What’s amusing is I’m long time stoner. As such, I have a shit memory. I do not remember writing this comment. Nor do I remember even struggling with this. I do know that I had a bunch of .crypt domains for a while.

So your comment is hilarious because I frequently find my own comments when I’m struggling through that thing I once did that I don’t remember, documenting what I did.

I do it to help others, I call it “leaving breadcrumbs for those further back on the path” but those breadcrumbs are great when a server dies and you have to re set it up.

Kudos for being a great guy and leaving breadcrumbs. Karma likes to remind you that you’re a wonderful person sometimes, so just enjoy it, and don’t let the bastards grind you down.

Rereading my own comment, I do this, I thank people hoping they’re still active at some point. I really do believe in thanking those that help me, even if they may not see it until 10 months later, if at all. You must have been the post that slotted it all into place.

I think I’m a step behind you. I use Uptime Kuma for monitoring and it worked really well. Just have it running on a pi separate from my main machine.

I worked out how to get it sending me emails when things are down and up, and now my email inbox is a fucking hot mess of notifications.

So I’ve just this weekend integrated it into Home Assistant and set it to notify me when things are down for 5 minutes or more.

My next step was going to be finding some way of integrating Portainer into Home Assistant so I can restart stopped containers, and maybe Proxmox so I can reboot VMs from HA. Not sure it’s possible yet though.

Ultimately I want to have HA send me a notification with actionable buttons with “reboot container” and “reboot VM” which, when pressed, will sort the issue out.

However this will not help when one of my drives goes down. They’re HDDs plugged in by USB3 which isn’t great and my server is behind the coat rack so sometimes the kids just throw their coats on and it falls onto my server, which then heats up and goes silly.

2 things, one of which has already been said

Get an SSD and a usb cable for it. Boot off that. Be aware that not all cables are the same (have a Google for usb 3 SSD cables for home assistant before you buy one). There’s a little song and dance you have to do to boot off ext SSD but it’s not hard and doesn’t take long (Google).

That combo will eliminate the SD card issues in the future. But you also need to look into the Google Drive backup add-on. Get that for when shit goes down.

With those two things you should be all set and eliminate this ever happening again. If it does you have a backup.

I’ll be honest and say that most of my self hosted music collection was pirated or ripped from CD like 20 years ago. I put it all on an iPod back then.

I found the iPod gathering dust in a drawer when I finally got a car with a usb jack a couple years ago (yeah I’m not exactly laden with bags of cash over here) and recently pulled all that music back onto my newly set up media server.

I have a Spotify family account I’m trying to phase out with resistance from the children.

To support artists I go and see them when they tour and buy a ludicrously expensive t-shirt

Plex was easy enough to set up. I use plexamp on my phone but can access the Plex server via a browser, which includes my music

Yeah I mean I get it because I was also thinking about self hosting for a long time and had a bunch of questions myself.

The problem is that a lot of the questions were not needed, and a bunch of the other questions I answered myself by just tooling around with the stuff.

Great comment btw, it’s a good idea to have a list of the services you’d like to run, in order of importance z then work through it.

I did that then found ways to combine a bunch of services, to the point where I had multiple stand alone VMs that are now just one for Home Assistant and second for Plex and Docker

I see a lot of posts like this and it’s always people overthinking something they haven’t tried to do yet.

So my advice is to just do it.

You may lose everything at some point in the future, Satan knows I have a few times, but because you’ve actually done it, you can do it again.

Now, because you’re just thinking about doing it, it seems like a massive deal because you’ve not gone out and done it yet.

As for recommendations, I use a Proxmox VM with Debian and Docker. My Proxmox does backups, but my Docker compose is also a text document on my PC so I can recreate it all from scratch from that. I also have an idea what I did when I was learning how to do it, and have retained a good bit of that info so I could probably do it without either the backups or the Docker Compose, it would just take longer.

Just do it

Well I guess it’s racist to call them bell ends now then, fucking bell ends

Even if you manage to stop the WiFi hack he can still get in to your network through the ethernet ports. He could train an army of ants to pull a wire through a small hole in your wall and attach it to your router.

Just in case, fill all your unused ports with yoghurt. This will drown the ants

Follow the Left Hand Path

When I die my friends will miss me like usual. Then the Plex server will go down and they’ll miss me all over again.

