I know for many of us every day is selfhosting day, but I liked the alliteration. Or do you have fixed dates for maintenance and tinkering?
Let us know what you set up lately, what kind of problems you currently think about or are running into, what new device you added to your homelab or what interesting service or article you found.
This post is proudly sent from my very own Lemmy instance that runs at my homeserver since about ten days. So far, it’s been a very nice endeavor.
I also finally set up Lemmy on my home lab, as well as moving Authelia from Docker to bare metal.
Other than that, I’ve been struggling to find any other self-hosted apps that would actually be useful to me.
I’m building services out for my family as things enshittify. Moved the family over to an immich instance, run a family blog on Wordpress (working on rolling my own since it’s over complicated and with all the Wordpress shenanigans…), plex (lifetime account, works for now). I have a number of self-built projects as well, a “momboard” like system that is integrated with my Wordpress blog for access and control, a pi based backup server that lives at my friends house and nails a VPN connection to my router and I’m playing with Meshtastic as an offline communication system for my kids scout troop when we’re camping without cell signal. Lots of home automation with home assistant as well.
I host it all on Debian servers, raspberry pi’s and esp32 devices (Meshtastic and home automation). I used to run kubernoodles but it was more complicated than needed and for my use case, docker, ansible and bash scripts manage it all just fine.
How’s your experience with meshtastic been? I’ve just started experimenting with it. There are very few nodes in my area, so my potential use cases seem limited.
Very limited so far. I don’t have much near me but there has been enough sproradic connectivity that I pick up the occasional chatter in the default channel and have about 145 nodes it’s aware of.
Mostly been my son and I playing around. He wants to get his neighborhood friends involved :).
I migrated my whole native service infrastructure to Docker services this weekend. I prepared for it the previous weeks; basically looking up information about details I wasn’t sure about. The services were mailing, file cloud, and traccar with modoboa, ownCloud respectively. I moved to mailcow and Nextcloud and replaced my feedly account with NextCloud News as a bonus. So far pretty happy with it, had a couple set-backs but also learned a lot in the process. This was the first time for me doing something productive with Docker
My current project is email. Setting up Mailcow and moving my domains over to VMs on a OVH KS-3 server right here in Canada. I’m sick of depending on cloud email providers and want more control of my data. Also getting Addy.io setup to move my aliases over from SimpleLogin. End game is to dump Proton and go all selfhosted for email and Mullvad for VPN. For Mullvad I found that you can buy a 6 or 12 month gift card vouncher on Amazon and it works out to being less than paying Mullvad directly per month.
Been messing around w/ podman, and after hours of slamming my head against the wall, I decided Seafile isn’t worth it. :) It launches a bunch of stuff inside one container, and I just couldn’t figure out how to get that to work w/ quadlet (worked fine w/
podman kube playthough).I got forgejo set up and now I’m looking into setting up runners so I can finally migrate off hosted gitlab onto my own forgejo instance.
Some other things I’m planning on doing this week:
- migrate existing services to podman quadlet from docker compose - will make each existing service into a pod and play w/ pod networking
- set up technitium - tested it locally and it worked well, so just need to move it and configure it; hope to use it as the primary DNS for my house
- set up owncloud ocis - there’s a new POSIX FS option, which was my main hangup when I last looked into a nextcloud alternative (I only need storage + collabora)
- probably some kind of dashboard, because the number of services I host is getting a bit long
If I get time, I want to install openSUSE MicroOS onto my NAS and start migrating everything to it (from openSUSE Leap). I really like the idea of an immutable base OS, and my NAS is already 90% containers (pretty much just Samba left). I need to fix some permission issues anyway (keep having to
chownmy videos so samba and jellyfin can work together), and this should make things a bit more obvious.I’ll probably also start a blog about my self-hosting journey, because the info around podman is kinda sparse, especially when it comes to quadlet.
Edit: got OCIS working, but it was a bit of a pain. Starting that blog really sounds like a good idea…
This week I realised my Mastodon instance was severely out of date because I was using nix flakes and didn’t autoupdate but now that’s been fixed 😄
Total noob to Docker (desktop for windows) and I’m just trying to figure out how (and where) to add a config to my Navidrome image or change lines on the image itself, to point it to my music library and create admin login credentials (ಥ﹏ಥ) If I can accomplish that then I eventually want to try Immich or NextCloud afterward.
