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.
You must log in or register to comment.
I’m trying to figure out a basic CRM for my local sports club. I use docker to self host a voting platform called RALLLY that we use a lot and enjoy. If people can recommend a CRM I’d give it a go today. I tried a platform called twenty yesterday but couldn’t get it off the ground
Consider reviewing odoo, I last looked at them when they were known as openERP, I know one guy that runs it and is happy. It might be a bit much if you just want a CRM…
I’ve just set up Wireguard, so I can access my home network from everywhere, but the old laptop that I wanted to use as a server has just quit. So now I have to find a different machine
Was using realvnc to vnc from remote, it was easy and cloud driven.
Fully swapped to tailscale and normal VNC sever now.
Performance is good and works great for the troubleshooting and small GUI stuff I need to do.
Finished my migration from Plex to Jellyfin
I’ve been learning bash and working on scripts to automate stuff in my homelab. It’s been a lot of fun. I’m currently working on a script that will rename the movies and TV shows I rip from my DVD collection.
The script queries the tmdb api, presents me with a mwnu of matches if there’s multiple matches, renames the media files according to jellyfin spec, and then places them in the proper folders to be indexed by Jellyfin and Kodi.
Bash variable manipulation is really, really fun.
Would you mind sharing the code?
I’ve finally powered on a 15 year old machine to run a bot I’ve been writing. The thing is slow as dirt and stuck behind a flakey power line network, but it’s working. I got to write my first systemd service definition, which is kind of cool.
The computer I’m using currently, I set the BIOS in 2012. WHen I built it, I stuffed every last piece of cutting edge tech of the time into it. Dual CPU, SLI, started with 64gb ram then later on maxed the board out at 128gb. It’s still a workhorse tho. It’s one of the three I use all the time for music production, selfhosting etc.
My machine is not a workhorse. I got it second hand. It has around 8gb of RAM, and an 80gb HDD I found in a laptop.
But it’s enough to work as a testbed, so it’s fine with me.
This is the home lab creed: You do with what you have. Before I accumulated a bit of equipment, I’ve used laptops, RPi, minicomputers, at one time I had a cluster of Wyse thin clients bootstrapped together.
I am currently arguing what to do with my gaming rig and home theater. Either get a long cable which would need a DP-to-HDMI adapter or get a used mini PC (which is currently cheaper than a Raspberry Pi?) and setup Sunshine and Moonlight (but over WiFi and not LAN) to be more flexible when I eventually move the two into separate rooms. Does anyone have some experience with that? Maybe also latency over wireless network?
I don’t have the quantitative metrics, but I will say that I had the flu last year and I just laid on the couch with my steam deck and streamed cyberpunk using Moonlight. The latency was imperceptible to my flu brain, and it was a much better experience than playing for an hour at a much lower quality natively on the deck. I have a friend who also streams his desktop to his Apple TV (hardwired desktop, wireless Apple TV) and he beat metal gear solid V like that.
I use sunshine and moonlight using a pi 5 running Android TV as the client. It works perfectly for the occasional video stream but latency for games is a bit rough. You’ll probably be fine playing something relaxed like Stardew Valley but platformers (I’ve tried Ultimate Chicken Horse) and racing games (Mario Kart Wii running in Dolphin) are just bad enough to be unplayable. This is with both devices connected over Ethernet (albeit through a powerline adapter and my router is fairly cheap) so WiFi will probably be worse.
Not sure if sunshine and moonlight just have loads of overhead or if there’s a part of my setup causing the latency.
Last week got my new epyc server with GPU running ollama and all the trimmings.
This week linked my 2 home bases with wire guard, all the subnets mesh and the wifi isolation is solid. Performance is surprisingly good considering they’re 9 time zones apart on different hemispheres.
Migrating plex to jellyfin to get hw accel working.
Also trying to get my second base multiple statics and 10gb if possible, rural fiber in Europe is unbelievably aweome, hope to drop Comcast business back home if it works.
Got someone to work with on a new company, so that’s part of this, though my day job relies on this too.
Docker compose. I had a plan to ease into docker, I slipped and fell in the fucking pool. So far I have AdGuard Home and Heimdall working. Some WireGuard variant is next, followed by moving grafana and Prometheus over.
So far so good……internet blogs, videos, etc have been not great, seems things have changed since dropping the version in your yaml file. All in all, I think the direction I’m heading in is good. Time will tell.
