Selfhosted

I previously asked here about moving to ZFS. So a week on I'm here with an update. TL;DR: Surprisingly simple upgrade.

I decided to buy another HBA that came pre-flashed in IT mode and without an onboard BIOS (so that server bootups would be quicker - I'm not using the HBA attached disks as boot disks). For £30 it seems worth the cost to avoid the hassle of flashing it, plus if it all goes wrong I can revert back.

I read a whole load about Proxmox PCIE passthrough, most of it out of date it would seem. I am running an AMD system and there are many sugestions online to set grub parameters to amd_iommu=on, which when you read in to the kernel parameters for the 6.x version proxmox uses, isn't a valid value. I think I also read that there's no need to set iommu=pt on AMD systems. But it's all very confusing as most wikis that should know better are very Intel specific.

I eventually saw a youtube video of someone running proxmox 8 on AMD wanting to do the same as I was and they showed that if IOMMU isn't setup, then you get a warning in the web GUI when adding a device. Well that's interesting - I don't get that warning. I am also lucky that the old HBA is in its own IOMMU group, so it should pass through easy without breaking anything. I hope the new one will be the same.

Worth noting that there are a lot of bad Youtube videos with people giving bad advise on how to configure a VM for ZFS/TrueNAS use - you need them passed through properly so the VM's OS has full control of them. Which is why an IT HBA is required over an IR one, but just that alone doesn't mean you can't set the config up wrong.

I also discovered along the way that my existing file server VM was not setup to be able to handle PCIe passthrough. The default Machine Type that Proxmox suggests - i440fx - doesn't support it. So that needs changing to q35, also it has to be setup with UEFI. Well that's more of a problem as my VM is using BIOS. A this point it became easier to spin up a new VM with the correct setting and re-do the configuration of it. Other options to be aware of: Memory ballooning needs to be off and the CPU set to host.

At this point I haven't installed the new HBA yet.

Install a fresh version of Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS and it all feels very snappy. Makes me wonder about my old VM, I think it might be an original install of 16.04 that I have upgraded every 2 years and was migrated over from my old ESXi R710 server a few years ago. Fair play to it, I have had zero issues with it in all that time. Ubuntu server is just absolutely rock solid.

Not too much to configure on this VM - SSH, NFS exports, etckeeper, a couple of users and groups. I use etckeeper, so I have a record of the /etc of all my VMs that I can look back to, which has come in handy on several occasions.

Now almost ready to swap the HBA after I run the final restic backup, which only takes 5 mins (I bloody love restic!). Also update the fstabs of VMS so they don't try mount the file server and stop a few from auto starting on boot, just temporarily.

Turn the server off and get inside to swap the cards over. Quite straightforward other than the SAS ports being in a worse place for ease of access. Power back on. Amazingly it all came up - last time I tried to add an NVME on a PCIe card it killed the system.

Set the PICe passthrough for the HBA on the new VM. Luckily the new HBA is on it's own IOMMU group (maybe that's somehow tied to the PCIE slot?) Make sure to tick the PCIE flag so it's not treated as PCI - remember PCI cards?!

Now the real deal. Boot the VM, SSH in. fdisk -l lists all the disks attached. Well this is good news! Try create the zpool zpool create storage raidz2 /dev/disk/by-id/XXXXXXX ...... Hmmm, can't do that as it knows it's a raid disk and mdadm has tried to mount it so they're in use. Quite a bit of investigation later with a combination of wipefs -af /dev/sdX, umount /dev/md126, mdadm --stop /dev/sd126 and shutdown -r now and the RAIDynes of the disks is gone and I can re-run the zpool command. It that worked! Note: I forgot to add in ashift=12 to my zpool creation command, I have only just noticed this as I write, but thankfully it was clever enough to pick the correct one.

$ zpool get all | grep ashift
storage  ashift                         0                              default

Hmmm, what's 0?

$ sudo zdb -l /dev/sdb1 | grep ashift
ashift: 12

Phew!!!

