What’s up, what’s down and what are you not sure about?
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.
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Email… My wife really wants to further de-google, this means moving custom domains off gsute.
Do I move to proton/tuta or go back to self hosting email again like I did for years until about 2010?
If I self host, do I do it at home or on the server that runs my lemmy instance?
Cool your wife is into de googling! My wife thinks I’m a conspiracy nut. I have custom domains on proton and its been great, but with their moves toward AI and crypto who knows. I would probably try tuta if I was setting it up now - but who knows if they will eventually go wonkey then you will wish you self hosted anyway 🤝
I self-host my email using Mailcow, and use a VPS for it. I don’t trust my home server to be reliable enough, and the VPS providers have nicer equipment (modern AMD EPYC CPUs, enterprise SSDs, datacenter-grade 10Gbps or 40Gbps connections, etc). I use a separate VPS just for my emails - it’s the one thing I want to ensure is secure, so I didn’t want any other random software (that could potentially have security issues) running on it…
I also use an outbound SMTP relay to avoid having to deal with IP reputation. SMTP2Go has a free plan for sending <1000 emails per month.
It kind of amazes me that, in this day and age, email has turned out to be the lynchpin of security. Email as a 2FA endpoint. Email password reset systems. If email is compromised, everything else falls. They used to tell us not to put anything in email that you wouldn’t put on a postcard…how did this happen?
That and email protocols are outdated and aren’t too secure. For example:
- Neither SMTP nor IMAP have no way to use two factor authentication.
- Spam blocking is so hard because SMTP was not designed with it in mind.
- SMTP has no way to do end-to-end encryption which is why you need to layer things like GPG on top.
IMAP has a modern replacement in JMAP, but it’s not widespread. SMTP is practically impossible to replace since it’s how email servers communicate with each other.
The “solution” has been for companies to make their own proprietary protocols and apps, for example the Gmail and Outlook apps combined with a Gmail or Microsoft 365 account respectively.
Was using realvnc to vnc from remote, it was easy and cloud driven.
Fully swapped to tailscale and normal VNC sever now.
Performance is good and works great for the troubleshooting and small GUI stuff I need to do.
I’ve finally powered on a 15 year old machine to run a bot I’ve been writing. The thing is slow as dirt and stuck behind a flakey power line network, but it’s working. I got to write my first systemd service definition, which is kind of cool.
The computer I’m using currently, I set the BIOS in 2012. WHen I built it, I stuffed every last piece of cutting edge tech of the time into it. Dual CPU, SLI, started with 64gb ram then later on maxed the board out at 128gb. It’s still a workhorse tho. It’s one of the three I use all the time for music production, selfhosting etc.
My machine is not a workhorse. I got it second hand. It has around 8gb of RAM, and an 80gb HDD I found in a laptop.
But it’s enough to work as a testbed, so it’s fine with me.
This is the home lab creed: You do with what you have. Before I accumulated a bit of equipment, I’ve used laptops, RPi, minicomputers, at one time I had a cluster of Wyse thin clients bootstrapped together.
I’ve been learning bash and working on scripts to automate stuff in my homelab. It’s been a lot of fun. I’m currently working on a script that will rename the movies and TV shows I rip from my DVD collection.
The script queries the tmdb api, presents me with a mwnu of matches if there’s multiple matches, renames the media files according to jellyfin spec, and then places them in the proper folders to be indexed by Jellyfin and Kodi.
Bash variable manipulation is really, really fun.
Would you mind sharing the code?
More incus:
- mounting persistent storage into containers (cheating by exporting NFS from my proxmox zfs into the incus host.
- wrote a pruning backup script for containers, runs daily
- passed through hardware (quicksync) into jellyfin container (it works!)
- launched an OCI container (docker home assistant) natively in incus (this is a game-changer!)
Next:
- build 2nd incus node
- move all containers from proxmox to incus
- decom proxmox
- setup Debian with NFS export
I hear about Incus being the next best thing. I’ve never played around with it. Is it all that and a bag o’ chips?
Side question, but where are you hearing this about incus?
I’m wrapping up 9 years of using proxmox and I have very specific reasons for switching to incus, but I this is the third time I’m fielding questions in the last month about incus.
I read a lot. LOL I might not understand it all, but I read TBs of articles and stuff.
I think so.
It is LXD + KVM, so way more and finer tune control on lxc instances. It can run OCI images as well, so for docker instances with only a few configs and no persistent storage, it is actually quite handy. For docker instances that need pretty complicated compose files, I just run docker inside an lxc for now, until I figure that out.
Does Incus allow you to use a VM with a GUI? One thing that’s nice about Proxmox is I have one VM with a very basic lxqt setup for when I need that, and I can either use remote-viewer + the spice protocol to access it or access it through the Proxmox web ui. That’s been very handy.
