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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • You have my sympathy on the basement flooding issues. Been there. Thankfully not sewage backup in my case.

    it’s definitely not an issue you want to let go for long. If there’s an obstruction, it will get worse quickly as more solids go down the drain. Easiest way is to just hire a plumber. Complexity and cost are going to depend heavily on the cause and location of the obstruction.

    If you want to try to DIY it, you could try to snake the drain but on a 3 or 4" line you’d need a good sized power auger to make any serious headway.

    If it were me, I would get a sewer inspection camera. Low end ones start at less than $150. This is really the only way you’re going to find out what the root issue (no pun intended) is outside of paying a plumber to come do the same thing. A large wet dry vac also comes in really handy in these situations.

    How old is your home and what’s the sewer line made of?


  • The big gap looks like the mortar has just deteriorated to the point that it’s fallen out. It’s not ideal but not necessarily an emergency yet either. Most likely the ground under the foundation has settled a bit. How urgent it is depends partly on whether the crack continues to expand. I would check it every week or two for a few months and see if it gets any wider. You can use a deck of of cards and keep track of how many you can squeeze into the crack. That will tell you if it’s expanding.

    I would also suggest making sure you don’t have rain water collecting anywhere next to the house. If you have downspouts, make they’re they’re diverted away from the house as much as possible.





  • Every time I think about hosting my own mail server, I think back to the many, many, many times I’ve had to troubleshoot corporate email systems over the years. From small ones that ran on duct tape and prayers to big ones that were robust, high dollar systems.

    98% of the time, the reason the messages aren’t coming or going is something either really obscure or really stupid. Email itself isn’t that complicated and it’s a legacy communications medium at this point. But it’s had so much stuff piled on top of it for spam and fraud prevention, out of necessity, and that’s where the major headaches come from. Honestly, it’s one service that to me it’s worth paying someone else to deal with.





  • Set up a VPS. Create a VPN tunnel from you local network to the VPS. Use the VPS as the edge router by opening ports on the VPS firewall and routing incoming traffic on those ports through the VPN tunnel to servers on your local network.

    I used to do this to get around CGNAT. I ran RouterOS in a Digital Ocean droplet and setting up a wire guard tunnel between it and my local Mikrotik router.

    It will obscure your local WAN IP and give you a static IP but that’s about the only benefit. And you have to be pretty network savvy to configure it correctly.

    It does not make you immune to DDoS attacks and is honestly more headache to maintain (albeit just a small headache).