What’s up, selfhosters? After accidently posting this in !solarpunk@slrpnk.net last week, here’s a new try. I usually post these in !selfhosted@lemmy.world but want to spread a bit to not concentrate on the mega instance too much.
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. Maybe even solarpunk related? In the last thread, someone posted their bird-listening setup, which sounded super cool.
I set up Pinepods recently, which is a selfhosted podcast player with web interface and device sync. I’ve been looking for a selfhosted pocket casts for years and was super excited to see Pinepods becoming a thing and am enjoying it since setting it up. The dev has also been asking for beta testers for mobile apps recently.
I’ve got two-ish projects that might count: I’ve been reading up on Reticulum mesh networking, particularly with LoRa nodes. I like the idea of that kind of network, but have no idea what amount of activity I’ll find nearby despite living in a pretty big city. I’m still at the stage of figuring out what to get and how I’d like to use it.
I’m also looking at setting up a Gemini server (the gopher-based web alternative protocol thing, not google’s dumb LLM) but I’m a bit skittish about anything that puts a hole into my home network, especially a service made by such a small group because I don’t know what kind of security holes might have been missed (I’m certainly not likely to spot them). Ideally I could set it up through Reticulum, so it’d be air gapped from my regular network, and it appears that someone has made that work, but I think it’d only be accessible to other folks on Reticulum and I’m not sure if that’d be worth it at first. We’ll see!
My active project at the moment probably barely counts because I’m going full analog. I’ve got two antique Leich 901 crank telephones (like an actual crank, not a dial. Turning it generates AC and rings all the phones on the network).
I plan to use them to rig an intercom between the kitchen and workshop. This’ll involve some woodworking as I’m making a nice box for the talk battery for one, and a display board with a voltmeter and two plexiglass-covered cutouts for displaying the wiring and batteries for the workshop end.
I got them all wired up with some really ugly splices and was impressed - they can ring each other and the sound quality is quite good when talking, no repairs needed! Attaching them together is rock simple, just a few wires, plug and play. But my plan is to wire in some old rj11 phone jacks to the display board and battery box so they can (mis)use standard phone cables to talk to each other. In fact I’m hoping to use some of the old wiring already in place in my apartment.
I finally need to get around automating the deployment of a Hugo based website via Forgejo webhooks this week.
We are installing new solar panels so that the “pool” will be off grid 24/7 and thus the local mesh network will have access to a world of educational materials and entertainment regardless of weather and the ISP situation.
Sounds amazing, what does the pool and the mesh network consist of?
The pool is a set of micro-atx servers each with about 100TB of storage that provide core services.
The mesh network is approximately 400+ routing nodes capable of providing access to 100k people in the event of emergency (other people are able to add their own nodes into the mesh network, so the details change daily); the standard has 96 hours of battery life and enough solar panels to provide 24 hours worth of power in 2-4 hours of sunlight.
Where is this mesh network located? Sounds amazing.
I’m very interested in how that network got started, if it’s some kind of community, more context, etc, if you’d like to tell a bit more.
It is actually a dozen different communities that I know of.
Local drug dealers, the local police department, local firefighters, End of the World preppers, black panthers, some old school ham radio operators, socialist rifle association and a bunch more (and honestly since anyone can join, there is definitely more than that)
This sounds rad, which protocol/meshnet system are you using?
Got fed up with of plex/jellyfin, so making my own thing that’s mostly a small browser based interface glueing together VLC and Qbittorrent.
It runs on a nuc connected to a large screen. I open up the application in my phone’s browser, and it shows just a search bar. I enter a query and it searches imdb. After opening a specific title it searches local hard drive to see if it’s available. If not it uses qbittorrent and their local api to download it. Once it’s available, it’s one click to send the file to VLC for playback.
CPU requests were filling up on my setup. Got a dirty cracked used Ideapad with 4C/8T (i5-8265U) and an NVMe SSD to reinforce my Talos Kuberbetes cluster. Cost €65.
Upgraded it from 4GB soldered + 4GB stick RAM to 20GB RAM total. 16GB DDR4 sticks only cost €20 on the used market nowadays :)
RAM upgrade done, still need to add it to the cluster.
Then I’ll install a nice observability stack: VictoriaMetrics, VictoriaLogs, Grafana, and set up alerting finally. Afterwards, I’m thinking of adding Karakeep.
Working on a split staging/prod hybrid-cloud k3s setup using nixos, tailscale, systemd-nspawn and fluxcd. If someone has advice for running k3s in unprivileged (mounts idmapped) nspawn containers, I’m all👂.
This will run
- (openwisp)[https://openwisp.org/] to make it feasible to provide lots of less tech-savvy people in the local community with secure, simple, privacy-respecting wifi using free software and recycled routers.
- Various libre software I’m helping community, unions and political orgs adopt. Notably Discourse and Peertube.
Sounds interesting. I just got a VPS, installed Easy Panel on it and am going to use it to setup portainer (used for container management) . I also just ran across k3s yesterday and am thinking I’d try an install of that as well to see how that works/what that’s about
Cool, I haven’t tried either of those.
I’m the type of person who likes to upgrade my systems via the terminal because I like to know the detailed processes, but I’ve also burned myself numerous times; hence my preference for declarative and immutable/atomic solutions.
It’s (quite) a bit more of a hassle, but I’ve lost trust in GUIs.
k3s is fairly simple (as far as k8s distros go). Helm is good to start with but for the long run I recommend using kubernetes manifests directly (i.e.
kubectl apply -f pvc.yaml, deployment.yaml, etc) rather than helm, because there are quite a few gotchas with helm which can cause trouble. Besides that, it’s good practice to use the--secrets-encryptionflag on the server node(s), and if you’re deploying agent nodes it’s good to use bootstrap tokens (k3s token create)I like to use the terminal as much as I can as well, but for first time use/checking it out something a gui is nice to be able to jump in as quickly as possible.
I learned a lot this morning about adding users via command line, ssh keys, default directories, and default shells. Stuff a gui wouldn’t teach me ☺️
I’ve decided to stop using Podman for the moment since it was not allowing me internet to access my services. I’ll try again later when the motivation comes back.
Other than that, I’ve been slowly working on security, reliability and maintenance. For the moment I am happy with my device’s own security which I just finished last week. If I need extra security at this point, it will most likely be from a third party service but I don’t intend on having a known presence so I may get by just being unknown and obscure.
Ddclient on Alpine linux works very strangely so I made a script to check that it’s still updating my IP address and force restart it if necessary. Combined it with my targetted backups script to make the beginning of a maintenance script.
The last two steps are to setup an IRC client + IRC bouncer and a Snikket service and I’ll be happy. Anything I add after that is simply a bonus I can tinker with for fun but I’m looking forward writing for my blog without technical issues floating in the back of my mind.
Why not Biboumi as an IRC bouncer?
I was planning on using weechat and the relay extension for a simple, all-in-one package. Currently I just use IRC for tech support, especially with Alpine linux.
Biboumi seems like a good idea if I wanted to set up a server and I’ll keep it bookmarked. I’m still back and forth about an IRC server so that idea has gone into the bonus category for now. I think Snikket would be a service that’s far more accessible and easier to share with the people I want using it.
I do like that it has xmpp support. I assume it would go well with Snikket.
Snikket isn’t really meant to be customized with other components right now, but it is possible to get Biboumi working with it.
Most people use Biboumi as a bouncer for external IRC networks, but of course it also works with a self-hosted IRC server.
