I have no idea what a DreamMachine is (and wikipedia does not help) so here’s the long answer :)

If you want a VPN tunnel to your own home, for secure access to your LAN, I’d recommend you look into NetBird and/or TailScale, which at their core are wireguard plus NAT punch-through (you can also run wireguard or openvpn directly, but it may be a pain since you most probably have a dynamic IP and possibly a CGNAT).

If you want to hide your traffic while connecting through networks you don’t trust (such as the work one or some cafe’s wifi), you can either use NetBird/Tailscale as above and connect though your home (well, assuming you trust your ISP of course) or some third party VPN which connects to their servers (I’d say look into Proton first).

Keep in mind that VPNs actually do very little for your online privacy (ie. it’s not like google or facebook can’t track or fingerprint you). They do is prevent man-in-the-middle traffic analysis from your ISP (or the admin of whatever LAN you are using), but then the VPN provider can do the exact same things, so… make sure to double-check the privacy guarantees of your VPN provider and compare them with those of your ISP.

What do you (think you) need a VPN for?

Lineage OS is not designed to relock the bootloader.

I don’t understand why so many people worry about that… doesn’t it only ensure that data is wiped if some agent secretly installs a rootkit or sorts on your phone before giving back the device to you?

To me, bootloader locking is mostly a way for phone manufacturers to make it harder to run anything but the ROM they have chosen (and it’s a PITA and the most laborious part of installing a ROM).

I hate them (seriously).

It’s basically a second distro inside your distro (try du -chs /var/lib/flatpak/) and if something breaks (eg. last year mesa with my graphics card) it isn’t easy to identify were the problem is (because all libs update at the same time), plus you can’t just try a newer (or older) version of some lib as you would in your distro.

Moreover, you can’t flatpak CLI tools (also servers and OS components, but I guess the ubuntu folks are the only ones who care about those).

btw :)

https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/ and make sure to double-check that unlocking the bootloader isn’t too much bother (ie. read the installation instructions)

I use just for that usecase - highly recommended

I fear I am not enough reverse (or Polish, for that matter) :)

Anyway, I have great esteem for you (if you actually use forth and are not just trolling)

Also you mentioned provisioning scripts, is that Ansible? If so python is already there, if you mean really just bash scripts I can tell you that does not scale well. Also if you already have some scriptsz what language are they on? Why not write the function there??

Currently it’s mostly nixos, plus a custom thing that generates preconfigured openwrt images that I then deploy manually. I have a mess of other vms and stuff, but I plan to phase out everything and migrate to nixos (except the openwrt stuff, since nixos doesn’t run on mips).

I don’t really need to run this specific synchthing-ID script except on my PC (I do the provisioning from there), but I have written scripts that run on my router (using busybox sh) and I was wondering if there is a “goto” scripting that I can use everywhere.

Elixir is quite big (yeah, it’s certainly smaller than something like java… sorry for not specifying what I mean by “small disk footprint”).

Thats basically what ansible does. Thats basically what ansible does. If you plan on doing this to multiple machines you should just use ansible.

Ansible requires python on the target machine (or a lot of extra-hacky workarounds) so… I could just use python myself :)

BTW getting ansible to do anything besides the very straightforward usecases it was meant for is a huge pain (even a simple if/else is a pain) and it’s also super-slow, so I hate it passionately.

Also how do you plan on ensuring the scripting interpreter is installed on the machines?

Ideally I’d just copy the interpreter over via ssh when needed (or install it via the local package manager, if it’s available as a package)

nim is great, but it is >200mb (plus AFAIK it is compiled… does it also have an interpreter?)

Installing node uses some 60MB (according to zypper on my current desktop). I’d rather have something small and possibly that consists of a single executable.

As a bonus, both support the vast and extensive NPM package repository

That’s not necessarily a feature :) Package repos are great if you are a developer (I am one) working primarily with that language, but are frustrating if you just want to run things.

Let alone the reliability, I somehow doubt my router would be able to run an LLM :)

Why aren’t python and bash be available in all your systems?

Among others, I run stuff on alpine and openwrt.

I don’t need to run these scripts everywhere (strictly speaking, I don’t need the homlab at all), but I was wondering if there’s something that I can adopt as a default goto solution without having to worry about how each system is packaged/configured.

As for python, I doubt the full version would fit in my router plus as said I don’t want to deal with libraries/virtualenvs/… and (in the future) with which distro comes with python3 vs pyton4 (2 vs 3 was enough). Openwrt does have smaller python packages, but then I would be using different implementations on different systems: again something I’d rather not deal with.

As for perl, it would be small enough, but I find it a bit archaic/esoteric (prejudice, I know), plus again I don’t want to deal with how every distro decides to package the different things (eg. openwrt has some 40+ packages for perl - if I were doing serious development that would be ok, but I don’t want to worry about that for just some scripts).

LOL you made my day :) “emacs is a part time job”

I think I can sense your love/hate relationship with nixos from here :) you are not alone

I thought you could still go Centos Stream 9?

Anyway, I’m pretty sure almalinux-deploy allows migration from Centos Stream 8… it’s your second chance to be done with fickle management decisions from RedHat/IBM: don’t miss it this time :)

Isn’t the purpose getting views on youtube?

Never used powershell (thanks heavens, I’ve not touched windows since windows 7). Is it similar to nushell?

Well, it’s not like by learning fish you’ll automatically forget bash :) but I do agree that you should learn bash first, then plain sh and only after those go explore other shells.

I love how “radical shells” sounds! :)