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.
Finished my migration from Plex to Jellyfin
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.
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
?
I’ve been fending off AI bots the last week or so; wrote about it here:
https://gerowen.substack.com/p/the-ai-data-scraping-is-getting-out
Interesting writeup, thanks! I thought maybe dropping connections with those user agents would be the best but idk. My sites have not been targeted yet fortunately.
So far I haven’t seen any attempts to change their user agents. I’ve seen one or two other bots poking around, but nothing to write home about so I’ve left them alone.
I have heard however that changing user agents is a tactic they do indeed employ, especially Claude, so it may be that I’ll eventually have to adapt my defenses.
A catalog for organizing various Roms you have. It can pull metadata from a number of sources and properly add all the details, cover art, and platform information to each game. It’s smart enough to auto-generate collections based on game series, and embed YouTube videos for gameplay of each one without even any configuration.
The best part? It has Ruffle and EmulatorJS built in so you can play any games supported by EmulatorJS in your browser. I tested games up to N64 and they all ran smooth as butter right in the browser with gamepad configurations built in. They even support local multiplayer.
Finally starting my self hosted journey. I have everything I need I’m setting up a 6tb nas for linux iso’s photos and files. And I recently got a “broken” laptop that works perfectly fine that I will use for running all my applications in proxmox such as immich, jellyfin and nextcloud. And probably many others in the near future.
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)
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!
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.
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
I’ve never done dev for apple stuff, but I think it’s probably just not that friendly with more open/cross platform frameworks
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.
Ann reason you choose authenik? There are a nmber of options and I’m not sure why to choose one over the other.
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
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.
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’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.
Agreed, with the clear exception being PHP, which often requires configuring a web server.
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
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’ve setup Nextcloud on Hetzner, and have ordered a mini PC to run Immich and experiment with.
Still trying to decide on a good cheap email host that I can also move my family on to eventually.
I recently moved from Gmail to mailbox.org with my own domain. Works as it should so far. And for 2.5€ per month I can’t complain about the price either.
And switching email addresses has actually been less painful than I expected. Most services let you change the associated Mail easily.
Recently been working on setting up forgejo to migrate away from GitHub. My open source stuff I’ve actually put onto codeberg and I’ve set up a handful of pull mirrors on my local instance for redundancy. This weekend I’ve been testing out woodpecker-ci for automating pushing files to s3 for some static websites for repos on codeberg as well as my forgejo instance. Today will tell if that is successful!
I set up my own Lemmy server, mastodon, and matrix. Finally making the move off centralized social media and communication platforms
Do you just do this for your own personal use, a few friends or just anyone from the internet?I’m just curious what the point is and how much effort is involved in connecting with other instances.
Nice! Hosting your own Fedi stuff feels great.
Shoutout to @Estebiu@lemmy.dbzer0.com for helping me appreciate the joy of docker compose. I got to set up Navidrome and it’s been great!
With that said, I have a security-related question: at what point in self-hosting am I exposed to the outside internet that warrants things like reverse proxies and other security measures? I’m currently typing router IPs (e.g. 192.168.x.x) to access the services, so is my machine exposed if the only people intending to connect are local on our wireless network?
There’s nothing wrong with making a reverse proxy only for use inside your homelab. It’s one way to resolve internal DNS queries and give addresses to your services. It’s perhaps the best, because it’s the only way I know that doesn’t necessitate remembering port numbers.
E.g. You are hosting something at 192.168.1.20 on port 3310. Even if you set a local DNS record for pihole.itjust.donn to resolve to 192.168.1.20, you’ll still have to type pihole.itjust.donn:3310 to access it. The same isn’t true with a reverse proxy.
This is good to know because I’m learning about nginx currently, so I’m glad it has practical use without opening up my network 🤘
Call me careless, but I personally don’t think exposing services publicly is that big of a deal. I’ve been publicly exposing Home Assistant, Jellyfin, Immich, Joplin and a few others for at least 3 years now with no repercussions. Everyone’s risk tolerance is different, but I wouldn’t write off publicly available services. Precautions like a reverse proxy, Crowdsec, Fail2ban, and Authelia all lower the risk profile.
To expose your stuff to the outside internet, you need to actively set port forward in your internet router, you won’t do that by accident.
What a relief, thanks for the clarity! I have vague memories of doing that as a teenager to play various games with friends, which sounds like something risky a teenager would do 😅
I’m switching my immich instance to an SSD one and switching my VPN from zerotier to tailscale.
Hopefully that means my Immich will be a little more reactive.
If at all possible see if you can do wireguard yourself. Tailscale is basically inserting a third party company for no reason as its just wireguard with their servers involved. For example if you can run opnsense its easy to get running via the GUI. Very rewarding!
Any resources you’d recommend?
Absolutely. I used Tailscale for a bit because I didn’t want to get a VPS (I’m behind CGNAT), but I needed to expose a handful of services and use my own domain name, and I couldn’t figure that out w/ Tailscale. So I bought a cheap VPS and configured WireGuard on it to get into my LAN and I’m much happier.
I’m considering going this route - just to hide my (static) home IP.
What’s the rough sizing I’d need for a VPS? I’m guessing the smallest possible, but with the best / unlimited data usage?
That really depends on your use case. I use very little transfer because most of my usage is within my LAN. I set up a DNS server (built in to my router) to resolve my domains to my local servers, and all the TLS happens on my local server, so it never goes out to the VPS. So I only need enough transfer for when I’m outside my house.
Here’s my setup:
- VPS - WireGuard and HAProxy - sni-based proxying
- router - static DNS for local services
- local servers - TLS trunking and services
My devices use my network’s DNS, but if that fails, they fall back to some external DNS and route traffic through the VPS.
VPSs without data caps tend to have worse speeds because they attract people who will use more transfer. I think it’s better to find one with a transfer cap that’s sufficient for your needs, so things stay fast. I use Hetzner, which has generous caps in the EU (20TB across the board) and good enough for me caps in the US (1TB base scales with instance size and can buy extra). Most of my use outside my house is showing something off every now and them, or accessing some small files or uploading something (transfer limits are only for outgoing data).
Ok, didn’t think about “unlimited” actually being slower - thanks for the insight.
I’m running a pfSense f/w at the edge, so split horizon DNS and haproxy are already sorted… I’ll check out wireguard - should be straight forward
Thanks
My ISP blocks all outgoing ports. Maybe I’m not trying hard enough but anything I try port forwarding ends up getting blocked.
Minecraft and port 80 are the 2 I’ve tried and they’ve been unresponsive
Pretty sure those two ports are blocked by a lot of IPs because they’re so popular
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.
Would you mind sharing the code?
Bash variable manipulation is really, really fun.
automate stuff in my homelab.
Love me some homelab automation. It puts a smile on my face when I get a little ding from telegram giving me a summary of this morning’s email, what the weather will be for the day along with a summary of established connections to my servers 'cause I’m paranoid like that. LOL fun stuff
Got my jetKVM in the mail yesterday. Really sleek build and software. Liking it a lot so far.
Migrated my network to a router running openwrt this past week as well. Having issues with avahi-daemon crash looping, so I haven’t been able to get mdns working in between networks 🤷