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.
I finally finished my first iteration of my Minilab including a very smooth migration from the old server yesterday so I can go to the service side of things again. I plan to get some kind of selfhosters VPN for external access to stuff that’s not exposed to the internet, I’ll have to investigate which one.
Hi, I finally set up tailscale on my raspbery pi, in exit node mode so I have access to my whole network. I also set AdGuard an the very same pi with dhcp. I finally bought home assistant voice device, didn’t arrive yet, but cant wait to experiment with it.
I still have to setup Authelia for sso, I want to setup a device on my network as a (proton) vpn gateway (zero knowledge right now) and then I want to start learning about pfsense to properly segment my network (into subnets) and have more control.
Went through and verified that a number of things were backing up and updating correctly. I feel a little less weight on my shoulders knowing things are working as they should.
Not really self-hosted, but I set up obsidian with syncthing and am going to transfer all of my notes from book stack to it and let bookstack be more organized documentation and obsidian to be a big scattering of notes and tags and such. I tried it with bookstack, but the flow was too much of a barrier for me to use it consistantly
Set up Traefik. Had it working with authelia to forward requests to authenticate then to the destination.
Friend mentioned caddy and a plugin that means all you need are docker labels. So I spent the next 3 days setting up caddy.
Accidentally overwritten my compose file and had to restart.
Luckily my authelia was saved elsewhere. But after fixing it
I ran git init and git add .
I shall be a fool no more.
Anyways, now I’ve got cloudflare blocking all requests outside of the UK, as well my friends and I don’t live outside of it. Set it up such that caddy uses the DNS challenge with cloudflare API key.
So now I can set a DNS entry for internally only. E.g. internal.example.com resolves to a private address for tailscale.
How the hell do you get Wger working on http only? I always get the CSRF error even after trying their recommendations
I finally dealt with the AI scrapers hammering my Forgejo instance - https://jade.ellis.link/blog/2025/05/18/actually-stopping-forgejo-ai-scraping Hopefully next week I’ll be able to get back to actually programming Continuwuity rather than fighting fires.
I’m working on self-hosting my own LLMs.
I realized there are things I wanna talk about and research but I don’t want to send it to open AI. Frankly I feel gross about how much I’ve sent to open AI. My desktop is a beefy gaming rig that I don’t use for gaming much. I have a 20thread core, 64gb ram, an Nvidia gtx 3060 and 5 spare TB so why not.
- I keep a few ollama models downloaded and I’m slowly getting to know them and what they can do. Gemma seems to answer the fastest so I’ve been using that. Deepseek is like the reasoning button on chatgpt.
- I use openai-whisper to transcribe meetings I record using OBS. It’s really slow so I have a cronjob transcribe all my meetings for that day overnight.
- Open Web UI is a fantastic LLM frontend. It provides tools, rags, web searching, and model ranking all as a simple to use UI.
- My desktop has a Wireguard server which makes it easy to use my OpenWebUI on my phone.
Now I want to work on giving the LLM access to my Google calendar so it can create reminders for me. I’m sick of forgetting to think about remembering to do things so I hope if I can just ramble at the LLM about what I’m doing or what’s on my mind it can organize my thoughts. What else are these LLM actually for?
Was able to put calibre web on nixos. Still trying to build a package that’s not available (piped), but boys is it hard to package java stuff for nixos…
Configured changedetection.io to notify me when my usual bus is delayed or canceled.
Latest thing is my server was hard locking up randomly every couple days. Finally thought to check IPMI and it was triggering a correctable ECC error on a specific stick of RAM.
I figured maybe the first couple errors were correctable by the ECC RAM but then they just got worse and caused the lock up.
Pulled the 2 sticks in that pair and so far so good. I’ll survive just fine with the remaining 192GB of RAM lol.
Also switched from my old Dell box with Opnsense to a Linksys MX4300 running OpenWRT, saves me about 20W and its fun to try something different.
