Selfhosted

Since it's winter and I mostly don't want to leave my house, I busted out an unused Raspberry Pi 4b a couple weeks ago. Started with CasaOS and AdGuard. Have now added a few other services including Navidrome to serve up a lot of local-area music for myself and friends. Got a Cloudflare tunnel set up, then some authentication through CF as well. And finally secured a static IP from my ISP. This is the farthest along I've ever gotten with any of this and it's been going great. Nearly every hurdle I've encountered I've been able to work through.

Two things causing me grief today though:

1. I also have Nextcloud hosted on a VPS and I cannot get to the point of running occ commands. First it wasn't found, then no php cli, then just errors. I gave up.

2. I'm using Homer because it's just so simple, but the theming and CSS is driving me nuts. Sure, I can change colors, but will this little bar in the neon theme change from 4em to 100% for me? NOPE. Override fonts? Nosir. All good though.

After having upgraded my Pi-Hole to v6, for some reason yesterday it started to not recognize any of the blocklists. So, I resetted it and now it works.

I'm a new selfhoster and reached the limit on what my DS923+ can handle after setting up an Immich instance (on top of qbitorrent, radarr/sonarr, plex). So I picked up a mini PC this week and migrated the Immich stack over (pointing to an NFS mount for the NAS!) and now it's running super smooth 🙌 Now I'm hype to move over more services and eventually start separating out media services from mission-critical stuff like photos when I have another machine handy.

I wanted to set up local domain resolution for my devices in order to stop having to visit sites with the local 192.168.1.x IP, so I started following some guides to run dnsmasq on the mini PC (Ubuntu Server) and add entries to /etc/hosts. It was pretty easy to get working OK, but for whatever reason the DNS doesn't seem to be working on a fresh boot. My local workstation can't ping the custom DNS entries for my devices until I sudo systemctl restart dnsmasq on the mini PC, after which everything works fine, which leads me to believe it's some weird boot order problem? I'm trying not to screw with it too much before bed, but hopefully I can figure out what's going on this week.

I've been working on some bash scripts to help manage my media files. I've been slowly working on learning more bash and I'm pretty pleased with my progress. After I finish this bash book I'm reading (can't remember the title atm), I think I'm gonna jump into awk.

Just swapped VPS hosts from ssdnodes to MassiveGRID. Got a pretty sweet deal, so I'm pretty excited.

Got my services transferred over this week and it's been fun as hell. It's interesting because I was discussing Portainer with my buddy and he has Portainer on his local PC to connect to his remote instances and with hindsight it sounds obvious of course, but it's such a nice little setup. Just finished setting up my Jellyfin reverse proxy so I'm gonna watch a movie and chill.

I'm in the process of doing an initial restic sync of my primary storage to B2 as offsite backup and while I'm at it finally got around having a look at resticprofiles to simplify my restic backups on all my systems. Highly recommend it as it reduced my mental overhead of doing regular backups quite a bit!

I'm setting up Seafile and trying to swap everything from docker to podman. The longer term goal is that once everything is on podman, I'll get a new NVME drive and install MicroOS so I can retire my old SATA SSD (I've had it for 10 years or so, across 3 PCs).

I'm also considering setting up Forgejo and getting a worker to build my Rust projects.

A third, and hopefully final attempt at getting an iredmail setup going. SPF, DKIM & DMARC all checking out fine. It's actually working this time. Need to get the ISP to change our PTR record though, last bit of the puzzle.

Also picked up a used negate device, so we now have pfsense fronting everything. That's allowed me to move the original router to a better location and put it in AP mode.

Emby media server moved off a Synology and into a proxmox container. Finally, we can stream high def with the hardware acceleration we weren't getting before.

Pushed Wireguard back onto my network. I've been a Tailscale user for a couple of years, but never really saw the need for it for me as I'm the only user of the service. :)

I will freely admit though, there's nothing wrong with the service and honestly is great if you are behind a CGNAT router or don't want to use Cloudflare for your tunneling.

I finally got link warden up and running, but I'm chasing down some failures on a few websites.

Also realized that me biting the bullet for unlimited bandwidth (screw you Comcast!) means I can run archive team warrior, so that's been going.

Many issues this week:

• Broke external-dns on my kube cluster because I updated my Pihole to v6
• Thinking of a way to expose a game server externally (usually used CF tunnels for specific services, but couldn’t get it to work cause it’s TCP/UDP and not HTTP traffic)

But at least i got my Velero backups working on an private S3

Personally I'm mostly involved with my homelab migration so there's not too much on the selfhosting page except os updates. I set up meshmini earlier to access my thin clients via vPro/AMT but I need to configure the clients before being able to actually using meshmini. Once I'm done with that I'll finally be able to set up Lemmy and Pine pods.

My selfhosted stuff currently works fine without me doing much which feels good and lets me focus on hardware stuff currently.

Got Prometheus and Grafana setup with https on my Talos Linux cluster. Tried to use cert-manager with a DNS01 Challenge with Let's Encrypt but was using a local TLD and found out it won't issue it. So I had to switch to a local issuer. Was using metallb to gain a routable ip, I used the nginx-ingress controller for Prometheus and Grafana. Next time I can tinker I'll place the rest of my services behind it.

Experimented with selfhosting a Woodpecker CI as a complement to my Forgejo.

Works quite nicely, I just need to set up a native ARM64 agent as the overhead of cross compilation on x86_64 is quite big.

I spent half a dozen hours this weekend trying to get Proxmox running on a 2nd hand laptop, but I can't get it to run without sounding like a jet engine. The machine did fine when I ran Mint and used it as a laptop - but even after blacklisting the dGPU and forcing all the CPU cores to powersaving, I'm still making heat like crazy.

Plan B is to put Mint back on it and install podman and see if fan noise is a problem then. But I'd rather have podman running in an unprivileged LXC.

I like iOS shortcuts. This week, I created an iOS shortcut to scan my Plex library. Now this may seem weird since there is an option to scan a library from the official Plex iOS app and there are also options to scan the library automatically or periodically. For various reasons (excuses), I didn't like that the official app only lets you scan one library at a time and I have automatic/periodic scans turned off to avoid network drive access, so I created the shortcut to scan from my phone any time I felt like I wanted to trigger it.

1. Create a new iOS shortcut
2. Add the "Get contents of URL" action
3. Get your X-Plex-Token (see instructions on official website)
4. Set the URL in your action to: https://{ip_address}:{port}/library/sections/all/refresh?X-Plex-Token={plex_token}