I have been experimenting with a btrfs raid array and am getting some new hard drives in the mail today, hoping it goes smoothly and they work 😬 All part of a larger goal of migrating my synology NAS to a purpose built machine.
Also got my first contribution and donation on my OIDC SSO project, which is really exciting!
Pretty smooth sailing at the moment. I’ve got:
All running on a 4 node raspberry pi kubernetes cluster.
I've finally setup Netbird instead of Tailscale to VPN to my network. Took some time since I wanted it to work with pocket-id and had some issues configuring everything properly. Runs like a charm now.
Just got some power measuring plugs. Home Assistant and immich-running raspberry pi + NAS (dual 20TB in raid 1) + switch clock in at around 30W. Surround receiver playing music ups that by 90W. After a minor water leak I added 5 leak sensors to the system that will blink lights and send texts if they detect anything.
The biggest problem is that I'm still running lights through hue and some of them have an annoying tendency to drop off the network...
Purchased 5 1tb drives to expand my study server. Going from 600GB to 4TB is going to make more complex labs possible.
I updated my Dietpi setup today, because a new version was available. It went very well, and everything works perfectly after a reboot.
Chose yesterday late evening as the time to migrate my containers from docker to podman (still rootful). By luck most things work again, except wireguard/qbittorrent
Working on automating tasks so I don't have to block out hours of time a week managing everything. Just got watchtower running and going to see how it does before trying out some other automations.
Trying to run a fediverse server on a decade-old Wi-Fi router and encountering some unexpected issues. Making progress, though.
Trying to smoothly orchestrate prowlarr, radarr, jellyfin, and transmission (via Proton vpn), using a big beautiful docker compose file. It's been working OK but not without roadbumbs and tough learnings. Keep messing up directory permissions one way or another.
Next step is setting up fail2ban on my public facing jellyfin to control things a little better. Everything is hosted at home, and I don't want to use cloud flare tunnels, are streaming video is technically not allowed in them.
If you have more good tips on securing a home server, let me know!
Also, this is all running on an ancient 2012 mac mini running Ubuntu. Slow as molasses and sometimes the fans make a noise. I should start looking into back-up solutions, at least for the configs.
I started out rewriting my network backup scripts only to realize I was adding functionality to a previous script I wrote to automatically mount and dismount luks encrypted volumes. I still want to type in my luks passphrase because I don't want everything automated and prefer to include inconvenience as an additonal security measure in securing some of my data.
I also came to the realization recently that the reason I don't relate strongly to other self hosters is because I've unknowingly been trying to create a minimal self hosted system that is more beneficial to small, low powered devices.
I've been using Alpine Linux, I install only the bare, older but well established tools and have been creating scripts soley based off those tools instead of seeking out bigger, more complicated modern tools. For example creating workflows by only using rsync or using https://github.com/RayCC51/BashWrite to create a blog that only uses bash and GNU sed to create a static blog site.
At least now that I'm aware of this, I can keep an eye out for such projects or communities and would hopefully be able to contribute something in that direction.
Everything here is smooth sailing. I have been trying to track down a bothersome Suricata entry.
202.136.163.11 PROTOCOL-ICMP destination unreachable port unreachable packet detected
202.136.163.11 PROTOCOL-ICMP destination unreachable port unreachable packet detected
202.136.163.11 PROTOCOL-ICMP destination unreachable port unreachable packet detected
202.136.163.11 PROTOCOL-ICMP destination unreachable port unreachable packet detected
ad nauseum. There are three individual ips. One from Singapore, one from China and one from Romania. They are being blocked, so that's good. Thing is, these are from realitvly 'clean' sources:
120.132.37.195 was not found in our database
202.136.163.11 was found in our database! This IP was reported 5 times. Confidence of Abuse is 0%:
On the server side, I have nothing calling out to these ip. That's what was really bugging me. Nothing server side, just these three bothersome ip hammering Suricata. Generally, I would dismiss as benign and part of normal UDP behavior. However, it's the constant hammering that makes me suspicious. Could be high volume port scanning. However, it could also be known attack campaigns like UDP amplification attempts.
Other than that, I might find something to get into today.
I finally moved my mail server from Hetzner to my homelab.
Pretty smooth sailing so far. For now I'm using Scaleway for outgoing mails since I can't set a PTR record here but I might just try sending a few without PTR to see how other providers react.
Just installed Owncast, so townsfolk can ride my G-scale Polar Express via an onboard livestream, as part of a revamped lighting and projection mapping festive season show.
While I was at it I also added Kokoro for TTS.
Thought I would spice up Jellyfin for the festive season, so am trying out the Jellyfin Enhanced and Home Sections plugins.
Bad week for me. Tandoor had become the home of quite a lot of recipes, and well, I'm never gonna just pull a docker container again without a backup, cause I did a pull and the bastard stopped working.
So I setup Django and got started doing my own recipe server cause I was never very enthused about Tandoor, too much netflix-like Presentation bullshit and did not allow for the very simple thing I wanted, which was, a compact list of my recipes by alphabet that I can swiftly click on the one I want.
I also need to get my Python chops back cause I think there will be jobs again, soon enough.
Meanwhile, anyone got any suggestions of a better recipe app? Needs to run as a Linux server, that's about it. I can go Tailscale if it has no security. If I get mine to something usable I'll make it available.