Docker compose is great! Good luck!
I’ve been moving from docker compose to podman, and I think that’s the better long term plan for me. However, the wins here are pretty marginal, so I don’t recommend it unless you want those marginal wins and everything is already in containers. IMO: Podman > docker compose >>>no containers. Docker compose has way better examples online, so stick with that until you feel like tinkering.
I really like the idea of containers, it def solves my problems of running multiple services in the host OS. I’d like to build my own containers to pull the few “bare metal” services I’ll have outside of docker. Anyway, I’ll keep podman in the back of my head.
One thing I’m already happy I did was create a docker directory and having sub directories keep all of my container volumes separate. Should make backing things up easier as well.
Yeah, containers are great! It’s really nice knowing exactly which directories to move if I need to rebalance my services onto other hardware or something.
Most of my services are on my NAS, so I have this setup:
- /srv/nas/<folder> - everything here is on my RAID, and offsite backups look here (and exclude certain directories to save on cost
- /home/<user>/containers - my git repo with configs, sans passwords/keys
- configs w/keys live in my password manager
Disaster recovery should be as simple as:
- Copy my data from backup into /srv/nas
- Clone my container repo
- Copy env files to their respective locations
- Run a script to get things set up
I use specific container versions, so I should get exactly the same setup.
I’m going to be reinstalling my NAS soon (boot drive is getting old), so we’ll see how this process works, though I’ll skip step 1 since I’m keeping the drives.
i run coolify and I have to make my own solutions so I’m learning a lot about docker.
I had to reboot my Proxmox server after applying powertop --auto-tune. All was fine with every advised tweak but touching the Lan interfaces was not a great idea
Did autotune touch the interfaces?
Yes, it applies some power-saving settings to both my interfaces, then I lose the connection in the following 10 seconds. I should screencap the commands for all the other settings and prepare a custom script that wouldn’t touch my network
Ouch!
Found out that docker volumes are important after restarting my server 🙃
That’s a mistake you only make once!
Meh, made it a few times.
Some images treat volumes differently .
Looking at you, nextcloud.
Am I mistaken that docker creates temporary volumes with a nondescript name and you can potentially dig up the volumes that were being used in
/var/lib/docker/volumes?
Finally switched from plex to jellyfin, seems to be ok so far. Needed to make some small scripts for metadata management but it’s running smoothly. Finally decided I’m hosting enough software with user accounts that I’ve made an authentik instance for SSO with each (ofc jellyfin first)
Doing that switch soon.
Plex doesn’t do hw accel well, which kind of defeats the purpose.
Setting up HW accel on Jellyfin was a bit more manual than a single checkbox. You have to tell it which codecs it should HW decode and encode. I had some issues with it so left it off for now
The only feature I want that jellyfin doesn’t have (or I haven’t found it) is shuffle. Throwing on how it’s made or mythbusters on shuffle is great background stuff.
I see it in the default WebUI, perhaps whatever app you’re using doesn’t support it?
Ya I don’t think it’s supported on the apple tv app. Damn.
Aren’t there clients that support that?
Maybe, i haven’t seen it yet though
I do it for music
Damn ok that sucks it doesn’t seem available on the client for apple tv.
Yeah I dont know why any Dev wouldn’t choose a cross platform framework
Ann reason you choose authenik? There are a nmber of options and I’m not sure why to choose one over the other.
I’m not the person you’re replying to, but Authentik:
- Has a UI for configuring it, including adding users.
- Supports LDAP if you need it. Authelia needs a separate LDAP server.
- Supports practically every two factor auth protocol you’d need: OIDC (OpenID Connect), OAuth2, SCIM, SAML, RADIUS, LDAP, and proxying for apps that don’t support any of them (which is getting rarer).
- Supports permissions and permission groups, i.e. only allow certain users to access particular apps.
- Can be used as the source of truth for Google Workspace and Microsoft Entra. Maybe not as relevant for home use.
I haven’t tried Keycloak but I hear it’s pretty good, albeit a heavier app to deploy.
I have tried Authelia, and it’s much less powerful than Authentik. Authelia requires you to manually modify config files rather than using a web UI. It also only supports OIDC (which is in beta) and proxying. Proxying is not recommended and has several issues since it’s not “true” single sign-on.
I’m considering Keycloak myself because it’s trusted by security professionals (I think it’s a RedHat project), whereas Authentik is basically a passion project.
