What’s up, what’s down and what are you not sure about?
Let us know what you set up lately, what kind of problems you currently think about or are running into, what new device you added to your homelab or what interesting service or article you found.
Personally I’m finally reaping the fruits of my labour and enjoy my stable homelab without doing much. One node went down recently and the other took over until I restarted so I was not in a hurry to fix things. Enjoying family time and only running updates that aren’t automated (yet). I’m about to dig a bit deeper into logging, probably setting up central log collection like Loki at some point, but not yet.
Recently set up my own nextcloud instance!
I’ve been hosting immich for a long time and finally decided to make a website so people could sign up for paid monthly accounts and upload their stuff to the server that I’m going to run anyway. Maybe it’ll make me beer money.
Ngl this would skeeve me out. The chances of someone uploading CSAM while slim scare the fuck outta me.
Oh, wow, I was expecting a comment about privacy from the preview I got of your message and then it went on to talk about risk to the provider instead! Yes, you’ve definitely identified a risk and I hope to mitigate it with hopes, prayers, and as anonymous access logs as I can get while still identifying public, popular images.
Found out Ghost 6.0 is out today and now it supports ActivityPub. It’s time to set up a new blog I’ll never write once more!
Oh exciting, finally!
Getting ready to move from out of the woods and back to civilization with my partner.
Not looking forward to having neighbors above or below me but I’m very excited to have internet that doesnt fucking suck.
Once were moved and a bit more settled, I’m gonna start really digging into to selfhosting things. I have the hardware, a couple HP mini PCs that will run home assistant and probably a server for various docker things. Nextcloud and immich seem to be the things I’ve found i wanna use so far. I already have a NAS set up, but was having am issue with it not booting if a monitor isnt plugged in. I bought a dummy plug for it but haven’t tried it out yet.
Will also be setting up an AI server for local LLM use. Hope to train one to fit my needs once I pull the trigger on 3060 12GB card but need to figure out what other parts I’ll use. Might upgrade my main rig and use the parts from that, or maybe I’ll buy a old dell and fix it up. Not sure yet.
Lots of ideas, so little time lol.
Tried building a storage box out of a bunch of old parts, it looks alright and has all the parts I want. Doesn’t boot though, that’ll be a tomorrow thing :(
Finally retired proxmox (actually I just removed pve packages and repos). Left the nfs export on there and hardened to whole thing.
Now I’m slowly working to get all my installs into layered ansible playbooks. Fortunately, there exists an incus ansible module.
With separate, mounted, persistent data, it’s getting very close to docker in easy deployment.
Does anyone know how to get a static IP for their server when their ISP doesn’t allow it. I’ve found out how to use duckdns, but I want to set up my own DNS server from anywhere but I’m pretty sure it requires using a static IP.
I use duckdns, and thus have a xyz.duckdns.org domain, that points to the dynamic ipv4 address of my server. I do not host my own DNS server, rather I rely on a cheap Website / Mail / domain bundle. There I can enter my duckdns domain as a CNAME DNS entry. Thus every DNS lookup that is not for the remote hosted Website will resolve the duckdns domain and finally end at my server.
I am not sure where you want to host your DNS server or also for what specific reason… If you don’t have a domain, you kind of don’t need to host a DNS, and every domain provider I had, also offered a DNS server with it.
I wanted to run a pi hole to use as a DNS so that I can be ad free on any device. The problem is that with my computer or with my phone, I need to put in a specific IP address when I want to change DNS on that device.
If you drop the “from anywhere” part, you can set up a pihole with a static address that you can use from within your LAN, without any involvement from your ISP.
Read section “Assign your Raspberry Pi a static IP address” of https://www.raspberrypi.com/tutorials/running-pi-hole-on-a-raspberry-pi/
Yes exactly, additionally you probably don’t want to host your pi hole for external use (mobile phone or laptop in a different network) for the reason of latency.
The delay that is imposed by visiting your pi hole at home for each DNS request is going to be very unpleasant.
Rather rely on an external dns provider that provides pi hole like funticionality.
But this does not mean that you can’t also host your pihole for internal use. I use it not just for removing ads, but also to allow the access of local domains.
Let us know what you set up lately, what kind of problems you currently think about or are running into
I noticed that my link collector nears perfection (for my use case) - not much stuff required to be done lately. Which is a good thing.
Another glorious day of not having to worry about my nice and stable Debian server. It runs on an old Dell thin client I got on ebay, which isn’t much, but it gets the job done.
Realized today that borgbackup failed for almost 2 months straight on one of my servers (was a simple case of a lock being stuck). Finally setup push notifications via Pushover to notify on success/fail.
This is worth it. Had this happen on OS backup. Lost my data. Notifs should be default.
Realized last week that my fail2ban settings are too strict – I get banned immediately if I visit my funkwhale (music server) domain without being logged in. In fact, I think much of my “downtime” might have actually just been me banning myself for 15 minutes now and then…
I was thinking about getting rid of Grafana, which is overkill for my server, and replacing it with Logdy this weekend, but didn’t get around to it.