Tried to setup a personal matrix server last night, got it to federate, next step is Matrix’s Element Call, spent too many hours trying to block the /_synapse endpoint with Traefik because it is recommended by Matrix, no luck unfortunately.
All this in hopes I can add a Music Bot to my instance or something similar.
Had a productive session this weekend migrating my promtail config to grafana Alloy and setting up a syslog receiver to capture output from my cron jobs. Next up I'll be messing with some scripts to sync my dashboard config across several instances which should be pretty neat if it works
I recently installed Beszel and really like it but I would prefer not to have to login every time I want to check my systems. Is there any easy alternative?
Going to try to convert two 2-post racks into a 4-post rack today. Dreading the mess though.
Trying to host stable diffusion to generate some art for my D&D campaign.
Switch my ActualBudget authentication to my locally hosted Authelia instance and it was a breeze, with no issues. Always a fantastic feeling.
Trying to work up the courage to troubleshoot a very worrying disk error on the new NAS I’ve been building, which if solved will leave me the problem of working up the courage to try and migrate to the new server without losing my Plex library settings and progress.
Basically I’m frozen in fear.
Finally got around to dns-01 and acme containers today. Hooray LE signed wildcard lab cert.
Burning the midnight oil on my self hosted journal app: https://github.com/journiv/journiv-app
Bought my first raspberry pi 5, 8 gb ram version. Gonna be using it to run a jellyfin server and maybe a foundry server if it can handle both concurrently. Anyone familiar enough to know if running multiple things on one of these is wise?
my server has been down for one week because I'm migrating to OpenBSD but I got a weird error while installing, but yeah, everything's fine!
I installed Jellyfin on my server and threw kodi on a minipc I dug out of dumpster pile at work. Works pretty well, but my server needs more RAM and the minipc needs either a wireless keyboard or a USB-HID remote controller to finalize the setup. Also ran some wiring in the house and added two network sockets to a room where the whole kodi-tv-gamingpc-whatever-pile is going to live.
On the server RAM I found some on ebay, but if anyone is interested on 64G DDR4 ECC DIMMs I have a few. I thought they were supported on my server motherboard when I took them out from a old server at work but it supports only up to 32G ECC dimms.
A recent t480 purchase may replace my second workstation tower, which I think is about to become my most powerful server in the cluster....
So nothing new hosting-wise, but that tower I can shove the spare 12tb and 4tb drives I have and net myself another 30ish TB's of usable storage, more once I replace the 12TBs in one of my NAS boxes with 18tb or more.
Speaking of which - where the hell do I track prices these days? diskprices.com seems to be a mess of inaccurate pricing and shucks.top can no longer track even half of what they used to. What a mess.
Mostly everything is running smoothly. Been fighting with some zigbee integrations randomly dropping connection from Home assistant but it's nothing too important.
Biggest issue I've been facing is how to make sure all my media is properly encoded so jellyfin doesn't pin my cpu transcoding when I'm streaming to the onn boxes around my house. Debating if I need to dump the onn's and try to spin up raspberries for each TV instead
Made some changes to my I2P router today, but otherwise all good.
Late to the party But I've been thinking about upgrading my proxmox and finally taking care of my backups in a more responsible manner. Just thinking about it, not actually doing anything yet :)
Smooth sailing for me too, shockingly. I've recently added my 26th service to Proxmox - LibreELEC (Kodi), with the very complex matter of monitor passthrough. It's such a versatile program and it has replaced my Chromecast with more features and side bonuses than I could've imagined. Another huge step towards degoogling.
Switching my main PC to nixos from fedora atomic sway. The sway config tripped me up last time, this time I'll succeed! (I hope)
Changed my family dashboard from magic mirror to a home assistant dashboard. I'm missing some cute things, but the major functions work better, and I get some options that I didn't before.
I just bought aan IP KVM switch for a hundo, now heading to the store foir a case of frosty's and re-rack my servers to make room.
I dug out an old laptop and installed Yunohost on it. I was so excited until I discovered that my ISP uses CGNAT. I'm trying to figure out what I want to do next.
I am looking at using headscale or just paying the US$10/month for a static public IP from my ISP. If I go with headscale, then it appears that I wouldn't need Yunohost.
I'm a newb at this so there's a lot I don't know yet.
One of my drives crippled itself a few days back, not sure what caused it. Wasn't able to be resolved without a host restart which was unfortunate. SMART isn't failing and has been working fine, so I'm chalking it down to a weird Proxmox bug or something.
For sure expected I was going to need to do a rollback on an entire drive after that restart though. Still may have to if it reoccurs.
docker-ce v29 update somehow messed up my homelab so badly that I had to downgrade to v28 to restore my system.
Following the FUTO guide, but having problems with getting mailcow going... I'll hopefully figure it out by tomorrow.
Evening is going ok, but noticed the screen saver on jellyfin isn't showing up lately.. need to investigate...
Also, watched the latest "Explaining Computers" episode today.
Planning to host a Nix caching server, and have CI build all package and NixOS outputs on every push to git, then in turn pushing the output artifacts to the cache. Would save me a good chunk of time when tinkering with VMs that haven't seen manual updates in a while.
Only thing is, I'm not sure how to approach building and caching NixOS configs that receive agenix secrets in their input. Obviously those should not be cached...
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