I hear keycloak has quarkus builds as well these days which should be much slimmer than how it used to be built.
I hadn’t heard of it, and looking into quarkus just reminded me of how complicated the whole Java ecosystem is. Gross.
Hosting Go, Rust, etc stuff is dead simple, but with Java, there’s all this complexity…
Nothing’s as bad as trying to host and maintain a Ruby on Rails app :)
Docker has made a lot of it a non-issue though, since the apps are already preconfigured within the Docker image.
Keycloak is very much lighter actually. Can run under half a gig ram whereas authentik uses about 1GB.
Authelia is king though in running with just about 30MB of ram.
That’s interesting… It used to be a lot heavier.
Authelia is definitely the lightest in terms of RAM, but it’s also the lightest in terms of features. As far as I can remember, they only added OIDC support fairly recently - previously it only supported proxying.
I did no research whatsoever and picked the one I’d seen the name of more often. I figured if it didn’t work for me I’d try something else, same as when plex wasn’t working for me so I switched to jellyfin. I have no idea how it compares to the other options but it feels pretty solid so far
Hey, we’re also thinking about setting up authentik. Could you answer the following, where I haven’t found answers to yet: does introducing SSO impede logging into Jellyfin on a TV / phone app at all?
no, works fine. there’s an LDAP plugin for jellyfin so you can use the jellyfin internal login page and the server will verify the login against authentik. took some setting up though.
Alright, thank you!
I added a cheap PCI 4 slot NVMe expansion card and a couple of SSDs for a new pool and then migrated all the database-heavy stuff over to it. Required some use of local ZFS send/receive which I didn’t know was possible, but it has gone smooth so far. Very happy with it! It no longer sounds like my HDD pool is trying to escape from hell and some of the services are much snappier, especially Bitmagnet. I’d highly recommend it as an upgrade for anyone still running purely HDDs. I thought I could get away with it but ZFS speeds are no faster than single drives and the amount of stuff I had was hammering it non-stop.
I also bought my own domain finally to escape the free-tier dynamic DNS woes and I can finally feel good about sharing links with other people. I slapped a file share container with disabled registrations on a sub domain. I put it all behind free tier Cloudflare to hide my server’s IP, it took a little bit of learning what the different records are but so far much easier than I thought. Although I have yet to do the hardest part of setting up dynamic IP for my DNS records. I see a bunch of scripts floating around, but none seem that easy or well-maintained…
Oh, and the PI I’ve had running Pi-Hole v5 for god knows how long with no maintenance couldn’t run Tailscale, so I wiped the entire thing to start fresh and got it up and running with Pi-Hole v6, Tailscale, and Unbound. I like having these separated from my other services as they are more critical to have at all times and I have had 100% uptime with my Pi so far. Although I chose Dietpi for my OS on a whim because it looked interesting and am not sold on it. I like that it has easy software installs with sane defaults so I probably saved time overall, but the amount of time I spent debugging the weird choices Dietpi made for basic shit like networking options really threw me off.
More incus:
- mounting persistent storage into containers (cheating by exporting NFS from my proxmox zfs into the incus host.
- wrote a pruning backup script for containers, runs daily
- passed through hardware (quicksync) into jellyfin container (it works!)
- launched an OCI container (docker home assistant) natively in incus (this is a game-changer!)
Next:
- build 2nd incus node
- move all containers from proxmox to incus
- decom proxmox
- setup Debian with NFS export
I hear about Incus being the next best thing. I’ve never played around with it. Is it all that and a bag o’ chips?
I think so.
It is LXD + KVM, so way more and finer tune control on lxc instances. It can run OCI images as well, so for docker instances with only a few configs and no persistent storage, it is actually quite handy. For docker instances that need pretty complicated compose files, I just run docker inside an lxc for now, until I figure that out.
Does Incus allow you to use a VM with a GUI? One thing that’s nice about Proxmox is I have one VM with a very basic lxqt setup for when I need that, and I can either use remote-viewer + the spice protocol to access it or access it through the Proxmox web ui. That’s been very handy.
Side question, but where are you hearing this about incus?
I’m wrapping up 9 years of using proxmox and I have very specific reasons for switching to incus, but I this is the third time I’m fielding questions in the last month about incus.
I read a lot. LOL I might not understand it all, but I read TBs of articles and stuff.
