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.
I finally finished my first iteration of my Minilab including a very smooth migration from the old server yesterday so I can go to the service side of things again. I plan to get some kind of selfhosters VPN for external access to stuff that’s not exposed to the internet, I’ll have to investigate which one.
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Finally got it working just in time for life to implode again so I just powered it down and unplugged everything again.
This time I’m probably just gonna huck it out a window or into the trash
mood
My biggest shortcoming at the moment is my NAS is also my gaming PC. It’s pretty inefficient to have that on all the time. But I haven’t had the time to build a dedicated NAS.
Yeah I had your idea back when I wanted a nas. I didn’t have the time and just bought a synology knowing it wasn’t the best option and was aware of the possibility of enshitification. Now that they’ve enshitified, I can’t really recommend them any longer. So far it’s been good but I’m still looking for options that are quick and easy to set up. Or maybe I’ll grit my teeth and start building one from scratch.
I’m perfectly happy to build my own NAS with NixOS and ZFS on it. I think it’s mostly a matter of getting the right hardware.
I’m putting together a pretty simple one this week. Got a used HP Elitedesk G4 SSF for around $150, already have 2 8TB external drives lying around that are easy enough to shuck and slap into it. Should be pretty easy to just slap TrueNAS Scale onto it, set up a mirror with the 2 drives, and be good to go for a while.
I’ll definitely need more space down the road and this thing can’t fit more than 2 drives without some modifications (3 is doable, but 4 will take some 3D printed parts which I believe someone’s still working on fine-tuning). But it’s good enough for me for now, still got 2.5TB I’m not using.
If I thought about storage a bit more before starting this project, I probably would’ve just gotten the same SSF but with some slightly better specs to use as the entire server, rather than running 2 different machines, but oh well.
Edit: Slight change of plans, got a 12tb drive free through a program at work, so gonna go with UnRAID instead. The license fee is a bit disappointing but it seems to suit my needs better, and being able to mix and match drives of any size at will is pretty nice
Trying to get navidrome routed through Traefik.
I think it’s rejecting it as an untrusted proxy because forwarding the ports locally works.
Also working on getting Traefik up and running on a TuringPi cluster to eventually move my workloads over to it.
I have navidrome running in k8s behind Træfik. Do you want to take a look at my environment variables for navidrome? I haven’t configured anything on Træfik
Sure thank you 🙂
Sorry, I can’t help you. I configured only the TZ and the schedule env vars…
spec: containers: env: - name: TZ value: Europe/Rome - name: ND_SCANSCHEDULE value: 0 * * * * image: deluan/navidrome:latest imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent name: navidrome ports: - containerPort: 4533 hostIP: null hostPort: null name: http protocol: TCP volumeMounts: - mountPath: /data mountPropagation: null name: config-volume - mountPath: /music name: music readOnly: true
I am re-re-factoring my plans for homelab 3.0 and the migration to it. Hardware budget is non-existant so I am trying to figure out how to do everything with what I already own, while re-organizing to better use what I have to make some room. Adding a few sticks of RAM and replacing some older cat5 are all I will do this year.
I installed Jitsi Meet on my YUNOhost server and am very impressed. It works really well and needed basically no setting up after installing.
I’m still trying to get a good backup strategy. I am currently using Duplicati but I cannot get the before script execution to work. I will eventually look at Kopia.
What kind of hardware are you using for a mini lab? I want to switch from a raspberry pi 5 to a small form factor Intel based system so I can run Proxmox. I was looking at the Lenovo m920q or an Optiplex 79xx series machine.
Do you have any recommendations for backups or the hardware switch I mentioned?
If you do make a switch to Proxmox, then Proxmox Backup Server is where it’s at for backups. Its de-duplication feature is incredible. I backup all my Proxmox VMs/LXCs with it, as well as my non-Proxmox hosts (laptop, etc.), with
proxmox-backup-client.Personally, I’m using a few of those tiny Beelink PCs (a couple Mini S12 and an EQ12) with the N100 processor, as well as a couple larger rackmount PCs I built for situations where I needed to add an HBA or some other PCI-Ex device. I do recommend something like a Beelink before building, though - they run Proxmox fine, they’re inexpensive, efficient, quiet, and each one can run a handful of VMs.
Yeah, I heard about Proxmox backup and that sounds really nice. Love the idea of being able to take a snapshot before any major changes to a VM and then if it goes south restore from snapshot very quickly.
I don’t know Duplicati or Kopia, im mostly just using VM snapshots as backups. I store them in an NFS Share on my NAS.
I just posted my Minilab, check my history - I’m also using tiny Lenovos. m920q should be able to do anything you want it!
I use cron schedules to run scripts that backup my important stuff to s dedicated backup drive, then copies the backups to a different external drive, then upload the backups to a dedicated backup cloud storage account. Then it deletes any backups older than a month.
Have a look at Backrest for Restic. It works great with pre/post scripting and supports healthchecks for monitoring status and stats.
Also is a nice easy to use WebUI which is great for servers.
I’ll look at this again. I had it before and did not stick with it though I don’t remeber why now.
I’ve installed coraza web app firewall with OWASP ruleset this weekend. I must admit that it wasn’t as easy as I expected it, but it now (mostly) works. I had to give up with nextcloud though.
This week moved all my vps’s to nixos, so am now able to use one flake for my desktop and all my vps’s which significantly lowers down the time I need to manage my vps’s.
Nowto move my proxmox homelab server ( an old desktop pc I bought recently ) and all my server’s/devices witll be running nixos.
