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.
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
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).
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 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.
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.
Not quite server related, but in the middle of a workday this week, I decided I was done with Windows on my home PC. Installed Zorin OS and things have been going really well. Any issues I’ve had have been really minor and mostly revolve around me being picky about theming.
I haven’t found a native mp3 tagger that makes sense to me yet, so I just installed Mp3tag. I’m open to suggestions on that front.
On the server side, it’s mostly just keeping on. A friend has me considering Home Assistant, I just don’t know if the value is there for me. I need to do some housekeeping today and update and clean up unused containers.
I have opinions about music tagging! I’m picky; I don’t trust any amount of automation to find the exact right release with the right album art I want, so I use GUIs instead of a CLI -
MusicBrainz has Picard, and that’s pretty slick. Also includes a handy renaming tool for keeping files organized. Quod Libet is also worth a look. I’m not as familiar with its feature set, but it’ll run on a toaster.
One day I might try to tackle Beets. Heard lots of good about that as an auto-tagging solution, so maybe check that out, too.
Yeah, same. Earlier this year I thought “Hey, people seem to love auto tagging with MB, Picard, Beets. I should try it.”
But that was short lived. I don’t want release information outside of artists, titles, albums, year. I just have no need for it. I know how to get what I want from mp3tag.
I am looking at using Beets to keep things clean, maybe find missing artwork, and fetch lyrics. But the vital information I’ll keep reviewing.
I haven’t ever gotten comfortable with how Picard works, but I’ll check out QL. Thanks!
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
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I’ve taken the opportunity to update most of my hosted services to newer image versions.
They’re all in Docker and behind private access (Tailscale, mTLS, IP whitelist etc.) so I’m not usually too worried. I update images manually whenever I can find time on a slow weekend, so this wasn’t strictly speaking related to the recent vulnerabilities. Volume data and container definitions are backed up automatically once a day and I also take manual copies of the old images when I update them.
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I’ve switched to new major versions of Immich and Jellyfin in the process and I’m very pleased with the new releases, amazing great work from the developers, they’ve been killing it lately.
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I’ve been tinkering with some custom images that I use for various things like syncing specialized data (logs off FTP services, archive email over IMAP from my mail provider, grab Garmin data copies, run monitors and log parameters to Influx, run port forwarders etc.)
I typically want to lock down this kind of images as much as possible, so I tweak them towards running with an unprivileged user, remove all caps and only grant strictly necessary ones, make the storage read-only inside the container etc.
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Some needs have been recurring inside this type of containers, like having a decent process manager to keep some things running and restart them, or having a decent cron service. So I’ve been toying with the idea of making a “universal” image for this kind of thing and maybe publishing it for others to use as a base too. If I get around to it I’ll be announcing it here.
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Got my hands on an old laptop. Since I started using nix a little while ago, and want to migrate to NixOS for my servers, this will be the starting point. Started cobbling together some code to commission it as a smart tv platform. KDE Plasma BigScreen is what I’m looking at atm.
I’m currently in the process of writing yet another script. This time my aim is to make one that will setup a server from a fresh Operating System install.
I want to do this for two reasons. The first is so that I have an alternative to backups. It would also help with major Operating System updates because sometimes those are a bit messy.
The second reason is because I want to help other people setup a simple, minimal and more secure setup for a home server as well.
It will all be POSIX portable too so it won’t be limited by extra requirements. I’ve already made a lot of progress with it because I started doing the same with my personal computer. I’ve been able to focus on that because my home server is super simple and I’ve been able to ignore all the recent vulnerabilities.
Don’t create another Omarchy please!
I have a similar thing but I’m using Ansible. That way, I don’t have to handle all the error checking etc myself.
I don’t like bloat or AI/LLMs and I focus more on minimalism to reduce surface attack areas while still focusing on security. There’s nothing flashy about how I plan to approach this project. It’s going to look ugly.
My main focus is to help create communication for local communities and not create tech that enables control over other peoples freedom.
I highly doubt my project will ever leave my community and that’s fine, I’m not interested in making a name in an already crowded space.
What are you building for your community? I think smaller communities is really the spot where this hobby can have a greater impact in enabling people to collaborate in different ways.
Working on a custom rust server / client for self hosted obsidian lifesync. Goal is to be significantly faster than existing solutions as well as being hassle free. Using noise with curve25519 keys instead of HTTPS.
Apart from that I finally figured out why tailscale wasn’t working on my pfsense and that enabled me to move the majority of my services to be behind the VPN.
I was 429ing a little too liberally, so I upped my burst rate. This week, just like last week, most of my traffic was bots. But if a real user does come by, I want his or her experience to be pleasant enough.
I am trying to find affordable 2x16Gb ram modules that are just right to run on my asrock J5040 and push my proxmox to more possibilities.
Because my needs for ram are increasing since its not just about have the services availble anymore. I plan to add gitlab and k3s and with the rest of my services the 16GB ram are pretty tight.
Good luck! I’ve been watching auctions for some weeks on ebay when I needed 2x32GB SODIMM some months ago and eventually got a pair for 230€. Fucking expensive but cheaper than most other offers I found.
This is a realy good price nowadays. Even more when it was DDR5. I only need DDR4 but atm its round about 80€ for one. Makes 160€… Fir this old stuff. And it even feels like a good price. Pretty sad somehow xD
I shut everything down only to discover nothing runs on php, while shit was going down at work. And I just recently discovered how to run docker compose updates through Komodo which is great.
I love Komodo! Have you attached Renovate as well?
I might check that out but for now I just added the existing docker-compose file as stacks in Komodo and enabled the auto pull and auto update flags
Using nix to maintain my fleet with automated updates so I didn’t really need to worry about it thankfully; just checking that I had relevant/patched versions. All my services are nice and up to date so didn’t even have to take anything down (yay)
What I’m excited for today is to progress personal slop project (be gentle) I started yesterday. Hoping it’ll just be one or two weekends.
I’ve been hallucinating a transcoding suite/workbench. Includes experimental sampling matrix of ffmpeg settings with a composable / layer-based project configuration; rust egui+mpv desktop client. Then the hosted orchestration server can distribute ffmpeg jobs across my worker machines (via my local headscale tailnet). Output produces a project+metadata bundle that includes hand-picked source:result JXL frame comparisons alongside both human readable reports and client readable configuration that makes the projects (more or less) reproducible (with worker tool env versioning via nix flake.lock) and logs provenance.
I intend for this to be a replacement to the piles of crappy python scripts I’ve been using for the last decade; my current workflow is to move files into host-labeled ingest folders with an argument string in a text file, then ssh to the host to run the job.
But what I’m most excited for is the experimentation matrix. I hope that it will reduce my electricity usage and disk thrashing; it will let me sample settings for ~1minute of footage around the sample frame and let me iterate my tuning much faster. Currently, it’s faster (in terms of hands-on time) to just transcode whole episodes or even entire seasons multiple times with different settings and then just discard the ones that underperform. Extremely wasteful; testing a settings matrix is something I’ve always wanted, but never had the time to build (and still don’t, hence slop).
