Selfhosted

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.

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 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.

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.

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!

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

I've been focused so much on work-related stuff involving DST changes that I neglected my own systems!

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 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'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.

My automatic weekly backup ran for the first time last night. Everything worked nicely.

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.

In terms of my setup, there was basically no impact. I use Debian (servers and some workstations) and Arch (couple of laptops and a couple of miscellaneous task-oriented devices I want more recent builds on than Debian will give me)

Work? Different story, so much manual updating!

Otherwise just regular stuff this week like backups (monthly incl since yesterday was the 31st), reviewing changelogs for minor updates, etc.

Hit a bit of a wall in my animal identification tools I'm making, so I'm going back to do some more reading to see if I can find a way to improve efficiency more and make it smaller while maintaining accuracy.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #152 for this comm, first seen 1st Nov 2026, 14:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I need to replace my server root filesystem from ext4 to btrfs..

And get rid of a leftover MD/raid1 as well ...

I was 429ing a little too liberally, so I upped my burst rate. This week, just like last week, most of my traffic was bots. But if a real user does come by, I want his or her experience to be pleasant enough.

Migrated my storage from an old xeon-d to an arm SBC w 4GB ram and a sata hat. Performance is great, ZFS keeps up with all tasks, and less than a third of the power consumed. Backup scripts are running nightly without issue.

I am continually astounded by how well ZFS performs, even 15 years after I starting working with it. 4GB is enough for a mirror.

Nothing really cool per se, but I installed Radicale on my local network as I am slowly moving away from my cloud providers.

Once I find some hardware to host Immich, I'll be fully self supporting on all my tech.

Not quite server related, but in the middle of a workday this week, I decided I was done with Windows on my home PC. Installed Zorin OS and things have been going really well. Any issues I've had have been really minor and mostly revolve around me being picky about theming.

I haven't found a native mp3 tagger that makes sense to me yet, so I just installed Mp3tag. I'm open to suggestions on that front.

On the server side, it's mostly just keeping on. A friend has me considering Home Assistant, I just don't know if the value is there for me. I need to do some housekeeping today and update and clean up unused containers.

Recently picked up a lenovo system x 3650 m5. Came with 16 GB DDR4 which is already worth more than I paid for it. Now to find the time to mess with it....

I am trying to find affordable 2x16Gb ram modules that are just right to run on my asrock J5040 and push my proxmox to more possibilities.

Because my needs for ram are increasing since its not just about have the services availble anymore. I plan to add gitlab and k3s and with the rest of my services the 16GB ram are pretty tight.

• I've taken the opportunity to update most of my hosted services to newer image versions.

  They're all in Docker and behind private access (Tailscale, mTLS, IP whitelist etc.) so I'm not usually too worried. I update images manually whenever I can find time on a slow weekend, so this wasn't strictly speaking related to the recent vulnerabilities. Volume data and container definitions are backed up automatically once a day and I also take manual copies of the old images when I update them.

• I've switched to new major versions of Immich and Jellyfin in the process and I'm very pleased with the new releases, amazing great work from the developers, they've been killing it lately.

• I've been tinkering with some custom images that I use for various things like syncing specialized data (logs off FTP services, archive email over IMAP from my mail provider, grab Garmin data copies, run monitors and log parameters to Influx, run port forwarders etc.)

  I typically want to lock down this kind of images as much as possible, so I tweak them towards running with an unprivileged user, remove all caps and only grant strictly necessary ones, make the storage read-only inside the container etc.

• Some needs have been recurring inside this type of containers, like having a decent process manager to keep some things running and restart them, or having a decent cron service. So I've been toying with the idea of making a "universal" image for this kind of thing and maybe publishing it for others to use as a base too. If I get around to it I'll be announcing it here.

I shut everything down only to discover nothing runs on php, while shit was going down at work. And I just recently discovered how to run docker compose updates through Komodo which is great.

Procrastination. Want to move may lab off my pi onto my mini PC.

I have done the backup off the pi, just need to restore it but motivation doesn't line up when the family is out of the house.

Weekly update and restart of my servers. Also planning migration of my k3s cluster from Archlinux to NixOS.

I've mainly been looking up some good ways to backup my Podman services. I manually copy my volumes every couple or months or so. (Which I was thankful when my hard drive started failing on me). I saw a post about Portabase here last week and figured it's time to look into something less involved.

I also used that as an excuse to start moving my 5 mysql containers that each service ran themselves into a single mariadb container.

The updates from the last CVEs were seamless. Nothing surprising since I have very little installed on my Debian server.

I didn't change my view on anything from the recent CVEs. I always assumed my server can be compromised, so everything sensitive is encrypted anyway, and I update all my systems/software often or automatically. The latter of which comes with its own set of risks I'm willing to take

I hosted Donetick. It was awful. Everything is processed server-side, which makes it crazy slow. Data should be backed up locally on device. Shame because it seems an otherwise sophisticated software.