I want to switch to Linux but I’m not sure where to start! I want to
- play current-gen games (graphically speaking) on steam, as well as
- lots of retro games with Launchbox/RetroArch
- do 3D modeling in blender, and
- produce music in a free DAW.
I don’t know if any of those factors impose restrictions due to software/hardware differences (or if that even makes a difference), but I want to move over everything I can into a linux environment
All of those should be fine, the main caveats w/ Linux are:
- anti-cheat games generally don’t work - there are exceptions, and this is a limitation by the developer, not Linux
- Windows-only software can be iffy - e.g. photoshop and whatnot
- using an NTFS drive on Linux can have surprises - don’t mount your game lib on Linux, just redownload
Blender works perfectly fine, gaming on Steam and Heroic works well, emulators work well, and while I don’t know anything about Linux music production, I know there are software options available.
Anyway, I recommend buying a separate disk and trying Linux out. That way you don’t touch your current Windows install while messing w/ stuff.
Good to know, thank you for the tips!
I need to migrate off Docker Desktop for Windows and Storage Spaces but I fear the process will be difficult due to my data volume and the stupidity of Windows. I should never have gone Windows, but I wanted to use Steam Big Picture off the media PC and didn’t want to deal with getting that functional on Linux.
But Docker Desktop for Windows keeps crashing WSL and bricking the network devices randomly, and also continuously grows memory consumption until the machine reboots. Piece of shit.
Try Podman Desktop if you want a GUI to manage your container , and docker desktop is the source of the the crashes. You can run docker images / container / kube through it as well as podman one.
Windows Docker is so bad, I don’t even know why it’s a thing.
Some good planning might make the migration less painful. I would recommend a ZFS or other COW storage solution under the docker host so you can do snapshot backups and not have to worry about quiesing databases, etc.
Yea I’m gonna do zfs or something when I get set up properly again. I’ve got 2 16TB HDDs and Storage Spaces won’t let me pull a drive out :v
I think I’m gonna have to make a new Storage Space and slowly grow that one and shrink the other as I basically shift the extra storage budget between the two until the data is on just one of my drives without redundancy, and then I’ll pull that drive, dual boot Ubuntu or something, format, get everything prepared, and then mount, copy, start services, and then go back and kill the old storage spaces and then never run Windows for anything meaningful again.
Check the returns policy, but if you could buy a large external drive at something like BestBuy, do your copy then return it, that might be a lot safer than what you’re talking about. Just a thought.
Piece of shit.
Docker on Windows is was what ended up pushing me to Linux on my workstation. What an absolute pain in the ass.
I’m working on my first kubernetes cluster. I’m trying to set the systems up with NixOS. I can get a kublet and a control plane running. But I’m getting permission errors when trying to use kubectl rootless on the system running the control plane. I think I figured out which file i need to change, now I just want to record that change in my configuration.nix.
nixos doesn’t play well with rootless containers in my experience
Ah sorry to hear that. Did you find something better that works for you? I’m open to suggestions :D
Not who you asked but I moved to Talos Linux for k8s
I’m curious how this goes for you. I run all my machines on NixOS except my k8s cluster which is Talos for now. I have been thinking of switching to Nix for that too.
I followed along the nixos wiki for kubernetes and creating the “master” kublet is super easy when you set easyCerts = true. Problem is, it spits out files to /var/lib/kubernetes/secrets/ that is owned by root. Specifically, the cluster-admin.pem file. If I want to push commands to the cluster using kubectl I have to elevate to a root shell. I could just chmod or chown the file but that seems like a security risk.
Now I’m not familiar with k8s at all. This is my first go through, so I could be doing something wrong or missing a step. I saw something about the role based security but I haven’t jumped down that rabbit hole yet. Any tips for running kubectl without root?
Maintenance day is when I log into my server once every 3 month because I forgot it (as everything is working fine).
