Selfhosted

Finished my migration from Plex to Jellyfin

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

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.

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.

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'm moving to Podman quadlets for self hosting infrastructure (Forgejo and Woodpecker CI) and Kubernetes for the actual services. I also still need to figure out were I'm going to do SSL terminations.

Nextcloud will be moved to Nextcloud AIO

I added a cheap PCI 4 slot NVMe expansion card and a couple of SSDs for a new pool and then migrated all the database-heavy stuff over to it. Required some use of local ZFS send/receive which I didn't know was possible, but it has gone smooth so far. Very happy with it! It no longer sounds like my HDD pool is trying to escape from hell and some of the services are much snappier, especially Bitmagnet. I'd highly recommend it as an upgrade for anyone still running purely HDDs. I thought I could get away with it but ZFS speeds are no faster than single drives and the amount of stuff I had was hammering it non-stop.

I also bought my own domain finally to escape the free-tier dynamic DNS woes and I can finally feel good about sharing links with other people. I slapped a file share container with disabled registrations on a sub domain. I put it all behind free tier Cloudflare to hide my server's IP, it took a little bit of learning what the different records are but so far much easier than I thought. Although I have yet to do the hardest part of setting up dynamic IP for my DNS records. I see a bunch of scripts floating around, but none seem that easy or well-maintained...

Oh, and the PI I've had running Pi-Hole v5 for god knows how long with no maintenance couldn't run Tailscale, so I wiped the entire thing to start fresh and got it up and running with Pi-Hole v6, Tailscale, and Unbound. I like having these separated from my other services as they are more critical to have at all times and I have had 100% uptime with my Pi so far. Although I chose Dietpi for my OS on a whim because it looked interesting and am not sold on it. I like that it has easy software installs with sane defaults so I probably saved time overall, but the amount of time I spent debugging the weird choices Dietpi made for basic shit like networking options really threw me off.

Finally installed jellyfin when I realized I could use rclone to mount 10G of free disk space from box (with client side encryption using rclone) on my server.

Very easy to install on Debian, but the plugins are a security nightmare. Jellyfin devs are kinda dumb.

Debatting with myself and to a lesser degree what to do in terms of our homeserver situation. While the proxmox node has more than enough CPU and RAM capacity left, the NAS, an older Synology, is full to the brim, EOL and needs replacement.And sadly being a mini PC the proxmox node is unable to get the HDs connected.

So something new is needed and I would rather have my setup streamlined and combine the two.

But that is... More difficult than anticipated. I really would like something power saving with ECC ram that can take at least two PCI-e (SFP+ and a potential graphic card for AI later on). That can take 4,better 6 HDs. And at least one,better two NVMe. ...that basically means self building which I am happy with, but all current builds I calculate come out somewhere south of 2000€ (including two new HDs, as two old ones need to go). And that's sadly out of the financial possibility at the moment.

If only the fucking Ugreen (DXP6800)would support ECC. While not ideal in terms of PCI-e it would be enough to do the trick.

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.

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)

Found out that docker volumes are important after restarting my server 🙃

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.

Oh, I've just been tinkering around with LangFlow specifically as a news aggregator.

The flow: https://i.imgur.com/5HqznQm.png

Then asking AI to go get me some news: https://i.imgur.com/ltZPBwC.png

Still needs a little tinkering and as the final step, to send said news stories to my Telegram. I really have a blast with automation platforms like N8N, Flowise, Gotify, DopplerTask, & Kestra.

Afterwards, I smoked a small bowl and worked on a couple songs I have in the works.

HBU?

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'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.

More incus:

• mounting persistent storage into containers (cheating by exporting NFS from my proxmox zfs into the incus host.
• wrote a pruning backup script for containers, runs daily, keeps last 7 days and the first of the month
• passed through hardware (quicksync) into jellyfin container (it works!)
• launched an OCI container (docker home assistant) natively in incus (this is a game-changer!)

Next:

• build 2nd incus node
• move all containers from proxmox to incus
• decom proxmox
• setup Debian with NFS export