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.
Personally I’m finally reaping the fruits of my labour and enjoy my stable homelab without doing much. One node went down recently and the other took over until I restarted so I was not in a hurry to fix things. Enjoying family time and only running updates that aren’t automated (yet). I’m about to dig a bit deeper into logging, probably setting up central log collection like Loki at some point, but not yet.
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I was excited to learn that homeassistant lets me bypass the atrocious Sonos app for controlling all my speakers from various music sources.
Though at the same time, I’m little disappointed that offTikTok is broken.
Getting ready to move from out of the woods and back to civilization with my partner.
Not looking forward to having neighbors above or below me but I’m very excited to have internet that doesnt fucking suck.
Once were moved and a bit more settled, I’m gonna start really digging into to selfhosting things. I have the hardware, a couple HP mini PCs that will run home assistant and probably a server for various docker things. Nextcloud and immich seem to be the things I’ve found i wanna use so far. I already have a NAS set up, but was having am issue with it not booting if a monitor isnt plugged in. I bought a dummy plug for it but haven’t tried it out yet.
Will also be setting up an AI server for local LLM use. Hope to train one to fit my needs once I pull the trigger on 3060 12GB card but need to figure out what other parts I’ll use. Might upgrade my main rig and use the parts from that, or maybe I’ll buy a old dell and fix it up. Not sure yet.
Lots of ideas, so little time lol.
Might want a bigger GPU, I have a 3080ti and the 12gb is pretty limiting in terms of how large a model you can use, or like one thing I was hoping to do was essentially replace Google Assistant/Gemini and can’t realistically run a good model and the STT/TTS off the one gpu.
Thats why i was considering training my own model if possible. Ive been toying around with kobold.CPP and gpt4all which both have RAG implementations.
My idea is to essentially chat with documentation and as a separate use case, have it potentially be a AI search engine but locally hosted. I do still prefer to search myself, but fuck man, searches have gotten so bad, and the kobold.CPP web lookup feature was pretty neat IMO.
So yea you’re not wrong, I’m just hoping that if in train it and or give it documentation it can reference when answering, it will be suitable. Mostly AI has been good for me as kind of a rubber ducky when troubleshooting and helping me search for things when I have some specific question and in don’t want “top 5 things vaguely related to your question” results.
Interesting, I mainly have used text generation webui which has a search support plug in, kinda nifty to use my searxng instance for it. It’s a bit finicky though.
Another thing to keep in mind then (apologies if this is just repeating info you already know), you’d also want to keep in mind your total potential context size in relation to the model size, since both take up VRAM. Reading search results/pages can eat up a lot
Yea I’m aware but I appreciate the insight :) so far my local ai experience has been lack luster so I’m hoping that training and RAG will make up for the context size at least a little. Ifnit can answer accurately in the first place, it may not need as big of a context window.
If you haven’t tried using RAG in some form, I would recommend giving it a go. Its pretty cool stuff, helps make models answer more accurately based on the documentation you give them though in my case, ive had limited success. Tbh, chatgpt has become my last resort when I just wanna get something done but I don’t like using it due to the privacy concerns, not to mention the ethical issues I have with ai training in general from big tech.
How is searxng BTW? Would you say its good to host or do you use a normal search engine more often? Or do you just use it for the AI search plugin?
Ive actually been thinking about using it rather than duckduckgo but was also hopeful the search index they are working on would be enough to satisfy my needs, or that a self hosted AI enabled search engine would work well enough when I need it.
I’ve completely replaced my searching with searxng, it is a little slower and ofc if I have an outage or something at home I have to go back to a different search temporarily but overall I like it a lot.
It was one of the first things I set up last year with my homelab because I am attempting to degoogle a fair amount, the Ai search stuff was just a fun test
Thats rad, thanks for the info. I may follow suit, been trying to degoogle myself lately.
For sure, good luck and have fun :D
I finished setting up my personal computer with Sway on Alpine so now I can’t procrastinate anymore on getting TLS working with Caddy for my RPi 5.
I decided to ditch Cloudflare since using that service makes me feel uncomfortable. TLS is a bit of a pain because I am using an uncommon port so I need to do a DNS challenge. I still haven’t been able to get it working with DeSec.io but I hope maybe sometime this week.
I might look into using a tunnel service in the future but if I can figure this out, I’ll at least be able to adapt to changes in the future if I need to deal with any changing situations.
