With the recent discussions around replacing Spotify with selfhosted services and the possibilities to obtain the music itself, I’ve been finally setting up Navidrome. I had to do quite a bit of reorganization to do with my existing collection (beets helping a ton) but now it’s in a neatly organized structure and I’m enjoying it everywhere. I get most of my stuff from Bandcamp but I have a big catalog from when I’ve still had a large physical collection.
I’m also still working on my docker quasi gitops stack. I’ve cleaned up my compose files and put the secrets in env files where I hadn’t already, checked them into my new forgejo instance and (mostly) configured renovate. Komodo is about to get productive but I couldn’t find the time yet. Also I need to figure out how to check in secrets in a secure way. I know some but I haven’t tried those with Komodo yet. This close of my fully automated update-on-merge compose stacks!
I’ve also been doing these for quite a while and decided to sometimes post them in !selfhosting@slrpnk.net to possibly help moving a bit from the biggest Lemmy instance, even though this community as it is is perfectly fine as well as it seems.
What’s going on on your servers? Anything you are trying to pursue at the moment?
Just sitting here surprised that my proxmox backups didn’t interrupt my VMs.
Trying to figure out how to drop my energy requirements and still keep ~100TB running.
Right now it’s 12x 10TB drives in a RAID 6 with ~8TB still available; it might be time to bite the bullet and upgrade to 20TB drives. Problem is, if my calculations are correct, I’d still need 7 drives - 5 X 20TB=100TB and then two more drives for “parity”.
The server I have lined up already has a PERC in it.
I have a couple pis that run docker containers including pihole. The containers have their storage on a centralized share drive.
I had a power outage and realized they can’t start if they happen to come up before the share drive PC is back up.
How do people normally do their docker binds? Optimally I guess they would be local but sync/backup to the share drive regularly.
Sort of related question: in docker compose I have restart always and yet if a container exits successfully or seemingly early in it’s process (like pihole) it doesn’t restart. Is there an easy way to still have them restart?
I finally got around to setting up my internal services with TLS. It was surprisingly easy with a Caddy docker image supporting Cloudflare DNS challenge.
I did this because various services I use are starting to require https.
Now everything is on a custom domain, https, and I can access it through Tailscale as usual.
I finally set up Jellyfin and Sonarr! I’ve been using Plex and manually managing torrents for a while now, recently found the *arr services and they are very impressive. Got the Jackett - Sonarr - Jellyfin - Nginx stack set up, now working on getting SSL + DynDNS so I can make it available remotely. Also accidentally blasted my ratio downloading a bunch of TV shows all at once so gotta seed up for a bit before i fill it out more. But so far the setup has been pleasantly breezy for how complex a setup it is ❤️
Why not Emby?
I spent some time last week learning both Ansible and Podman Quadlets. They are a powerful duo, especially for self hosting.
Ansible is a desired state system for Linux. Letting you define a list of servers and what their configuration should be, like “have podman installed” and “have this file at this location with this content”.
Podman quadlets is a system for defining podman containers as a service. You define the container, volumes, and networks all in essentially Systemd unit files.
Mixing the two together, I can have my entire podman setup in a format that can be pushed to any server in seconds.
And of course everything is text files that git well.
I did the same last week (and am still in the process of setting up more services for my new server). I have a few VMs (running Fedora CoreOS, with podman preinstalled), and I use ansible to push my quadlets, podman secrets, and static configuration files. Persistent data volumes get mounted using virtiofs from the host system, and the VMs are not supposed to contain any state themselves. The VMs are also provisioned using using ansible.
Do you use ansible to automatically restart changed containers after pushing your changes? So far, I just trigger a
systemctl daemon-reload, but trigger restarts manually (which I guess is fine for development).I was thinking about this for some time now, can you link me to some good tutorials about quadlets in particular? Ansible will have to wait for now.
Unfortunately not. I found documentation largely lacking. I mostly read the docs and searched specific questions that came up(which often just took me back to the docs). I did as a local LLM for help, but found it’s knowledge base lacking. Sometimes it would work for a hint, but it more often than not made up parameters and features.