I also have passed through the USB backup disks I have, mounted them and started the restic backup restore. So far it's 1.503TB in after precisely 5 hours, which seems OK.

I'll setup monthly scrub cron jobs tomorrow.

P.S. I tried TrueNAS out in a VM with no disks to see what it's all about. It looks very nice, but I don't need any of that fancyness. I've always managed my VM's over SSH which I've felt is lighter weight and less open to attack.

Thanks for stopping by my Ted Talk.

I would like to scale back my hosting costs and migrate one (or a few) sites over to a machine that I host at home.

The bandwidth is more than enough to cover the traffic of these small sites.

The simplicity of IPv6 has attracted me to the idea of exposing that server over IPv6 for hosting, while my daily machines remain on the IPv4 side of the stack.

I don't care if this means that the sites are reachable by fewer visitors, as the traffic has never been huge.

Am I going down a rabbit hole that I will later regret? How would you do this right?

I want to set up ufw on my server, but something wrong here. Even when I trying to block 22 port ssh still working and nothing changing. I have ufw enabled, but nothing works.

Vague title I know, but I'm enough of a beginner at this to not really know what I need to ask!

I would like to rent a server, that allows me to spin up different services, including things like Windows to use as a remote desktop. Ideally, I would then be able to just migrate this whole setup to my home server.

I thought it would be as easy as renting a scalable VPS, but apparently if you run something like Proxmox on those, you'll get terrible performance?

My understanding is that I'd need to rent a bare metal server, but then my 'scalability' will suffer- I can't just wind up and down the specs as needed, correct?

My user case: For the next several months, I'm on the road, without a proper computer. I may have some work doing some CAD drafting, hence Windows. I'd also like to have some containers to run some dev tools, databases, web hosting. I'd also like to use the same service to start building my future home server environment- nextcloud, *arr, etc. Once I'm back home, I'd like to easily migrate this setup to a local machine, then continue to use the server as my own cloud and public entry point. And further down the line, hosting a gaming server for friends. In terms of location, Sydney would be great.

Will a VPS do this? Or do I need bare metal? Is there a single service that will allow me to do both, with one billing? Or am I doing a Dunning-Kruger?

Thanks in advance for your hints.

I'd like to host my own container images centrally in my network so that I can both cache the images (if dockerhub or similar goes down) but also host my own images that I don't want public. Anyone doing this?

Does anybody here self-host a mail-by-proxy solution? If so, I'm interested to hear about your setup, experiences and any drawbacks. I have a custom domain and a hosted email service with a very small amount of storage. I'd like to host something locally so that I can keep all my email without stressing about the space. I also want to be able to use email on my phone and computer and a web interface for tablets or while traveling. Finally, I'd like emails that I send to be stored locally so I can search it. Does anybody else already do something like this? I can forge my own path, but oftentimes, somebody else is already doing it better.

Hello,

Small question to this incredible community.

Does anybody have a good suggestion about a link manager with plug-ins for different browsers?

If it could also support Samsung browser would be an incredible plus.

In my use case I intent to (easily) save some links for reading later and the integration with a mobile browser is fundamental to make the things easy.

Thanks in advance!!

Im tried of giving my data to google for all my email needs. Preferably I would like to use the thunderbird client.

I also have a number of self hosted services. I used to run my own email server, but ATT no longer allows the ports open and I want to move away from self hosting that solution. Figured I would ask people what they use here, since Im assuming others are in a similar situation.

Any suggestions?

I'm looking for a selfhosted app for inventory management with SSO support.

I already looked ad Grocy and Homebox. Grocy seems to be a really good app for the purpose. It's overloaded with features but fortunately you can deactivate the ones you don't need.

The only thing missing is SSO support via OIDC or SAML. Are there any alternatives that do support SSO?

So, here's what I set up:

Docker with some containers behind Gluetun

Gluetun gives access to the local network so I can access the containers on my home network through http.

The only port I exposed to the internet is the 32400 for Plex.

I reach my home network remotely only through Wireguard, my fritzbox router has a guided setupt that gives me a wg configuration so I just scanned the QR code with my phone. I learned this opens the default wg port.

