thirdBreakfast

thirdBreakfast OP , 14 days ago

Thanks for the tip on the squeal. Now you’ve said that I realise I don’t hear it when I’m frothing directly in a ceramic mug (as I do for hot chocolate), so I’ll try a different jug.

thirdBreakfast , 18 days ago

E. Jean Carroll could buy it off them for the lols.

thirdBreakfast , 1 month ago

I run two local physical servers, one production and one dev (and a third prod2 kept in case of a prod1 failure), and two remote production/backup servers all running Proxmox, and two VPSs. Most apps are dockerised inside LXC containers (on Proxmox) or just docker on Ubuntu (VPSs). Each of the three locations runs a Synology NAS in addition to the server.

Backups run automatically, and I manually run apt updates on everything each weekend with a single ansible playbook. Every host runs a little golang program that exposes the memory and disk use percent as a JSON endpoint, and I use two instances of Uptime Kuma (one local, and one on fly.io) to monitor all of those with keywords.

So -

• weekly: 10 minutes to run the update playbook, and I usually ssh into the VPS’s, have a look at the Fail2Ban stats and reboot them if needed. I also look at each of the Proxmox GUIs to check the backs have been working as expected.
• Monthly: stop the local prod machine and switch to the prod2 machine (from backups) for a few days. Probably 30 minutes each way, most of it waiting for backups.
• From time to time (if I hear of a security update), but generally every three months: Look through my container versions and see if I want to update them. They’re on docker compose so the steps are just backup the LXC, docker down, pull, up - probs 5 minutes per container.
• Yearly: consider if I need to do operating systems - eg to Proxmox 8, or a new Debian or Ubuntu LTS
• Yearly: visit the remotes and have a proper check/clean up/updates

thirdBreakfast , 1 month ago

I’m on board with original punctuation going inside the quote, but then to be consistent, capitalization has to as well. So instead of “This comment…” it should be “this comment…” since in the original quote that was just a clause separated by a comma, not its own sentence.

thirdBreakfast , 1 month ago

No answer, but just to say I run most of my services with this setup - Docker in a Debian LXC under Proxmox, and don’t have this issue. The containers are ‘privileged’, and I have ‘nesting’ ticked on, but apart from that all defaults.

thirdBreakfast , 1 month ago

My ‘good reason’ is just that it’s super convenient - for backups and painlessly moving apps around between nodes with all their data.

I would run plain LXCs if people nicely packaged up their web apps as LXC templates and made them available on LXCHub for me to run with lxc compose up, but they generally don’t.

I guess another alternate future would be if Proxmox added docker container supervision to their web interface, but you’re still not going to have the self-contained neat snapshot system that includes the data.

In theory you should be able to convert an OCI container layer by layer into an LXC, so I bet there’s projects out there that attempt this.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/68d09ae5-4a06-455b-9acb-249b8015b607.jpeg

thirdBreakfast , 2 months ago

There are a heap of general “Linux Administration” courses which will patch a lot of holes in the knowledge of almost all self-taught self hosters. I’d been using Linux for a while but didn’t know you could tab to complete file names in commands till I learned it on Udemy ¯_(ツ)_/¯

thirdBreakfast , 2 months ago

#2 back and sides, finger length on top

thirdBreakfast , 2 months ago

The two extremes:

1. Keep it alive on ZFS with frequent scrubbing. Review best practice every couple of years in case it’s time to migrate it to holograms or whatever,
2. Clay tablets.

thirdBreakfast , 2 months ago

I routinely run my homelab services as a single Docker inside an LXC - they are quicker, and it makes backups and moving them around trivial. However, while you’re learning, a VM (with something conventional like Debian or Ubuntu) is probably advised - it’s a more common experience so you’ll get more helpful advice when you ask a question like this.

thirdBreakfast , 2 months ago

Obligatory James Hoffman clip.

thirdBreakfast , 2 months ago

how to access the NAS and HA separately from the outside knowing that my access provider does not offer a static IP and that access to each VM must be differentiated from Proxmox.

