Have you thought about not trying to drag meshtastic down to try and prop ham up?

I get it, you spent a bunch of time studying for your ham and you don’t want it to feel like a waste, but lets be perfectly frank here- most people aren’t going to get a HAM license. It IS, however, VERY accessible for someone to buy a cheap gadget on sale to try out.

I never understand why ham radio people always try to sabotage every other communication method, but you guys do it every time.

Let other people communicate how they want.

You do realize your DNS MX records can point to both IPs, and your primary connection just has a higher priority number, right? This is 2025, dns is outright expected to have multiple IPs behind it in varying levels of priority and availability. Just because the cell IP isn’t the active route for LAN-to-WAN traffic doesn’t mean it’s not connected or available for WAN-to-LAN traffic.

As for DDNS constantly rolling things, I’ve got, as I said, spectrum residential and my IP address has changed once in half a decade, and even then it was extenuating circumstances (I literally moved).

Finally, I literally mentioned that there were other ways around this, like an external proxy server on a static IP. Throw it on DO or something.

This is entirely viable for a email server. Would it be better to have two hardwire connections load balanced instead of a primary and failover that’s metered? Sure, if that’s an option in your area, then you just round-robin your DNS. But it still works just fine with a primary and failover.

Regardless, having two IPs for you email server is absolutely a complete non-issue. That was a solved problem ages ago.

That is, in fact, exactly the opposite of what I just said.

I would actually disagree- it doesn’t take much budget at all, or even a quality server setup, to have a decent uptime. A consumer router with a sim card slot is possibly something you already have. If not, a cell modem can be as cheap as $30. You could stick your email server on a old shitty raspberry pi. A data sim is $6/mo. If all you’re running is a cable modem, a router, and a rpi, you don’t even need a big fancy UPS, you can just get a DC battery UPS for like $40. And all this is assuming you’re buying stuff new instead of used.

You don’t need a lot of budget, quality stuff, or even a ton of hours in the week for self hosting- once you get this stuff set up it should stay working other than the standard upgrades/maint your email server will need.

Everything past that, like setting things up so your mail server is reachable on two IP addresses, is just… skill.

So this sort of a setup is called Dual-WAN, and yes, it allows it all to work. Basically, my router has two connections to the internet- a cable modem on one port, which connects to Spectrum, and a cell modem on another port, which has my sim card on it. Both provide internet access simultaneously, and at that point, internet is internet- it doesn’t matter if it’s over data or through cable, you’re part of the net. My router is then configured to reach the internet via what it decides is the ‘best’ internet. In my case, because my cell connection is metered, I have it configured so that it prefers the spectrum connection, and only falls back to the cell connection if the spectrum connection is losing traffic, and only for as long as that connection is losing traffic.

Note that a dedicated cell modem is not necessarily required- some routers have sim card slots themselves, for exactly this reason, and tend to make this sort of configuration very simple to do. I’m personally using a small computer running OPNSense, which is again, probably overkill for the average homelabber, but you don’t need something that complicated.

As a result, my server always has access to the internet, and should you configure your firewalls appropriately (remember, I don’t personally run my own email- I have a custom dns name I point towards tutamail), the internet will then always have access to your server. There’s some details here and there about IP address caching, dns resolution, and the like which have various solutions from DDNS to an external proxy/loadbalancer/etc, but those are more implementation details.

I mean, my use case is abnormal and generally has more beef behind it than most people would have, yes, but a simpler, cheaper version of what I have set up is kind of a no-brainer if you want to self-host.

e.g. I don’t think a simple cyberpower/APC ups on your home server is any kind of a weird ‘specialty’ thing, and it should definitely run your server for 2-3 hours during an outage for like $100-150 if you grab it on sale (which, you know, why wouldn’t you?) As for the generator, I don’t have that for my network stack, I have that for my fridge/deep freeze lol. It can just also recharge my UPS if it’s really that big of a deal.

As for cell backup, that’s definitely less a ‘common’ homeserver thing, but I’m only paying like $10/mo for my cell backup connection from tello for 5gb of 5G. Hardly breaking the bank, and honestly probably overkill, you could likely get away with their $6/mo 2gb plan. No complaints with it either, I use them for my regular cell plan too. if you were interesting in self-hosting your own email server and wanted better uptime than 99.9%, you probably don’t even need that if your ISP only sucks slightly instead of mostly, but it allows you to just not care about your ISP having extended downtime and potentially timing out any retry mechanisms.

Your ISP is kind of dogshit if it’s forcing 15-30m of downtime overnight every few weeks. And power outages are kind of a weird thing to focus on, you should be on a UPS anyway.

In any case, someone interested in self-hosting email very likely has a redundant connection anyway. I’m not even hosting my own email and I have 5gb/mo of cellular backup in dual-WAN, and enough battery capacity to run my entire stack for several hours.

Not to mention a generator to recharge them, if it comes down to that.

Like, I need you to understand that in the networking industry, 99.9% uptime is genuinely laughable. You should be able to hit that by accident. The gold standard is ‘five nines’, or 99.999% uptime, or less than 5 minutes of downtime a year.

8 hours of downtime a year? If a service I was managing had 8 hours of downtime a year I would be laughed out of my job lol.

Please go find a sense of humor, and stop punishing people for imagined slights with biohazards.

The fuck is wrong with you.

I’m poking holes in his argument heehee!

These are real fucking people. Get some empathy.

GOG has no DRM, but they also don’t offer the same kind of services, like workshop, updates, cloud sync, etc.

Not trying to say they’re worse or anything, I love GOG, but it’s really kind of comparing apples to oranges here.

I’m going to be honest, I have no idea how I forgot google. They also definitely take 30%.

I should note that 30% is incredibly standard in the industry, and Valve offers a LOT more for that 30% than literally any other digital publisher. Physical publishers take substantially more, and the only digital store that offers less is EGS, which is simultaneously absolute dogshite and also has been trying very, very hard to astroturd the ‘30%’ thing for ages.

Nintendo, Sony, and Apple all take 30%. I think MS does as well, but don’t quote me on that one.

Sure. First one that came up for me was https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5584077-democrats-snap-funding-shutdown-concerns/ I can’t find the original article the person linked when I saw it, the politics channel of that discord is… uh, lets go with ‘busy’ lol

Most Americans say country is on the wrong track, blame Trump for inflation, disapprove of the president and say he is going too far to expand power of presidency

Democrats: “Oh shit, this is actually working, quick, find 8 fall guys to let the budget pass!”

(yes, that is really happening- 8 democrats have broken with the party and said they would be willing to vote for it.)

The only thing the tolerant cannot tolerate is intolerance.

The 91-year-old author, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986, said the US consulate asked him to bring in his passport so his visa could be cancelled in person as new unspecified information had come to light.

Anyone else feel like they were hoping to grab him? Yikes.

He can demand all he wants, the federal government doesn’t get to decide how elections work.

Because rich people don’t actually buy anything- they just get a loan, using their potential income as the collateral. You and I aren’t rich enough for that, and paying down debt prevents that sort of thing from happening as well.

No, it makes them horny, because they confuse intimacy with sexuality because they get neither without force or payment.

Yep. I broke my wrist, pretty much the same thing happened. I figured I just pinched a nerve, was going about my shit until I finally got badgered into going and getting an X-Ray.

Turns out, broken. Whoops.