Oh that’s smart! I just got started with podman and quadlets. Loving how simple it is to setup a systemd service and even organize multi-pod apps
Just ordered a used HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF (3.6GHz Intel Core i7-7700, 8GB DDR4 RAM, 256GB SSD) off EBay to replace my Apple Mac mini “Core i7” 2.3 (Late 2012/Server). Hoping to put 32GB of RAM in it, 1TB NVMe boot drive and maybe a 3.5” HDD for media instead of using an external drive. Might move to NixOS (I’d like to learn how to administer Nix even though it’s very complicated sometimes) and Podman, instead of using Proxmox and Docker Debian VMs and LXC containers.
Any advice and guidance appreciated!
I got two of those for 100$ USD for the purpose of hosting openwrt in proxmox LXC containers. One thing I noticed is they have no cooling. I put a 10 GBe mellanox card in it plus a very low end radeon gpu and it gets quite hot in there. My recommendation, instead of trying to embiggen it as much as possible, by putting 2 more sticks of ram and the biggest cpu, I would recommend just buying another. The performance boost per dollar isn’t as much as the performance capacity of a second, third or 4th machine.
Thanks for the recommendation, I got this one for just over $100 after tax. Space is an issue for me, so more machines isn’t the best and I can always keep the Mac Mini chugging if needed. I’ll probably only do the HDD/SSD and RAM upgrade, but it’s definitely worth keeping in mind if I throw a new NIC or GPU in it. I am thinking of putting a Noctua fan on the CPU cooler to keep it quieter and cooler!
What is beets, hobbits?
It’s a tool that checks and corrects metadata for your music collection. You can also import music with it to your collection (it will put everything in the right folders etc).
It does require some manual intervention now and then, though (do you really want to apply this despite some discrepancies? Choose, which of these albums it really is. Etc).
Just got a domain and started exposing my local jellyfin through cloudflare, mostly wanting to listen to my music on my phone when i’m outside too.
I followed some guides that should make it fine with cloudflare’s policy, video doesnt work when i tried it but otherwise its been fun despite me feeling like im walking on eggshells all the time. I guess time will tell if it holds up
Some things which have caused issues for me:
File permissions
Video/audio format (264/aac stereo is best for compatibility)
Oh file permissions are a nightmare to me, I thought I managed to get it sorted but after i installed lidarr, it alone suddenly can’t move files out of the download location anymore. I even tried to chmod 777 the data folders and nothing. I dont think I quite have the grasp on how those work with docker on linux yet, it seems like those arr services also have some internal users too which I dont get why would they.
Wdym with the formats, is this referring to transcoding? I kept those on defaults afaik
Could be that lidarr is setting its own permissions for downloaded stuff (look for something like dmask or fmask in the docker config). You might also need to chmod -R so it hits all sub folders. If you have a file or directory mask option, remember that they’re inverse, so instead of 777, you’d do 000 for rwxrwxrwx.
You might be onto something, lidarr does have UMASK=002 setting in the .env file. I think the issue is when sabdnzbd puts the files and then lidarr can’t read them, so what exactly is the expected permission setting then in this case? If I put it to 000 for lidarr, won’t other services then be unable to add the files there?
I always feel so dumb when it comes to these things since in my head it’s something that should be pretty straightforward and simple, why can’t they all just use the same user and share the same permissions within this folder hierarchy…
Sab might have its own mask settings - it would be worth looking at. Same thing applies here - subtract the mask part from 7 to get the real permissions. In this case, mask 002 translates into 775. This gives the uid and gid that the container is running under (probably defined in a variable somewhere) Read/Write/Execute, but anyone else Read/Execute. The “anyone else” would just be any account on the system (regardless of access method) that didn’t match on the actual uid or gid value.
In linux user and group names don’t matter. Only the gid and uid matter. Think of user and group names as human names like domains are for IPS.
In docker when you use mounts, all your containers that want to share data must agree on the gid and uids.
In rootless docker and podman things subuids and subgids make it a little more complicated since IDs get mapped between host and container, but its still the IDs that matter.
I have one .env file with UUID/GUID 1000 set for all docker services in the docker-compose so it would make sense in theory if that’s enough, but it seems it rarely is…
Considering switching my Forgejo to a Tangled.sh knot. Their easy self hosted CI option is appealing
but mostly itd be easier to collaborate than opening sign ups on my instance of forgejo
Forgejo is developing ActivityPub support, so eventually we’ll be able to collaborate across forgejo instances :) I’ll have a look at tangled as well
oh thats cool thanks for sharing!