I’ve just moved and I’m setting up my machines. NIC died in my DIY router just before the move so I’m upgrading to 2.5/10 Gbps at the same time.
What NIC are you looking at and what OS have you chosen?
It’s a complete experiment with cheap network gear from China. I have a HP T730 mini PC that serves as my router. I’m installing a cheap 2.5 Gbps NIC for LAN side. Then there’s a switch with 4x2.5 Gbps Ethernet and 2xSFP+ ports. My two main machines (PC and home server) are getting 10 Gbps SFP+ cards that I’ll attach with DAC cables.
OS is OpenWRT, because I’ve been connecting over WiFi to the Internet in both old and new locations. OPNsense just will not work with any wireless adapter I’ve tried. I will try agan once I route Ethernet to my room.
I’m curious if all of this works with cheap network gear. Today I’m configuring a fresh OpenWRT installation on the router.
I have a self-hosted AI system that works pretty well. I can interact with it via my phone, the shell, my IRC server, and I can verbally talk to it.
But I want to get it to remember things, so I need to start working on RAG or something. Eventually I’d like to be able to have it draft emails for me, and schedule appointments.
Same, except the irc, I have a python thing to interface.
Stealing your idea, that sounds awesome.
I’d appreciate some feedback on what I’m looking to do.
I’m wanting to follow the FUTO guide, but I don’t want to build a router, to save on some money for now.
So I’m planning on buying a Mikrotik MT RB750Gr3 and putting OpenWrt on it, then using my current TP-Link Archer C6 as a wireless access point. (will buy a dedicated AP in the future).
One thing I wonder is, if there is a Mikrotik model that would be better?It looks like the hEX refresh is the same price from that vendor.
RB5009 is better but more expensive. There’s a PoE version that can power your WiFi APs in the future.
I also question the decision to put OpenWrt on it. RouterOS is solid. There’s a learning curve, but it’s worth it if you’re a nerd.
I’m using the rb5009 but im using RouterOS not openwrt. Any reason why you’d want to do that?
I personally think if you’re buying a purpose built hardware and then putting your own software on it, you should move to a mini computer with OpnSense.
Besides adding a UPS, how do you deal with power failures? Are you somewhere where they’re not much of a problem?
In my experience mini computers don’t handle power failures nearly as well as purpose-built hardware.
After several power failures the SSD on my Raspberry Pi became so corrupted it wouldn’t boot, and I was 250 miles away at the time and lost access to my home network for weeks. Overlay file systems work but are a PITA to maintain. By contrast my routers have never had a problem even with repeated power failures, so instead of relying on the Pi I’ve moved my DNS and Wireguard servers to my router.
All of my remote routers are running RouterOS without anything on top of it. RouterOS is powerful enough for anything I throw on it. But I am using much beefier routers, I have 2 x 5009 and a HAP AX3 which have plenty of flash and ram ro run the additional packages I need.
As for normal computers, I have it on a UPS and I backup core files to off-site areas. Additionally, I buy SSDs that have a little bit of powerloss protection.
I’ve never had issues with mini PCs but I’ve had issues with PIs. I’ve since switched to high endurance SD cards for my Pis and they’ve been rock solid. One’s actually semi exposed to the elements for about a year now without a hiccup.
With RouterOS you can still use DoH with either a self hosted list or a selected ad list. If you want to selfhost a DNS server I’d just host a Adguard Home instance on a VPS for all of your devices.
I also have 2 VPN system for my remote management on 2 separate systems. I learned that the hard way when one of my clients is 8 timezones away.
Power loss protection on SSDs is an interesting addition I hadn’t come across before.
We live in a very windy area and power blinks are common. A high endurance MicroSD was in use the first time the Pi wouldn’t boot, but I was in town and it was just annoying. It was a big issue when the Pi wouldn’t boot from the SSD while I was out of the country.
We don’t have high bandwidth demands so any decent OpenWRT router works fine and supports both Adguard Home and Wireguard. What I really like about putting WG in particular on the router is that if the router is up, WG is working, and the routers come back up without fail after every power outage. A 2nd Wireguard instance still runs on my Pi but since switching to WG on the router a year ago there hasn’t been a reason to even connect to it.
My problems with the Pi had me looking for other solutions and I ended up with a mini Dell laptop running Debian. (Can’t easily run WG on it due to some software conflicts.) It alleviates the need for a UPS and runs for 6+ hours if the power goes out, rather the minutes provided by my small UPS.
One of these days I’ll find a bogus reason to talk myself into upgrading the router with more powerful hardware. Mikrotik looks like a great option and I’ll take a look at RouterOS. Thanks for the info.
