selfhosting

I'm trying to unfuk myself from Google. It's an admirable goal, but damned difficult to do if you intend to continue using the Internet.

Except ... well ... you actually can do this. You can run a search proxy locally that will completely obfuscate you to the search engines and also strip out all of the tracking and ads they spit back at you.

I think there are more apps, but there are two primary search proxy platforms that are well developed and support running in a Docker container, so you could run it on any Windows or Linux box.

....

Whoogle https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search

Try this app first. Low system requirements. Super, super easy to setup. "Whoogle is intended to only ever be deployed to private instances by individuals of any background, with as little effort as possible." Let Whoogle be your gateway to running a search proxy.

I've run Whoogle for almost 6 months now. Google has tried to break it twice. Had to adjust some docker params and upgrade the LXC to fix. I'm extremely satisfied with Whoogle.

....

SearXNG - https://github.com/searxng/searxng

This app is the all around better tool, but its much more complicated to manage. It's had a fractious background, forked from an older project called SearX. The author of Whoogle says, "I'm a huge fan of Searx though and encourage anyone to use that instead if they want access to other search engines/a different UI/more configuration."

I've just deployed SearXNG today based on benbusby's recommendation. Ya know, I was a Whoogle fan, but this is just a step above. 140+ search engines, it looks awesome, and its got a large contributor list with lots of recent commits.

....

I run Proxmox VE, and both of these apps have been given the tteck treatment for easy setup.

Whoogle - https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=whoogle

SearXNG - https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=searxng

I'm new to lemmy. I posted this in one of the big self-hosting forums and it was deleted by the mod. I assume they felt it was off topic.

=======

This is a hack to add an extra drive bay to a Dell Server. Tried with both PowerEdge R230 and R430.

Replace DVD w/SATA Bay. They make replacements for laptop DVD bays that allow you to put a second sata drive there instead. This replacement part can also drop right in place of the slim DVD bay on a Dell PowerEdge. I’ve seen multiple references to this setup working. This guy’s blog has screenshots of it. https://tachytelic.net/2019/10/install-ssd-optical-13th-generation-poweredge/

I don’t see the disk. At all. The OS doesn’t. PERCCLI doesn’t see it. iDRAC doesn’t. When I got into Lifecycle Controller to manage the disks, It used to see the SATA DVD drive at the end of the list, but now there’s no entry. (On the R230 when I removed the drop-in and put the original DVD back, it went back to normal. The bay is in the R430 right now.)

I’ve got the right bay, it fits. More important, the electrical stuff all matches up. The drive light activates. Got a brand new drive in there. It hasn’t been tested otherwise, but I’d like to think its ok. In the post I’ve linked, it looks like he has his SATA set to ATA, not AHCI, so I tried that, but no change. Poked at it quite a bit. Can’t think of anything else to examine.

Alright … so there’s all the setup. And here’s why I think it doesn’t work. My main disks are all SAS on both machines. R230 PERC H330 - 4 x SAS 7.5k 3.5" spinners R430 PERC H730 mini - 6 x SAS 10.5k 2.5" spinners

I’ve read that you can’t mix SAS and SATA drives. As the DVD seemed to be a normal SATA, I figured I could use that port with a SATA SSD. But maybe not. It’s not worked on either server, and all the gear involved appears to be operational. It’s worked for other people. But every reference I’ve seen to this working seems to be all SATA setups.

Does anybody know for sure?

=======

Since I first wrote this, I've decided to remove all the SAS drives from the machine and test with just this SATA SSD. I'll do that soon, when I'm ready to tear down the current array.