What’s happening on your servers? Any interesting news things you tried?
I didn’t do anyone other than updating Mastodon (native deployment) lately due to a lack of time. Reading so much about Immich caused me to consider trying it in parallel to Nextcloud but I’m not sure if I want to have everything twice.
Not quite homelab, but I’m about to install Linux Mint on my mom’s laptop and that had me thinking about creating an off-site backup in her place again since she has a fiber connection. I’m still not sure about the potential design though, but currently my only backup is in the same rack as the live stuff.
I’ve been making another attempt to replace Docker with Podman. The issue is I can’t connect to my server through a web browser. I think it’s a firewall issue.
Networking and networking troubleshooting is a bit confusing for me and that’s the least favourite part about self hosting for me. Turns out I actually enjoy writing scripts more and the challenge of writing POSIX scripts especially.
If I can figure it out, I’ll probably write a guide for setting up Podman and Caddy on Alpine Linux since there isn’t a lot of recent information out there from what I found in my searches so far.
I actually did something for quite a while. Finished long overdue wiring for outdoor access point and one more camera, replaced a main switch since the old one started to behave unreliably, installed frigate (which still needs some work), cleaned up some wiring while messing around, updated a bunch of firmwares, replaced switch in garage to managed one and made some changes on my workstation and some other minor stuff.
Next would be to move cameras into their own VLAN and harden that setup a bit. And I really should get around on better backups for my VPS. But it’s a new week coming up, if the work isn’t too busy I might get something more done.
I’ve set up Kavita for my e-books. Nice UI, looks promising, and I’ve added some books. I haven’t really used it yet, because half of this was just an excuse to try podman (instead of docker). I wanted to set it up to run as unprivileged user, without the docker daemon running as root. That wasn’t too hard, but it was definitely a few extra steps.
But something about Kavita didn’t sit well with me. Maybe I don’t self-host enough stuff to know what’s normal, but there is a donate button, which I don’t mind, but its tooltip says: “You can remove this button by subscribing to Kavita+.”
I’m donating to a few software projects already, and I have developed a substantial amount of free software myself. There is nothing wrong with asking for money. But what I cannot stand is when software running on my own device is intentionally acting against my interests. And this tooltip was very clear about not letting me do something that I might want to do.
So I checked the source code for more. I found another anti-pattern: telemetry is opt-out instead of opt-in. But that seems to be it, I didn’t find anything worse than that. So… fair I guess, if the author wants it that way. It’s still free software. It looks like I could delete all the Kavita+ stuff myself and re-build. Which I’m going to do if I keep using it. But this is now an extra step that prevents me from just using it, because I need to feel in control of what I run. Kind of self-inflicted, I guess…
Love the post haha! Nothing much here things run rather stable and with low maintance right now.
I’m super glad I arrived this state and don’t have to do anything mostly. Just when I want to change stuff :)
I finally got my home services covered with my website’s wildcard ssl. Which is great, because now I can setup ELK Stack and setup an auth portal on my vps, and get Plex and gitlab out of the house securely.
I finally got my ISP to enable bridge mode on my modem.
I also learned that I didn’t lose port forwarding and related services because I had been moved behind CGNAT or transitioned to IPv6 – they simply no longer offer port forwarding to residential customers. Ruminate on the implications of that statement so I’m not the only one with blood pressure in the high hundreds.
Port forwarding is done at the router/firewall, so if ports can’t be transferred its a cgnat thing they are doing. Like a Non CGNAT IP on the internet can be sent a packet on any port.
No, I got it from the horse’s mouth: my WAN address was publicly routable all along, the ISP just disabled those NAT-related features remotely.
the implication of that is weird to me. I’m not saying that the horse is wrong, but thats such a non-standard solution. That’s implementing a CGNAT restriction without the benefits of CGNAT. They would need to only allow internal to external connections unless the connection was already established. How does standard communication still function if it was that way, I know that would break protocols like basic UDP, since that uses a fire and forget without internal prompting.
