Let’s do another round of this. What’s going on on your servers, any cool things? How’d the recent CVE flood tangent you and did it change how you see/do stuff?
I’m currently in the process of writing yet another script. This time my aim is to make one that will setup a server from a fresh Operating System install.
I want to do this for two reasons. The first is so that I have an alternative to backups. It would also help with major Operating System updates because sometimes those are a bit messy.
The second reason is because I want to help other people setup a simple, minimal and more secure setup for a home server as well.
It will all be POSIX portable too so it won’t be limited by extra requirements. I’ve already made a lot of progress with it because I started doing the same with my personal computer. I’ve been able to focus on that because my home server is super simple and I’ve been able to ignore all the recent vulnerabilities.
Don’t create another Omarchy please!
I have a similar thing but I’m using Ansible. That way, I don’t have to handle all the error checking etc myself.
Got my hands on an old laptop. Since I started using nix a little while ago, and want to migrate to NixOS for my servers, this will be the starting point. Started cobbling together some code to commission it as a smart tv platform. KDE Plasma BigScreen is what I’m looking at atm.
I deleted a bunch of services I’m not actually using on my home server. Nothing used php, but it was good to do some house cleaning.
I also started a blog (Hugo is much nicer than I thought). The procrastination has helped me get a lot of other things done.
From my logs nothing bad happened to any of my services. I turned off my entire homelab for a few days until every single app/service had an update. Then I turned everything on, updated and that was that.
One cool thing I have is https://github.com/lklynet/hypermind totally pointless, but I like it.
Finally took the leap and wiped my NUC to start doing things over. Originally had a family member who works in IT set everything up, but he did the absolute bare minimum and I screwed some stuff up along the way the first time around, so I figured now was as good at time as any to teach myself to set things up from scratch!
I also have moved from Portainer, to Dokploy, to Arcane for docker management, and I actually really like Arcane. I’ve also accomplished something I’m really damn proud of, which is getting HTTPS working on Tailscale (so, for example, arcane.(my subdomain).ts.net but with HTTPS!) alongside Pocket ID for all of it. Maybe it’s just me, but I had trouble finding clear documentation on how to do this, no matter how much I searched. But I documented it for myself, at least. And it’s probably that I lack a lot of knowledge in this field, too.
I have some questions, and although I know there’s a chance this gets buried, I figured I’d try asking anyway. Little skittish about making a thread myself.
My NUC is running Debian 13, and I was wondering some security things. Everything is behind Tailscale and I don’t plan on exposing anything to the internet (even through Tailscale Funnel, I’m using Tailscale Serve for the HTTPS.)
- How valuable is a firewall in this case? I’ve never used one, and I’m wondering if it’ll just make adding services more of a hassle than it’s worth for the security since everything is staying local.
- Similarly, what about Fail2Ban? I have it on my RPi and it’s not a big deal to set up, but I was reading a firewall is more important?
- Is it okay to run unattended updates for security OS stuff on the NUC? I don’t always check updates, admittedly I’m easily distracted and forgetful. I’m a little worried about auto restarting it to finish the updates up just because I utilize a NAS and sometimes it’s annoying to get them to reconnect to each other (even with the fstab edited) when there’s a restart for either of them.
- Thoughts on auto updates on docker containers? I know this is pretty personal preference, but I mostly ask because I’m forgetful and distractable. I know this is kinda my own problem, but I want to know other people’s thoughts if possible.
Thank you for reading my very long update! And any answers to my questions are very appreciated. Hope everyone else is doing well!
F2B/FW: If it’s only available locally/via VPN, I think your threat model is your LAN. People in your wifi or rogue smart home stuff. I think a firewall makes more sense here, but if it’s just 1 machine, you should be fine with ufw or the like. If you have several VMs that are supposed to be separated, the solution would depend on the virtualization software.
Unattended upgrades are way better than none at all, both for system and docker. Of course it depends on how important it is that your services are “always” available and I get the NAS struggle though.
I got a network rack and a rack mounted UPS that I need to install today and then move everything over too. Looking forward and not to getting it done lol
I’ve been focused so much on work-related stuff involving DST changes that I neglected my own systems!
Using nix to maintain my fleet with automated updates so I didn’t really need to worry about it thankfully; just checking that I had relevant/patched versions. All my services are nice and up to date so didn’t even have to take anything down (yay)
What I’m excited for today is to progress personal slop project (be gentle) I started yesterday. Hoping it’ll just be one or two weekends.
I’ve been hallucinating a transcoding suite/workbench. Includes experimental sampling matrix of ffmpeg settings with a composable / layer-based project configuration; rust egui+mpv desktop client. Then the hosted orchestration server can distribute ffmpeg jobs across my worker machines (via my local headscale tailnet). Output produces a project+metadata bundle that includes hand-picked source:result JXL frame comparisons alongside both human readable reports and client readable configuration that makes the projects (more or less) reproducible (with worker tool env versioning via nix flake.lock) and logs provenance.