Tailscale, it will take about 5 minutes to set up and cost nothing.

thirdBreakfast , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Infrastructure:

• Proxmox VE - everything’s virtualised on Debian, mostly in docker inside LXC’s for neat backup/restore and moving between nodes
• NGINX Proxy Manager - in front of most of my homelab services so they have https certificates
• Tailscale - access everything, everywhere, including on phone, securely
• Uptime Kuma - monitoring, with ntfy notifications
• apt cacher NG - unnecessary caching of apt updates

Apps:

• AudioBookShelf - Audio books (download them from here into BookPlayer (iOS) to listen in the car)
• Kavita - eBooks.
• BOINC - curing childhood cancer
• Forgejo - git repository. I do a bit of dev, but everyday self-hosters should probably still learn git to manage their configs
• Jellyfin - TV/Movies
• Syncthing - I replaced dropbox with Syncthing and FileBrowser, and Evernote with Syncthing and SilverBullet

Currently in testing on the dev server:

• neko - virtualised browser. Been experimenting with this in a container with a VPN for really simple secure browsing - ie launch it, do your online banking and then destroy the container.
• Dashy - I go through periods of wanting a pretty home page with all my services, set it all up, then fail to actually use it and eventually delete it, then hear about another cool one…
• Sharry - securish file sharing. I don’t love just emailing my accounts off to the accountant.
• LimeSurvey - survey software (like Survey Monkey) - just something I’m testing for work
• Omada controller - I’ve got a TP-Link switch and WAP that don’t really need centrally controlled, but you know, can be.
• A couple of development environment LXCs I use VS Code in

I still have not landed on a music system. I’ve put some of my library on Jellyfin, and tried a couple of apps with, but haven’t hit on a good combination yet. [edit:formatting}

thirdBreakfast , 2 months ago

I’ve got three of these little 1L HP’s, one for production, a spare, and one for development. But really, it’s a small load - that list would happily run on an old nuc. The constraint is really memory which I’ve mostly addressed by moving from VMs to LXCs. And I could be even more efficient by just running all the docker containers on one host if I had to.

Storage for media and backups is a Synology NAS.

thirdBreakfast , 2 months ago

I’m on iOS. I’ve been testing a beta of Jello that looks really promising, but as a beta has a bit of distance to go. I’ll check out Feishin though - thanks for the recommendation.

I’d love Jellyfin to turn out to be the solution, but I suspect it’s not, at least yet.

thirdBreakfast , 2 months ago

Yes, in a shallow tourist mine in Australia. Apparently coal starts to flake easily once it’s been exposed to air for a bit, so they kept a big chunk in a large jar of water that you could take out and handle. It felt like a light wet rock.

The sample, and the coal at the workface of the mine was stereotypicaly black. We wore hats with lights on, and when we emerged back out to the daylight I had an overwhelming urge to speak in a Monty Python type Yorkshire accent and go home and have my back scrubbed clean of the coal dust by my swarthy tired looking wife while I sat in a tub in front of the fire in the kitchen and our urchins played in the street.

I don’t want to give the impression I’m a big fossil fuel tourist, but I’ve also seen blobs of crude oil on beaches near Mediterranean sea oil terminals.

Sadly, I didn’t try to set fire to them on either of these occasions, which I now regret.

thirdBreakfast OP , 2 months ago

Oh no! This is a sad story.

thirdBreakfast OP , 2 months ago

I hand grind for the Aeropress with a Timemore C2, which I gather would be good enough to get me started with espresso.

thirdBreakfast , 2 months ago

This, or two turnbuckles joined at the top point with a couple of links of chain.

thirdBreakfast OP , 2 months ago

lol - you are probably right, I’m over-thinking it. The coffee I drink every day now (with an acceptably small amount of fiddling around) is reliably excellent. Perhaps I don’t need to watch the Aeropress movie ;-)

thirdBreakfast , 3 months ago

I read somewhere that GoPros and other action cameras are one of the least used purchases, so I figured “that should mean there’s plenty on eBay”. So grabbed up second hand bargain, played around with it for a couple of weeks, bought some extra batteries and other accessories, and since then it’s sat in the cupboard except for a single occasion.

Turns out you don’t need an action cam if you’re not getting any action.

thirdBreakfast , 3 months ago

I’m also on Silverbullet, and from OP’s description it sounds like it could be a good fit. I don’t use any of the fancy template stuff - just a bunch of md files in a directory with links between them.

thirdBreakfast , 3 months ago

Your workload (a NAS and a handful of services) is going to be a very familiar one to members of the community, so you should get some great answers.

My (I guess slightly wacky) solution for this sort of workload has ended up being a single Docker container inside an LXC container for each service on Proxmox. Docker for ease of management with compose and separate LXCs for each service for ease of snapshots/backups.

Obviously there’s some overhead, but it doesn’t seem to be significant.

On the subject of clustering, I actually purchased three machines to do this, but have ended up abandoning that idea - I can move a service (or restore it from a snapshot to a different machine) in a couple of minutes which provides all the redundancy I need for a home service. Now I keep the three machines as a production server, a backup (that I swap over to for a week or so every month or two) and a development machine. The NAS is separate to these.