EDIT: An issue I’m thinking about is getting a “proper” server. Not a server like a server rack server, but a mini pc or something along those sides wbich would be a lot stronger and a lot more power efficient than the current 10+ y/o desktop pc I’m using currently.
So would like some reccomendations on that front, like what are some good mini pc brands and mini pc’s that I could have raid seted up on for nas or good budget parts and case to make one myself.
Hey! Another nixos user 😁 What are you using for your VPS? nixos-infect? nixos-everywhere?
As for mini PCs, a friend bought one from Minis Forum and quite likes it. But if you want to support the opensource ecosystem, there are tuxedo computers and slimbook. There’s also starlabs byte.
Take your pick :)
I’m using nixos-anywhere to install and then deploy-rs to deploy updates to nixos vps’s.
Also using agenix for managing secrects for the services so that I can easilly have them all in a public repo, so that other’s could take a look and take inspiration.
My nixos flake url if you wan’t to take a look.
Configured changedetection.io to notify me when my usual bus is delayed or canceled.
I know next to nothing about using the command line, so I’ve been relying pretty heavily on ChatGPT to set my stuff up and so far it has reliably helped me overcome every issue. The problem is, of course, that I often don’t even understand what the issue was in the first place so I don’t even know if the fix that the ai spits out is, let’s say, correct. I don’t really want to become an It expert, I just want to be able to host some services on my own to depend less on corps, is it alright if I continue to rely on the AI? Or do you guys think that I just have to learn this stuff or else I might mess up?
I don’t have great security concerns btw, my ISP doesn’t allow port forwarding, so I access my server exclusively though Tailscale.
I’ve had some amusing mixed experience with ChatGPT for this. When I asked about iptables rules to restrict podman, it was great. About podaman quadlets, though, which I first misspelled ‘quartlets’, it completely made it up, and even sent me a fake link to nonexistent documentation when I challenged it!
- it’s more helpful if you ask the right questions
- and its answers often give you ideas of what to google
- Old stuff that has been written about many times over is more likely to get a proper answer
- sometimes the gist of a wrong command/answer could still help me understand what to do with the right one
Try to understand whatever you use from AI. At least understanding the general picture of what it means, and a basic idea of “this flag is for this; this option is for that”. AI can also help you with that understanding, but again beware of it completely making up something logically coherent but wrong.
Yes this happened to me as well, I don’t remember what I was talking about but I remember I made a typo and it just ran with it as if it was a real thing. I let it keep going to see if it ever realized it was talking about something that didn’t exist but nope it kept going until I pointed it out.
I ask for it to explain what the command did and I did manage to wrap my head around a few concepts but in the end I feel like I’m trusting it to not insert any vulnerabilities into the system, and I don’t like that. Mistrust is the whole reason I’m doing this. But yeah I’ll pay close attention and maybe even ask all the implications of he changes we make.
I love Tailscale.
The more you learn with the command line the more interesting stuff you can do.
Most of the stuff will somewhat work, but you’ll introduce side effects sooner or later by using commands that might work but are not the proper ones and alter unrelated things. At some point those will likely bite you and you have no idea where it’s coming from. I’d suggest to check at least what the commands you are copying are doing.
I’d encourage learning. The more you understand the better you can control your data and maintain your services. You don’t need to be an expert but I’d encourage working towards relying less on gpt.
What you can probably do to build some knowledge if you’re going to be using AI anyway is ask it to explain some of the concepts to you. You also have the ability to ask clarifying questions about anything you don’t understand.
Yes I do that, and it does help me a lot to understand what I’m doing it’s just I’m a top down type of guy. Like I don’t like messing with anything unless I fully understand it, which often makes me very unproductive. I decided to not be that way with this self hosting thing because I realized I would never get around to it with that mentality. Better to break shit as I go.
Yeah, I’m the same way. I learned mostly through making Docker containers and bumbling through tutorials/documentation until things worked, just deleting them and starting over when I fucked up irreparably (except the compose file, of course).
There are a lot more comprehensive written and video tutorials than there used to be so those are very helpful too.
Today I learned that for some reason some DNS servers don’t like SRV records, so had to troubleshoot it when people were unable to log onto my Minecraft server that is on a non-default port.
I recently setup a full matrix server. What I am currently worried about is my server. I am currently shopping for a used dual Xeon server. I am hosting close to 40 docker containers on 2 1 liter PCs with very low specs. I would love to bring it all in house to a single server with a separate NAD which I do have currently holding 60 terabytes of storage space.
Trying to get the right combo of iptables rules to shuttle traffic from vps to home lab server (as I think I’ll need to do once my ISP upgrade puts me behind CGNAT for the first time…
Got it working sorta, but I didn’t like seeing my vps private link address instead of the remote in logs.
No new devices, but I migrated my homelab from an intel nuc to an old recycled HP z240 with a p1000 gpu I got for free. I had Nextcloud and jellyfin on it, but jellyfin gets the majority of the use.
I then added a gitea docker container to my server for my personal projects. Then I configured a miniflux container with some of my favorite RSS feeds for a lightweight way to view my feeds on my computer.
I would like to get pihole configured again in a docker container(I have only ever run it on a raspberry pi), but I have small children and a baby and they make it hard to find extra time in the day.
I finally finished setting up my Nebula network! An overlay network, as opposed to a true VPN, but excellent for flexibility and remote access. For anyone wanting maximum control over your network with excellent performance, I highly recommend it.
Check out apalrd’s blog for a great tutorial if you’re interested.