Now, you can never be 100% safe, but is my simple setup safe/solid enough?

9 times out of 10 I thinker with it when I am at home

It's still a work in progress and I am open to any kind of suggestions

I'm going to move away from lastpass because the user experience is pretty fucking shit. I was going to look at 1pass as I use it a lot at work and so know it. However I have heard a lot of praise for BitWarden and VaultWarden on here and so probably going to try them out first.

My questions are to those of you who self-host, firstly: why?

And how do you mitigate the risk of your internet going down at home and blocking your access while away?

BitWarden's paid tier is only $10 a year which I'm happy to pay to support a decent service, but im curious about the benefits of the above. I already run syncthing on a pi so adding a password manager wouldn't need any additional hardware.

I run my HomeAssistant on a RaspberryPi 4 from a SD card. Two days ago I did a upgrade to the newest version (I don't remember if it was HomeAssistant or the Operating System) and since then it does not boot anymore.

I connected it via HDMI to a screen and got those errors:

It looks to me that the SD card is corrupted or something. Any idea if I can fix it in any way or do I need to redo the setup from scratch?

The goal of Fireshare is to provide a very simple and easy way for you to share any videos you have through a unique link.

Demo website: https://v.fireshare.net

I'm proud to share a major development status update of XPipe, a new connection hub that allows you to access your entire server infrastructure from your local desktop. It works on top of your installed command-line programs and does not require any setup on your remote systems. XPipe integrates with your tools such as your favourite text/code editors, terminals, shells, command-line tools and more.

Here is how it looks like if you haven't seen it before:

Icons

A big new feature, which is probably going to be interesting for the selfhosted crowd here, is the addition of custom icons for services. A huge shoutout to https://github.com/selfhst/icons, without them this would have not been possible. Essentially, you can now set icons for any connection to better organize individual ones. For example, if you connect to an opnsense or immich system, you can now mark it with the correct icon of that service.

Other additions

There is now a popup to automatically save a file with sudo when permissions are denied in the file browser. This should make it much less of a hassle when forgetting to elevate to root before editing a file, which is a trap I also often fall into.

You can now restart any ended terminal session by pressing R in the terminal. This makes it much easier to reconnect, for example, if you restarted a server or your connection isn't stable.

There are new actions in the file browser to compress/uncompress zip/tar/tar.gz/7z files. There are options to compress both individual files or complete directory contents. This will save you having to deal with remembering tar CLI parameters.

You can now use the Windows Credential Manager as a password manager in XPipe.

XPipe does no longer use wmic on Windows as it seems like Microsoft actually pulled through and removed wmic from the latest Windows 11 releases. This fixes various errors on Windows ARM systems.

I implemented various performance improvements for lower-end systems, so hopefully things will run more smoothly on these as well now.

There is now support to specify SSH keys and change the SSH port for Proxmox VMs.

There has also been a lot of work going into the git sync feature to fix various issues. There is more documentation in the git settings, the workflow has been improved, and various bugs with xcode git and gpg were fixed.

There have been many other bug fixes, e.g., for csh, fish, opnsense, pfsense shells being broken, fixes for dashlane, some Proxmox VM issues, and much more.

XPipe Webtop

XPipe is a desktop application first and foremost. It requires a full desktop environment to function with various installed applications such as terminals, editors, shells, CLI tools, and more. So there is no true web-based interface for XPipe. Since it might make sense however to access your XPipe environment from the web, there is now a so-called webtop docker container image for XPipe. XPipe Webtop is a web-based desktop environment that can be run in a container and accessed from a browser via KasmVNC. The desktop environment comes with XPipe and various terminals and editors preinstalled and configured. You can use this with the git sync to have access to all your connections remotely as well.

A note on the open-source model

Since it has come up a few times, in addition to the note in the git repository, I would like to clarify that XPipe is not fully FOSS software. The core that you can find on GitHub is Apache 2.0 licensed, but the distribution you download ships with closed-source extensions. There's also a licensing system in place as I am trying to make a living out of this. I understand that this is a deal-breaker for some, so I wanted to give a heads-up.

