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 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 ❤️

For privacy reasons, I have finally fully disabled dynamic dns updates and closed the last holes in the home firewall, moving to 100% proxying via a VPS for publicly available stuff, and a tailnet (headscale) for everything private. The only real cross-over is Nextcloud - mountains of private data, but I want it publicly available for file shares. Fortunately, Nextcloud has a setting to whitelist IP addresses that allow log-in, so I can restrict that to just the non-VPS tailnet addresses. From the public internet, only public shares are accessible.

I set up a L4 proxy so that the encryption for Nextcloud happens at home and the VPS just passes encrypted packets. Then it occurred to me that a compromised VPS could easily grab a SSL cert for my Nextcloud subdomain via a regular-old http-challenge and MITM access to all my files, defeating the point.

Then I found a neat hack that effectively disables http-challenge certs for subdomains by requiring a wildcard certificate - which can only be created with a dns-challenge. I was able to also disable all other certificate authorities. Obviously, I have /some/ trust in the VPS I administer - it's on my tailnet network - but no longer have the concern that it could easily MITM Nextcloud. https://www.naut.ca/blog/2019/10/19/mitigating-http-mitm-possibilities-with-lets-encrypt/

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

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'm a newbie to the whole selfhosting thing. Been doing NAS+minipc for past 6 months with a few services running. 2 days ago I embarresed myself.

So, I been running 5 services on nginx proxy manager. But I heard that NPMplus is slightly better and can renew certs automatically. I had transferred settings from NPM to NPMplus by hand off the photo and for some reason NPMplus couldn't work with services ran on NAS. I went back to NPM and haven't touched the issue til last Sunday.

During troubleshooting I found out that my dumb ass didnt pay attention and put '':'' instead of ''." . So 192.168.xxx.xx became 192:168:xxx:xx and that was the reason I spent whole day troubleshooting the issue.

Next goal: go back to my homeland and set Pi3 at my parent's place to be my VPN so I can setup an arr stack and automate media downloads in a way that govt. of my current residence couldn't put a deep hole in my wallet.

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

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 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?

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!

Just discovered TinyAuth and it is fantastic. I am replacing Authentik with it because it has what I want but is much faster, smaller, and simpler. Also, the license is FOSS.

What is beets, hobbits?

Just got my new NAS drives, so about to make the transition.

It’s actually new drives, and a new host. I’ve been running my old Synology NAS for years. But decided I ought to switch to a “real” NAS through Proxmox.

Just set up a simple samba container with Cockpit as a web manager, so far working really well. But I want to validate backups before I start moving all the irreplaceable data.

Something I’m excited about is using my old Synology NAS as an automatic, off-site backup once I transition. Heard about Duplicati from a friend, sounds like a great syncing solution.

Other than that I’ve been looking into using Apple HomeKit features with my Home Assistant devices. And also planning to move my hardware from the cheap Amazon floor shelf to a real 19” rack.

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.

What's the best ACME server?

I'm in planning for upgrading my NAS. It has a 10Gbps fiber connection, and my main workstation does, as well. My goal is to be able to saturate that with both read and write speed. Timeline is 6 to 8 months out.

Budget in the range of $2000-3000. Currently doing RAID1 on a pair of 18TB disks. I usually want to double that with each upgrade, but there's some leeway on there.

I think my best option is 6 NVMe sticks on RAID6. 8TB sticks would give 32TB of usable space. Not quite double, but close enough.

I would like easy hot swap capabilities. Unfortunately, it looks like the only option for that would be Icydock, and those are expensive. The other way is to go down to SATA drives where relatively cheap 2.5" hot swap bays exist, but a setup that can saturate 10Gbps writes with reasonable redundancy would be even more expensive.

Need a motherboard that has a pair of 16x slots. One needs to be a GPU for Jellyfin transcoding. Also need a 4x slot for a 10Gbps sfp+ NIC. With two NVMe slots on the mobo, this should be workable without going to Threadripper or Epyc chips and such--idle power consumption sucks on those. Totally giving up on hot swap here, though.

There are 8tb NVMe sticks that are priced close to fit in this budget range. I had found one Samsung stick that, according to Amazon price trackers, was around $300 in the recent past (can't seem to find it now). A lot will depend on tariffs, of course.

One surprise is that a Kioxia CD6-R u.3 drive at 15.36TB goes for $1150. 4 drives on RAID10 would be a workable space upgrade. That setup would be out of budget, but not as much as I would have expected. Referb deals or future price movement might put it in range.

I am at the very beginning of my journey taking those first baby steps. As I don't yet understand all the sysadmin stuff, I'm treading rather carefully to avoid making unfuckable mistakes.

I recently switched to Void on my daily driver so it has been a bit of a trial to get used to a new OS and configure it correctly. Nevertheless, it's been a great learning experience.

Alongside it I've downloaded OpenWrt on my router and begun to configure it as well (still need to deal with the Wireguard and Unbound config).

For the actual server I managed to secure an old Dell Optiplex. In the near future, I plan to flash it with Libreboot and then install Debian or FreeBSD (apparently great ZFS support) on it. Though I've still no idea whether I should use Proxmox and how I should format my drives (one 500GB SSD and 4TB HDD) for maximum effiency and for the possibility of later easily upgrading my storage capacity.

When I've finally past these steps, I plan to selfhost music services, as well as few other basic services. My goal at the moment is to replace Spotify for my whole family. But it's still a long way to go.

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.

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.