I love Proxmox, but most times it get mentioned here people pop up to boost Incus/LXD so that’s something I’d like to investigate, but my skills (and Ansible playbooks) are currently built around Proxmox so I’ve got a bit on inertia.

thirdBreakfast , 3 months ago

Is that a mini? I love those little 1L HP’s. I run 3 G2 800’s. These are very nicely built and therefore a joy to work on, and sip power when idling. Highly recommend. Also +1 for Proxmox.

thirdBreakfast , 3 months ago

For light touch monitoring this is my approach too. I have one instance in my network, and another on fly.io for the VPSs (my most common outage is my home internet). To make it a tiny bit stronger, I wrote a Go endpoint that exposes the disk and memory usage of a server including with mem_okay and disk_okay keywords, and I have Kuma checking those.

I even have the two Kuma instances checking each other by making a status page and adding checks for each other’s ‘degraded’ state. I have ntfy set up on both so I get the Kuma change notifications on my iPhone. I love ntfy so much I donate to it.

For my VPSs, this is probably not enough, so I am considering the more complicated solutions (I’ve started wanting to know things like an influx of fali2ban bans etc.)

thirdBreakfast , 4 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

<span style="color:#323232;">- fiction
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    - Abbott, Edwin A_
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        - Flatland
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            - Flatland - Edwin A. Abbott.epub
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            - Flatland - Edwin A. Abbott.jpg
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            - Flatland - Edwin A. Abbott.opf
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    - Achebe, Chinua
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        - Things Fall Apart
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            - Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe.epub
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            - Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe.jpg
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            - Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe.opf
</span>

So in each directory that I use to delineate a library, I have a subdirectory for each author (in sort order form). Within each author subdirectory is a subdirectory for each book, with just the title, then the book with (edit - the anti-injection code mangled how I was trying to say the book file name. it’s [book name]-[author].[extension])

I didn’t invent this, it’s just what Calibre spits out. When I buy a new book, I ingest it into Calibre, fix any metadata and export it to the NAS. Then I delete the Calibre library - I’m just using it to do the neatening up work.

thirdBreakfast , 4 months ago

Or SyncThing + Filebrowser

thirdBreakfast , 4 months ago

If this is a question about how to access your server at home from devices anywhere, securely, with a simple setup, then the answer is turn off all that port forwarding, and use Tailscale.

thirdBreakfast , 4 months ago

With a somewhat similar usecase, I ended up using Kavita.

thirdBreakfast , 4 months ago

If you didn’t have to deal with a cumbersome spacesuit, I imagine you could run, but you’d lean over much more towards the horizontal - like maybe 45° or lower, so each ‘step’ would be a push backwards in line with your longitudinal axis. Don’t waste energy by bounding up.

Source: wild speculation.

thirdBreakfast , 4 months ago

Yo dawg, I put most of my services in a Docker container inside their own LXC container. It used to bug me that this seems like a less than optimal use of resources, but I love the management - all the VM and containers on one pane of glass, super simple snapshots, dead easy to move a service between machines, and simple to instrument the LXC for monitoring.

I see other people doing, and I’m interested in, an even more generic system (maybe Cockpit or something) but I’ve been really happy with this. If OP’s dream is managing all the containers and VM’s together, I’d back having a look at Proxmox.

thirdBreakfast , 4 months ago

This is where I landed on this decision. I run a Synology which just does NAS on spinning rust and I don’t mess with it. Since you know rsync this will all be a painless setup apart from the upfront cost. I’d trust any 2 bay synology less than 10 years old (I think the last two digits in the model number is the year), then if your budget is tight, grab a couple 2nd hand disks from different batches (or three if you budget stretches to it,).

I also endorse u/originalucifer’s comment about a real machine. Thin clients like the HP minis or lenovos are a great step up.

thirdBreakfast , 5 months ago

This. Hosting at home might be cheaper if you are serving a lot of data, but in that case, the speed’s going to kill you.

I’m a keen self-hoster, but my public facing websites are on a $4 VPS (Binary Lane - which I recommend since you’re in Aus). In addition to less hassle, you get faster speeds and (probably) better uptime.

thirdBreakfast , 6 months ago

I’ve just been down this exact journey, and ended up settling on Kavita. It has all the browse, search and library stuff you’d expect. You can download or read things in the web interface. I’m only using it for epub and PDF books, but its focus is comics and manga so I expect it to shine there.

