Ah ok. You aren’t doing auth. I don’t understand how this is relevant.

Are you doing auth in the reverse proxy for Jellyfin? Do you use Chromecast or any non-web interface? If so I’m very interested how you got it to work.

The concern is that it would be nice if the UNIX users and LDAP is automatically in sync and managed from a version controlled source. I guess the answer is just build up a static LDAP database from my existing configs. It would be nice to have one authoritative system on the server but I guess as long as they are both built from one source of truth it shouldn’t be an issue.

Yes, LDAP is a general tool. But many applications that I am interested in using it for user information. That is what I want to use it for. I’m not really interested in storing other data.

I think you are sort of missing the goal of the question. I have a bunch of self-hosted services like Jellyfin, qBittorrent, PhotoPrism, Metabase … I want to avoid having to configure users in each one individually. I am considering LDAP because it is supported by many of these services. I’m not concerned about synchronizing UNIX users, I already have that solved. (If I need to move those to LDAP as well that can be considered, but isn’t a goal).

I do use a reverse proxy but for various reasons you can’t just block off some apps. For example if you want to play Jellyfin on a Chromecast or similar, or PhotoPrism if you want to use sharing links. Unfortunately these systems are designed around the built-in auth and you can’t just slap a proxy in front.

I do use nginx with basic with in front of services where I can. I trust nginx much more than 10 different services with varying quality levels. But unfortunately not all services play well.

How are you configuring this? I checked for Jellyfin and their are third-party plugins which don’t look too mature, but none of them seem to work with apps. qBittorrent doesn’t support much (actually I may be able to put reverse-proxy auth in front… I’ll look into that) and Metabase locks SSO behind a premium subscription.

IDK why but it does seem that LDAP is much more widely supported. Or am I missing some method to make it work

But the problem is that most self-hosted apps don’t integrate well with these. For example qBittorrent, Jellyfin, Metabase and many other common self-hosted apps.

NixOS makes it very easy to declaratively configure servers. For example the users config to manage UNIX users: https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/options#opt-users.users

Yet another service to maintain. If the server is crashing you can’t log in, so you need backup UNIX users anyways.

I mean it is always better to have more open source. But the point of the multi-hop system is that you don’t need to trust the server. Even if the server was open source:

1. You wouldn’t know that we are running an unmodified version.
2. If you need to trust the server then someone could compel us to tap it or monitor it.

The open source client is enough to verify this and the security of the whole scheme.

I use NixOS.

Yeah, I can’t believe how hard targeting other consoles is for basically no reason. I love this Godot page that accurately showcases the difference:

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/consoles.html

Currently, the only console Godot officially supports is Steam Deck (through the official Linux export templates).

The reason other consoles are not officially supported are:

• To develop for consoles, one must be licensed as a company. As an open source project, Godot has no legal structure to provide console ports.
• Console SDKs are secret and covered by non-disclosure agreements. Even if we could get access to them, we could not publish the platform-specific code under an open source license.

Who at these console companies think that making it hard to develop software for them is beneficial? It’s not like the SDK APIs are actually technologically interesting in any way (maybe some early consoles were, the last “interesting” hardware is probably the PS2). Even if the APIs were open source (the signatures, not the implementation) every console has DRM to prevent running unsigned games, so it wouldn’t allow people to distribute games outside of the console marker’s control (other than modded systems).

So to develop for the Steam Deck:

1. Click export.
2. Test a bit.

To develop for Switch (or any other locked-down console):

1. Select a third-party who maintains a Godot port.
2. Negotiate a contract.
   • If this falls through go back to step 1.
3. Integrate your code to their port.
4. Click export.
5. Test a bit.

What it could be (after you register with Nintendo to get access to the SDK download):

1. Download the SDK to whatever location Godot expects it.
2. Click export.
3. Test a bit.

All they need to do is grant an open source license on the API headers. All the rest is done for them and magically they have more games on their platform.

Mullvad is one of the best options if you care about privacy. They take privacy seriously, both on their side and pushing users towards private options. They also support fully anonymous payments. Their price is also incredibly reasonable.

I’m actually working on a VPN product as well. It is a multi-hop system so that we can’t track you. But it isn’t publicly available yet, so in the meantime I happily recommend Mullvad.

HTTP/1.1 403 UNAUTHORIZED
{
  "error": {
    "status": "UNAUTHORIZED",
    "message": "Unauthorized access",
  },
}

I would separate the status from the HTTP status.

1. The HTTP status is great for reasonable default behaviours from clients.
2. The application status can be used for adding more specific errors. (Is the access token expired, is your account blocked, is your organization blocked)

Even if you don’t need the status now, it is nice to have it if you want to add it in the future.

You can use a string or an integer as the status code, string is probably a bit more convenient for easy readability.

The message should be something that could be sent directly to the user, but mostly helpful to developers.

This is basically admitting that consumers don’t actually value their subscription service for the cost. If users were buying used bikes and signing up for subscriptions Peloton would be thrilled, they would do everything that they could to encourage that like free trials. But it must be that most people who buy used bikes don’t find the subscription worth it and cancel within a few months. Adding this fee both extracts more money and creates a sunk cost fallacy that will cause them to go longer before cancelling.

If the product sold itself they would just let people pay them subscriptions, its basically free money.

Vista sucked so bad. I got a nice new laptop and it was constant pain. One of the real breaking points was that it would refuse to let me modify or delete some files even as superuser. If I recall correctly they weren’t even system files, maybe a separate partition or something.

I tried installing XP but there was some sort of driver issue with my CD drive. It would start installing fine, but then once it tried to reboot off of the HDD to finish the installation it couldn’t find the installation CD to finish copying things, so the install just crashed half-way done.

I installed Ubuntu on a partition, dual booted for a while. After a few months I realized that I never even used the Windows partition anymore so I wiped it.

Likely what is happening is that the game is probing audio devices and triggering the mic on your headphones to get picked up. This switches them into the “headset” profile which has awful audio quality. I don’t know why the UI isn’t showing that, make sure you are checking while the game is running and the audio sounds bad.

If you want your headphone mic to work there is not much choice. There isn’t a standard bluetooth profile with good audio and mic. If you never want to use your headphone mic you can probably configure some advanced settings in your audio manager (probably PulseAudio or PipeWire).

These are all good points. This is why it is important to match your recommendations to the person. For example if I know they have Chrome and a Google account I might just recommend using that. Yes, it isn’t end-to-end encrypted and Google isn’t great for privacy but at least they are already managing logins over all of their devices.

In many cases perfect is the enemy of better. I would rather them use any password manager and unique passwords (even “a text file on their desktop”) than them sticking to one password anywhere because other solutions are too complicated.

It depends on your threat model. It does mostly reduce the benefit from 2FA, but you are probably still very safe if you use a random password per site. I mostly use 2FA when forced (other than a few high-value accounts) so I don’t worry about it. For most people having a random password which is auto-filled so that you don’t type it into the wrong site is more than sufficient to keep themselves secure.

Firefox Sync is end-to-end encrypted. So Firefox’s password manager with syncing does this.