In the HAM Radio world we use them. But we also use our own infrastructure. I have mine set to let me know when something happens that needs my attention asap. Only works around my stuff or other HAMs that have stuff tied into our system. So not useful outside narrow circumstances.

Waaaaay better.

Restic allows you to make dedupe snapshots of your data. Everything is there and it’s damn hard to loose anything. I use backblaze b2 as my long term end point / offsite… some will use AWS glacier. But you don’t have to use any cloud services. You can just have a restic repository on some external drives. That’s what I use for my second copy of things. I also will do an annual backup to a hard disk that I leave with a friend for a second offsite copy.

I’ve been backing up all of my stuff like this for years now. I used to use BORG which is another great tool. But restic is more flexible with allowing multiple systems to use a single repository and has native support for things like B2 that BORG doesn’t.

We also use restic to backup control nodes for some of supercomputing clusters I manage. It’s that rock solid imho.

Yeah that was my thoughts too. It’s not like it can’t be bypassed but it’s not “easy.” This is kinda how I see it going for commercial 3D printers. It’s not a bad thing either. I’ve always been a fan of making people earn dangerous knowledge & skills. Even in fictional universes like Star Trek there’s restrictions on using a replicator to make weapons.

So it’s not unreasonable, imho, to put some kind of guard rails up that force people to actively bypass restrictions in making weapons.

The trick will be telling the difference between making a nerf gun, action figure guns, and an actual weapon. That I don’t see being possible at this time. Too many edge cases that don’t neatly fit.

It’s all good, hope you find a solution that works best for you 😊

You could also just grab a wire guard configuration and use it too. They provide them along side the openvpn configs

To be honest, there’s a few good comments linking to scripts and methods here to batch convert them on a windows pc/vm. That’s the best way to go.

To add on to their comments. If you’re just interested in preserving them then maybe printing them to pdf, specifically pdf/a, would be my approach once you got them opened.

I’ll leave this one here for someone:

You can tunnel L2 over OpenVPN. Just bridge your interfaces in both sides and it works.

That way if you need to provision a VOIP phone or just have something NetBoot remotely. Not that I recommend doing that…

I thought they were already???

Like how/why wouldn’t they be public? Even if the data isn’t readily accessible via a gui it’s gotta be somewhere so that federation works. Unless you’ve been thirsty in your main it shouldn’t be a problem?

Am I missing something?

Hey now! We got to know why god needs a starship! 😂

Like Star Trek movies 😂

That is distinctly less whimsical

I LOVED it until I saw the price 😢