When I figure that out, I’ll look into Gemeni protocol and host something there. I don’t want anything big, just a little space of my own in the corner of the internet. Maybe I’ll look into hosting an irc server for a small group of people too.
I’m also using caddy with desec.io. When first triggering the challenge for an entry, it can fail a couple of times. I think it just takes a while for the DNS entry to be available.
Another thing that I’ve experienced is that I can’t use wildcard subdomain entries. My guess is that it’s somehow because I only have public IPv6 addresses (but I don’t remember the details). I have configured an internal DNS with the wildcard entry since I’m only ever connecting to that host via wireguard from outside my network. For the host itself I’ve created a regular AAAA record.
Realized last week that my fail2ban settings are too strict – I get banned immediately if I visit my funkwhale (music server) domain without being logged in. In fact, I think much of my “downtime” might have actually just been me banning myself for 15 minutes now and then…
I was thinking about getting rid of Grafana, which is overkill for my server, and replacing it with Logdy this weekend, but didn’t get around to it.
Started looking at Gemini-protocol over the weekend. (It’s like a newer version of gopher) Now I’m looking for a problem to fit the tool.
I started writing a science fiction, choose your own adventure, short story to fit the platform But that’ll take ages to finish.
I’m also eyeing a meshtastic client proxy. But you only get about 200 bytes per message so I’m not entirely sure it’s worth it.
The last thing, it would be kind of cool is a Zim tie-in. It would be cool to have a canned Wikipedia that could be accessed via Gemini protocol.
Recently set up a Maloja container and a Multi-scrobbler container so I can finally ditch last.fm!
I’ve been thinking about setting up a scrobble server, but haven’t been sure what I would do with it. What do you use the information for? Does it affect how you listen?
I use it just for myself mostly to look at my listening habits. When I was younger I used last.fm to find new artists and talk to people who had similar interests and took their suggestions. These days its just to keep a log of my music listening.
Also, I have noticed a pattern of listening to less music for myself and being a lot more deferential to my partners when I am in a relationship over when I am single. This year is 20 years since I started using last.fm and part of my goal this year is to listen to more music than I have listened to yearly over the past 20 years. 2005 was my highest listening year ever, and while I’m not on pace to break that record, I’m on place to come close to it and shatter every other year in between.
Anyway, that’s just a me thing, it’s helped me feel like myself again, re-embracing really enjoying music in a way I have not over the past 16 years of being with two different partners (one for 2 years, another for 13 years). It’s like a celebration of 20 years of loving music and coming back into my own and becoming more me again, and less codependent on others and letting them drive the music.
Wow, thank you for this response. I hadn’t thought of tracking music preferences as a tool for self discovery.
I installed a new server at home and went with NixOS. It looks super cool but it takes so much time to learn everything. The only thing keeping me from going back to Debian is how easy it was to permanently mount drives (and save a configuration for any future install or mishaps).
(I.e. mount,
nixos-generate-config,nixos-rebuild switchand done!)You might have some luck with Suse, their Yast configuration is very easy and was stable for years for me. Now I’m running on an M1 Mac mini which was more of a pain than a regular setup for sure. Unfortunately the Linux support just isn’t there yet.
Another glorious day of not having to worry about my nice and stable Debian server. It runs on an old Dell thin client I got on ebay, which isn’t much, but it gets the job done.
Have had Opnsense router, Ubiquiti switch, and shitty ASUS Router in AP mode for years. Got new Ubiquiti APs to improve wifi speed and coverage.
Can’t get VLANS to work to save soul. Feels bad.
Tried building a storage box out of a bunch of old parts, it looks alright and has all the parts I want. Doesn’t boot though, that’ll be a tomorrow thing :(
I wanna get into it but man, the mountain of knowledge I need to even understand what people are talking about is hard to climb. I’m trying to just get some stuff running in docker and it fails to launch and I’m like… How?! Isn’t that the whole point of docker lol. Baby steps I guess
Check out Cosmos, I struggled piecing things together but when I restarted from scratch with this as the base is has been SO much easier to get services working, while still being able to see how things work under the hood.
