I know for many of us every day is selfhosting day, but I liked the alliteration. Or do you have fixed dates for maintenance and tinkering?
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.
This post is proudly sent from my very own Lemmy instance that runs at my homeserver since about ten days. So far, it’s been a very nice endeavor.
Looking to install Immich, BitDefender Password Manager and YouTube downloader on the NAS this week.
what’s maintenance? is that when an auto-update breaks everything and you spend an entire weeknight looking up tutorials because you forgot what you did to get this mess working in the first place?
I do love how little maintenance is needed until you have to re-learn everything you forgot
I know you’re half joking. But nevertheless, I’m not missing this opportunity to share a little selfhosting wisdom.
Never use auto update. Always schedule to do it manually.
Virtualize as many services as possible and take a snapshot or backup before updating.
And last, documentation, documentation, documentation!
Happy selfhosting sunday.
I think auto update is perfectly fine, just check out what kind of versioning the devs are using and pin the part of the version that will introduce breaking changes.
I just like it when things break on scheduled maintenance and I have time to fix it or the possibility to roll back with minimal data loss, instead of an auto update forcing me spend a week night fixing it or running a broken system till I have the time.
You can have the best of both worlds - scheduled auto updates on a time that usually works for you.
With growing complexity, there are so many components to update, it’s too easy to miss some in my experience. I don’t have everything automated yet (in fact, most updates aren’t) but I definitely strive towards it.
In my experience, the more complex a system is, the more auto updates can mess things up and make troubleshooting a nightmare. I’m not saying auto updates can’t be a good solution in some cases, but in general I think it’s a liability. Maybe I’m just at the point where I want my setup to work without the risk of it breaking unexpectedly and having to tinker with it when I’m not in the mood. :)
There’s a fine line between “auto-updates are bad” and “welp, the horribly outdated and security hole riddled CI tool or CMS is how they got in”. I tend to lean toward using something like renovate to queue up the updates and then approve them all at once. I’ve been seriously considering building out a staging and prod env for my homelab. I’m just not sure how to test stuff in staging to the point that I’d feel comfortable auto promoting to prod.
Yes
I’ve had this happen twice in two weeks since installing Watchtower and have since scheduled it to only run on Friday evening…
Nothing greater than crashing your weekend evening just trying to watch a movie on a broken jellyfin server :'D
No you just continue updating until it’s fixed again.
I’m building services out for my family as things enshittify. Moved the family over to an immich instance, run a family blog on Wordpress (working on rolling my own since it’s over complicated and with all the Wordpress shenanigans…), plex (lifetime account, works for now). I have a number of self-built projects as well, a “momboard” like system that is integrated with my Wordpress blog for access and control, a pi based backup server that lives at my friends house and nails a VPN connection to my router and I’m playing with Meshtastic as an offline communication system for my kids scout troop when we’re camping without cell signal. Lots of home automation with home assistant as well.
I host it all on Debian servers, raspberry pi’s and esp32 devices (Meshtastic and home automation). I used to run kubernoodles but it was more complicated than needed and for my use case, docker, ansible and bash scripts manage it all just fine.
How’s your experience with meshtastic been? I’ve just started experimenting with it. There are very few nodes in my area, so my potential use cases seem limited.
Very limited so far. I don’t have much near me but there has been enough sproradic connectivity that I pick up the occasional chatter in the default channel and have about 145 nodes it’s aware of.
Mostly been my son and I playing around. He wants to get his neighborhood friends involved :).
I just set up wanderer and workout-tracker. Along with installing gadgetbridge on my phone, I now have a completely self hosted fitness/workout stack with routes, equipment tracking, heatmaps, general health metrics like HRV, heart rate, etc through my Garmin watch, without having Garmin Connect installed. Awesome!
Wait, is that possible? I thought gadgetbridge didn’t work with Garmin! Nedd to check this out. Thanks for the inspiration!
That sounds so cool! Not using any tracking/nav devices other than my phone but currently my routes just stay local without having any kind of management for them.
Holy shit! I didn’t know about GadgetBridge. Is there a way to connect it to Home Assistant?
Maintenance day is when I log into my server once every 3 month because I forgot it (as everything is working fine).
But I just discovered OpenSuse microOS, while looking at the docs for my laptop Thumbleweed, and now I want to try it with no real reasons. Maybe it is just an excuse to buy a new Raspberry pi.
I’m looking at moving my NAS to it.
I currently use openSUSE Leap, so to prep for the switch, I’m moving everything to podman.
