One way is to run Pi-hole’s admin interface on a different port. That’s configured in:

/etc/lighttpd/external.conf

Set:

server.port := 8000

Then your URL is http://IP:8000/admin

Depends a lot on your existing reverse proxy.

You can read the nginx config that the defaults include and it’s some basic rules to route incoming requests to either lemmy or lemmy-ui. If your existing reverse proxy is nginx you could just incorporate the rules in there.

It also depends on why you need it behind the existing proxy, and how you’ll choose to route your traffic, and where you traffic is coming from in general.

I’d start with taking a look at the default nginx config to see if you can move those rules to your existing reverse proxy, or just forward everything coming in that’s for lemmy straight to the lemmy reverse proxy, although that might be more complicated in correctly preserving the incoming requests.

Many years ago working for a monitoring software company someone had found a bug in the uptime monitoring rules where they reset after a year.

It was patched and I upgraded one client and their whole Solaris plant immediately went red and alerted. They told me to double it to two years and some stuff was still alerting.

They just said they’d try to get around to rebooting it, but it was all stable.

Everywhere else I’ve worked enforces regular reboots.

If you want a reliable provider try Fastmail. Used them for years, very rare outages. I have my local postfix set to relay to them for locally sent mail. Great web UI.

Most towers will fit 4 drives.

If you’re out of SATA ports or M2s you can buy PCI adapters.

If you’re buying SSDs they’re small and don’t care about orientation, can but plugged into the cables and stuffed anywhere in the case that doesn’t impede airflow.

Where do you want your drives? What sort of drives? I’ve also found it more performant to stuff them in the case and 4 drives isn’t a stretch unless you’re also running a ton in the target server.

Fastmail.

But, it’s not the cheapest. $5 a month gets what you need though.

Really quick WebUI, great features, including hosting your own domains and smtp rewriting.

Very smart helpful support team.

Great for degoogling.

The major email providers will only handle email from know good and trusted IPs. If you’ve been hosting on the same IP for 15 years you’re trusted. If you started it last night your IP is still untrusted. It takes a long time to gain trust.

SendGrid has a good explanation here: https://sendgrid.com/resource/email-guide-ip-warm-up/

That’s cool. I’ve used crafty for years, but mainly because I outgrew my scripts to manage each server instance and my kids need instance responses to restarting servers. So I went looking for something Minecraft specific to give them restart and reset commands.

Moving to Caseta for lighting from the random mix of bulbs which never quite work was amazing. It’s also much cheaper to put in one controllable switch than replace the 6 bulbs in the light fittings connected to the wall switch. Those bulbs always fail in weird and non-debuggable ways.

I use Crafty Controller (https://craftycontrol.com/) to manage the minecraft servers. It runs in a docker instance and gives you a nice web UI to manage each minecraft server. I use it to delegate control to my kids to create and manage servers as necessary.

Finally, if you’re not using a config mgmt tool, I’d start looking, so you can make everything easily re-doable. Personally I’m using Ansible, but puppet, chef, salt, etc all work too. Ansible is easiest given it does need it’s own infra. I like it so if something dies I can redeploy everything onto a different server.

I’ve had a lot of success with a QOTOM box from aliexpress.

They’re little fanless boxes running basic intel Core chips, in a variety of configs.

I’ve run OPNSense and PFSense as routers (also doing wireguard, torrents, etc), as well as just standard Ubuntu server.

Very small and low power, and pretty cheap. They come in a variety of configs.

I run ddclient on a local machine and it updates my Cloudflare DNS records if my IP changes.

OPNSense has it built in too, if you use it. So does PFSense, I think. Been a while, might be misremembering.