It’s basically a docker manager with integrated reverse proxy and OpenID SSO capability, with optional VPN and storage management
Im at the level where I don’t know what SSO means. I can follow instructions to change a DNS. But what a DNS actually is I don’t know. Which is fine, until I need to work out what’s broken
SSO is “single sign on”. DNS is “domain name service”, which is just a way to turn a hostname (like www.google.com) into an IP address. It’s sort of like a phone directory, but for the Internet.
SSO is single sign on, so you don’t need individual username and password for every service. It’s a bit more advanced so don’t worry about it until you have what you want working properly for a while.
DNS is like the yellow pages of the internet - when you type www.google.com your computer uses a DNS server to look up what actual IP address corresponds to the website name. The point of Adguard or pihole is that when a website tries to load an ad your custom DNS server just says it doesn’t recognize the address
Oh like a custom yellowpages, sick!
I felt exactly the same when i started - the learning curve is real! Try TrueCharts.org or linuxserver.io for reliable docker templates with good docs that actually work, saved me so much troubleshooting headache.
Thanks will do!
Are you doing things through docker compose? If so, feel free to PM me or reply here with your compose file and I’ll help as best I can
Sometimes you just need to start small and not worry about over complicating things. I started my journey in 2011 running Plex on a crappy laptop
Docker should be trivial to run. Hopefully it gives you some useful messages in the logs.
I’ve learnt it from scratch in my week off, spending 2 or 3 hours on it every night for a week (although this might be underselling it as I had become familiar with desktop Linux over the past year and had a superficial idea of Docker containers with my Synology NAS). But still it’s not as big a deal as you think once you find some good resources. I’m going to comment about my setup after this in this thread… Have a look.
Main resource that helped me was Marius Hosting and ChatGPT got me out of trouble when I got stuck by deciphering logs for me when things didn’t work.
Thanks. Yeah I’m just trying to work at it slowly in my downtime instead of just watching YouTube all night.
It’s messy. Dockers superpower: You can write a crazy ass python application that needs dozens of dependencies and weird software configured. You put it into a container, you can update and publish the container with a single script call. Other people can install that, set some variables and not have to install the dozens of other pieces of software. They also don’t have to worry about updates.
But that’s not to say you don’t have to worry about networks, storage and ports.
Then the simplicity of the configuration of containers depends upon the person that made the container. Maybe they wanted to be very flexible and there are dozens of things you need to set. Maybe they didn’t include the data store internally in that container and you need your own data store in another container.
Found out Ghost 6.0 is out today and now it supports ActivityPub. It’s time to set up a new blog I’ll never write once more!
Oh exciting, finally!
I’ve set up Pangolin on my VPS and had no problems accessing docker services on my homelab remotely. However, I don’t know how I am supposed to SSH or SFTP to my homelab. Will I connect to my VPS instead? Would I need to break Pangolin or expose a vulnerability to do so?
Honestly I am in need of a proper networking tutorial at this point.
According to the Pangolin docs it supports raw TCP and UDP connections.
For SSH you can also try to use the VPS as a jump host like this:
$ ssh user@vpn-homelab-ip -J user@vps-ipI would never have found this on my own otherwise. I feel any amount of gratitude would fall short of compensating for how much time and effort it has saved me. Thank you regardless.
If possible, can you share how I can achieve the same effect with SFTP?
Either use the
sftpcommand, it also supports the-Joption, or use SSH tunneling. For example here I bind the homelab port 4533 to my local port 8080.$ ssh -L 8080:vpn-homelab-ip:4533 user@vps-ip (user@vps) $I can now open a new shell and run:
$ curl http://localhost:8080/ <a href="/app/">Found</a>.You could also do it this way:
$ ssh -L 8080:localhost:4533 user@vpn-homelab-ip -J user@vps-ip (user@homelab) $Thanks a ton!
I made some more tweaks to my Renovate bot which runs on a Woodpecker CI instance on my own hardware. Now it merges green PRs automatically. And I have it running every hour so all my software projects stay up-to-date and it responds quickly when I request a rebase.
I’ve also been cleaning up my Home Assistant automations and devices and trying to think up some useful things I can do for myself in an apartment where I can’t replace switches or the thermostat.
finally picked up a bunch of cheap 2.5" sas drives to turn my dumpster server (Proliant DL380 G7 with 16 hot swap bays) into a backup server.
still trying to work out the specifics but the idea is because it’s a power hog and LOUD I want to use wake on lan to run a backup task and turn it off automatically.
I can turn it on via lan so I’m halfway there right? …
