This would be an absolute game changer for me. I am dictating this text now on a local model and I think this is the way to go. I want to have everything locally. I'm not opposed to AI in general or LLMs in general, but I think that sending everything over the pond is a no-go. And even if it were European, I still wouldn't want to send everything to some data center and so on. So I think this is a good, it would be a good development and I think I would even buy an Apple device for the first time since the iPod just for that.
JFYI, for measuring power draw, you might be able to use `macmon`[0] to see the total system power consumption. The values reported by the internal current sensor seem to be quite accurate.
Speaking of hardware, the RTL8159 (10Gbps) hit the market late last year and is said to consume only about 2–3W. It apparently runs very cool compared to older chips. (Though it would need to be bonded to reach 25Gbps ;-)
I got me one of these adapters (RTL8127AF TXA403, with SFP+ cage); I haven't properly benchmarked it yet.
There's no driver support on macOS, and for Linux you'd need a bleeding edge kernel. Just trying to physically connect it (along with a connected SFP28 transceiver) to my Mac's Thunderbolt port using an external PCIe-to-TB adapter, macmon tells me a power draw of around 4.3 W, so it's not significantly less for half the bandwidth, but the card doesn't get hot at all.
Just for future reference, you can disable DNS management for specific groups [0].
You can find the option under "DNS > DNS Settings > Disable DNS management for these groups". Netbird will stop modifying the resolv.conf on those groups.
Can Netbird run the DNS resolver (so it can be used for the internal domain ONLY by systemd-resolved) but not alter the host's DNS settings?
It looks to me like the setting that tells Netbird to leave the system DNS alone is arbitrarily tied to the setting that causes it to run a resolver at all.
Pangolin recently added desktop clients for win/mac/linux[0] and the Private Resource feature (similar to Netbird's Network Routes/DNS), so it's starting to overlap with Netbird more and more.
That said, it seems focused on client-to-site (newt) connections, and I don't see support for client-to-client connections like Netbird’s SSH access. Also, their Private Resources don't seem to support TLS termination yet. (Correct me if I’m wrong!)
In my case, I have a k3s cluster running on Netbird with a Traefik ingress for TLS termination inside my home network. Thanks to netbird's P2P nature, traffic stays entirely local as long as I'm on my home WiFi. (I suppose one could achieve the same with a Netbird + Caddy + DNS-01 setup, too.)
Netbird's flexibility with IdPs is really nice. I recently switched mine to Pocket ID. Overall, it's perfectly sufficient and lightweight for homelab use.
You’re from the dev team, right? Thanks for the amazing OSS!
Regarding the containers, AFAIK it's 5 for the core setup (dashboard/signal/management/relay/coturn) plus Traefik in my case. It feels like a bit much, but the services are almost stateless and not resource intensive even on my little VPS. The setup script (bash + envsubst) is so straightforward and thanks to good documentation, I’ve never found the setup confusing. (I use Renovate to keep things updated, but I’d love to know if there's a recommended update path.)
A couple of minor things I noticed: 1. the dashboard image isn't on ghcr.io. 2. the generated compose.yaml contains hardcoded values. It could be even better if it referenced values from a .env file instead.
By the way, are there any ways to support NetBird other than GitHub Sponsors?
On my Pixel 9a (also on GrapheneOS) the biggest limitation is it can't be set to higher than 1080p, and the upscaling algorithm with my 4K display (not sure where in the chain that happens, monitor or phone) was quite terrible to the point of text legibility being a concern.
The usage experience otherwise is quite good, it's perhaps my preferred way to sync data to and from my phone, I have it all stored on a NAS so I connect to my Type-C display (which has keyboard, mouse, and ethernet connected to its switch), fire up a terminal, type in my rsync commands, and my pictures & music are synced ~instantly at LAN speeds.
Actually, it's the Android 16 Linux Terminal (pKVM) [1], so it's 100% on-device.
Since this is a full VM, unlike Termux, you can run Docker too!
(Though Termux is more stable and lightweight for daily use.)
I recently got a junk M2 MacBook Air (16GB/512GB) with a broken screen for $250.
It idles at just 0.2W (!) when accessed via SSH. While it offers zero expandability, lacks wired LAN, and runs on a non-free OS, it's an interesting candidate for an ultra-low-power inference server.