I’ve never had a system update go bad on Leap, but I am being impacted by old system packages but don’t want to jump to Tumbleweed. I’m hoping this will give me a more up to date base and force me to put things into containers properly.
I started hosting audiobookshelf since Jellyfin was pretty clunky for audiobooks.
how is your experience with it? I’m considering setting up audiobook shelf as well.
It’s worked really well for me.
It’s been great for me so far.
For the first time I configured ssh with pubkey auth.
Auth between windows (agent) and alpine (host) to use as a helper/backup proxy in veeam (helper is used to mount file level restore assistant)
Took me 3 hours to find out that
Windows didnt know the private key
Pubkey auth wasnt active
Fucked up pubkey auth
Alpine isnt supported by Veeam so it didnt work
Needed to install a small debian VM.:|
At least I did my first pubkey auth setup.It gets better.
Heya! I’m looking to get into self hosting. Any recommendations on good beginner tutorials or resources?
Pick something you want to self host first. Do you want a media library? Then look into Jellyfin guides, or komga, or whatever. Do you want a centralized blocking dns server for all your devices? Look into adguard/pihole/etc. do you want to fuck around with llms? That’s a whole thing but you totally can and look into guides on doing it
Just as advice you’ll find people that become borderline evangelical on what you use. It doesn’t really matter. Debian vs unraid vs truenas, ecc ram or not, etc. I mean it does, somewhat, and you should read about it, but don’t get hung up on small details. For home use basically anything is fine. Get an old ewaste pc from 2012 and run whatever os you want (just not windows though)
You can start by using any old PC you have laying around and install Proxmox on it. Proxmox is a free hypervisor that allows you to make virtual machines and containers which makes it easy to setup and administrate servers/services. This will give you a good foundation to start playing around and give you an idea of your resource requirements.
Find something that interests you, and look at the docs of how to get started. It literally is the easiest way to learn and get involved in self hosting
Here’s a list of self-host/foss/Linux YouTubers. Check them out. I’ve learned SO much from them:
- Veronica Explains
- Network Chuck
- Jim’s Garage
- Andrea Borman
- Awesome Open Source
- Techno Tim
I can add links to each but searching should find them easily
Veronica Explains is on PeerTube! https://peertube.wtf/a/vkc@tinkerbetter.tube/video-channels
To add:
- Jeff Geerling
- Raid Owl
- Hardware Haven
- Apalrd Adventures
- BeardedTinker
- Craft Computing
I follow these and some other I can’t think of the name right now, but some great resources!
Wow, thanks! I couldn’t find Andrea Bowman, it shows me some video about criminal cases! 😆
It would have helped if I got her name right Andrea BoRman
😆 Thanks!
Welcome to the deep rabbit hole :-) how much do you know about how computers work? In general, you’re going to need to understand some basic networking and general Linux administration, but if you already have a grasp on that then I’d say you just need to start small (simple service, aim to have a resilience goal with backups and restoration) and other metrics that motivates you. Perhaps you want to learn something new with every service you host? You decide, this is your hobby :-)
Don’t have a good guide, but in addition on the thing you plan to selfhost yourself you need to decide where it’s supposed to run. In a rented VM from a hoster? There are several ones where you can get a decent VM for a few bucks each month.
Nowadays, Docker (or containers in general) are very popular, as an alternative to directly installing services on the vm. They make many things easier, but it’s another thing to learn about when you’re just starting - fortunately, there’s plenty of guides etc!
Fellow noob here, lots of great suggestions already. I agree with the “find a specific idea and start there” so you can be vested in what you need to learn.
I suggest starting with an old raspberry pi or other old hardware that may not get the job done, but fiddle with it toward your goal until you prove you can do it. It’s so rewarding!
Once that’s done, move on to getting whatever hardware you need to execute the vision well. Mechanics don’t start learning by working on a Ferrari!
I got a new job, and the group chat is on WhatsApp, so I’m looking into running a Synapse server with a bridge to it. I really don’t want to have to use Meta’s apps on my phone.
From what I’ve read so far, it seems like it’s going to be the most convoluted install process I’ll have encountered in my self-hosting journey. I’m excited to tackle it, but also a bit overwhelmed. Which is why I’ve been putting it off :P
Try conduwuit instead of Synapse if you get stuck. For me, it was really simple to install and the dev is really nice.
It was a huge pita to get it running, but I have it.
One thing about the WA bridge is that element won’t let me give display names or look up the contact number, so the people in chatting with don’t have names, just “their number (WA)”
Holy crap, you’re me. Except I plan on using slidge-whatsapp.
