Unless you configure pihole to connect to CF via DoH, the above is still entirely true. Pihole is not a privacy tool, it’s a filtering tool.
I used to have this setup too until I realised spending a single hour per year on pihole “costs” me more than paying for a good DNS resolver which can also do the blocking, and I can easily use on my phone as well when I’m away. I’m very happy to have switched, personally.
The above is still true for the upstream regardless, pihole provides filtering - it doesn’t replace the privacy provided by using a trusted upstream server and you should still configure pihole to use DoH to the upstream.
Your isp can most likely tell which VPN you’re using (unless you also use tor, and even then there’s the theories that a lot of it is ran by law enforcement… depends on how paranoid you are), they will still see the quantity of traffic coming from your home to the VPN and vice versa. All they need to do is to check the IP and they’ll likely find it’s in use by … VPN service.
As long as using a VPN is not illegal in your country you can pay for it however you want really (in some places paying with crypto may make it more suspicious than if you just paid for it through PayPal), if law enforcement really wanted to find out the VPN service you use they probably could, the payment would only make it a tiny bit easier.
The key point as mentioned multiple times is to use one you trust, there’s no objectively best one, but you’ll find a lot of objectively bad ones (for privacy) if you research them. As a start just never use any which are sponsoring YouTube videos or blog articles, pretty much all of those are crap.
VPNs usually route your DNS through them as well, sometimes to other DNS servers but sometimes they just send them to your original DNS server but through the VPN, kinda up to your VPN config - all of the vpn services I’ve used to date did this, although they were all reputable ones. I’d not recommend to use a questionable VPN though.
Dnssec only verifies authenticity of the server and the integrity of the data, so it helps to prevent man-in-the-middle of DNS, it doesn’t provide privacy. Look into DNS over Https (DoH) instead. It provides e2e encryption for your DNS traffic which achieves what dnssec does, but also gives you privacy. DNS over TLS (DoT) also does this, but it runs on a different port so it’s easier to block (e.g. if your isp decided they don’t like private DNS), while with DoH your DNS traffic looks the same as other web traffic - and afaik it can’t be blocked. As above, it’s likely this is not needed for use with a VPN, but I’d recommend looking into in general for use even when not on the VPN. Things like controld or nextdns can give you even more peace of mind (although read up on their policies for yourself)
Thank you for this, very useful!
Thank you! This is great information.
I use unraid (currently without parity since it’s all just stuff I’ve been okay to lose) with drives I’ve collected over the years: 2x3TB WD red (one of which is almost 10y old, the other ~7 since it had died once in warranty and got replaced), 1x 12 TB WD red (which is ~3y old).
I was going to add something between another 16-20TB drive depending on the price/TB whenever the next expansion comes up. I’ve mentioned it in another comment, but I’ve never used not-new drives and have been fairly shy about them, hence the larger price tag for expansion than expected.
Even if I cut down on my usenet providers/indexers since I’ve shot a bit overboard with coverage, the cost of realdebrid/alldebrid is still very similar to just the cost of those/year, entirely excluding the cost of disks - hence my interest in feasibility.
This is likely very true, good point. I imagine there is some resilience with there being multiple debrid providers available so worst comes to worst you’d have to pay up for another membership and swap (and I guess hope that the other one still fulfills the purpose).
Findroid is not available for android TV as far as I know so couldn’t try it, my other option there would be to use Kodi with a plugin but I’ve never really been a Kodi user so it’s less appealing to me.
It’s a bit nitpicky to be fair but:
I do think eventually I’ll end up on jellyfin, probably once the chapter API arrives and skipping credits and intro has first party support tho.
Thank you, those are pretty good prices! Have you used recertified drives? I’ve been fairly scared of used drives so curious if you have and their failure rate compared to new?
Another option you could consider is rather than running the VPN on the pi and downloading through that, to run the VPN on your media server as you planned and instead use the pi (or your router if you can run openwrt) as the remote access point. Then you only need to worry about the performance needed for remote access
I’m not sure how tailscale works, but this is what I do with zerotier (i.e. run it on my router).
Very difficult to predict the future, but my bet would be on no (to the in 20years question).
I doubt the hardware would last 20 years and eventually it’ll become hard to source parts as the popularity falls off, even if you could repair it yourself. I’m sure anything with an online dependency will not work either, but offline games have a chance.
But the real question is would you want to use the switch in 20 years (or honestly, even today)? There is already a better alternative (steam deck) with a much more open platform with way more capabilities and I believe it can already emulate Nintendo games (although no first hand experience with that)
I have a switch myself and would never recommend it to anyone personally.