Let’s do another round of this. What’s going on on your servers, any cool things? How’d the recent CVE flood tangent you and did it change how you see/do stuff?
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My automatic weekly backup ran for the first time last night. Everything worked nicely.
Same I switched from rsync to borg for my QNAP NAS since my offsite rsync host didn’t support file ACLs, and it’s finally working for the most part. Just need to figure out how to trigger zfs snapshots and backup from there in the docker container that has Borg and Borg UI in it instead of directly backing up from the mounted share which sometimes things like DB files are changing constantly. But at least the backup is running and most shares don’t have files changing all that often like the DB server’s share. It’s a big step in moving some stuff from VPSs to local servers and setting up some of the more private stuff and stuff that needs too much storage to host remotely like Jellyfin and Immich.
I practiced restoring my offsite backup this week. Good experience.
Then I printed and laminated the instructions and stored in two locations.
Just curious. How long does lamination last? I assume light hurts paper.
I dunno. Longer than bare paper, I hope.
I’m always super excited for this kind of stuff :D
If it’s automated, why only run it weekly?
Some backup methods – like VM backups on a basic Proxmox VE – only support full backups, so they put a lot of stress on the system and take a lot of space. Even if the performance hit or service disruption during the backup is manageable, a homelabber has finite disk space for backups, so there’s a tradeoff between RPO (most recent backup) and retention (oldest backup). Keeping 2 weeks of backups is cheap for weekly, expensive daily.
Ideally, everything would be backed up incrementally at fairly short intervals (short RPO, long retention), and restorable very quickly (short RTO). Getting there is a journey and weekly automatic backups is a great step.
But maybe losing a week of data is fine in their case. There are parts of my lab that would even be fine with monthly backups…
(that’s correct, I just wanted to add that Proxmox Backup Server supports incremental backups)
Ah that makes sense, thanks!
Decided to get back into podcasts recently, but baked-in ads and sponsor reads make standard listening unbearable.
I spent the weekend spinning up MinusPod, an open-source tool that detects ad reads and strips them using ffmpeg. It uses Whisper for local transcription, then feeds the transcript to an LLM to identify exact timestamps for sponsor segments and commercial breaks before slicing them out. I routed the text processing through Gemini Flash, which runs about $0.07 per episode. Clean, ad-free audio feeds with zero manual editing.
This reminds me of a project idea I’ve had.
Auto-muting a TV using an HDMI splitter and an SBC running some sort of algorithm that detects if there’s an ad on the TV.
iSponsorBlockTV?
Isn’t that only for YouTube?
But yes, something similar to that.
Everything behind a VPN now, Wireguard is my single point of failure…
Got a static IP routed in from https://getrealip.net/ so I can go back to hosting my own servers at home again properly without needing to hack up everything to route through Cloudflare with Tailscale. CGNAT is really messing up the internet. The service even supports reverse DNS, yay.
I’m into this as a regular thing!
Pinned, I think a lot of us really enjoy seeing what others have been doing to take back and make improvements to our own setup.
Glad you like it! I tried to go for a 2-3 week cycle as I realized every week is a bit too often (less comments). I also tried to do it alternating with the community on slrpnk but they’re currently down. I often forget to do these anyways :D
Anyone can make these, of course. I always enjoy doing them and talking about stuff I enjoy.
Nothing really cool per se, but I installed Radicale on my local network as I am slowly moving away from my cloud providers.
Once I find some hardware to host Immich, I’ll be fully self supporting on all my tech.
Yeah, working some radicale related stuff on my end. Roommate decided tasks.org was the most useful to-do list app/implementation for keeping track of house chores. Gotta say, hate that radicale has basically no front end, but boy has it been crazy easy on the plug and play side.
But yeah, looking to take an old tablet and set it up as a kiosk for showing the days chore list. Might be the beginnings of me trying my hand at building a full fledged smart speaker (X to doubt tho).
Radicale and immich replaced my nextcloud instance and I never looked back. I have both updating through apt like everything else and it’s amazing how little maintenance it requires.
I recently got around to setting up OIDC for my internal apps using Pocket ID.
Sonarr v5 adds OIDC support, currently only in beta
Jellyfin SSO plugin
Nextcloud with the Nextcloud OIDC app
Mealie, Paperless, and Immich natively support OIDC
Calibre-Web I migrated to AutoCaliWeb, which supports generic OIDC
Sadly Navidrome doesn’t natively support OIDC and forward auth is a bit jank due to the subsonic API
Feeling better every day having my stuff under my control and away from prying eyes of trackers and other unsavory stuff.
Procrastination. Want to move may lab off my pi onto my mini PC.
I have done the backup off the pi, just need to restore it but motivation doesn’t line up when the family is out of the house.
I bought some hardware last winter… still sitting in boxes. I do have adhd though
Part of it is I want to shuffle around some stuff, like switch my mobo out on my main pc and use its mobo in the new server
I have proxmox installed on the mini PC with a Debian VM ready to go, just the step of moving everything is the problem.
Ha, that’s my plan as well
I’m considering trying to host my own mail (receive and internal send only, at least at first), as I have a friend who’s hosting all the useful services and mail’s the only one left.
