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.
Building a simple workflow with AI agent for our community watch group. Also building an open source automation platform, currently working through GUI templates for it.
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.
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.
Bash variable manipulation is really, really fun.
Would you mind sharing the code?
I’ve just moved and I’m setting up my machines. NIC died in my DIY router just before the move so I’m upgrading to 2.5/10 Gbps at the same time.
What NIC are you looking at and what OS have you chosen?
It’s a complete experiment with cheap network gear from China. I have a HP T730 mini PC that serves as my router. I’m installing a cheap 2.5 Gbps NIC for LAN side. Then there’s a switch with 4x2.5 Gbps Ethernet and 2xSFP+ ports. My two main machines (PC and home server) are getting 10 Gbps SFP+ cards that I’ll attach with DAC cables.
OS is OpenWRT, because I’ve been connecting over WiFi to the Internet in both old and new locations. OPNsense just will not work with any wireless adapter I’ve tried. I will try agan once I route Ethernet to my room.
I’m curious if all of this works with cheap network gear. Today I’m configuring a fresh OpenWRT installation on the router.
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
- 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
I hear about Incus being the next best thing. I’ve never played around with it. Is it all that and a bag o’ chips?
Side question, but where are you hearing this about incus?
I’m wrapping up 9 years of using proxmox and I have very specific reasons for switching to incus, but I this is the third time I’m fielding questions in the last month about incus.
I read a lot. LOL I might not understand it all, but I read TBs of articles and stuff.
I think so.
It is LXD + KVM, so way more and finer tune control on lxc instances. It can run OCI images as well, so for docker instances with only a few configs and no persistent storage, it is actually quite handy. For docker instances that need pretty complicated compose files, I just run docker inside an lxc for now, until I figure that out.
Does Incus allow you to use a VM with a GUI? One thing that’s nice about Proxmox is I have one VM with a very basic lxqt setup for when I need that, and I can either use remote-viewer + the spice protocol to access it or access it through the Proxmox web ui. That’s been very handy.
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.
Firing up my NAS and Arrs. My Aoostar WTR Pro and all the components arrived, it’s all setup, and I swapped out the fan for a larger one to get more airflow into the nvme drive area since I live in a hot climate.
Spending the day configuring a vpn, sab, and qbit. Already learning a lot!
i run coolify and I have to make my own solutions so I’m learning a lot about docker.
Last week got my new epyc server with GPU running ollama and all the trimmings.
This week linked my 2 home bases with wire guard, all the subnets mesh and the wifi isolation is solid. Performance is surprisingly good considering they’re 9 time zones apart on different hemispheres.
Migrating plex to jellyfin to get hw accel working.
Also trying to get my second base multiple statics and 10gb if possible, rural fiber in Europe is unbelievably aweome, hope to drop Comcast business back home if it works.
Got someone to work with on a new company, so that’s part of this, though my day job relies on this too.
I’m trying to figure out a basic CRM for my local sports club. I use docker to self host a voting platform called RALLLY that we use a lot and enjoy. If people can recommend a CRM I’d give it a go today. I tried a platform called twenty yesterday but couldn’t get it off the ground
Docker compose. I had a plan to ease into docker, I slipped and fell in the fucking pool. So far I have AdGuard Home and Heimdall working. Some WireGuard variant is next, followed by moving grafana and Prometheus over.
So far so good……internet blogs, videos, etc have been not great, seems things have changed since dropping the version in your yaml file. All in all, I think the direction I’m heading in is good. Time will tell.
Docker compose is great! Good luck!
I’ve been moving from docker compose to podman, and I think that’s the better long term plan for me. However, the wins here are pretty marginal, so I don’t recommend it unless you want those marginal wins and everything is already in containers. IMO: Podman > docker compose >>>no containers. Docker compose has way better examples online, so stick with that until you feel like tinkering.
I really like the idea of containers, it def solves my problems of running multiple services in the host OS. I’d like to build my own containers to pull the few “bare metal” services I’ll have outside of docker. Anyway, I’ll keep podman in the back of my head.
One thing I’m already happy I did was create a docker directory and having sub directories keep all of my container volumes separate. Should make backing things up easier as well.
Yeah, containers are great! It’s really nice knowing exactly which directories to move if I need to rebalance my services onto other hardware or something.
Most of my services are on my NAS, so I have this setup:
- /srv/nas/<folder> - everything here is on my RAID, and offsite backups look here (and exclude certain directories to save on cost
- /home/<user>/containers - my git repo with configs, sans passwords/keys
- configs w/keys live in my password manager
Disaster recovery should be as simple as:
- Copy my data from backup into /srv/nas
- Clone my container repo
- Copy env files to their respective locations
- Run a script to get things set up
I use specific container versions, so I should get exactly the same setup.
I’m going to be reinstalling my NAS soon (boot drive is getting old), so we’ll see how this process works, though I’ll skip step 1 since I’m keeping the drives.
Found out that docker volumes are important after restarting my server 🙃
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
?That’s a mistake you only make once!
Meh, made it a few times.
Some images treat volumes differently .
Looking at you, nextcloud.
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.
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?
This week I finally managed to route torrent traffic through a VPS that was sitting around gathering dust. I am behind CGNAT so was taking me 6 weeks to do the kind of traffic I do in a day now. I couldn’t be more chuffed.
What ratio are you at with your Linux ISOs *wink.