That looks super interesting. Just yesterday I was reading on https://radicle.xyz/ for similar reasons.
I’m setting up a yunohost machine for my brother as a birthday present. I got him a domain good for 10 years, and installed nextcloud and Jellyfin with some home videos digitized from our parents’ vhs tapes.
I’m trying to find a reasonably priced used rack mount computer to move all my containers to. I have a rack in my house but measuring the depth between posts only gets me around 17.5". Recently deployed paperless-ngx and decided it would be too much to add onto my poor little NAS which hosts everything else so its deployed on my main computer and I want to avoid that strategy.
Challenge is that being new to rack servers and all of this (the NAS was a great intro box) I’ve got a large learning curve ahead of me.
I have a Dell R220 and a R240 which I’m looking to offload, free. They’re both specifically for short racks if you happen to be near central NC.
Funny you should say that! If I was still over in that part of the country I’d absolutely take you up. There is a local used IT shop near me and I was really excited to purchase some of those for a good deal. Then found out that they only update their online inventory when you click add to cart. Long story short, the prices were too good to be true and they didn’t have any left in stock.
For what it’s worth, Ikea’s LACK tables make great mini racks
The LACK rack!
Already have the rack and it hosts most of my items (router, switch, raspberry pi rack, NAS, PS3 apple TV). Honestly other than the raspberry pi rack and the router, the rest are just using shelves anyways. I need to find a good, non-bulky way to take the enclosure fan and switch it on when temps get above a set point. What I’ve done in the past with an arduino is way too bulky.
I love your idea and its funny you mention the mini PCs and thin clients. As I look at prices I’m more and more leaning towards just another shelf and using mini PCs.
Just be sure to get a decent KVMoIP (KVM over IP); it’s worth it for the first time you’re not home and a system blue screens.
Nothing new, just peacefully chugging along hosting my blog, Jellyfin, Radicale for calendar and contacts. Still long-term searching for a photo storing & sharing (gallery) solution, as well as a better music server. Maybe Navidrome is what I’m looking for.
Oh, and I need to renew my SSL certificate soon. I don’t like Letsencrypt. Everything EU-based, I’m not going to start making US-based contracts.
Can recommend Immich for the Photo gallery and sharing option.
Can recommend Navidrome for music.
Did you have a look at Immich yet for photos?
I feel like my little Pi server is set up nicely now. At least I’m at the point where I’m not concerned about technically maintaining it. It’s as secure as I want it to be and I’ve tweaked my maintenance scripts slightly to avoid any unexpected issues.
I tried installing snikket but I couldn’t figure out how to get it to work with my Caddyfile using my current wildcard domain cert configuration. I’ll try again another time when I’m motivated again. It’s a low priority to me.
The last changes I made were adding logs and making them accessible to myself. So far they are all boring and predictable. Which is good news. It’s also nice to see that I’m the only person accessing it. The bots haven’t found my little corner of the internet yet.
Right now I’m taking a break from self-hosted stuff to work on my gardens and two artsy projects. A wooden carving for a friend’s birthday and an overly complicated shell script that has no real purpose. Although I’ve learned lots from it already so it’s not a complete waste of time.
How did you approach the logging?
Since my logs barely move, I just made aliases to where the logs are so it’s quick display and scan them within the terminal. I’m basically just viewing the system logs, fail2ban log and Caddy’s log so it’s fairly quick and simple for me.
The only change I’d like to do is change the output of Caddy’s log file so it’s not a long single line of information per output. I’ll have to do a bit more reading on that so I know what information I want to keep and how I want to visually organize it. At least for the moment, I am familiarising myself with what I am looking at and am slowly figuring out what information is relevant to me.
I like to keep my systems as simple and lean as possible which seems to strongly reflect my general approach to life. I find that kind of interesting.
If you like, check GoAccess on the Caddy Files. You can watch them through that instead of less/cat/whatever to see a nice Dashboard. It helps getting a better overview IMHO.
It looks interesting and seems like it would be easy to set up. I’ll play with it and see how I like it. Thanks for the suggestion
What’s the best ACME server?