I wanna get into it but man, the mountain of knowledge I need to even understand what people are talking about is hard to climb. I’m trying to just get some stuff running in docker and it fails to launch and I’m like… How?! Isn’t that the whole point of docker lol. Baby steps I guess
I felt exactly the same when i started - the learning curve is real! Try TrueCharts.org or linuxserver.io for reliable docker templates with good docs that actually work, saved me so much troubleshooting headache.
Thanks will do!
I’ve learnt it from scratch in my week off, spending 2 or 3 hours on it every night for a week (although this might be underselling it as I had become familiar with desktop Linux over the past year and had a superficial idea of Docker containers with my Synology NAS). But still it’s not as big a deal as you think once you find some good resources. I’m going to comment about my setup after this in this thread… Have a look.
Main resource that helped me was Marius Hosting and ChatGPT got me out of trouble when I got stuck by deciphering logs for me when things didn’t work.
Thanks. Yeah I’m just trying to work at it slowly in my downtime instead of just watching YouTube all night.
Check out Cosmos, I struggled piecing things together but when I restarted from scratch with this as the base is has been SO much easier to get services working, while still being able to see how things work under the hood.
It’s basically a docker manager with integrated reverse proxy and OpenID SSO capability, with optional VPN and storage management
Im at the level where I don’t know what SSO means. I can follow instructions to change a DNS. But what a DNS actually is I don’t know. Which is fine, until I need to work out what’s broken
SSO is single sign on, so you don’t need individual username and password for every service. It’s a bit more advanced so don’t worry about it until you have what you want working properly for a while.
DNS is like the yellow pages of the internet - when you type www.google.com your computer uses a DNS server to look up what actual IP address corresponds to the website name. The point of Adguard or pihole is that when a website tries to load an ad your custom DNS server just says it doesn’t recognize the address
Oh like a custom yellowpages, sick!
SSO is “single sign on”. DNS is “domain name service”, which is just a way to turn a hostname (like www.google.com) into an IP address. It’s sort of like a phone directory, but for the Internet.
Sometimes you just need to start small and not worry about over complicating things. I started my journey in 2011 running Plex on a crappy laptop
Are you doing things through docker compose? If so, feel free to PM me or reply here with your compose file and I’ll help as best I can
Docker should be trivial to run. Hopefully it gives you some useful messages in the logs.
Everything is just peachy this week except that I’m still trying to sort out why my I’m unable to access the internet when I’m connected to my unraid wireguard instance.
I am also finally ready to ditch my plex instance, too. Got some self-inflicted permissions issues sorted and it’s been smooth sailing for long enough that I’m ready to make the switch
I installed a new server at home and went with NixOS. It looks super cool but it takes so much time to learn everything. The only thing keeping me from going back to Debian is how easy it was to permanently mount drives (and save a configuration for any future install or mishaps).
(I.e. mount,
nixos-generate-config,nixos-rebuild switchand done!)NixOS […] learn everything
I don’t think it’s possible to learn everything for NixOS as a casual user / admin. It’s massive. I was luckily able to sneak a NixOS project into work which gave me some paid time on the topic. But there’s always room to learn more about it. Which is a good thing - by its nature, it’s just more powerful than conventional distributions.
More powerful = more mental burden and capacity used to know how to run and manage its unique syntax and structure.
Sincerely NIX user daily. Switching away from nix and off to fedora kinoite.
You might have some luck with Suse, their Yast configuration is very easy and was stable for years for me. Now I’m running on an M1 Mac mini which was more of a pain than a regular setup for sure. Unfortunately the Linux support just isn’t there yet.
My homelab has been mostly on autopilot for a while. Synology 6 bay running most lighter weight docker stuff (arrstack, immich, etc) and an Intel nuc running heavy stuff (quicksync transcodes for Plex+jf, ollama). Both connected to digitalocean via WG for reverse proxy due to CGNAT.
I had my router SSD either die or get corrupted this past week, haven’t looked much at the old SSD besides trying to extract the config off of it. I ended up just fresh installing opnsense because I didnt have any recent backups (my Synology and nuc back up to rsync.net, but I haven’t gotten around to automated backups for my router since it’s basically a plain config, and my cloud reverse proxy which is just a basic docker compose + small haproxy config). Luckily my homelab reaching out to the cloud reverse proxy means there’s basically no important config on my router anymore, they just need DHCP and a connection.
Besides that the arrstack just chugs along on its own.
I recently figured out I can load jellyfin playback URLs into vrchat video players, either direct stream or through the transcoding pipeline as an m3u8 that live transcodes based on the url parameters you set. This is great because the way watch parties in VRChat works is that everyone in an instance loads the same URL pasted into media players and syncs the playback. That means you need to have a publicly accessible url (preferably with a token of some sort) that can be loaded by an arbitrary number of unique IP addresses simultaneously, which I don’t think is doable with Plex.
I’m now working on a little web app to let me log into Jellyfin, search/browse media, and generate the links with arbitrary or pre-set transcode settings for easy copy/pasting into VRChat. The reason it’s needed is that Jellyfin only provides the original file without transcoding when you use the “copy stream” option, so I believe the only way to get a transcoded stream url currently is to set the web interface to specific settings and grab the URL from the network. But that doesn’t let you set arbitrary stuff like codecs and subtitle burn in and overriding what it thinks you support. So a simple app to construct the URL will make VRChat watch parties a lot easier.