I started this about a month ago, absolutely no idea what I was doing, and in that short time this little box has grown a ton. Got the basics for cloud storage, jellyfin with the arr suite, navidrome to replace spotify/tidal, etc. Got my scanner going right into paperless, finally starting a budget planner with actualbudget, even set up homebox to maybe eventually keep track of my collections of random bullshit. Spent 3 days fighting with Wireguard and gluetun to make a single VPN connection that’ll hook me into my LAN but also output all my traffic through Mullvad, using pihole as my DNS - I should get Unbound set up at some point too but that’s a project for another day.
Today I learned about homeassistant, and while I’m not one to care about IoT shit or whatever, just dabbling with NFC tags for the lights and such has been pretty neat.
This week I’m getting a second machine in that I’m going to use exclusively as a NAS and stop relying on USB external hard drives.
I really just wanted a little 24/7 Bob Ross box with a bit of cloud storage, and this project blew up a lot more than I thought it would LOL
Bob Ross box???
Grab the entire series, load it up on the tv, and let it rip all day
Hello! I recently deployed GPUStack, a self-hosted GPU resource manager.
It helps you deploy AI models across clusters of GPUs, regardless of network or device. Got a Mac? It can toss a model on there and route it into an interface. Got a VM on a sever somewhere? Same. How about your home PC, with that beefy gaming GPU? No prob. GPUStack is great at scaling what you have on hand, without having to deploy a bunch of independent instances of ollama, llama.ccp, etc.
I use it to route pre-run LLMs into Open WebUI, another self-hosted interface for AI interactions, via the OpenAI API that both GPUStack and Open WebUI support!
Oh that’s dope. How many hours are you running? Do you also use them for things like encoding or something like that?
Today I learned that for some reason some DNS servers don’t like SRV records, so had to troubleshoot it when people were unable to log onto my Minecraft server that is on a non-default port.
This week moved all my vps’s to nixos, so am now able to use one flake for my desktop and all my vps’s which significantly lowers down the time I need to manage my vps’s.
Nowto move my proxmox homelab server ( an old desktop pc I bought recently ) and all my server’s/devices witll be running nixos.
EDIT: An issue I’m thinking about is getting a “proper” server. Not a server like a server rack server, but a mini pc or something along those sides wbich would be a lot stronger and a lot more power efficient than the current 10+ y/o desktop pc I’m using currently.
So would like some reccomendations on that front, like what are some good mini pc brands and mini pc’s that I could have raid seted up on for nas or good budget parts and case to make one myself.
Hey! Another nixos user 😁 What are you using for your VPS? nixos-infect? nixos-everywhere?
As for mini PCs, a friend bought one from Minis Forum and quite likes it. But if you want to support the opensource ecosystem, there are tuxedo computers and slimbook. There’s also starlabs byte.
Take your pick :)
I’m using nixos-anywhere to install and then deploy-rs to deploy updates to nixos vps’s.
Also using agenix for managing secrects for the services so that I can easilly have them all in a public repo, so that other’s could take a look and take inspiration.
My nixos flake url if you wan’t to take a look.
I’m currently trying to figure out why my email server got blocked by Proofpoint and they refuse to talk to me. Really about ready to give up on email after self-hosting it for a decade with few problems.
Check RBLs a lot of times services just use one of those, and they can be flaky. Usually, you can fill out a form and get reinstated.
I’m not on any of those blacklists, luckily. I guess Proofpoint doesn’t publish theirs. At least iCloud and Gmail both use them. I saw one hint that they may require mail servers to literally have the word “mail” as the subdomain, so I’m working up the courage to mess around with my perfectly working DNS.
Oh that sucks! One would think that after that long, it’d be somewhat established.
RIGHT?!
There is still the relay through the cloud route (SES, but also at least Scaleway)
Part of me thinks if I have to pay for a relay service, I should just pay for hosted email. But I’ve definitely been considering it!