I don’t think it does mobi, but since I use Calibre on my laptop to neaten up covers and metadata before I drop books on to the server it’s a simple matter to convert the odd mobi I end up with. Installation (using docker inside an LXC) was simple.

It’s been a really straightforward, good experience. Highly recommend. I like it better than AudioBookshelf (which I’m already hosting for audio books) which I also tried, but didn’t like as much for inexplicable reasons. I also considered Calibre-Web, but that seemed a bit messy since I guess I’d use Calibre on my laptop to manage my books on a NAS share then serve it headless from the server with Calibre-Web? I might have that completely wrong, I didn’t spend any time looking into it because Kavita was the second thing I tried and it did exactly what I wanted.

thirdBreakfast , 6 months ago

Thanks - I thought it would be something like this I just hadn’t made the effort. Calibre-web just runs as a server?

thirdBreakfast , 6 months ago

It has a practical element (Hello Jellyfin, Kavita, AudioBookshelf & Syncthing), but for the rest of it, it’s about 60% hobby and 20% learning stuff that could be potentially career enhancing.

Gnu/Linux absolutely annihilating server operating systems means that I can run the same stack, and use the same tools, that giant companies are based on. All for free. In my spare room. 1L x86 computers cost less than two packs of cigarettes! Little SSD’s are ridiculously cheap. And you don’t even need that stuff - that old laptop in your cupboard will do. Even if you kick in to donate for your software (and I recommend you do if you can) it’s a cheap hobby compared to golf or skating or whatever. Anything you need to learn there’s blog posts and videos available.

We live in an amazing time in this hobby. I know there’s companies that would like to take it away from us, but Open Source just keeps kicking goals. Thank you FOSS developers, Gnu, Linus, FSM, Cthulhu and the other forces in the universe that make this possible.

thirdBreakfast , 6 months ago

There’s a project called Filebrowser that allows you to edit text files in a web interface. You can just run that on the 192.168.1.2 machine. It’s easy to set up simple auth, and you can restrict it to the /data/ directory.

thirdBreakfast , 6 months ago

+1 for Tailscale. It’s a vital piece of the system for me now.

thirdBreakfast , 7 months ago

Your head might be spinning from all the different advice you’re getting - don’t worry, there are a lot of options and lots of folk are jumping in with genuinely good (and well meaning) advice. I guess I’ll add my two cents, but try and explain the ‘why’ of my thinking.

I’m assuming from your questions you know your way around a computer, can figure things out, but haven’t done much self-hosting. If I’m wrong about that, go ahead and skip this suggestion.

• Jellyfin good - a common gateway drug to homelabbing, and the only thing you’ll do that non-tech friends will appreciate
• Proxmox good - it makes the backups simple and provides a path forward for all sorts of things
• Docker good - you’ve said it increases complexity; this is correct in that you’re adding more layers of stuff, but it reduces your complexity of management by removing a heap of dependency issues. There is a compute and memory overhead involved, but it’s small and the tradeoff is worth it.
• VM good - yes an LXC is more efficient, but it’s harder to run docker in. Save that for a future project
• Media data somewhere else good - I run a separate NAS with an SMB share. A NAS in a VM is a compromise, but like all things self hosting, you start out with what you’ve got. I let Jellyfin keep the metadata in the VM that’s hosting my Jellyfin though since the NAS is over the network. That’s less of a consideration if you are visualizing your NAS on the same machine, but I’d still do it my way for future proofing.
• Passthrough magic not yet - this can also be a future project. If your metal has quicksync that can be utilized to reduce the CPU load, but that can also be a future project.

thirdBreakfast , 7 months ago

Same, but with the jellyfin/jellyfin image. Been solid for me, less dramas than raw on the OS. Two cores and 8GB for the VM (in Proxmox), media on a NAS, metadata on local SSD.

thirdBreakfast , 7 months ago

I have a very similar setup. Jellyfin in Docker on a Debian VM (2 cores, 8GB RAM), and all the media on the NAS. The CIFS/SMB from the NAS is mounted in fstab. I keep all the metadata locally for speed - ie not on the NAS. I don’t like the extra layer of running Docker, but it works like a charm whereas I had a few hassles running Jellyfin natively in the VM. I do have a special ‘media’ user with the name and password in the mount command which only has permissions for the media.

Can’t comment on the arrs suite since I get all my linux distros on those disks attached to the front of magazines.

thirdBreakfast , 7 months ago

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/03cfdffa-969b-4dae-b7da-8c31b1e2c9a1.jpeg