I wanna get into it but man, the mountain of knowledge I need to even understand what people are talking about is hard to climb. I'm trying to just get some stuff running in docker and it fails to launch and I'm like... How?! Isn't that the whole point of docker lol. Baby steps I guess

Found out Ghost 6.0 is out today and now it supports ActivityPub. It’s time to set up a new blog I’ll never write once more!

Another glorious day of not having to worry about my nice and stable Debian server. It runs on an old Dell thin client I got on ebay, which isn't much, but it gets the job done.

Realized last week that my fail2ban settings are too strict -- I get banned immediately if I visit my funkwhale (music server) domain without being logged in. In fact, I think much of my "downtime" might have actually just been me banning myself for 15 minutes now and then...

I was thinking about getting rid of Grafana, which is overkill for my server, and replacing it with Logdy this weekend, but didn't get around to it.

Getting ready to move from out of the woods and back to civilization with my partner.

Not looking forward to having neighbors above or below me but I'm very excited to have internet that doesnt fucking suck.

Once were moved and a bit more settled, I'm gonna start really digging into to selfhosting things. I have the hardware, a couple HP mini PCs that will run home assistant and probably a server for various docker things. Nextcloud and immich seem to be the things I've found i wanna use so far. I already have a NAS set up, but was having am issue with it not booting if a monitor isnt plugged in. I bought a dummy plug for it but haven't tried it out yet.

Will also be setting up an AI server for local LLM use. Hope to train one to fit my needs once I pull the trigger on 3060 12GB card but need to figure out what other parts I'll use. Might upgrade my main rig and use the parts from that, or maybe I'll buy a old dell and fix it up. Not sure yet.

Lots of ideas, so little time lol.

I installed a new server at home and went with NixOS. It looks super cool but it takes so much time to learn everything. The only thing keeping me from going back to Debian is how easy it was to permanently mount drives (and save a configuration for any future install or mishaps).

(I.e. mount, nixos-generate-config, nixos-rebuild switch and done!)

Started looking at Gemini-protocol over the weekend. (It's like a newer version of gopher) Now I'm looking for a problem to fit the tool.

I started writing a science fiction, choose your own adventure, short story to fit the platform But that'll take ages to finish.

I'm also eyeing a meshtastic client proxy. But you only get about 200 bytes per message so I'm not entirely sure it's worth it.

The last thing, it would be kind of cool is a Zim tie-in. It would be cool to have a canned Wikipedia that could be accessed via Gemini protocol.

Recently set up my own nextcloud instance!

I've been hosting immich for a long time and finally decided to make a website so people could sign up for paid monthly accounts and upload their stuff to the server that I'm going to run anyway. Maybe it'll make me beer money.

Everything is just peachy this week except that I'm still trying to sort out why my I'm unable to access the internet when I'm connected to my unraid wireguard instance.

I am also finally ready to ditch my plex instance, too. Got some self-inflicted permissions issues sorted and it's been smooth sailing for long enough that I'm ready to make the switch

I looked into VyOS to replace my main firewall/IPS system (IPfire) with, as I would like to switch to running it in a VM, which is not recommended with IPfire. Seems pretty good so far with the new gratis semi-stable Stream releases.

And I set up Unified Push notifications with my Ejabberd server. Works great.

I recently started setting up home server on Raspberry Pi 5. Having issues with raid1. I have 2 nvme PCIe gen 4 SSDs. There was power outages while writing. Now second disk keeps randomly falling. Though, I’m not sure if that’s the reason because I don’t know what was raid status before outage, also disk passes checks. First time it degraded, it tried to recover and it failed. I removed that disk from raid, recreated partition run some test using nvme-cli. Disk looked healthy. I re-added disk, rebuild started and completed successfully. Then I’ve written around 500Gbs of data and it degraded again. At that point I took a break.

There are two things I’m yet to try:

1. Change configs to use gen 2 PCI, currently it’s set to gen 3, but AFAIK pi 5 does not support gen 3 officially.
2. Remove, format and write data to problematic disk directly. I hope this will give me an idea is this hardware issue or software issue

I’m frustrated and will appreciate any hints.

My homelab has been mostly on autopilot for a while. Synology 6 bay running most lighter weight docker stuff (arrstack, immich, etc) and an Intel nuc running heavy stuff (quicksync transcodes for Plex+jf, ollama). Both connected to digitalocean via WG for reverse proxy due to CGNAT.

I had my router SSD either die or get corrupted this past week, haven't looked much at the old SSD besides trying to extract the config off of it. I ended up just fresh installing opnsense because I didnt have any recent backups (my Synology and nuc back up to rsync.net, but I haven't gotten around to automated backups for my router since it's basically a plain config, and my cloud reverse proxy which is just a basic docker compose + small haproxy config). Luckily my homelab reaching out to the cloud reverse proxy means there's basically no important config on my router anymore, they just need DHCP and a connection.

Besides that the arrstack just chugs along on its own.

I recently figured out I can load jellyfin playback URLs into vrchat video players, either direct stream or through the transcoding pipeline as an m3u8 that live transcodes based on the url parameters you set. This is great because the way watch parties in VRChat works is that everyone in an instance loads the same URL pasted into media players and syncs the playback. That means you need to have a publicly accessible url (preferably with a token of some sort) that can be loaded by an arbitrary number of unique IP addresses simultaneously, which I don't think is doable with Plex.

I'm now working on a little web app to let me log into Jellyfin, search/browse media, and generate the links with arbitrary or pre-set transcode settings for easy copy/pasting into VRChat. The reason it's needed is that Jellyfin only provides the original file without transcoding when you use the "copy stream" option, so I believe the only way to get a transcoded stream url currently is to set the web interface to specific settings and grab the URL from the network. But that doesn't let you set arbitrary stuff like codecs and subtitle burn in and overriding what it thinks you support. So a simple app to construct the URL will make VRChat watch parties a lot easier.

