A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Nothing new, just peacefully chugging along hosting my blog, Jellyfin, Radicale for calendar and contacts. Still long-term searching for a photo storing & sharing (gallery) solution, as well as a better music server. Maybe Navidrome is what I'm looking for.
Oh, and I need to renew my SSL certificate soon. I don't like Letsencrypt. Everything EU-based, I'm not going to start making US-based contracts.
I feel like my little Pi server is set up nicely now. At least I'm at the point where I'm not concerned about technically maintaining it. It's as secure as I want it to be and I've tweaked my maintenance scripts slightly to avoid any unexpected issues.
I tried installing snikket but I couldn't figure out how to get it to work with my Caddyfile using my current wildcard domain cert configuration. I'll try again another time when I'm motivated again. It's a low priority to me.
The last changes I made were adding logs and making them accessible to myself. So far they are all boring and predictable. Which is good news. It's also nice to see that I'm the only person accessing it. The bots haven't found my little corner of the internet yet.
Right now I'm taking a break from self-hosted stuff to work on my gardens and two artsy projects. A wooden carving for a friend's birthday and an overly complicated shell script that has no real purpose. Although I've learned lots from it already so it's not a complete waste of time.
How did you approach the logging?
Since my logs barely move, I just made aliases to where the logs are so it's quick display and scan them within the terminal. I'm basically just viewing the system logs, fail2ban log and Caddy's log so it's fairly quick and simple for me.
The only change I'd like to do is change the output of Caddy's log file so it's not a long single line of information per output. I'll have to do a bit more reading on that so I know what information I want to keep and how I want to visually organize it. At least for the moment, I am familiarising myself with what I am looking at and am slowly figuring out what information is relevant to me.
I like to keep my systems as simple and lean as possible which seems to strongly reflect my general approach to life. I find that kind of interesting.
If you like, check GoAccess on the Caddy Files. You can watch them through that instead of less/cat/whatever to see a nice Dashboard. It helps getting a better overview IMHO.
It looks interesting and seems like it would be easy to set up. I'll play with it and see how I like it. Thanks for the suggestion
I am at the very beginning of my journey taking those first baby steps. As I don't yet understand all the sysadmin stuff, I'm treading rather carefully to avoid making unfuckable mistakes.
I recently switched to Void on my daily driver so it has been a bit of a trial to get used to a new OS and configure it correctly. Nevertheless, it's been a great learning experience.
Alongside it I've downloaded OpenWrt on my router and begun to configure it as well (still need to deal with the Wireguard and Unbound config).
For the actual server I managed to secure an old Dell Optiplex. In the near future, I plan to flash it with Libreboot and then install Debian or FreeBSD (apparently great ZFS support) on it. Though I've still no idea whether I should use Proxmox and how I should format my drives (one 500GB SSD and 4TB HDD) for maximum effiency and for the possibility of later easily upgrading my storage capacity.
When I've finally past these steps, I plan to selfhost music services, as well as few other basic services. My goal at the moment is to replace Spotify for my whole family. But it's still a long way to go.
Just sitting here surprised that my proxmox backups didn't interrupt my VMs.
O.o Should I be concerned that this is surprising?
I don't believe there's cause for concern. I just assumed based on the prompts while setting up the backups that it would actually restart the VMs. I was wrong.
I understand that COW file-systems can do snapshots at "instantaneous" points in time and KVM snapshots ram state as well, but I still worry that a database could be backed up at just the wrong time and be in an inconsistent state at restore. I'd rather do less frequent backups of a stopped VM and be more confident it will restore and boot correctly. Maybe I'm a curmudgeon?
I suppose it boils down to a threat model. I wouldn't lose sleep if any of my VMs imploded and I had to rebuild them from scratch.
I'm in planning for upgrading my NAS. It has a 10Gbps fiber connection, and my main workstation does, as well. My goal is to be able to saturate that with both read and write speed. Timeline is 6 to 8 months out.
Budget in the range of $2000-3000. Currently doing RAID1 on a pair of 18TB disks. I usually want to double that with each upgrade, but there's some leeway on there.
I think my best option is 6 NVMe sticks on RAID6. 8TB sticks would give 32TB of usable space. Not quite double, but close enough.
I would like easy hot swap capabilities. Unfortunately, it looks like the only option for that would be Icydock, and those are expensive. The other way is to go down to SATA drives where relatively cheap 2.5" hot swap bays exist, but a setup that can saturate 10Gbps writes with reasonable redundancy would be even more expensive.
Need a motherboard that has a pair of 16x slots. One needs to be a GPU for Jellyfin transcoding. Also need a 4x slot for a 10Gbps sfp+ NIC. With two NVMe slots on the mobo, this should be workable without going to Threadripper or Epyc chips and such--idle power consumption sucks on those. Totally giving up on hot swap here, though.
There are 8tb NVMe sticks that are priced close to fit in this budget range. I had found one Samsung stick that, according to Amazon price trackers, was around $300 in the recent past (can't seem to find it now). A lot will depend on tariffs, of course.
One surprise is that a Kioxia CD6-R u.3 drive at 15.36TB goes for $1150. 4 drives on RAID10 would be a workable space upgrade. That setup would be out of budget, but not as much as I would have expected. Referb deals or future price movement might put it in range.
I'm setting up a yunohost machine for my brother as a birthday present. I got him a domain good for 10 years, and installed nextcloud and Jellyfin with some home videos digitized from our parents' vhs tapes.