I set up oauth for my sites

Not to brag but everything’s working fine, clean as a whistle. Upgraded forgejo to the latest version. I’m still helping maintain the awesome-selfhosted list, and get inspiration from selfh.st a lot (big shoutout!) Hope to make sure some postgres dbs are up to date at some point, all of my dockhand instances that i set up have been a big help :)

I found the best thing to deal with a device that won’t work…

I’m trying to get the 3.5" adafruit touchscreen working and it’s being stubborn…

So… I went outside and split a large pile of logs.

Problem still not fixed, but I feel a hellofalot better

I built a dashboard themed around my dog. It uses the Home Assistant API to get various stats from the house. I’m pleased with it!

The best thing I did was probably set up Obsidian Live Sync after hearing about it in selfh.st weekly. Compared to the Syncthing setup I had before it is so much quicker, much easier to catch sync errors, and won’t drain my damn phone battery as much! The more things I can move away from Syncthing the better so I will probably be looking at Immich for my photos soon as well.

On the management side, I’ve had my Docker stacks split across Dockhand and Komodo ever since a poorly executed move away from Dockge a few months ago. I finally thought about it and had the time to decide to give up on them both. I like some of the concepts of compose in a git repo and the fancier interfaces, but I just realised it was all over the top for what I need. I missed being able to simply SSH into a damn machine and docker compose up -d in an emergency. Compared to the constant deploy errors of Dockhand and the potential of scrounging application databases for in-DB compose data or attempting to deploy stacks from forgejo when forgejo itself is a stack deployed via git… going back to basic files is a blessing. Lesson learned!

What that culminated in is all my stacks are now in Sencho (which clearly uses a lot of AI code sadly), but it was that or Dockge and I knew Dockge lacked a few things I wanted. The nice thing about Sencho (and Dockge) is that I don’t need either of them because they are based around file-on-disk simple operation. I can cut it out of my setup entirely at any moment and not shed a tear. So much peace of mind leaving Dockhand. Now I just need to find a builder image or write a script to replace Komodo’s build feature because I don’t want to keep using it.

We’re on the first Sunday of the month, mdadm raid array be scrubbing… With Debian 13 came a crazy complex systemd scheduling for that, I liked the awkward cron job better. It’s now using some kind of random delay before start, and cut in chunks of 6 hours or so over multiple days Edit: typos

Over the last few weeks I’ve been making the horrifying leap from PHP5 to PHP8. I knew it was going to be a lot of work to upgrade all my various scripts and web pages but I’m nearing the end, just have some random CLI scripts still failing that I have to work through.

I’ve been making a big push this year to get all my servers caught up to supported operating system levels. Debian will truly run forever even when it really shouldn’t. I was happy to finally get my mail servers modernized last month. The old code I had relied on for managing spam scanning and such had been abandoned but I finally discovered rspamd which replaced everything plus does so much more. The first couple weeks saw an awful lot of server emails being marked as spam while I trained the new system, seems to be settling in nicely now though, and I created some new spam-trap mailboxes and sprinkled the addresses around several web pages. Nice to see their activity picking up again.

Not working on anything particular, but I’m going on a road trip on Tuesday to this regional airport that is giving away two racks perfect for my use case. Deep enough for my larger machines, sound proofed and 42U tall.

Finally my hardware can have a proper rack instead of being in a stack/pile in this harrypotteresque locker under my stairs.

spent some time last week adding metadata to my mp3 music obtained with yt-dlp. used musicbrainz Picard.

I’m actually really surprised how comprehensive that database is, and how easy it was to manually tag the tracks that didn’t get picked up automatically.

I finally got my immich docker running again. I lost all my meta data in the process but oh well, it works again.

After a lot of trial and error, I managed to get rsgain working with Lidarr on my raspberry pi. I might actually be fully satisfied with my music piracy/streaming setup now (until I find the next silly addition :3 ).

I just published the weekly report for OpenAltFinder: #31

Added 19 new alternatives, and all projects in the CMS gained a total of 26,373 stars! The top gainer was Pi, with 2,302 new stars.

Not much for me atm, though in a day or two I’m (finally) fixing a major problem with my VM storage array - I’m replacing the crappy Crucial BX500’s in my VM storage mirror with a couple refurbished 2TB Intel D3-S4510 SSDs I got from Server Part Deals. I’m very excited for this saga to be over, since I’ve been fighting horrible VM performance for over a year, and it was bad enough to where simply pushing changes to git repos or syncing a modest amount of data to my Nextcloud would hang the VMs for a few minutes!

Otherwise I’m just looking at maybe replacing my Puppet infra with SaltStack, and getting some new Packer images built for FreeBSD 15.1 and Almalinux 10 :)

Finally think I got everything installed on my Raspberry Pi 4 that I want there, thankfully.

I’ve been trying to document my journey with selfhosting this time better than previous attempts, as far as writing down what worked and didn’t work. It’s coupled with me trying to write little explanation guides for my partner about what service does what, and how to use them. They’re really excited to actually use them, but I want to get the guides done first, which has been a challenge.

Kinda surprised Grimmory is taking up so much RAM but if it becomes an issue I’ll put it on my other, beefier server. It was the last service I was struggling with, because every time I would upload a book, something would go wrong. An example being that one time I uploaded a book and it went into every single folder after, then deleting one copy deleted all the copies.

Admittedly, I’m not terribly well experienced so it was probably an issue on my end. Still learning!

Speaking of, my next project to tackle is overhauling my more powerful server and what it’s running. Since I use a split setup where I store media on my NAS, I’ve had difficulties with databases hating that aspect. Now that I know a bit more than I did when I started, and I have nowhere else to ask (thank you for having this community, by the way, it seems a lot more newbie friendly than some others) I was wondering if I could map the database of a service to be on the server itself, while having the media mapped to my NAS? From my research, I think this is possible, but I’m not 100% sure.

Hope everyone else’s experiences are going well!

I started playing around with RedHat Cockpit as a potential podman-based replacement to my disorganized docker server. Only got a jellyfin instance running on at the moment, sharing the same network disk as my “production” jellyfin server.

So far, I am not impressed. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to preserve settings when I want to update the image, which is one of the main reasons I want to migrate. I’d like to have a weekly cron job that checks for new latest images, and updates them automatically, ideally without me having to intervene, but that doesn’t seem like something cockpit can do. If I want to update a container image through the GUI, it seems like I have to recreate it from scratch.