You need to pick a machine (if you only have 1 you don’t lol) to be your web portal, bang a block of code in via ssh or command line (I copy pasted) then you can access Portainer via the web portal.

From there “Stacks” is Docker Compose and you can fiddle with your containers, networking settings and all the other stuff via a UI instead of having to SSH in all the time to look at your compose files.

Then if you wanna use docker on more machines you just bang a block of code into that machine via ssh and it will appear in your Portainer

Far easier imho

I found a lot of the problems I had with Docker were with Docker. Once I moved to using Portainer for Docker it became much more accessible.

This looks like a good shout. I have actually tried it out but it was years ago when I was trying to get a Sonos-like service and ultimately settled on Squeezebox.

Maybe it’s time to try it again, thanks for the idea

It’s a Dell Optiplex 7050

Eh I did all this with a cheap thin client.

Proxmox as the frontend

OMV in a VM with usb passed through

Debian VM for Plex and Docker

Adguard and Nginx and Arr in Docker

Network sharing from the OMV VM

HDDs to USB.

I’ve solved this exact issue and numerous others with samba / CIFS recently. This is how I have my Proxmox on a mini pc with usb mounted HDDs at present:

1 VM Home Assistant OS, not relevant really

1 VM OMV Open Media Vault.

1 VM Debian with Docker installed.

So in my experience over the last few months you want your usb drive to have absolutely nothing to do with Proxmox. Nope.

I had 3 hooked in mounted in Proxmox and when one of them threw a fit Proxmox refused to load.

Better to have a NAS VM installed and have the drive(s, I have 3, 2x1tb and 1x750gb) passed straight through, whole usb, to the NAS VM.

This means if the drive fails Proxmox doesn’t break, and also in my experience with OMV, it’ll still run if a drive breaks

Then what I did was set up the shares and made them samba in OMV then set my other VM, the Debian one, with mount points in the Fstab.

The key for me in this endeavour was to make sure the Fstab entry made sure that the OS wouldn’t fail if it couldn’t find a drive, as happened in Proxmox, so I made sure “nofail” was somewhere in the Fstab config.

For Samba to work in Linux you need to install cifs-utils, then add a line in /etc/fstab. Mine goes:

//omv.local/sharename /mnt/filename cifs credentials=/etc/cifs-credentials,file_mode=0777,dir-mode=0777,auto,nofail,vers=3.0 0 0

You have to create the mount point mkdir /mnt/filename and give it permissions with chmod

You also need to made the cifs-credentials file in /etc/

It needs to contain:

username=yourusername password=yourpassword domain=WORKGROUP

Then what I do for Audiobookshelf and whatnot is mount the mount point as directories in Portainer under the volumes: - /mnt/Downloads:/Downloads

Then in the UI of the service I’m using in Docker I can use the Downloads folder and it’s the mount point.

This is what’s working well for me. If a drive fails I try and fix it in OMV instead of trying to plug a monitor into my mini pc to try and work out from the logs why Proxmox has failed…

Use this comment as a framework for your research and save yourself some heartache. You can mount the CIFS/Samba share to Proxmox and use that, so you can still use the drive in Proxmox for backups and such

I’ve just come back to this comment to get sabnzbd running, thanks again

My budget-friendly solution has been to replace my ISP provided router with a 10 year old Netgear router that handles all the protocols my ISP does off eBay for £25.

I have a 4 storey townhouse so having this on the ground floor is useless when you’re on the top floor.

So I have a power line system installed which I’ve hooked into the modem. I’ve got a wired router in the front room that has all the front room tech worked in.

On the top floor I have an even older Netgear router a friend gave me, with OpenWRT installed plugged into the power line and running as an access point.

In total this whole system has probably cost me £80 to fully install as I was given the older Netgear.

Works beautifully, cost very little, and I’ve got a Guest Mode ap that turns on when I turn guest mode in Home Assistant, a simple “Hey Google turn on Guest mode”

Over the last few months I’ve made a whole bunch of different combinations of VMs, LXC and Docker until now, where I have Home Assistant, a NAS and a Debian server which I deploy docker stacks into.

At one point I had about 15 different machines I could spin up, but now it’s just the 3. The great thing about Proxmox is you can just create and destroy to your hearts content