Finally retired proxmox (actually I just removed pve packages and repos). Left the nfs export on there and hardened the whole thing.

Now I'm slowly working to get all my installs into layered ansible playbooks. Fortunately, there exists an incus ansible module.

With separate, mounted, persistent data, it's getting very close to docker in easy deployment.

I'll paste a comment I made about this recently (with updates). My question is: what is a good solution to keep a music folder backed up (lives on my server NVME partitioned boot drive, but want it backed up automatically to my NAS HDD)? Also: how can I back up my Docker setup in case I screw it up and need to set it all up again?

I used just a Synology NAS with Docker containers to begin with but outgrew that. Now I have a mini PC with a 12th Gen i5 (picked up cheap on eBay) for computing and the Synology NAS is just a NAS.

Docker containers:

Glutun (VPN), qBittorrent, media managers (sonarr, radarr, prowlarr, flaresolverr), Jellyfin (video streaming), Paperless NGX (document upload), Immich (photo upload), watchtower (auto update Docker containers), Plex (because my wife+friends aren't used to Jellyfin yet and it takes a while to transition them to unfamiliar technology), Actual (budgeting), Syncthing (file sync, update: removed this, not needed, actually need a backup solution), Element server (chat server just for myself, I make channels to cross-share snippets of text/links/images to myself, accessible on any device).

Still need to set up Lidarr and Beet for my music management (update: tried these last night and don't really need them). Also need to find a good exercise logger, set up Guacamole remote access interface (update: done, happy with this), learn to use Dockage to replace Portainer (done, happy with this), set up an RSS docker app (update: done, still messing around with FreshRSS) and audio bookshelf for podcasts and audiobooks. Haven't got the guts to approach Home Assisstant yet.

I stopped looking for a notes app and use Joplin to sync with my Mailbox.org account, but I might look for a Docker solution for notes.

NoMachine runs on my server PC for remote desktop. The server PC runs Debian with KDE (because I'm familiar with setting up what I need in KDE, which is the most superior of all desktop environments).

Synology handles making my apps accessible externally (from Synology.me reverse proxy addresses).

I used to use the Marius Hosting site to set up Synology Docker containers. Now I just copy his YAML data and edit it for my server. So I still use those guides.

I've written a noob guide notes for myself to set this all up again in case I destroy it somehow (already happened once). Really enjoyed using my week off to learn all this.

I've set up Pangolin on my VPS and had no problems accessing docker services on my homelab remotely. However, I don't know how I am supposed to SSH or SFTP to my homelab. Will I connect to my VPS instead? Would I need to break Pangolin or expose a vulnerability to do so?

Honestly I am in need of a proper networking tutorial at this point.

Tried building a storage box out of a bunch of old parts, it looks alright and has all the parts I want. Doesn't boot though, that'll be a tomorrow thing :(

Have had Opnsense router, Ubiquiti switch, and shitty ASUS Router in AP mode for years. Got new Ubiquiti APs to improve wifi speed and coverage.

Can't get VLANS to work to save soul. Feels bad.

I finished setting up my personal computer with Sway on Alpine so now I can't procrastinate anymore on getting TLS working with Caddy for my RPi 5.

I decided to ditch Cloudflare since using that service makes me feel uncomfortable. TLS is a bit of a pain because I am using an uncommon port so I need to do a DNS challenge. I still haven't been able to get it working with DeSec.io but I hope maybe sometime this week.

I might look into using a tunnel service in the future but if I can figure this out, I'll at least be able to adapt to changes in the future if I need to deal with any changing situations.

When I figure that out, I'll look into Gemeni protocol and host something there. I don't want anything big, just a little space of my own in the corner of the internet. Maybe I'll look into hosting an irc server for a small group of people too.

I made some more tweaks to my Renovate bot which runs on a Woodpecker CI instance on my own hardware. Now it merges green PRs automatically. And I have it running every hour so all my software projects stay up-to-date and it responds quickly when I request a rebase.

I’ve also been cleaning up my Home Assistant automations and devices and trying to think up some useful things I can do for myself in an apartment where I can’t replace switches or the thermostat.

Got my HPE DL380 G9 networked and configured with hardware RAID 0 and Debian running under ProxMox for a test run (need more disks for RAID 5). Thing had an advanced iLo license intact from the previous owner.

Deployed a docker container of linkwarden to it to try out and it seems pretty nice.

finally picked up a bunch of cheap 2.5" sas drives to turn my dumpster server (Proliant DL380 G7 with 16 hot swap bays) into a backup server.

still trying to work out the specifics but the idea is because it's a power hog and LOUD I want to use wake on lan to run a backup task and turn it off automatically.

I can turn it on via lan so I'm halfway there right? ......

I was excited to learn that homeassistant lets me bypass the atrocious Sonos app for controlling all my speakers from various music sources.

Though at the same time, I'm little disappointed that offTikTok is broken.

Recently set up a Maloja container and a Multi-scrobbler container so I can finally ditch last.fm!

I run MECM at home so that my Windows machines don't reboot themselves on their own. Apparently it corrupted its database some weeks ago, and I didn't notice until the backups had aged out. So I had to build a new one from scratch, and holy fuck I hate it every time. So many steps not documented or automated in the installation, to say nothing of all the items scattered across the MECM console that you have to configure before it does anything.

So I guess I should get around to log and system monitoring.

Does anyone know how to get a static IP for their server when their ISP doesn't allow it. I've found out how to use duckdns, but I want to set up my own DNS server from anywhere but I'm pretty sure it requires using a static IP.