What’s happening on your servers? Any interesting news things you tried?
I didn’t do anyone other than updating Mastodon (native deployment) lately due to a lack of time. Reading so much about Immich caused me to consider trying it in parallel to Nextcloud but I’m not sure if I want to have everything twice.
Not quite homelab, but I’m about to install Linux Mint on my mom’s laptop and that had me thinking about creating an off-site backup in her place again since she has a fiber connection. I’m still not sure about the potential design though, but currently my only backup is in the same rack as the live stuff.
Working on getting bazarr to work with Plex, turns out it still requires radarr/sonarr even if I don’t sail the seven seas. Guess I’ll be learning the entire stack tonight :)
I’ve been trying to convince a VPS to run two instances of mariadb - one for local databases, one to replicate the homelab. Got mariadb@server and mariadb@replica sorted out through systemd, but now stuck on replication from mysql to mariadb. Looks like I’ll be ripping out mariadb and putting everything on mysql.
Have you checked if statement-based replication works from mysql to mariadb?
I’m hung up on unrecognized charset #255. Tried rolling everything back to utfmb3; suppose I could go all the way to Latin1. I imagine there’s a lot of depth I could learn, but dropping mariadb for mysql seems like the path of least resistance right now.
eta: got the character set sorted. Had to make a new dump, confirm that everything in the dump was utf8mb3, then re-prime the replica with that data. Wasn’t enough just to change the character sets internally.
So it works now! Good job
Interesting using systemd for that, I’d probably have chosen containers for that.
What’s the reason for replication vs. dumps? Does the client failover to the replica?
I’m not a systemd guru, but it turned out pretty easy. https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/using-systemd.html#systemd-multiple-mysql-instances Basically just make
[]sections in my.cnf thensystemd start mysqld@copyand systemd is smart enough to passcopyinto mysql.I did it slightly different, using
systemctl edit mysql@.serviceto define different default files for each instance, then[]sections in each of those files. Seems like theportoption for each has to go in a[]section, but otherwise ok.Replication because I want to put some live data, read-only, on the VPS, exposed to the world while the ‘real’ database stays safely hidden in my intranet. SSH tunnel so the replica can talk to the real database.
Love the post haha! Nothing much here things run rather stable and with low maintance right now.
I’m super glad I arrived this state and don’t have to do anything mostly. Just when I want to change stuff :)
I mean I still do from time to time. Breaking changes require some attention and migrations. But overall its good and not a load of daily maintance.
I actually just wrote about today’s fun experience! https://gotosocial.michaeldileo.org/@mdileo/statuses/01K7YKQ9584YBY1QTYQ8RMW7SS
I finally got my home services covered with my website’s wildcard ssl. Which is great, because now I can setup ELK Stack and setup an auth portal on my vps, and get Plex and gitlab out of the house securely.
Finally finished setting up and testing a Peertube instance. The video stuff and object storage related things certainly make it more involved than other fediverse software, but overall it is working quite nicely. Just need to find some workable solution to using GPU acceleration in containers, but I think I mostly figured it out (might work after a server restart, but my sweet, sweet uptime makes me procrastinate on that 😅 ).
How much storage do you think you’ll need with caching external content? Does Peertube even do that?
Not automatically, but you can configure it to mirror certain video channels or individual videos. But I have not looked into that too much yet.
As for storage: a typical video you would find on such a platform with the different stored video resolutions and so on will take between 0.5 and 3 GB… depending on the length and how well it compresses.
At this point my whole setup is mostly in maintenance mode - I’ve got everything I need up and running, making some minor changes here and there (like swapping out StirlingPDF for Bento), and keeping things up to date. I only started this hobby about 6 months ago or so, and I’m really satisfied with where things are at. We’ll see when the next Big New Thing arrives.
I migrated iptimr-kuma to the new v2.0 release. The DB migration took a long time. I learned I probably should have run the vacuum command before the migration, but I never noticed the button in the settings before.
Also preparing Jellyfin for its new 10.11.0 which comes with another long running DB migration.
I threw a thinkcenter in my laundry room and did the bare minimum to securely SSH into it (fail2ban, nonstandard port, root login disabled, can’t login with password, etc), to be used as a testing platform for building my workplace a new website.
Just gotta relearn HTML/CSS and figure out what platform to use.
Also set up traefik/Authelia/maybe Anubis for the new domain and block any access outside of my home or workplace.
I actually did something for quite a while. Finished long overdue wiring for outdoor access point and one more camera, replaced a main switch since the old one started to behave unreliably, installed frigate (which still needs some work), cleaned up some wiring while messing around, updated a bunch of firmwares, replaced switch in garage to managed one and made some changes on my workstation and some other minor stuff.
Next would be to move cameras into their own VLAN and harden that setup a bit. And I really should get around on better backups for my VPS. But it’s a new week coming up, if the work isn’t too busy I might get something more done.
I’ve set up Kavita for my e-books. Nice UI, looks promising, and I’ve added some books. I haven’t really used it yet, because half of this was just an excuse to try podman (instead of docker). I wanted to set it up to run as unprivileged user, without the docker daemon running as root. That wasn’t too hard, but it was definitely a few extra steps.
But something about Kavita didn’t sit well with me. Maybe I don’t self-host enough stuff to know what’s normal, but there is a donate button, which I don’t mind, but its tooltip says: “You can remove this button by subscribing to Kavita+.”
