Selfhosted

Managed to finally get around to self-hosting ntfy, added that to uptime kuma as notifications, experimenting with Checkcle, stood up a invidious instance for funsies (prob will see how much i use it, but might as well).

A hopefully "success in progress": I am building a new trueNAS server for storage. I have a k8s cluster and am currently using rancher for storage, but I decided at my scale central storage made more sense & would be easier to manage. I am also using that opportunity to upgrade from 2TB usable storage to 44TB usable storage. Fingers crossed everything will work 🤞

It was a couple of weeks ago for me but I managed to get my docker compose script for all my infrastructure cleaned up and all versions of containers are now pinned.

I have renovate set up to open PR's when a new version is available so I can handle updates by just accepting the PR and it's automatically deployed to my server.

Nice and easy to keep apps up to date without them randomly breaking because I didn't know if a breaking change when blindly pulling from latest.

Reconnected my light switches to home assistant. I just had to press the pairing button on the device again for some reason. But it's inside de Switch box in the wall, not so practical. I wich they thought of another way to put the device in pairing mode, like switch one-off 10 times, something like that.

I finally set up a VPN instead of exposing unnecessary ports to the wild!

I've been running all my apps on my NAS as docker containers, but some get 'stuck' occasionally, requiring a reboot of the whole machine. Using the NAS was mostly out of convenience.

I also had an old laptop running k3s, hosting a few stateless services.

This week I picked up three Wyse 5070 devices and started setting up a more permanent Kubernetes cluster. I decided to use Talos Linux, which is a steep learning curve, but should hopefully reduce the amount of ongoing work for upgrades. I'll be deploying everything with FluxCD this time around too.

I've stumbled a bit with the synology-csi-driver. It didn't work with Talos out of the box, but turns out the latest commits have a fix. The only thing remaining before I can start porting the apps over is figuring out how to spin up a new CA and generate client certificates for mTLS. I currently do that in Vault but it seems like something cert-manager could handle going forward.

The table (dm) might finally make the switch from roll20 to foundry for a campaign!

I have tried out Openclaw in a container, and it wasn't hard at all.

All the warnings of danger are right, though. But if anything goes wild, I still know how to delete a container :-)

I migrated openaw from docker running on my raspberry pi to an old nuc I had lying around. Backed it with mainly models off of OpenRouter or my local Ollama instance. For very difficult tasks it uses anthropic. Added it to my GitHub repo and implemented Plane for task management. Added a subagent for coding and have it work on touch up or research tasks I don’t have personal time to do. Made an sdlc document that it follows so I can review all of its work. Added a cron so it checks for work every hour. It ran out of tasks in five days. Work quality: C+, but it’s a hell of a lot better than having nothing.

It helped research and implement SilverBullet for personal notes management in one shot.

I also migrated all of my services’ DNS resolution to CloudFlare so I get automatic TLS handoff and set up nginx with deny rules so any app I don’t want exposed don’t get proxied.

This weekend I’m resurrecting my HomeAssistant build.

Still waiting for my success. Pihole randomly doesn't answer DNS requests in time, causing a lot of trouble between my services. It's happening since I switched to dnsmasq in opnsense (which is upstream for my local domain for Pihole), but also for external domains. Can't nail it down and am this short of reconsidering my whole network setup. It used to work fine for over a year though..

Opnsense dnsmasq is DHCP for my servers and also resolves them as local hosts. (e.g. server1.local.domain) and Pihole conditionally forwards there. Since the issue is also when resolving external domains, it shouldn't be related, but the timing is suspicious. I also switched the general upstream DNS.

Pihole does have some logs indicating too many concurrent requests, but those are not always correlating with the timeouts.

I know it's DNS, I just don't know where yet.

Hum. I've been smooth sailing for a while now. I've tried installing OwnTracks again and made some progress by figuring out cloud flare tunnels are a problem (at least the way I configured them). New to MQTT. So the app still doesn't work properly but now I have an idea why and I'm not just banging my head on the wall anymore.

I got gitea running on my VPs cluster that I use to host keyboard vagabond services. I moved my repository from my home PC into it, and set up an action runner to automate a build and deploy of piefed, so it runs my build script, pushes to harbor registry (internal), and then deletes and recreates a job to run db migrations and restarts the web and worker pods.

I'm going to migrate the other build services to it as well, and after that I should be able to finally get all of my services behind cloud flare tunnels and tail scale, and finally remove the last bits of ingress-nginx. The registry was the only thing still on ingress-nginx because I needed to push larger image files than are permitted by cloud flare. since all of that is internal now, I get to finally seal those bits off.

The build is also faster since I don't have to rely on wifi

This week - Apache Airflow setup to automate running backups (replacing cron).

Started my self-hosting journey a couple of year ago with a Raspberry Pi, OpenMediaVault and a couple of Docker containers. This week i finally managed to move my Adguard Home container and my DNS setup over to my NAS, which was the final thing that kept the Pi running. I also synched all the data to the NAS.

The next step I am trying to figure out is a decent backup setup. Read about Borg, Restic and Kopia, but haven't decided on one of them yet. What are you guys using?