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.
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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
Yes
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. :)
No you just continue updating until it’s fixed again.
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
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 been great for me so far.
It’s worked really well for me.
It’s been pretty good after I got it working. Configuring Nginx reverse proxy took a bit to figure out since I had to forward the port internal to the docker network. But after that it was easy to configure everything.
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 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.
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.
I finally got IPv6 working in Docker Swarm…by moving from Docker Swarm to regular Docker.
Traefik now properly gets IPv6 addresses and forwards them to the backend.
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.
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
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 have had success with a monthly reminder in my google calendar. Sometimes I skip it, but I have been updating and keeping everything nice and tidy much more frequent than I used to!
Google calendar? In the selfhosting community? Bold statement😄
Let’s get Radicale!
I recently setup Music Assistant and have been trying to make it work in my VLANs with my esp32 devices. It has been slow going. Nothing has the level of logging required to easily debug the issues I’ve encountered but I’m slowly working through it all.
I migrated my whole native service infrastructure to Docker services this weekend. I prepared for it the previous weeks; basically looking up information about details I wasn’t sure about. The services were mailing, file cloud, and traccar with modoboa, ownCloud respectively. I moved to mailcow and Nextcloud and replaced my feedly account with NextCloud News as a bonus. So far pretty happy with it, had a couple set-backs but also learned a lot in the process. This was the first time for me doing something productive with Docker
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.
I run everything off my gaming rig, so maintenance is kinda already a part of it.
I just don’t really look forward to the day I need to reinstall :p
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.
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)
Cool! Home Assistant has it and I can imagine Nextcloud as well but those are overkill just for that.
I just spent a good few hours optimizing my LLM rig. Disabling the graphical interface to squeeze 150mb of vram from xorg, setting programs cpu niceness to highest priority, tweaking settings to find memory limits.
I was able to increase the token speed by half a second while doubling context size. I don’t have the budget for any big vram upgrade so I’m trying to make the most of what ive got.
I have two desktop computers. One has better ram+CPU+overclocking but worse GPU. The other has better GPU but worse ram, CPU, no overclocking. I’m contemplating whether its worth swapping GPUs to really make the most of available hardware. Its bee years since I took apart a PC and I’m scared of doing somthing wrong and damaging everything. I dunno if its worth the time, effort, and risk for the squeeze.
Otherwise I’m loving my self hosting llm hobby. Ive been very into l learning computers and ML for the past year. Crazy advancements, exciting stuff.