I’m donating to a few software projects already, and I have developed a substantial amount of free software myself. There is nothing wrong with asking for money. But what I cannot stand is when software running on my own device is intentionally acting against my interests. And this tooltip was very clear about not letting me do something that I might want to do.
So I checked the source code for more. I found another anti-pattern: telemetry is opt-out instead of opt-in. But that seems to be it, I didn’t find anything worse than that. So… fair I guess, if the author wants it that way. It’s still free software. It looks like I could delete all the Kavita+ stuff myself and re-build. Which I’m going to do if I keep using it. But this is now an extra step that prevents me from just using it, because I need to feel in control of what I run. Kind of self-inflicted, I guess…
This looks cool, but I really wouldn’t like having the donate button right in front of me
If you reach the point of looking for a different solution, check out Calibre Automated. I tried several different things and this was the best one for me.
I’ve been running Kavita for a year and a half +, and honestly cannot tell where the donate button is, other than going into the settings and clicking the “kavita+” selection. Maybe I’m oblivious. Can you share what you’re seeing? As well with the telemetry option?
Telemetry is in Server -> General -> Allow Anonymous Usage Collection. When you opt-out, it also send a final message to the server that you’ve opted out. The the telemetry itself looks reasonable, I don’t mind sending it. It’s really just the dark pattern of opt-out vs of opt-in that bothers me.
The donate button is the heart in the bottom left menu (not visible in the settings). It’s unobtrusive. I wouldn’t bother to remove it, except the tooltip says that I have to pay to remove it - now it has to go. Asking for donations is fine, but asking for money to remove a button is disgusting.
Thanks!
Telemetry: I was able to find it, but it was already disabled. Maybe i noticed and unchecked it when I initially setup.
Donate button: Ah, I see where you mean. Interestingly I do not see it when accessing from my mobile device, either as a mobile site or requesting a desktop site. But when accessing it from a desktop browser I do see it in the bottom left.
A quick test shows ublock origin can block the element from showing. I believe that even if the user donates, it is not sufficient to hide this button, and the user must opt to pay for Kavita+ which is a subscription, not a one time license/etc, and forgoing it may lock other features a user is interested in.
https://wiki.kavitareader.com/donating/ https://wiki.kavitareader.com/kavita+/
I’ve been making another attempt to replace Docker with Podman. The issue is I can’t connect to my server through a web browser. I think it’s a firewall issue.
Networking and networking troubleshooting is a bit confusing for me and that’s the least favourite part about self hosting for me. Turns out I actually enjoy writing scripts more and the challenge of writing POSIX scripts especially.
If I can figure it out, I’ll probably write a guide for setting up Podman and Caddy on Alpine Linux since there isn’t a lot of recent information out there from what I found in my searches so far.
Did the switch from Docker to Podman a couple of months ago. Now I host all my services (arr-stack, Forgejo, Nextcloud, Authelia, Traefik, Immich… to name a few) on my VPS and mini pc/home server with Podman.
I recently sat up headscale to connect my VPS running the Traefik Proxy to my home lab to make some of my services running on there accessible from the internet. It was quite the journey, to say the least, as networking is not my forte either.
But feel free to drop me a pm if you need some inspiration or support, maybe I can help.
Thank you for the offer. I still need a bit more more time to experiment and zero in on the issue again. Fortunately my setup is quite simple and the only bottleneck will be Caddy.
I basically run Caddy which redirects to a static generated blog, simple file server page and a Kiwix instance. I’m mostly making a self hosted reference site of materials for Linux and Scripting resources.
One day I may add a Forgeo instance but currently my entire workflow exists around rsync. I’m happy just having my single file scripts hosted as text files and don’t really need the power of git. At least not at the moment.
Rootless podman cannot bind ports <1024, only root can by default (on pretty much any distro I guess). Have you done something like
sysctl net.ipv4.ip_unprivileged_port_start=80to allow non-root processes to bind to port numbers >=80?Good luck 🫡 I made the switch about half a year ago and went all in on rootless quadlets while I was at it. It was a pretty nightmarish couple weeks figuring out things like user id mappings and rootless permissions, but I got there eventually. Landed on a super neat Traefik config that should work for anyone and makes spinning up new quadlets with their own reverse proxied subdomains really simple. I should really post it somewhere…
In the end I wouldn’t exactly say it was worth it… but it sure feels cool to be fully moved into a more open/native container implementation.
Yeah, I mainly just want to move away to more open projects. When I first started, everyone kept suggesting using Cloudflare. After half a year using their service, I just felt icky the entire time.
In the past couple months I was able to move away and chose to protect myself by learning how to harden my server as well as hiding my server behind multiple layers of obscurity.
With my current setup, the only site traffic I get has only been myself and my custom ssh port only gets hit by bots about 3-10 times a week according to my logs. Only time will tell how effective my layers of obscurity will hold up but so far it seems to satisfy my needs better than I was expecting.
Once I get podman in a state I like, I’ll pretty much be all open sourced and all I’ll have to do for myself is be in maintenance mode unless I care to add a new service. I like to keep things simple so I don’t normally go crazy adding new services anyways.
So, serious question, should I self-host my servers in AWS?
Why would you?
Updated to OpenSuSE Leap 16.0 with the autotool and it broke some things, but nothing terrible. Had to fix network config and add back Packman for ffmpeg for Jellyfin to work but that was about it
Working on setup reserve proxy properly. With all this research and testing, im going to be ans expert in the area, just to never speak about to another human being… except on and another post




