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.
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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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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’ve set up Pangolin on my VPS and had no problems accessing docker services on my homelab remotely. However, I don’t know how I am supposed to SSH or SFTP to my homelab. Will I connect to my VPS instead? Would I need to break Pangolin or expose a vulnerability to do so?
Honestly I am in need of a proper networking tutorial at this point.
According to the Pangolin docs it supports raw TCP and UDP connections.
For SSH you can also try to use the VPS as a jump host like this:
$ ssh user@vpn-homelab-ip -J user@vps-ipI would never have found this on my own otherwise. I feel any amount of gratitude would fall short of compensating for how much time and effort it has saved me. Thank you regardless.
If possible, can you share how I can achieve the same effect with SFTP?
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”. 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.
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.
I looked into VyOS to replace my main firewall/IPS system (IPfire) with, as I would like to switch to running it in a VM, which is not recommended with IPfire. Seems pretty good so far with the new gratis semi-stable Stream releases.
And I set up Unified Push notifications with my Ejabberd server. Works great.
I made some more tweaks to my Renovate bot which runs on a Woodpecker CI instance on my own hardware. Now it merges green PRs automatically. And I have it running every hour so all my software projects stay up-to-date and it responds quickly when I request a rebase.
I’ve also been cleaning up my Home Assistant automations and devices and trying to think up some useful things I can do for myself in an apartment where I can’t replace switches or the thermostat.
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.
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.
I finished setting up my personal computer with Sway on Alpine so now I can’t procrastinate anymore on getting TLS working with Caddy for my RPi 5.
I decided to ditch Cloudflare since using that service makes me feel uncomfortable. TLS is a bit of a pain because I am using an uncommon port so I need to do a DNS challenge. I still haven’t been able to get it working with DeSec.io but I hope maybe sometime this week.
I might look into using a tunnel service in the future but if I can figure this out, I’ll at least be able to adapt to changes in the future if I need to deal with any changing situations.
When I figure that out, I’ll look into Gemeni protocol and host something there. I don’t want anything big, just a little space of my own in the corner of the internet. Maybe I’ll look into hosting an irc server for a small group of people too.
I’m also using caddy with desec.io. When first triggering the challenge for an entry, it can fail a couple of times. I think it just takes a while for the DNS entry to be available.
Another thing that I’ve experienced is that I can’t use wildcard subdomain entries. My guess is that it’s somehow because I only have public IPv6 addresses (but I don’t remember the details). I have configured an internal DNS with the wildcard entey since I’m only ever connecting to that host via wireguard from outside my network. For the host itself I’ve created a regular AAAA record.
