Let’s do another round of this. What’s going on on your servers, any cool things? How’d the recent CVE flood tangent you and did it change how you see/do stuff?
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Home Assistant got a larger STT recognition model thanks to openvino (on an Intel NUC). The intent was to get better recognition of music artists names.
It’s better, but not perfect. Instead I’m scraping the music directory for names and injecting them into a database that the automation can query.
I recently got around to setting up OIDC for my internal apps using Pocket ID.
Sonarr v5 adds OIDC support, currently only in beta
Jellyfin SSO plugin
Nextcloud with the Nextcloud OIDC app
Mealie, Paperless, and Immich natively support OIDC
Calibre-Web I migrated to AutoCaliWeb, which supports generic OIDC
Sadly Navidrome doesn’t natively support OIDC and forward auth is a bit jank due to the subsonic API
I set up crowdsec on all my internet-facing services. Couldn’t seem to get the online dashboard connected but I could at least confirm that it can block requests.
I’m also struggling with a new Home Assistant automation to send a live notification to my phone when my washer and dryer are running. The notification action works when I run it manually, and the automation as a whole gets triggered when the machine is on, and Home Assistant says it activates the notification, but I get nothing on my phone during a real test. Gonna keep fiddling.
Crowdsec is on my to-do list as well. Should be easy to set up on OpnSense, just never pulled the trigger.
I have HA notifications set up for the same thing, but sometimes they simply won’t work. Have you set up all the energy settings? There’s a way to create a manual notification from HA, does that work?
Got my hands on an old laptop. Since I started using nix a little while ago, and want to migrate to NixOS for my servers, this will be the starting point. Started cobbling together some code to commission it as a smart tv platform. KDE Plasma BigScreen is what I’m looking at atm.
I’m currently in the process of writing yet another script. This time my aim is to make one that will setup a server from a fresh Operating System install.
I want to do this for two reasons. The first is so that I have an alternative to backups. It would also help with major Operating System updates because sometimes those are a bit messy.
The second reason is because I want to help other people setup a simple, minimal and more secure setup for a home server as well.
It will all be POSIX portable too so it won’t be limited by extra requirements. I’ve already made a lot of progress with it because I started doing the same with my personal computer. I’ve been able to focus on that because my home server is super simple and I’ve been able to ignore all the recent vulnerabilities.
Don’t create another Omarchy please!
I have a similar thing but I’m using Ansible. That way, I don’t have to handle all the error checking etc myself.
I don’t like bloat or AI/LLMs and I focus more on minimalism to reduce surface attack areas while still focusing on security. There’s nothing flashy about how I plan to approach this project. It’s going to look ugly.
My main focus is to help create communication for local communities and not create tech that enables control over other peoples freedom.
I highly doubt my project will ever leave my community and that’s fine, I’m not interested in making a name in an already crowded space.
What are you building for your community? I think smaller communities is really the spot where this hobby can have a greater impact in enabling people to collaborate in different ways.
I deleted a bunch of services I’m not actually using on my home server. Nothing used php, but it was good to do some house cleaning.
I also started a blog (Hugo is much nicer than I thought). The procrastination has helped me get a lot of other things done.
Finally took the leap and wiped my NUC to start doing things over. Originally had a family member who works in IT set everything up, but he did the absolute bare minimum and I screwed some stuff up along the way the first time around, so I figured now was as good at time as any to teach myself to set things up from scratch!
I also have moved from Portainer, to Dokploy, to Arcane for docker management, and I actually really like Arcane. I’ve also accomplished something I’m really damn proud of, which is getting HTTPS working on Tailscale (so, for example, arcane.(my subdomain).ts.net but with HTTPS!) alongside Pocket ID for all of it. Maybe it’s just me, but I had trouble finding clear documentation on how to do this, no matter how much I searched. But I documented it for myself, at least. And it’s probably that I lack a lot of knowledge in this field, too.
I have some questions, and although I know there’s a chance this gets buried, I figured I’d try asking anyway. Little skittish about making a thread myself.
My NUC is running Debian 13, and I was wondering some security things. Everything is behind Tailscale and I don’t plan on exposing anything to the internet (even through Tailscale Funnel, I’m using Tailscale Serve for the HTTPS.)
- How valuable is a firewall in this case? I’ve never used one, and I’m wondering if it’ll just make adding services more of a hassle than it’s worth for the security since everything is staying local.
- Similarly, what about Fail2Ban? I have it on my RPi and it’s not a big deal to set up, but I was reading a firewall is more important?
- Is it okay to run unattended updates for security OS stuff on the NUC? I don’t always check updates, admittedly I’m easily distracted and forgetful. I’m a little worried about auto restarting it to finish the updates up just because I utilize a NAS and sometimes it’s annoying to get them to reconnect to each other (even with the fstab edited) when there’s a restart for either of them.