Outlook

If this project sounds interesting to you, you can check it out on GitHub or visit the Website for more information.

Enjoy!

I kind of want to self host a lemmy instance. What are the requirements for a single user lemmy instance?

Any suggestions for a selfhosted comic book collection manager? I.e. a database of the physical comics that I own.

Hello,

I have been owning an APC Back-UPS BX1600MI for a little under two years and have been encountering issues with it recently: the battery failed in August, I had to RMA and the replacement one is stuck on battery power while plugged to the mains since last night.

From what I gathered online, this model is plagued with issues, so I'm looking for another one.

My requirements are:

• Purchasable in the EU
• Has a variant with FR or DE plugs
• Can be monitored with NUT over USB or Ethernet
• At least 900VA capacity but if I can get the same capacity as currently (1600VA) for about 200€ I would

Thanks a lot!

EDIT: The UPS is fine, it turns out my street's transformer had an issue and only provided 135V instead of the expected 230V, which means that the UPS was on battery for a valid reason. What lead me to believe that the UPS was at fault was that every other appliances seemed to work fine.

Do you have games on your server and need an application to download, install, share, launch and track them?

Then you have come to the right place!

The website also links to their Lemmy community!

[email protected]

Prometheus-alertmanager and graphana (especially graphana!) seem a bit too involved for monitoring my homelab (prometheus itself is fine: it does collect a lot of statistics I don't care about, but it doesn't require configuration so it doesn't bother me).

Do you know of simpler alternatives?

My goals are relatively simple:

1. get a notification when any systemd service fails
2. get a notification if there is not much space left on a disk
3. get a notification if one of the above can't be determined (eg. server down, config error, ...)

Seeing graphs with basic system metrics (eg. cpu/ram usage) would be nice, but it's not super-important.

I am a dev so writing a script that checks for whatever I need is way simpler than learning/writing/testing yaml configuration (in fact, I was about to write a script to send heartbeats to something like Uptime Kuma or Tianji before I thought of asking you for a nicer solution).

I bought a domain from them about 3 months ago (luckily for one year). I decided to choose them because there were good references regarding privacy. So I started to point my self-hosted services (with proper certications and stuff) which were solely used by myself and my family, to the domain and subdomains. So far, so good.

Suddenly, my domains stopped working. I went to the admin dashboard and tried to click on "Manage," but the button wasn't working. I checked the button code, and it was labeled as "disabled." So I contacted support, and I won’t provide much more explanation; I will just paste their response.

Domains not working

open - created 15 hours ago

Whats going on with my domain and its subdomains ? i cant even access to manage them anymore, why?

Replies:

[Reply #1] from Njalla - 13 hours ago

Your account is suspended.

[Reply #2] from you - 8 hours ago

May i have a reason ? What kind of answer is that? If i cant use the service i want my money back

[Reply #3] from Njalla - an hour ago

We don't refund services, and your domain has been suspended for violating our terms of service, for among other things, being flagged as malicious by various browsers.

[Reply #4] from you - now

What terms did I violate and how? Do you have evidence? You are not even providing a notification, nor a reason, nor any evidence. And you just go ahead and suspend my domain??? What kind of service are you providing? Are you self-hosting the servers? For the record, I was just self-hosting my own services and was doing nothing wrong. I don't even understand why this is happening. And if you can't give me a clear reason, I will go ahead and spread everywhere what you did, including the fact that you are not even refunding me.

Edit: adding their “profesional” response. I assumed they just stole my money and my domain. I’m not able to even enter to manage my domain. They just disabled the button … wtf

[Reply #5] from Njalla - 3 hours ago

Why was your domain flagged by security vendors as malicious?

This post is mostly just me bitching about the music industry but also genuine interest in what other people in this community do when it comes to music streaming. Apologies if this is an incomprehensible wall of text.