I intend for this to be a replacement to the piles of crappy python scripts I’ve been using for the last decade; my current workflow is to move files into host-labeled ingest folders with an argument string in a text file, then ssh to the host to run the job.
But what I’m most excited for is the experimentation matrix. I hope that it will reduce my electricity usage and disk thrashing; it will let me sample settings for ~1minute of footage around the sample frame and let me iterate my tuning much faster. Currently, it’s faster (in terms of hands-on time) to just transcode whole episodes or even entire seasons multiple times with different settings and then just discard the ones that underperform. Extremely wasteful; testing a settings matrix is something I’ve always wanted, but never had the time to build (and still kinda don’t, hence slop).
I migrated my backups from Hetzner Object Storage to OVH, because Hetzner had too many service disruptions in the last few months for my taste (no dataloss, only unavailability). My automatic backup afterwards worked without any issues. Plus point, OVH doesn’t charge for traffic or API calls, only for used storage, and has replication jobs, so I can automatically replicate the backups to another bucket in another location.
I’m into this as a regular thing!
Pinned, I think a lot of us really enjoy seeing what others have been doing to take back and make improvements to our own setup.
Glad you like it! I tried to go for a 2-3 week cycle as I realized every week is a bit too often (less comments). I also tried to do it alternating with the community on slrpnk but they’re currently down. I often forget to do these anyways :D
Anyone can make these, of course. I always enjoy doing them and talking about stuff I enjoy.
My automatic weekly backup ran for the first time last night. Everything worked nicely.
I practiced restoring my offsite backup this week. Good experience.
Then I printed and laminated the instructions and stored in two locations.
Just curious. How long does lamination last? I assume light hurts paper.
I’m always super excited for this kind of stuff :D
Working on a custom rust server / client for self hosted obsidian lifesync. Goal is to be significantly faster than existing solutions as well as being hassle free. Using noise with curve25519 keys instead of HTTPS.
Apart from that I finally figured out why tailscale wasn’t working on my pfsense and that enabled me to move the majority of my services to be behind the VPN.
In terms of my setup, there was basically no impact. I use Debian (servers and some workstations) and Arch (couple of laptops and a couple of miscellaneous task-oriented devices I want more recent builds on than Debian will give me)
Work? Different story, so much manual updating!
Otherwise just regular stuff this week like backups (monthly incl since yesterday was the 31st), reviewing changelogs for minor updates, etc.
Hit a bit of a wall in my animal identification tools I’m making, so I’m going back to do some more reading to see if I can find a way to improve efficiency more and make it smaller while maintaining accuracy.
What kind of id tools? Like the bird sound thing?
Similar but not the whole thing. I’m identifying more broadly (deer, horse, chicken, etc) but more focused on their movement and condition. Are their coats are healthy, their movements normal, so on.
Classification then changes which CV model is used to evaluate the rest.
Right now they are too big to be fast enough, and going smaller is breaking the model. N9t because there aren’t unnecessary bits to trim out, but because I’m not doing a good enough job at minimizing what’s actually needed.
I’ve been working on it for a while now, but still have a long way to go unfortunately.
That sounds very cool! Did you have prior knowledge in that field or are you learning as you do it?
Only a little as far as animal health goes, my wife knows a lot though, and she knows quite a few vets who have let me abuse them with questions :) Majority is as I go along though for the non-tech side.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters IMAP Internet Message Access Protocol for email NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
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I need to replace my server root filesystem from ext4 to btrfs…
And get rid of a leftover MD/raid1 as well …
Sometimes I think : wouldn’t it be great to migrate my setup from ext4 to btrfs ?
Then I think : my services are working perfectly. Why break it now and risk downtime ? 😔
I use btrfs on main data disks and backup disks. Recently it caught a data corruption due to a wrong write (neutrino? Luck? Halloween approaching?).
Then it occurred to me that similar corruption would have been undiscovered for years until I needed that file on ext4…
So, that’s a good reason to migrate…
What’s your full setup, may I ask ?
I’m running proxmox over ext4/lvm on a single SSD (I know, bad). I have a jbod of 4 data disks in an USB3 enclosure (ext4/mergersFS/snapraid) for mass storage on the side.
My data is a raid5 (Linux MD raid) on top of which I have btrfs partition. They are 4 dad’s.
I have another raid5 on USB mechanical disks again MD raid5 + btrfs, which is my 1st level backup.
Os, Gentoo Linux, is on an nvme ext4, going to migrate to btrfs when I have time.
Server is a Ryzen 9 with 64gb ram that I also use for AI inference thanks to two Nvidia RTX A4000. Currently one on PCIe 16x and one on pcie 4x. I am waiting for a pci-e bifurcation card to move both cards on 8x 8x pcie bus… Splitting my CPU bound 16x lanes in two…
Edit: I host lost of stuff… Mostly on bare metal or podman rootless…
Check out my wiki at https://wiki.gardiol.org/ where I keep track of what i install and how.