- Thoughts on auto updates on docker containers? I know this is pretty personal preference, but I mostly ask because I’m forgetful and distractable. I know this is kinda my own problem, but I want to know other people’s thoughts if possible.
Thank you for reading my very long update! And any answers to my questions are very appreciated. Hope everyone else is doing well!
F2B/FW: If it’s only available locally/via VPN, I think your threat model is your LAN. People in your wifi or rogue smart home stuff. I think a firewall makes more sense here, but if it’s just 1 machine, you should be fine with ufw or the like. If you have several VMs that are supposed to be separated, the solution would depend on the virtualization software.
Unattended upgrades are way better than none at all, both for system and docker. Of course it depends on how important it is that your services are “always” available and I get the NAS struggle though.
Hey, thank you for the comment!
That makes sense, that I would be tightening security on the LAN. It’s not just one machine, I have a Raspberry Pi 4 as well running a flavor of Debian (and the Synology NAS), so I would assume a firewall on both the Raspberry Pi and my NUC would make sense? I don’t have any VMs that I’m aware of, and I’ve heard of VLANs but don’t know anything about those.
Services don’t always have to be available! It’s just me and my partner who are accessing them, so nothing like a lot of people who need media playback. I’ll have to weigh if it’s worth fighting with the NAS over auto reboots, but I’m leaning towards yes as an experiment. I’ll have to actually look into how to do unattended Debian security updates, though.
I think for that use case, Firewalls on the hosts make sense. VLAN is not a bad idea either, though you’d need a managed switch (hardware) for that.
From my logs nothing bad happened to any of my services. I turned off my entire homelab for a few days until every single app/service had an update. Then I turned everything on, updated and that was that.
One cool thing I have is https://github.com/lklynet/hypermind totally pointless, but I like it.
Using nix to maintain my fleet with automated updates so I didn’t really need to worry about it thankfully; just checking that I had relevant/patched versions. All my services are nice and up to date so didn’t even have to take anything down (yay)
What I’m excited for today is to progress personal slop project (be gentle) I started yesterday. Hoping it’ll just be one or two weekends.
I’ve been hallucinating a transcoding suite/workbench. Includes experimental sampling matrix of ffmpeg settings with a composable / layer-based project configuration; rust egui+mpv desktop client. Then the hosted orchestration server can distribute ffmpeg jobs across my worker machines (via my local headscale tailnet). Output produces a project+metadata bundle that includes hand-picked source:result JXL frame comparisons alongside both human readable reports and client readable configuration that makes the projects (more or less) reproducible (with worker tool env versioning via nix flake.lock) and logs provenance.
I intend for this to be a replacement to the piles of crappy python scripts I’ve been using for the last decade; my current workflow is to move files into host-labeled ingest folders with an argument string in a text file, then ssh to the host to run the job.
But what I’m most excited for is the experimentation matrix. I hope that it will reduce my electricity usage and disk thrashing; it will let me sample settings for ~1minute of footage around the sample frame and let me iterate my tuning much faster. Currently, it’s faster (in terms of hands-on time) to just transcode whole episodes or even entire seasons multiple times with different settings and then just discard the ones that underperform. Extremely wasteful; testing a settings matrix is something I’ve always wanted, but never had the time to build (and still don’t, hence slop).
I’ve been focused so much on work-related stuff involving DST changes that I neglected my own systems!
I migrated my backups from Hetzner Object Storage to OVH, because Hetzner had too many service disruptions in the last few months for my taste (no dataloss, only unavailability). My automatic backup afterwards worked without any issues. Plus point, OVH doesn’t charge for traffic or API calls, only for used storage, and has replication jobs, so I can automatically replicate the backups to another bucket in another location.
I got a network rack and a rack mounted UPS that I need to install today and then move everything over too. Looking forward and not to getting it done lol
My automatic weekly backup ran for the first time last night. Everything worked nicely.
I practiced restoring my offsite backup this week. Good experience.
Then I printed and laminated the instructions and stored in two locations.
Just curious. How long does lamination last? I assume light hurts paper.
I dunno. Longer than bare paper, I hope.
I’m always super excited for this kind of stuff :D
I’m into this as a regular thing!
Pinned, I think a lot of us really enjoy seeing what others have been doing to take back and make improvements to our own setup.
Glad you like it! I tried to go for a 2-3 week cycle as I realized every week is a bit too often (less comments). I also tried to do it alternating with the community on slrpnk but they’re currently down. I often forget to do these anyways :D
Anyone can make these, of course. I always enjoy doing them and talking about stuff I enjoy.
Working on a custom rust server / client for self hosted obsidian lifesync. Goal is to be significantly faster than existing solutions as well as being hassle free. Using noise with curve25519 keys instead of HTTPS.
Apart from that I finally figured out why tailscale wasn’t working on my pfsense and that enabled me to move the majority of my services to be behind the VPN.
