Everything behind a VPN now, Wireguard is my single point of failure…

I’m considering trying to host my own mail (receive and internal send only, at least at first), as I have a friend who’s hosting all the useful services and mail’s the only one left.

Also experimenting with (rootless) podman, I’m finding the permission mapping a bit confusing tbh.

I have electric baseboard heaters so i like to heat my home with my server in the winter. I dont use it enough in the summer to warrant the power draw, but i’m looking forward to doing so this winter.

I’m hoping the AI bubble pops soon… i’d really like to pick up a decent accelerator card for AI for my desktop. My current server doesn’t have the PCIe slots left (all filled with U.2 drives on PCIe adapters or HBAs) so it would need to go in my desktop… i thought 64GB was a lot when i built this 3 years ago but now i’m wishing I put 128GB in it…

My server has 238GB though (ordered a 256GB kit and one stick was dead. Caught that on the 4th test cycle with memtest86+ pro which I 100% paid for.) Since I use it for not only ZFS but also all of my random containers and game server VMs.

Finally got around to self hosting Fluxer (Discord alternative) because they’ve implemented an easy to use setup.

Now I’m trying to optimise the setup for my needs as a backup space if my friends decide to stop using Discord and it’ll be a frictionless changeover.

On a side note; it’s the most containers for a single hosted service that I have. I can’t check the exact number right now but it’s over 10 containers!

Got a static IP routed in from https://getrealip.net/ so I can go back to hosting my own servers at home again properly without needing to hack up everything to route through Cloudflare with Tailscale. CGNAT is really messing up the internet. The service even supports reverse DNS, yay.

Ordered a cheap Coral TPU for my server (an older HD mini PC with AMD CPU, no discrete GPU), just waiting on it to show up.

Last week, I finally got my Tapo cameras + Frigate + Home Assistant all working together, but now my server’s CPU idles between 65% and 90%, hence the TPU.

A while ago I made my first attempt at setting up a SSO for some of the things I host. I figured out things that have built in support, like Immich, but struggled with getting it done through Proxy for things that don’t have baked in OAuth or OIDC support.

I revisited it yesterday and figured everything out so I’m happy about that. Navidrome was one of the more difficult ones to figure out because I need SSO authentication for the web-ui, but username/password for the API. That was actually pretty easy once I wrapped my head around it.

I picked Authentik based on general positive things I’ve heard about it, and I use Nginx Proxy Manager for reverse proxy.

I finally ran a hardware accelerated ML container for immich.

My immich is in a VPS and my GPU is in my home server. Cheaper to run that than to rent GPU compute.

Decided to get back into podcasts recently, but baked-in ads and sponsor reads make standard listening unbearable.

I spent the weekend spinning up MinusPod, an open-source tool that detects ad reads and strips them using ffmpeg. It uses Whisper for local transcription, then feeds the transcript to an LLM to identify exact timestamps for sponsor segments and commercial breaks before slicing them out. I routed the text processing through Gemini Flash, which runs about $0.07 per episode. Clean, ad-free audio feeds with zero manual editing.

The only PHP vuln I had was from parts-db which I deployed recently to check it out. Haven’t set it up yet seems like a lot of work. I keep a running record of my electronics parts in obsidian hoping maybe I can bulk add em or something.

Thanks for this post, something I miss from earlier selfhosting communities.

I have simply running two SFF Lenovo Thinkcentres—one for all local services and another for all online services. They could run on one but I keep them separate for security and stability reasons. I often crash the local one by running out of space…

I finally got to building a second backup recently which I am happy about.

Honestly, since moving and downsizing from several services at home and at work, this solution works. I run out of space frequently but it forces me to not hoard things I will not actually use. My previous rack server seeded something like 50tb as I kept everything I leached to benefit the community, now less possible.

This has also made me move away from services that are not needed.

• [ ] I would like to offload all my home videos to an external drive as I am running out of space for actual services and Jellyfin media.

• [ ] I would like to consolidate all of my local and online databases rather than run a new one for each container stack.

Added no-new-privileges to all my outward facing containers :P

Feeling better every day having my stuff under my control and away from prying eyes of trackers and other unsavory stuff.

Just completed my set of needed services by adding nextcloud to the list. Now life is good. Jellyfin: check. Navidrome: check. Pihole: check. Invidious: check. Nextcloud: check. What else? lol

This week, I’ve mainly been handling the fallout from the PHP vulnerability that occurred in late October. Following that incident, I made a few changes: I’ve opened only the necessary ports to the outside world, and the admin panel is now accessible only via VPN. I’ve created an inventory list for each server, clearly detailing which services are running and their versions, so that the next time a CVE is released, I’ll know immediately which servers are affected. In addition to running daily automatic backups, I periodically restore them to a clean machine to verify they work.

Remember: Always treat your servers as if they might be lost tomorrow, and make sure to have a thorough recovery plan in place.