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Can you have local reverse proxies?
  • Yes - I do this with Pi-hole. It happens to be the same domain name that I host (very few) public services on too, so those DNS names work both inside and outside my network.

  • Pros and cons of Proxmox in a home lab?
  • It all depends on how you want to homelab.

    I was into low power homelabbing for a while - half a dozen Raspberry Pis - and it was great. But I'm an incessant tinkerer. I like to experiment with new tech all the time, and am always cloning various repos to try out new stuff. I was reaching a limit with how much I could achieve with just Docker alone, and I really wanted to virtualise my firewall/router. There were other drivers too. I wanted to cut the streaming cord, and saving that monthly spend helped justify what came next.

    I bought a pair of ex enterprise servers (HP DL360s) and jumped into Proxmox. I now have an OPNsense VM for my firewall/router, and host over 40 Proxmox CTs, running (at a guess) around 60-70 different services across them.

    I love it, because Proxmox gives me full separation of each service. Each one has its own CT. Think of that as me running dozens of Raspberry Pis, without the headache of managing all that hardware. On top of that, Docker gives me complete portability and recoverability. I can move services around quite easily, and can update/rollback with ease.

    Finally, the combination of the two gives me a huge advantage over bare metal for rapid prototyping.

    Let’s say there’s a new contender that competes with Immich. They offer the promise of a really cool feature no one else has thought of in a self-hosted personal photo library. I have Immich hosted on a CT, using Docker, and hiding behind Nginx Proxy Manager (also on a CT), accessible via photos.domain on my home network.

    I can spin up a Proxmox CT from my custom Debian template, use my Ansible playbook to provision Docker and all the other bits, access it in Portainer and spin up the latest and greatest Immich competitor, all within mere minutes. Like, literally 10 minutes max.

    I have a play with the competitor for a bit. If I don’t like it, I just delete the CT and move on. If I do, I can point my photos.domain hostname (via Nginx Proxy Manager) to the new service and start using it full-time. Importantly, I can still keep my original Immich CT in place - maybe shutdown, maybe not - just in case I discover something I don’t like about the new kid on the block.

    That's a simplified example, but hopefully illustrates at least what I get out of using Proxmox the way I do.

    The cons for me is the cost. Initial cost of hardware, and the cost of powering beefier kit like this. I'm about to invest in some decent centralised storage (been surviving with a couple li'l ARM-based NASes) to I can get true HA with my OPNsense firewall (and a few other services), so that's more cost again.

  • What YouTubers did you used to watch back then but not anymore?
  • Jimmy Diresta. I'm a huge fan of makers, and the maker movement in general, and there was a time I just couldn't wait for Jimmy's next video.

    Lately, I've come to feel that he no longer lets his work speak for itself. His videos used to just be really well made time lapses of him making a thing. But, for the past couple of years now, he feels the need to narrate just about everything. And there's the faintest whiff of semi-arrogant self promotion about it, which just puts me off every time.

    Don't get me wrong. Talking through the making process is 100% OK with me. I watch plenty of makers that talk through their videos (Pask Makes, Wesley Treat, etc) but something has changed in Jimmy's style, and I just don't like him any more.

    Shame. Arguably, Jimmy is the one that (re)ignited the movement's popularity on the internet, but it just kinda feels he's let it go to his head somehow.

  • What uses of a smartphone do you think most people miss out on?
  • lol - I stole from someone else, so all good here mate.

  • What uses of a smartphone do you think most people miss out on?
  • I do exactly this! I use Calibre Web and have all the PDF manuals for my appliances in it (among other books). I then encode an NFC tag for the Calibe Web URL to the manual for the appliance in question. Works perfectly!

  • What is the right way to have your toilet paper?
  • Came here to say this exact thing! lol

  • What is the right way to have your toilet paper?
  • Some people just want to watch the world burn

  • What tool do you use to display your self-hosting infrastructure
  • I've written my wiki so that, if I end up shuffling off this mortal coil, my wife can give access to one of my brothers and they can help her by unpicking all the smart home stuff.

  • What tool do you use to display your self-hosting infrastructure
  • I’m using self hosted wiki.js and draw.io. Works a treat, and trivial to backup with everything in Postgres.

  • which one do you prefer? having kids or no kids? and why??
  • Have seen both sides of the fence on this.

    Met my first wife when I was in my 20s, she was a bit older, already divorced with kids. We were together for over 10 years, and one of her sons lived with us off and on during his teenage years. We enjoyed all the benefits of a childless existence - disposable income, freedom to do whatever we wanted evenings/weekends, etc, etc.

    Eventually our marriage broke down. The reasons for it are entirely unrelated to us not having kids, but we were definitely not destined to be together for the rest of our lives.