Also experimenting with (rootless) podman, I’m finding the permission mapping a bit confusing tbh.
A while ago I made my first attempt at setting up a SSO for some of the things I host. I figured out things that have built in support, like Immich, but struggled with getting it done through Proxy for things that don’t have baked in OAuth or OIDC support.
I revisited it yesterday and figured everything out so I’m happy about that. Navidrome was one of the more difficult ones to figure out because I need SSO authentication for the web-ui, but username/password for the API. That was actually pretty easy once I wrapped my head around it.
I picked Authentik based on general positive things I’ve heard about it, and I use Nginx Proxy Manager for reverse proxy.
I’m also on authentik, because of the extensive list of tutorials. I’m also using Navidrome but couldn’t be bothered to set up SSO there since I’m mostly listening via clients
I finally ran a hardware accelerated ML container for immich.
My immich is in a VPS and my GPU is in my home server. Cheaper to run that than to rent GPU compute.
I have electric baseboard heaters so i like to heat my home with my server in the winter. I dont use it enough in the summer to warrant the power draw, but i’m looking forward to doing so this winter.
I’m hoping the AI bubble pops soon… i’d really like to pick up a decent accelerator card for AI for my desktop. My current server doesn’t have the PCIe slots left (all filled with U.2 drives on PCIe adapters or HBAs) so it would need to go in my desktop… i thought 64GB was a lot when i built this 3 years ago but now i’m wishing I put 128GB in it…
My server has 238GB though (ordered a 256GB kit and one stick was dead. Caught that on the 4th test cycle with memtest86+ pro which I 100% paid for.) Since I use it for not only ZFS but also all of my random containers and game server VMs.
Finally got around to self hosting Fluxer (Discord alternative) because they’ve implemented an easy to use setup.
Now I’m trying to optimise the setup for my needs as a backup space if my friends decide to stop using Discord and it’ll be a frictionless changeover.
On a side note; it’s the most containers for a single hosted service that I have. I can’t check the exact number right now but it’s over 10 containers!
Finally took the leap and wiped my NUC to start doing things over. Originally had a family member who works in IT set everything up, but he did the absolute bare minimum and I screwed some stuff up along the way the first time around, so I figured now was as good at time as any to teach myself to set things up from scratch!
I also have moved from Portainer, to Dokploy, to Arcane for docker management, and I actually really like Arcane. I’ve also accomplished something I’m really damn proud of, which is getting HTTPS working on Tailscale (so, for example, arcane.(my subdomain).ts.net but with HTTPS!) alongside Pocket ID for all of it. Maybe it’s just me, but I had trouble finding clear documentation on how to do this, no matter how much I searched. But I documented it for myself, at least. And it’s probably that I lack a lot of knowledge in this field, too.
I have some questions, and although I know there’s a chance this gets buried, I figured I’d try asking anyway. Little skittish about making a thread myself.
My NUC is running Debian 13, and I was wondering some security things. Everything is behind Tailscale and I don’t plan on exposing anything to the internet (even through Tailscale Funnel, I’m using Tailscale Serve for the HTTPS.)
- How valuable is a firewall in this case? I’ve never used one, and I’m wondering if it’ll just make adding services more of a hassle than it’s worth for the security since everything is staying local.
- Similarly, what about Fail2Ban? I have it on my RPi and it’s not a big deal to set up, but I was reading a firewall is more important?
- Is it okay to run unattended updates for security OS stuff on the NUC? I don’t always check updates, admittedly I’m easily distracted and forgetful. I’m a little worried about auto restarting it to finish the updates up just because I utilize a NAS and sometimes it’s annoying to get them to reconnect to each other (even with the fstab edited) when there’s a restart for either of them.
- Thoughts on auto updates on docker containers? I know this is pretty personal preference, but I mostly ask because I’m forgetful and distractable. I know this is kinda my own problem, but I want to know other people’s thoughts if possible.
Thank you for reading my very long update! And any answers to my questions are very appreciated. Hope everyone else is doing well!
F2B/FW: If it’s only available locally/via VPN, I think your threat model is your LAN. People in your wifi or rogue smart home stuff. I think a firewall makes more sense here, but if it’s just 1 machine, you should be fine with ufw or the like. If you have several VMs that are supposed to be separated, the solution would depend on the virtualization software.
Unattended upgrades are way better than none at all, both for system and docker. Of course it depends on how important it is that your services are “always” available and I get the NAS struggle though.
Hey, thank you for the comment!
That makes sense, that I would be tightening security on the LAN. It’s not just one machine, I have a Raspberry Pi 4 as well running a flavor of Debian (and the Synology NAS), so I would assume a firewall on both the Raspberry Pi and my NUC would make sense? I don’t have any VMs that I’m aware of, and I’ve heard of VLANs but don’t know anything about those.
Services don’t always have to be available! It’s just me and my partner who are accessing them, so nothing like a lot of people who need media playback. I’ll have to weigh if it’s worth fighting with the NAS over auto reboots, but I’m leaning towards yes as an experiment. I’ll have to actually look into how to do unattended Debian security updates, though.
I think for that use case, Firewalls on the hosts make sense. VLAN is not a bad idea either, though you’d need a managed switch (hardware) for that.