My favorite self-hosted project is Navidrome. I've been running it for years and it's been absolutely perfect the entire time. Related clients like Supersonic and Tempo have been fantastic as well. More than half of my donations to open source software have been to music related projects like these, I use them for multiple hours every day.

I'm giving up on using them though, because actually obtaining the music to stream has become harder and more expensive every year. Unlike self-hosted movie/tv streaming, the primary reason I self-host music is to support the artists. I feel better paying $10 for an album I enjoy compared to the artist getting pennies from me streaming it. I'm sure as hell not doing this to save money, I spend around $30/month on average on new music.

My only criteria for buying music is that it's at least CD-quality. Going back a few years, my options (ordered by preference at the time) were Bandcamp, Qobuz, 7Digital, the artist's own website, physical CDs that I'd rip myself, then finally giving up and using Soulseek. Bandcamp and Qobuz would typically cover 95% of what I was looking for, I'd rarely need to use Soulseek.

But over the course of those past few years...

Bandcamp was bought by Epic, then sold to Songtradr, half of its staff were laid off, and it's been a shell of its former self ever since. It seems like Bandcamp is now mostly ignored by artists, with albums rarely releasing or releasing far later than other platforms. It's genuinely a surprise when I find the artist or album I'm looking for on Bandcamp at this point.

Qobuz has been experiencing rapid enshittification as they try to get people to subscribe to their streaming service. Dark patterns added throughout the purchase and download process, albums being pulled from my account, and albums becoming more expensive (I'm seeing a whole lot more $15-$20 albums than $10 albums now).

7Digital is dead.

Artist websites rarely offer lossless downloads anymore. Last time I bought an album directly from an artist was Madeon in 2019, and that's now an archived page you have to go out of your way to find.

CDs are somehow still a reliable option, but I just cannot justify this anymore. At some point having a collection of 250 plastic discs that I rip precisely once and then store forever just doesn't make sense. I'm tired of buying physical clutter to get digital files. I sold a sizable chunk of my collection a few months ago.

Soulseek, the "fuck it I'm pirating it" option whenever I can't buy an album through any available means. Surprisingly even Soulseek seems to be suffering, I used to be able to find anything, but now even a slightly obscure release can be hard to find.

So now, my preferred options are Bandcamp, Qobuz if the album is less than $15, then Soulseek. I'm using Soulseek a hell of a lot more now, which defeats the point of why I do this in the first place. So fuck it, I subscribed to Tidal.

But like, what the fuck? Why is it so hard to give artists more money?

So, for others who self-host their music collection, or even still rock an iPod or something, what do you do? Do you buy lossy releases? Do you pirate everything? Is there a magical website that has every album for sale that I just don't know about? CDs? I can't be the only one with this problem, but I haven't seen anyone else talk about it.

I'm re-setting up my HomeLab and one of the things I'm trying to learn about on this go-around is Zero Trust networking. To accomplish this I am planning on using NetBird's mesh overlay network. I would like all of my services to use the NetBird mesh network at all times, whether they are communicating within my homelab's LAN or I am accessing them from outside via the greater internet.

I have successfully set up the NetBird management interface on a Hetzner VPS, however the issue I run into is if I lose internet access at home, none of my services are able to function as they can no longer reach the management interface. However, if I self host the management interface in my homelab, I am unable to access it from outside my home LAN.

I've identified 2 solutions that could solve this:

1. Self host the management interface and set up a Cloudflare tunnel to the management interface, which would allow access from outside my home network.

2. Self host the management interface, then set up a wireguard proxy/tunnel on a VPS that forwards traffic to my management interface (Similar in my mind to option 1, but not relying on Cloudflare)

What are your thoughts? Any other ideas?

I appreciate your comments/criticisms!

I see some fairly interesting prices for refurbished drives on Amazon, 35~40% cheaper than new. Example here: 16TB Seagate Exos X18 Refurbished at 166€ and New at 260€.

I am considering this option for my home NAS, running with BTRFS RAID10, plus important files are backed-up to a cloud storage, but not my media collection.

In your opinion, how risky is it to use refurbished drives ? Do you have to good or bad experience doing so ?