    About a year or so later I met an incredible woman, and I truly learned what it meant to have a soulmate. We were awesome together. She already had two young kids - 6yo and 9yo - and, a year or so later again, we had our own baby girl. We married a couple of years after that.

    We now have a family that includes an amazing 21yo woman, a fabulous 18yo fella, and a beautiful 10yo daughter. My life is complete and I can't imagine it without any of them in it.

    When you know, you know.

  • Self hosting is hard. How do you overcome?
  • It doesn't have to be hard - you just need to think methodically through each of your services and assess the cost of creating/storing the backup strategy you want versus the cost (in time, effort, inconvenience, etc) if you had to rebuild it from scratch.

    For me, that means my photo and video library (currently Immich) and my digital records (Paperless) are backed up using a 2N+C strategy: a copy on each of 2 NASes locally, and another copy stored in the cloud.

    Ditto for backups of my important homelab data. I have some important services (like Home Assistant, Node-RED, etc) that push their configs into a personal Gitlab instance each time there's a change. So, I simply back that Gitlab instance up using the same strategy. It's mainly raw text in files and a small database of git metadata, so it all compresses really nicely.

    For other services/data that I'm less attached to, I only backup the metadata.

    Say, for example, I'm hosting a media library that might replace my personal use of services that rhyme with "GetDicks" and "Slime Video". I won't necessarily backup the media files themselves - that would take way more space than I'm prepared to pay for. But I do backup the databases for that service that tells me what media files I had, and even the exact name of the media files when I "found" them.

    In a total loss of all local data, even though the inconvenience factor would be quite high, the cost of storing backups would far outweigh that. Using the metadata I do backup, I could theoretically just set about rebuilding the media library from there. If I were hosting something like that, that is...

  • Breaking change in ESPHome 2024.6.0 ota component
  • Cheers mate - no doubt I would've scratched my head for a bit when I do my weekly container updates tomorrow.

  • YouTube is dedicated to making itself worse; destroys SponsorBlock with ad injection changes
  • The whole point of this particular comment thread here is that we’re already starting to see what’s happening: people are taking back control. You’re here on Lemmy, proving that exact point.

    I never said we needed Cory to tell us what comes next. Just come up with another colourfully descriptive term like he did with enshittification.

    You sound like that insufferable ponytail from Good Will Hunting.

  • YouTube is dedicated to making itself worse; destroys SponsorBlock with ad injection changes
  • We need Cory to coin a term for what comes after enshittification. Perhaps we can call it the Great Wipening, where we all stop paying to be treated like serfs and start taking back control of our content and data.

  • Men, are you physically affectionate with other male friends? (eg, hugging, snuggling, playful wrestling, etc). If you aren't, do you wish it was more socially acceptable if it isn't in your culture?
  • Bloody oath! My brothers and my closest mates all get hugs, and my near 18yo stepson and I still hug goodbye or goodnight too.

  • How was your NBN fttp upgrade experience ?
  • I needed four cables run from one room, up two storeys, across the roof, and back down into my garage, where my network cabinet is.

    I reckon each cable was about 25m. I supplied half the cable (had some left on a drum), he supplied the other half, the conduit, and of course the labour. I terminated the cables myself later.

    Sparky charged me $300 for cash.

  • How was your NBN fttp upgrade experience ?
  • I reckon I was pretty much first in my suburb when we got it a couple of years back - I called my ISP the second it was available, and they hadn't even updated their records yet.

    My experience was really good, but it probably helped that I'd already paid my sparky to run some Cat 6 to where I knew the nbn tech would want to put the NTD, so it was a straight-forward drill and connect job once the lead-in had been run.

  • Do you pay for some pirated contents
  • I pay for Usenet - not my fault if they don't pass it on.

    Joking aside, like some others have said, I support many artists via Bandcamp.

  • BAD PROXMOX UPDATE WARNING
  • lol - I'm the same, and frequently wonder if I'm allowing tech debt to creep in. My last update took me to 8.0.3, and that was only because I built a new node and couldn't get an older version for the architecture I wanted to run it on.

  • Preventing auto-login as Home Admin profile

    I host a Plex server for our household, which includes a couple of teenagers. All members of the household (myself included) have a PIN protected managed user profile on our Plex server.

    The problem is, if I let the teenagers have my Plex account password to login to our Plex server, it automatically logs them in with the Home Admin profile, whereas I'd much rather it force them to select from the list of profiles on our server (eg. just like Netflix does).

    This means that, every now and then, I have to manually go to whichever new device they want to run Plex on (such as a Playstation) and handle the login process myself, so I can be certain they're logged in with their own user profile - not the Home Admin profile.

    I've set a PIN on the Home Admin profile, but that doesn't help unless you've already logged in first, then go to use fast user switching to select a different profile. On very first login, Plex will always auto-select the Home Admin profile.

