoft (a third party) process your users private data. And probably a case-by-case study as Office365/Teams/… consists of a wide variety of different services and products and has lots of configurable options as well. And then we had the Datenschutzkonferenz come to the conclusion Office365 is not allowed in 2022. And it got messy after that. A big debate. The EU and several German states and different institutions doing reviews over the years and coming to different (sometimes opposing) conclusions. And the law concerning data safe harbour / EU data boundary got updated. And we have 2025 now and the situation in the US changes daily. On the upside I believe they’ve all renewed the Data Privacy Framework certifications so it’s legally possible to use the services. But I don’t think the debate is solved or over yet. And you’ll get some 50+ pages PDF instructions on how to configure your company/organization’s cloud office to be in line.

I suppose it’s similar for Google? But I see less professional use of their cloud services, I believe it’s more popular with smaller organizations and individuals. Honestly I don’t know much about that one, I’ve never considered Google for data that need protection, as that company is one of the largest data leeches on earth.

In any case OP needs to qualify for their NGO programs, as both Google and Microsoft cost about $1,000 a year for like 15 people and that’s well above their weight. And GDPR compliance for group members and commissioned data processing is a business feature, that’s not in your average private (free) Google account.

Other than that, you can google “office365 gdpr” (or dsgvo) if you haven’t heard of it yet and see all the different opinions out there.

I believe cycling and constantly discharging and charging a battery might be even worse than letting the built-in charge controller do its job and keep the charge. I’m not an expert on battery chemistry, though. All I can say, I’ve seen desktop replacements plugged in all the time and the battery at 100% and they go bad. Thinkpads and other laptops have configurable thresholds for quite some time now. And despite me using that for my last 2 laptops, the batteries still go bad eventually. It’s supposed to help, and batteries got better, but it’s a thing to factor in.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Or just the average sense of impending doom?

Yes, but there’s 2 sides to that story. It’s a free UPS and that’s really nice. But then I’ve seen old batteries degrade and swell. People call it the spicy pillow syndrome. And with two of my older devices, batteries got recalled by the manufacturer. So I’d advise against running these things 24/7 unattended. Either know what you’re doing or rip it out before it burns down the building. As a minimum that includes a location made of concrete or bricks and mortar and no burnable stuff in the vicinity. And regular checks on the state of the battery, maybe both visual inspections and whatever the mainboard reports.

I personally would advise against gsuite and office356 as well as it’s currently debated whether they can be used in accordance to the GDPR. That’s not stopping institutions and organizations… Both are very popular products, but I’d be cautious and not put any sensitive stuff or personal stuff or pictures there. And not hand out logins to other people, especially not minors.

I don’t think the BSA compare to the major German scouting associations. Different organization structure and substantially different ideology and activities. Also none of the big controversies surrounding the BSA. But I suppose idiots are everywhere, at least that’s my general life experience 😅 It is very unfortunate once they start to ruin things.