Selfhosted

Infrastructure as code. My lab has been working stable for a while now, so it's time to mess things up again. I want everything in code. The POC with the ansible proxmox collection is already working, but it will surely take some time. In particular since I want to implement some improvements like VLANs, proper user management and such

I installed cameras in my condo recently, and I need to buy and install a larger HDD for capture storage. I ordered a 6TB WD Purple off Amazon, only to have it arrive used (it was absolutely not marked used or refurbished.) So I returned it, naturally. I think that the safest bet is just to order it directly from one of their vendors.

Also, I need to tinker with my postgres install on my Unraid server a bit. Right now a couple other services I host on Unraid use it, but moving forward I need it available to other devices on the LAN.

I just set up an orange pi as an off-site restic backup!

I use restic for backups in my homelab onsite to my NAS. I've been doing this for about a year but I don't have off-site backups. I've set up the orange pi with just a small HDD and set up wireguard on it so I can still access the pi when it is outside my network.

Then I added a restic copy command to copy my repo from my NAS to the remote, and it's working!

Now I'll leave it in my house for about a month or two to test that it's still working, then take it to a family member's house!

I completed a 300 mile move yesterday, and my homelab was one of the least stressful parts thanks to my pre-emptive downsizing from a half rack to just a Synology + Intel nuc. I also pre-emptively switched from forwarded ports to a reverse proxy because I didn't want to be thinking about what isp I would end up with. Even further, I linked the nas and nuc directly with Ethernet so that I wouldn't need to rely on static IPs or router-assisted local hostnames, mdns, avahi, whatever because I wanted to be able to transplant my lab onto any network just in case of emergency - thankfully I haven't had to test that out but it's nice knowing my lab should work on any network where both boxes can reach the internet / my reverse proxy. I was thinking worst case if we ended up in some apartment complex with some crappy provided setup that had broken local discovery then it would be 1 less thing to worry about.

I started playing around with RedHat Cockpit as a potential podman-based replacement to my disorganized docker server. Only got a jellyfin instance running on at the moment, sharing the same network disk as my "production" jellyfin server.

So far, I am not impressed. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to preserve settings when I want to update the image, which is one of the main reasons I want to migrate. I'd like to have a weekly cron job that checks for new latest images, and updates them automatically, ideally without me having to intervene, but that doesn't seem like something cockpit can do. If I want to update a container image through the GUI, it seems like I have to recreate it from scratch.

Not much for me atm, though in a day or two I'm (finally) fixing a major problem with my VM storage array - I'm replacing the crappy Crucial BX500's in my VM storage mirror with a couple refurbished 2TB Intel D3-S4510 SSDs I got from Server Part Deals. I'm very excited for this saga to be over, since I've been fighting horrible VM performance for over a year, and it was bad enough to where simply pushing changes to git repos or syncing a modest amount of data to my Nextcloud would hang the VMs for a few minutes!

Otherwise I'm just looking at maybe replacing my Puppet infra with SaltStack, and getting some new Packer images built for FreeBSD 15.1 and Almalinux 10 :)

Slowly uploading my media collection from a slowly dying TrūNAS box up to B2… slowly 😬

Setup an XMPP server for family and friends to use. While I really like it, I can't seem to get Jitsi to play nice for group calls with the Openfire server. Atleast 1 on 1 calls seem to work fine with Dino and Conversations anyway.

I've had an eventful week, I setup a laptop as a Proxmox Backup Server, moved my VMs storage to my NAS so I could reconfigure the Proxmox server's local LVM, and now I have qocw2 storage instead of raw disk files! It was super stressful, but seeing my incremental backups take less than 5 minutes was sooo worth it.

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

[Thread #72 for this comm, first seen 2nd Aug 2026, 22:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]