But I just discovered OpenSuse microOS, while looking at the docs for my laptop Thumbleweed, and now I want to try it with no real reasons. Maybe it is just an excuse to buy a new Raspberry pi.
I’m looking at moving my NAS to it.
I currently use openSUSE Leap, so to prep for the switch, I’m moving everything to podman.
I’ve never had a system update go bad on Leap, but I am being impacted by old system packages but don’t want to jump to Tumbleweed. I’m hoping this will give me a more up to date base and force me to put things into containers properly.
I want to host a personal dashboard with weather forecast and upcoming appointments. I couldn’t find anything that fits my needs so now I‘m building my own.
Cool! Home Assistant has it and I can imagine Nextcloud as well but those are overkill just for that.
I use magic mirror for that. I tried homeeassistant but I’m alleric to a million PIs and they make installing any other way hard. (Rant about vm versions not supporting extentions)
what’s maintenance? is that when an auto-update breaks everything and you spend an entire weeknight looking up tutorials because you forgot what you did to get this mess working in the first place?
I know you’re half joking. But nevertheless, I’m not missing this opportunity to share a little selfhosting wisdom.
Never use auto update. Always schedule to do it manually.
Virtualize as many services as possible and take a snapshot or backup before updating.
And last, documentation, documentation, documentation!
Happy selfhosting sunday.
I think auto update is perfectly fine, just check out what kind of versioning the devs are using and pin the part of the version that will introduce breaking changes.
I just like it when things break on scheduled maintenance and I have time to fix it or the possibility to roll back with minimal data loss, instead of an auto update forcing me spend a week night fixing it or running a broken system till I have the time.
You can have the best of both worlds - scheduled auto updates on a time that usually works for you.
With growing complexity, there are so many components to update, it’s too easy to miss some in my experience. I don’t have everything automated yet (in fact, most updates aren’t) but I definitely strive towards it.
In my experience, the more complex a system is, the more auto updates can mess things up and make troubleshooting a nightmare. I’m not saying auto updates can’t be a good solution in some cases, but in general I think it’s a liability. Maybe I’m just at the point where I want my setup to work without the risk of it breaking unexpectedly and having to tinker with it when I’m not in the mood. :)
There’s a fine line between “auto-updates are bad” and “welp, the horribly outdated and security hole riddled CI tool or CMS is how they got in”. I tend to lean toward using something like renovate to queue up the updates and then approve them all at once. I’ve been seriously considering building out a staging and prod env for my homelab. I’m just not sure how to test stuff in staging to the point that I’d feel comfortable auto promoting to prod.
I do love how little maintenance is needed until you have to re-learn everything you forgot
Yes
No you just continue updating until it’s fixed again.
I’ve had this happen twice in two weeks since installing Watchtower and have since scheduled it to only run on Friday evening…
Nothing greater than crashing your weekend evening just trying to watch a movie on a broken jellyfin server :'D
I started hosting audiobookshelf since Jellyfin was pretty clunky for audiobooks.
how is your experience with it? I’m considering setting up audiobook shelf as well.
It’s been great for me so far.
It’s worked really well for me.
I just set up wanderer and workout-tracker. Along with installing gadgetbridge on my phone, I now have a completely self hosted fitness/workout stack with routes, equipment tracking, heatmaps, general health metrics like HRV, heart rate, etc through my Garmin watch, without having Garmin Connect installed. Awesome!
That sounds so cool! Not using any tracking/nav devices other than my phone but currently my routes just stay local without having any kind of management for them.
Wait, is that possible? I thought gadgetbridge didn’t work with Garmin! Nedd to check this out. Thanks for the inspiration!
Holy shit! I didn’t know about GadgetBridge. Is there a way to connect it to Home Assistant?
For the first time I configured ssh with pubkey auth.
Auth between windows (agent) and alpine (host) to use as a helper/backup proxy in veeam (helper is used to mount file level restore assistant)
Took me 3 hours to find out that
Windows didnt know the private key
Pubkey auth wasnt active
Fucked up pubkey auth
Alpine isnt supported by Veeam so it didnt work
Needed to install a small debian VM.:|
At least I did my first pubkey auth setup.It gets better.
