Host it yourself

[maru]

Way back at the inception of this board we talked a bit, in a very freeform way, about workflows and tools. It came up again talking about computers, just figuring out new ways to organise piles of stuff across computers.

Another example: I moved from streaming services to just having all my music as files again. But now I have lots of computers and mobile devices, so it became a bit unwieldy considering how to keep it all present and current. I used to sync everything with Syncthing, but I kept finding myself losing music outright; a media player would edit ID3 tags, and then a conflict would occur, and Syncthing would conclude CONTAINMENT METHOD BRAVO was needed and nuke the site from orbit.

I would always make this smart playlist on all my devices, "things I haven't listened to yet," where if play count was 0, a song would be added. This meant on every single device I had 24 days of music that just ... waited for me to go through it all again. And seeing as I am extremely something, I kept going through that smart playlist as the main access point for my music. It felt like chipping away at a huge effort. But the effort would restart; get a new computer or just switch computers and it didn't match the way I remembered the effort.

In the time since this board began dear friend @meri put me onto just hosting my music instead with navidrome. And I ended up starting to use it, and things like Immich, on my Mac mini at home. But then I also realised, what if the external HDDs I have, the ones without SMART checks -- what if they just died? Well, photos and music matter more than just, like, stray things to watch or listen to. Even though I back up all these databases, I don't even want to cause the stress on these drives to get to that place. I decided I was better off segregating some stuff to a VPS.

So music and photos now live in a Tailnet VPS, but I still host bookmarks, my RSS feeds and my personal booru at home.

After looking at bep-san here I'm realising I don't host any websites or forums or whatever on my own hardware -- this forum and my fediverse instance and the like are all in a proper data centre, but I could definitely afford to host something from my house with a Cloudflare tunnel, or I guess a public Tailscale DNS entry, though I hate their subdomains. I would rather assign something proper, aesthetic ... something cafe...

I think I could do more, probably? I was considering importing all my mail in one big archive I serve to myself, and remove any storage requirements I would have from an IMAP provider. Even just ssh-ing into my server to notmuch it would be possible. But is this crazy? Who needs to look through their mail that way? Ignoring that services like protonmail have terrible search, making it hard to live from your inbox ...

I wanted to know what you do across your personal network. Graphs and diagrams welcome.

[8sumint]

one day i will write a universe of good software that will solve inter-device synchronization and extensible, relational metadata in distributed and heartwarming ways. until then i know nothing will be good enough to truly satisfy me so i just don't bother trying...

[sinku]

So in the past few days I took my old Thinkpad T430 and set it up with slackware 15 with the goal to host a website. So far, I've set up the box, SSH and port forwarding. So as I type this where I am sitting in Spain, I can SSH into the machine in England. I think that is super cool. I spent time with @8sumint yesterday setting up talkd and using talk, which is this primitive realtime chat program where you can see your friend type out her messages in real time. wall and write are also very cool. It is very cute and instead of a modern chat program where it is horizontal, the layout is vertical, so its almost like a game of tennis.

Anyway, I set this box up to stand up a simple static website. I signed up for a free domain from eu.org (no relation to the european union) and I'm using hurricane electric for DNS, also free. eu.org apparently take a very long time to dispense requested domains. It could take a month or more and they dont even notify you, according to reddit and other forums. I was concerned that they were dead, but apparently not as of may last year. I will probably end up following a guide that @maru gave to me and set up my site with darkhttpd. I keep thinking of what else I could possibly do with this box. AS I was typing this, little things popped into my mind. Maybe I could put a few widgets like a guestbook or a user counter onto my site. Maybe put the free-use ticker on the website. I dunno. But then it'd be out of the purview of darkhttpd and I would need to use something else. Decisions... I already downloaded nginx, but who needs that.

[hint_of_jasmine]

I think you’ve hit on a key thing with storage durability. That was my primary concern — the access software comes and goes (and honestly, given a few years, is something I could make a decent pass at); the data is irreplacable.

The core of my setup is Mumei, a trusty former gaming rig running proxmox. The bedrock, though, is a truenas instance, leyline. It’s got the four drives passed through so it runs a 0+1 zraid for one-drive redundancy and weekly backups to backblaze b2. Backblaze is probably more key here, and if you don’t have 30TiB of data it’s likely a lot cheaper. This offers SMB and NFS to everything else.

For local services, I’ve got the arrs but honestly Infuse over SMB and deluge get more play. This ensures I have a local media collection. I’m currently using PlexAmp for as long as they continue to honour the lifetime subscription I bought in college. Immich for videos. Watch-tracking by the service isn’t important to me since I use MAL and letterboxd, but Infused apparently has a sync for this? And I’m using youtube premium but am considering moving to invidious for sponsorguard.

Access is accomplished through tailscale. I should likely be using my router’s innate WireGuard support, but it was easier to install a tailscale subnet router onto mumei. 6to4 tunneling is important to avoid overlapping IPv4 subnets here, especially from public wifi.

Overall I’m pretty happy with it! And old desktop towers are great at just having a bunch of disks and truenas on them.

[maru]

Immich for videos

Immich? For like, your personal video collection? Do you mean Infuse? Or do you have an intriguing workflow...