Yeah because making it isn’t only about just waiting for time to pass and money to come it, it is also about compounding.

The thing with Ubuntu / Canonical isn’t that it doesn’t work, it is that they’ve bad policies and by using their stuff you’re making yourself vulnerable to something akin to what happened with VMWare ESXi or with CentOS licensing - they may change their mind at some point and you’ll be left with a pile of machines and little to no time to move to other solution.

For starters Ubuntu is the only serious and corporate-backed distribution to ever release a major version on the website and have the ISO installer broken for a few days.

Ubuntu’s kernel is also a dumpster fire of hacks waiting for someone upstream to implement things properly so they can backport them and ditch their own implementations. We’ve seen this multiple times, shiftfs vs VFS idmap shifting is a great example of the issue.

Canonical has contributing to open-source for a long time, but have you heard about what happened with LXD/LXC? LXC was made with significant investments, primarily from IBM and Canonical. LXD was later developed as an independent project under the Linux Containers umbrella, also funded by Canonical. Everything seemed to be progressing well until last year when Canonical announced that LXD would no longer remain an independent project. They removed it from the Linux Containers project and brought it under in-house development.

They effectively took control of the codebase, changed repositories, relicensed previous contributions under a more restrictive license. To complicate matters, they required all contributors to sign a contract with new limitations and impositions. This shift has caused concerns, but most importantly LXD became essentially a closed-off in-house project of Canonical.

Some people may be annoyed at Snaps as well but I won’t get into that.

Look so damn good, they even seem to know what padding is this time.

Will they learn how to apply padding to stuff this time?

This means I don’t need to mess around with QBT’s “proxy” settings?

No, you don’t. In short, trackers will look at the source address of the incoming connection on their side, that means you VPS IP because you’re doing NAT on the VPS.

Just make sure qBittorrent is restricted to the WG interface and nothing else.

I agree with that, 100% but for the majority of the world how green it is usually depends on how far-left you are.

So… now nuclear is considered “green power”. Okay boomers.

but without nix it’s a pita to maintain through restores/rebuilds.

No it isn’t. You can even define those routing polices in your systemd network unit alongside the network interface config and it will manage it all for you.

If you aren’t comfortable with systemd, you can also use simple “ip” and “route” commands to accomplish that, add everything to a startup script and done.

major benefit to using a contained VPN or gluetun is that you can be selective on what apps use the VPN.

Systemd can do that for you as well, you can tell that a certain service only has access to the wg network interface while others can use eth0 or wtv.

More classic ip/route can also be used for that, you can create a routing table for programs that you want to force to be on the VPN and other for the ones you want to use your LAN directly. Set those to bind to the respective interface and the routing tables will take place and send the traffic to the right place.

You’re using docker or similar, to make things simpler you can also create a network bridge for containers that you want to restrict to the VPN and another for everything else. Then you set the container to use one or the other bridge.

There are multiple ways to get this done, throwing more containers, like gluetun and dragging xyz dependencies and opinionated configurations from somewhere isn’t the only one, nor the most performant for sure. Linux is designed to handle this cases.

In terms of homelab stuff, I know a lot of people appreciate the containerized approach.

What I said applies to containerized setups as well. Same logic, just managed in a slightly different way.

Just fire up Wireshark and inspect what Firefox calls, a lot of calling home and even if you change all the settings and config parameters to something sane it will still contact a 3rd party analytics company. Mozilla also acquired an ad analytics company recently for some reason.

Yeah repositories and FTP don’t include that, but it is kind shady that the first way to get it (website) for the majority of regular users (Windows/macOS) has a unique ID - after all this is the company that goes all in for privacy…

Nothing, not everyone liked it, the only difference is that my comment would result in a shit show of downvotes last week while not people are starting to realize what Mozilla/Firefox really is. Mozilla was never the “all savior” pained them to be and it only took Wireshark and a couple of minutes to see it.

No no, guys Mozilla are the good guys. They never did something nasty like bundling tons of spyware and 3rd party calls with Firefox nor adding unique IDs to every installation. Mozilla also acquired an ad analytics company recently for some reason.

By “set up wireguard to route through the VPS” you mean having wireguard forward a port from the VPS to a port on the homeserver at its wireguard IP address?

Yes, he means that.

qBittorrent will still need to publish the right IP address to peers though, right? So I will need to configure the proxy VPS’s IP address in qBittorrent…

No. For most things qBittorrent does public IP detection. For the rest your VPS will be doing NAT between the WG interface and the public internet. This means your qBittorrent client sends outgoing packets with the source address of your WG private IP and then the VPS will change those to it’s public IP address.

The thing you must be careful about is that you need to restrict qBittorrent to only send and receive traffic on the WG interface, otherwise it will be using both. You can do it in the settings, but the safest way is to do it at the container setup or systemd service level and completely hide any interface that isn’t the WG one from it.

You can force all outgoing traffic to use the VPN interface via iptables/routes (meaning if it doesn’t exist or doesn’t work nothing will be able to access the internet) OR use systemd globally hide the non-VPN network interface from all services except for the VPN client.

All of that can be achieved with simple systemd or iptables/routes tweaks. You can force all outgoing traffic to use the VPN interface via routes (meaning if it doesn’t exist or doesn’t work nothing will be able to access the internet) OR use systemd globally hide the non-VPN network interface from all software except for the VPN client.

Hm, so now people suddenly notice and care about this? lol

Not specifically for amazon devices, they’ve opened up the network to “selected partners”, I believe Samsung isn’t on the list but that may happen at any point and to be fair did you read the ToS to know if they don’t have something similar already? What are their plans?

That doesn’t guarantee 100% privacy on a densely populated area anymore. Nowadays you’ve stuff like Amazon Sidewalk and who knows who’s partner and what devices are in it.

That doesn’t guarantee 100% privacy on a densely populated area anymore. Nowadays you’ve stuff like Amazon Sidewalk and who knows who’s partner and what devices are in it.