Oh shit, that’s terrible.
I’ve learned a hard lesson this week. Jellyfin server OS partition run out of free space and corrupted the database. Nothing to do but reinstall. I guess this week I’ll be reviewing backups! 🤣🤣🤣
I don’t like the sound of that. Sounds like bad programming? Who’s at fault? Jellyfin or the database implementation? Why would a nospace error corrupt everything. Sounds absolutely volatile. 😱
I have been looking for something new.
Last week was moving Immich up to the new release I was on an old version, which meant migrating to an intermediate version to allow a database rebuild. It worked well.
I was bored this week so just ran some wattage testing.
- 15w at idle (800MHz)
- 20w active (3.4GHz)
- 30w peak at boot
What kind of hardware is it running on?
It’s an Intel i5-7700 cpu in a Gigabyte Z270N mobo. Those were chosen as a form factor fit for the Monsterlabo fanless case. (Only a select set of boards, and in this case 1151 brackets, fit the case)
At this point my whole setup is mostly in maintenance mode - I’ve got everything I need up and running, making some minor changes here and there (like swapping out StirlingPDF for Bento), and keeping things up to date. I only started this hobby about 6 months ago or so, and I’m really satisfied with where things are at. We’ll see when the next Big New Thing arrives.
I’ve had immich but went to homegalley instead. Mostly because I want to keep MY directory structure in case I’m abandoning the choosen platform. Have not regretted my choice (so far … 8 months)
I’ve been using Immich, but with my photos as external media. That lets me keep my directory structure too, but with the Immich features 🙂
You can adjust the directory structure in immich using templates
Self hosting wise, not much, just ran through updates (I prefer to do this manually) and set up a new box which will host another proxmost host and NAS.
The mobo/CPU that became the new server has been replaced with an Asus prime x370-pro and a spare 1700x to be used as a new endeavoros desktop (their defaults are close enough to what I want I dont bother with full manual install). Mostly need it for a KDE 6 box for dev/testing to go alongside the instances of Trixie/Sid, since I’m considering arch for some work stuff that Debian won’t fit the bill for.
I actually just wrote about today’s fun experience! https://gotosocial.michaeldileo.org/@mdileo/statuses/01K7YKQ9584YBY1QTYQ8RMW7SS
I threw a thinkcenter in my laundry room and did the bare minimum to securely SSH into it (fail2ban, nonstandard port, root login disabled, can’t login with password, etc), to be used as a testing platform for building my workplace a new website.
Just gotta relearn HTML/CSS and figure out what platform to use.
Also set up traefik/Authelia/maybe Anubis for the new domain and block any access outside of my home or workplace.
Finally finished setting up and testing a Peertube instance. The video stuff and object storage related things certainly make it more involved than other fediverse software, but overall it is working quite nicely. Just need to find some workable solution to using GPU acceleration in containers, but I think I mostly figured it out (might work after a server restart, but my sweet, sweet uptime makes me procrastinate on that 😅 ).
How much storage do you think you’ll need with caching external content? Does Peertube even do that?
Not automatically, but you can configure it to mirror certain video channels or individual videos. But I have not looked into that too much yet.
As for storage: a typical video you would find on such a platform with the different stored video resolutions and so on will take between 0.5 and 3 GB… depending on the length and how well it compresses.
I’ve been trying to convince a VPS to run two instances of mariadb - one for local databases, one to replicate the homelab. Got mariadb@server and mariadb@replica sorted out through systemd, but now stuck on replication from mysql to mariadb. Looks like I’ll be ripping out mariadb and putting everything on mysql.
Interesting using systemd for that, I’d probably have chosen containers for that.
What’s the reason for replication vs. dumps? Does the client failover to the replica?
Have you checked if statement-based replication works from mysql to mariadb?
I’m hung up on unrecognized charset #255. Tried rolling everything back to utfmb3; suppose I could go all the way to Latin1. I imagine there’s a lot of depth I could learn, but dropping mariadb for mysql seems like the path of least resistance right now.