RouterOS has WG built in as well as ZeroTier. RouterOS has become quite powerful lately, but make sure you have at least an ARM/ARM64 CPU for it.
Building a simple workflow with AI agent for our community watch group. Also building an open source automation platform, currently working through GUI templates for it.
A new homepage for the business of my wife.
I plan to use Hugo for it, I just wish the documentation would be better.
For the homepage I need a few additional “non-blog” pages and from the documentation I am not sure how to do that the best way.
But to be honest, I have not really looked deeper into that, so it is very possible that I just missed something.
Ive been using Zola for a bit now and love it. Very simplistic. Could be worth a look but simple pages can be html or markdown. Couldnt be much simpler. Super fast to build
Debatting with myself and to a lesser degree what to do in terms of our homeserver situation. While the proxmox node has more than enough CPU and RAM capacity left, the NAS, an older Synology, is full to the brim, EOL and needs replacement.And sadly being a mini PC the proxmox node is unable to get the HDs connected.
So something new is needed and I would rather have my setup streamlined and combine the two.
But that is… More difficult than anticipated. I really would like something power saving with ECC ram that can take at least two PCI-e (SFP+ and a potential graphic card for AI later on). That can take 4,better 6 HDs. And at least one,better two NVMe. …that basically means self building which I am happy with, but all current builds I calculate come out somewhere south of 2000€ (including two new HDs, as two old ones need to go). And that’s sadly out of the financial possibility at the moment.
If only the fucking Ugreen (DXP6800)would support ECC. While not ideal in terms of PCI-e it would be enough to do the trick.
I use a little mini PC with a DAS connected via USB. So you don’t need to go full server to expand the storage.
Finally installed jellyfin when I realized I could use rclone to mount 10G of free disk space from box (with client side encryption using rclone) on my server.
Very easy to install on Debian, but the plugins are a security nightmare. Jellyfin devs are kinda dumb.
A LOT of plugins in many projects are a huge concern. I say this as someone who ran security for an OS for a while. It’s just people making bad decisions for everyone and then hand-waving the risks when questioned.
I am currently arguing what to do with my gaming rig and home theater. Either get a long cable which would need a DP-to-HDMI adapter or get a used mini PC (which is currently cheaper than a Raspberry Pi?) and setup Sunshine and Moonlight (but over WiFi and not LAN) to be more flexible when I eventually move the two into separate rooms. Does anyone have some experience with that? Maybe also latency over wireless network?
I use sunshine and moonlight using a pi 5 running Android TV as the client. It works perfectly for the occasional video stream but latency for games is a bit rough. You’ll probably be fine playing something relaxed like Stardew Valley but platformers (I’ve tried Ultimate Chicken Horse) and racing games (Mario Kart Wii running in Dolphin) are just bad enough to be unplayable. This is with both devices connected over Ethernet (albeit through a powerline adapter and my router is fairly cheap) so WiFi will probably be worse.
Not sure if sunshine and moonlight just have loads of overhead or if there’s a part of my setup causing the latency.
I don’t have the quantitative metrics, but I will say that I had the flu last year and I just laid on the couch with my steam deck and streamed cyberpunk using Moonlight. The latency was imperceptible to my flu brain, and it was a much better experience than playing for an hour at a much lower quality natively on the deck. I have a friend who also streams his desktop to his Apple TV (hardwired desktop, wireless Apple TV) and he beat metal gear solid V like that.
Shoutout to @[email protected] for helping me appreciate the joy of docker compose. I got to set up Navidrome and it’s been great!
With that said, I have a security-related question: at what point in self-hosting am I exposed to the outside internet that warrants things like reverse proxies and other security measures? I’m currently typing router IPs (e.g. 192.168.x.x) to access the services, so is my machine exposed if the only people intending to connect are local on our wireless network?
There’s nothing wrong with making a reverse proxy only for use inside your homelab. It’s one way to resolve internal DNS queries and give addresses to your services. It’s perhaps the best, because it’s the only way I know that doesn’t necessitate remembering port numbers.
E.g. You are hosting something at 192.168.1.20 on port 3310. Even if you set a local DNS record for pihole.itjust.donn to resolve to 192.168.1.20, you’ll still have to type pihole.itjust.donn:3310 to access it. The same isn’t true with a reverse proxy.
This is good to know because I’m learning about nginx currently, so I’m glad it has practical use without opening up my network 🤘
To expose your stuff to the outside internet, you need to actively set port forward in your internet router, you won’t do that by accident.
What a relief, thanks for the clarity! I have vague memories of doing that as a teenager to play various games with friends, which sounds like something risky a teenager would do 😅
i run coolify and I have to make my own solutions so I’m learning a lot about docker.
