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.
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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.
Finally switched from plex to jellyfin, seems to be ok so far. Needed to make some small scripts for metadata management but it’s running smoothly. Finally decided I’m hosting enough software with user accounts that I’ve made an authentik instance for SSO with each (ofc jellyfin first)
Hey, we’re also thinking about setting up authentik. Could you answer the following, where I haven’t found answers to yet: does introducing SSO impede logging into Jellyfin on a TV / phone app at all?
no, works fine. there’s an LDAP plugin for jellyfin so you can use the jellyfin internal login page and the server will verify the login against authentik. took some setting up though.
Alright, thank you!
Ann reason you choose authenik? There are a nmber of options and I’m not sure why to choose one over the other.
I did no research whatsoever and picked the one I’d seen the name of more often. I figured if it didn’t work for me I’d try something else, same as when plex wasn’t working for me so I switched to jellyfin. I have no idea how it compares to the other options but it feels pretty solid so far
I’m not the person you’re replying to, but Authentik:
- Has a UI for configuring it, including adding users.
- Supports LDAP if you need it. Authelia needs a separate LDAP server.
- Supports practically every two factor auth protocol you’d need: OIDC (OpenID Connect), OAuth2, SCIM, SAML, RADIUS, LDAP, and proxying for apps that don’t support any of them (which is getting rarer).
- Supports permissions and permission groups, i.e. only allow certain users to access particular apps.
- Can be used as the source of truth for Google Workspace and Microsoft Entra. Maybe not as relevant for home use.
I haven’t tried Keycloak but I hear it’s pretty good, albeit a heavier app to deploy.
I have tried Authelia, and it’s much less powerful than Authentik. Authelia requires you to manually modify config files rather than using a web UI. It also only supports OIDC (which is in beta) and proxying. Proxying is not recommended and has several issues since it’s not “true” single sign-on.
I’m considering Keycloak myself because it’s trusted by security professionals (I think it’s a RedHat project), whereas Authentik is basically a passion project.
I hear keycloak has quarkus builds as well these days which should be much slimmer than how it used to be built.
I hadn’t heard of it, and looking into quarkus just reminded me of how complicated the whole Java ecosystem is. Gross.
Hosting Go, Rust, etc stuff is dead simple, but with Java, there’s all this complexity…
Nothing’s as bad as trying to host and maintain a Ruby on Rails app :)
Docker has made a lot of it a non-issue though, since the apps are already preconfigured within the Docker image.
Agreed, with the clear exception being PHP, which often requires configuring a web server.
Keycloak is very much lighter actually. Can run under half a gig ram whereas authentik uses about 1GB.
Authelia is king though in running with just about 30MB of ram.
That’s interesting… It used to be a lot heavier.
Authelia is definitely the lightest in terms of RAM, but it’s also the lightest in terms of features. As far as I can remember, they only added OIDC support fairly recently - previously it only supported proxying.
The only feature I want that jellyfin doesn’t have (or I haven’t found it) is shuffle. Throwing on how it’s made or mythbusters on shuffle is great background stuff.
Aren’t there clients that support that?
Maybe, i haven’t seen it yet though
I do it for music
Damn ok that sucks it doesn’t seem available on the client for apple tv.
Yeah I dont know why any Dev wouldn’t choose a cross platform framework
I’ve never done dev for apple stuff, but I think it’s probably just not that friendly with more open/cross platform frameworks
I see it in the default WebUI, perhaps whatever app you’re using doesn’t support it?
Ya I don’t think it’s supported on the apple tv app. Damn.
Doing that switch soon.
Plex doesn’t do hw accel well, which kind of defeats the purpose.
Setting up HW accel on Jellyfin was a bit more manual than a single checkbox. You have to tell it which codecs it should HW decode and encode. I had some issues with it so left it off for now
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?
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.
Would you mind sharing the code?
Bash variable manipulation is really, really fun.
automate stuff in my homelab.
Love me some homelab automation. It puts a smile on my face when I get a little ding from telegram giving me a summary of this morning’s email, what the weather will be for the day along with a summary of established connections to my servers 'cause I’m paranoid like that. LOL fun stuff
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?
Recently been working on setting up forgejo to migrate away from GitHub. My open source stuff I’ve actually put onto codeberg and I’ve set up a handful of pull mirrors on my local instance for redundancy. This weekend I’ve been testing out woodpecker-ci for automating pushing files to s3 for some static websites for repos on codeberg as well as my forgejo instance. Today will tell if that is successful!
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, keeps last 7 days and the first of the month
- 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?
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.
It can manage KVM, so I don’t see why not .
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.
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.
Just under two right now but it is throwing out 55-60GB a day at the moment. Gotta keep those Linux ISOs seeded!
A catalog for organizing various Roms you have. It can pull metadata from a number of sources and properly add all the details, cover art, and platform information to each game. It’s smart enough to auto-generate collections based on game series, and embed YouTube videos for gameplay of each one without even any configuration.
The best part? It has Ruffle and EmulatorJS built in so you can play any games supported by EmulatorJS in your browser. I tested games up to N64 and they all ran smooth as butter right in the browser with gamepad configurations built in. They even support local multiplayer.
Scrubbing a little demo project I made featuring a web app behind oauth2-proxy leveraging keycloak as local idp with social login. It also uses a devcontainer config for development. The demo app uses the Litestar framework (fka starlite, in Python) because I was interested, but it’s hardly the focus. Still gotta put caddy in front of it all for easy SSL. Oh, and clean up all the default secrets I’ve strewn about with appropriate secret management.
All of it is via rootless podman and declarative configuration.
Think I might have to create my own Litestar RBAC plugin that leverages the oauth headers provided by the proxy.
It has been a minute since I worked daily in this space, so it has been good to dust off the cobwebs.
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 tried to update my lemmy instance and it all went so horribly wrong. DB never came up, errors everywhere, searching implied I updated to a dev branch sometime in the past (not a dev, don’t think I did) and it’ll be console and DB queries for a fix.
Ran out of time and overwhelmed, I restored backups and buried my head in the sand. Nope, not now. Future, yes, but oh not now.
Sometimes we get so engrossed in what we’re doing we can’t see the problem(s). I do that a lot, so I have take a break. Same with creating music. You get so deaf to what you are trying to write that nothing sounds good no matter what you do. In the words of Snoop Dog, ‘I had to back up off of it and sit my cup down. Tanqueray and chronic, yeah, I’m fucked up now.’
Take a break.
A while back, the docker installation instructions just had “lemmy:latest” as which version to pull. The Lemmy devs aren’t the brightest, and the beta versions are included as “latest”. Now the instructions have you put the specific version to pull, like “0.19.10”.
I wonder if that’s what happened?
I had that problem once, just had to delete a duplicate db function
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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
Consider reviewing odoo, I last looked at them when they were known as openERP, I know one guy that runs it and is happy. It might be a bit much if you just want a CRM…
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.