Migrating from proxmox to incus, continued.
- got a manually-built wireguard instance rolling and tested, it’s now “production”
- setting up and testing backups now
- going to export some NFS and iscsi to host video files to test playback over the network from jellyfin
- building ansible playbooks to rebuild instances
- looking into ansible to add system monitoring, should be easy enough
Lots of fun, actually!
What’s your motivation for the switch? Second time in a short while I’ve heard about people migrating to incus.
I’ve moved to all containers and I’m gradually automating everything. The metaphor for orchestration and provisioning is much clearer in incus than it was in lxd, and makes way more sense than proxmox.
Proxmox is fine, I’ve used it for going on 8 years now, I’m still using it, in fact. But it’s geared toward a “safe” view of abstraction that makes lxc containers seem like virtual machines, and they absolutely aren’t, they are much, much more flexible and powerful than vms.
There are also really annoying deficiencies in proxmox that I’ve taken for granted for a long time as well:
- horrible builtin resource usage metrics. And I’m happy to run my influxdb/grafana stack to monitor, but users should be able to access those metrics locally and natively, especially if they’re going to be exported by the default metrics export anyway.
- weird hangovers from early proxmox versions on io delay. Proxmox is still making users go chase down iostat rabbit holes to figure out why io_wait and “io delay” are not the same metric, and why the root cause is almost always disk, yet proxmox shows the io_wait stat as if it could be “anything”
- integration of pass through devices is a solved problem, even for lxc, yet the bulk of questions for noobs is about just that. Pass through is solved for so many platforms, why proxmox just doesn’t have that as a GUI option for lxc is baffling.
- no install choices for zfs on root on single disk (why???)
- etc
Ultimately, I have more flexibility with a vanilla bookworm install with incus.
Thanks a lot for your response! I too was a bit misguided by the way Proxmox presents LXCs but I’m mostly on VMs and haven’t explored LXCs further so far.
No worries. And don’t misunderstand: I think proxmox is great, I’ve simply moved on to a different way of doing thing.
Finally upgrading my Plex server from Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04! I’ve been putting it off out of habit, as I always wait for the *.1 releases but I’ve done several of these for clients and every single one went flawlessly. But I still waited it out.
Also thinking about switching my Ext4 mirrored softRAID to ZFS… Since Ubuntu has the only acceptable ZFS implementation outside of UNIX proper (Ubuntu’s is in-kernel, everyone else uses kernel modules, which i hate). But that’s going to be extra work I may not be in the mood for. But damn would compression and deduplication be nice! So still maybe
Wait, you mean you host plex servers for clients? Or that you work with Ubuntu in general? And for the ZFS thing, it doesn’t really matter if it’s in-kernel or something else, at the end of the day, they all work the same. I’m using zfs on my arch machine for example, and everything works just fine (dkms). And zfs is super easy in general, you should definetly try it
That is one thing I still need to do, upgrade my Ubuntu server from 22.04 to 24.04. laat time I tried this I noticed many python packages were missing or failing. Reverted to the backup. Maybe now is the time to do the switch and iron out the crinks that may be left after.
I want to host a personal dashboard with weather forecast and upcoming appointments. I couldn’t find anything that fits my needs so now I‘m building my own.
Cool! Home Assistant has it and I can imagine Nextcloud as well but those are overkill just for that.
I use magic mirror for that. I tried homeeassistant but I’m alleric to a million PIs and they make installing any other way hard. (Rant about vm versions not supporting extentions)
Fumbling around with k3s to get my toes into deploying a Kubernetes cluster from scratch for the first time ever. No real long term usage planned, just some testing to gather experience.
Currently trying to step up my game bv setting up kubernetes. Cluster is running, but I am really struggling getting the combination domain name, let’s encrypt and traefik, but without a cloud load balancer, to work. I feel like I went through most tutorials available, but it seems each one is missing a crucial part. Gonna invest some more hours today…
Check out MetalLB for a local Loadbalancer
Without supported loadbalancer Kubernetes is no fun / not doable in my opinion.
For Hetzner for example, there are some recipes to be found to use an LB and also volumes.
I’ve stepped back to docker compose with a traefik proxy which takes labels from the containers to decide where to route what.
Highly recommended!
I’ve started to setup Authentik this weekend. My goal is to learn more about SSO and have one account for most of my selfhosted services.
Did that as well a while ago and generally it’s working pretty good, some services had the possibility to migrate existing accounts to authentik even. But even though it’s been pretty reliable so far I’m hesitant to migrate my more critical services behind another runtime dependency.
