Category: Self-Hosting

Posted on

New House Projects – Weather Watching V0.5

I’ve always been fascinated with the weather. I can still remember the daily routine of charting the weather in kindergarten with meticulous scientific rigor: Each morning one pupil, on a rotation, would peer out a window and then mark down if it was sunny, or cloudy, or possibly raining. Growing up in New Hampshire I used to follow the extreme weather on Mount Washington. And, as a lover of metrics and data, I love the idea of contributing my own, hyper-local, data to the larger pool available for weather predicting and archiving.

Life is funny though, and when I finally saved up and bought a nice weather station for home we decided we needed to move.… Click here to read more!

Posted on

New House Projects – Network 2.0

Ok – So, take one of this project didn’t go as planned. I don’t regret the choices I made, and while I’m very happy with how everything is working today. it’s not the setup I had hoped for. So, where did I end up?

Firstly – I ended up ordering a firewall from Protectli, the VP2420, which I ordered with Coreboot BIOS. Performance has been great, it was easy to setup, and the 2.5Gb ports work great. My only gripe is that the console port on the unit isn’t a true serial port. It’s a USB serial adapter, for which only drivers for Windows exists.… Click here to read more!

Posted on

New House Projects – Network Planning and Setup

EDIT - 11.1.2024 - I have changed many of the equipment choices listed below, which will be another blog post. The equipment from FS has been a total disaster, and the Qotom firewall, while effective, lacked the usability I really wanted in such an important device. The FS wireless equipment is likely to be e-waste, which is horrible, but the Qotom will live on, just in a different role

We’re in the process of moving from our apartment to a house to call our own. It will be somewhere I can drill holes, make improvements, and really nerd-out. The new spot has, if you can believe it, access to symmetric 2 Gigabit internet service for under $100/month.… Click here to read more!

Posted on

Dell Wyse 5070 – RAM and Coral AI

I too have been bitten by the bug and have a growing number of Dell Wyse 5070 thin clients appearing. I’ve been very happy with them, and since I struggled to find clear info on a couple of upgrades, I thought I’d add my text based ramblings to the Internets in case it’s a help for someone else.

I have a 5070 Extended, which has a PCIe 2.0 4x slot. The one I have included the AMD E9173 graphics card which works fine, but I don’t use it. I have it removed at the moment and, given time, will likely try out some other cards in there.… Click here to read more!

Posted on

My Default Apps at the End of 2023

Quick and dirty! Here’s all the stuff I can think of…

Mail Client: Apple Mail and Thunderbird
Mail Server: Fastmail
Notes: Apple Notes
To-Do: Nothing
iPhone Photo Shooting: iOS Camera
iPhone Photo Backup: Nextcloud
Photo Management: Apple Phones (on iPhone), On1 on MacOS
Calendar: Apple Calendar
Cloud File Storage: Nextcloud
RSS: TinyTinyRSS
Contacts: Apple Contacts
Browser: Firefox
Chat: iMessage
Bookmarks: Firefox
Homepage/News: Protopage
Music: Apple Music (The app, not the service)
Podcasts: Overcast
Password Management: KeePassXC

Other Default Apps and Devices:

Mastodon Client: Mono
eReader: Kindle Oasis
Digital Audio Workstation (DAW): AVID Pro Tools
Video Editing (NLE): Davinci Resolve
Linux Distribution: Debian (Bookworm)
Firewall: OpnSense (PC Engines APU4)
VPN Platform: Wireguard
Storage System: ZFS (on Debian)
Virtual Machines: KVM/qemu
Containers: Podman
Backup Service: Crashplan Pro
ZFS Data Replication: Syncoid (Sanoid)
Non-Web File Syncing: Syncthing
Home Automation: Home Assistant (Zigbee and WiFi for devices, with MQTT)
Weather Station: WeeWx
‘Serious’ Camera: OM Digital Solutions OM-1 (Micro Four Thirds)

Posted on

RSyslog, ZFS, and Storing logs based on the source in my HomeLab

There are many ways to store syslog data, and nearly all of them are better than what I am outlining here. If you’re looking to learn how to deal with syslog at scale, take a look at Graylog, or the Elk Stack or some other similar tool. There are many free and/or open source options to do this. Many of which I’ve setup and used for my employers.

For me though, I’m not looking to load big piles of data into some database and keep it stored for long periods, automatically indexed and cataloged. I don’t need that.

Instead, I’d like to gather logs from a handful of devices, store them as flat files based on the date, and then just throw them away after a month.… Click here to read more!

Posted on

Libresonic on Centos 7 with SSL

I’ve been a happy iTunes Match user since the service was introduced. I have a large music collection and I don’t always want to dedicate the required amount of iPhone and computer storage to keeping it available all the time on all my devices. iTunes Match lets Apple deal with storing the whole thing and allows me to just download what I want on a given device or stream music I own to any device I’d like. It’s been $25/year well spent.

That being said, with streaming music plans taking over the market, I can’t imagine Apple’s going to want to offer this service forever, plus I prefer to self-host as much of my digital needs as possible.… Click here to read more!