    I've searched high and low, but can't find any info or settings that help me change this behaviour.

    So, my question is simple: is it possible to prevent auto-login as the Home Admin profile, and force selection from the list of managed users instead?

    Thanks in advance.

    ---

    EDIT: I should have provided more details about what I've tried so far. We have tested out using a separate Plex user account for the oldest kid, as all the reading I did suggested she would "inherit" my server's Plex Pass rights when streaming from it.

    But, we found that the iPhone app could still stop playback after a minute. Plus we couldn't log her account onto the shared Chromecast TV, so she could watch her shows on the house TV. So we ended up moving her back to a managed user profile on our server.

    ---

    EDIT 2: after some more reading, it now seems the mobile app must either be logged in with a Plex Pass account (mine, in our case) or the user has to pay a once-off fee to unlock it.

    I could've sworn it was different when I first read about it a year or two back, where the app would "inherit" the server's rights, but I guess that's either faulty memory or they changed the rules. The once off unlock fee isn't a big problem, so that's one hurdle overcome.

    The second problem is how to use multiple Plex accounts on the Plex app for Chromecast, so the kids can enjoy their content on the big screen when they want to. Has anyone cracked the code on how to achieve that?

    11
    So glad I'm ditching these fucking idiots

    Can't even take a short break from 3D designing stuff. Glad I'm switching over to FreeCAD. All I wanted was to grab some dimensions from an old model.

    86
    Fossify Music Player 1.0.0 released

    cross-posted from: https://reddrefuge.com/post/189022 > > > Obligatory note for those that haven't read/retained the news: Simple Mobile Tools was sold to ZipoApps - an Israeli company that specialises in buying and monetising popular apps. > > > > Fossify is the fork of the Simple Mobile Tools repos, and they're gradually getting through each app and re-releasing them under the new name.

    1
    Fossify Music Player 1.0.0 released

    cross-posted from: https://reddrefuge.com/post/189022

    > Obligatory note for those that haven't read/retained the news: Simple Mobile Tools was sold to ZipoApps - an Israeli company that specialises in buying and monetising popular apps. > > Fossify is the fork of the Simple Mobile Tools repos, and they're gradually getting through each app and re-releasing them under the new name.

    2
    Fossify Music Player 1.0.0 released

    Obligatory note for those that haven't read/retained the news: Simple Mobile Tools was sold to ZipoApps - an Israeli company that specialises in buying and monetising popular apps.

    Fossify is the fork of the Simple Mobile Tools repos, and they're gradually getting through each app and re-releasing them under the new name.

    10
    Tips for a new Ender owner?

    So, after nearly 10 years of faithful service, my shitty ol' Wanhao i3 Plus is finally ready for retirement. Steppers are buzzing, occasional collisions with the bed, and the heat block just doesn't... heat as quickly as it used to.

    Talking to a mate who does a lot more printing than I, it seems I can't pass up the Ender 3 V2. The right price for what I typically do, and is backed by a mature community.

    I've ordered the auto-level kit with it, but nothing else. My i3 already sits in a Lack Rack I made, and it should comfortably take the new printer.

    I have a couple of functional print projects on the backburner that were waiting for me to make a move, but wanted to get some advice on mods and upgrades first, that might make the first experience with the Ender even better.

    So, asking the more experienced Ender owners out there: are there any essential upgrades, preferably 3D printed, you think I should look at first?

    Cheers in advance!

    19
    What are your homelab stats?

    I just spent a good chunk of today migrating some services onto new docker containers in Proxmox LXCs.

    As I was updating my network diagram, I was struck by just how many services, hosts, and LXCs I'm running, so counted everything up.

    • 116 docker containers
      • Running on 25 docker hosts
      • 50 are the same on each docker host - Watchtower and Portainer agent
    • 38 Proxmox LXCs (19 are docker hosts)
    • 8 physical servers
    • 7 VLANs
    • 5 SSIDs
    • 2 NASes

    So, it got me wondering about the size of other people's homelabs. What are your stats?

    75
    Jimmy Barnes to undergo open heart surgery after bacterial infection spreads
    www.abc.net.au Jimmy Barnes to undergo open heart surgery after bacterial infection spreads

    Musician Jimmy Barnes reveals a bacterial infection he's been battling has spread to his heart.

    Jimmy Barnes to undergo open heart surgery after bacterial infection spreads

    We have tickets for a festival he's headlining next month. I'm sure the promoters will line up someone else who'll put on a good show but, having seen Jimmy at this festival before, I know he'll be missed.

    Wishing Jimmy a full, and speedy, recovery. The man's a national treasure!

    0
    Australia developing 'top secret' intelligence cloud computing system
    www.abc.net.au Australia developing 'top secret' intelligence cloud computing system

    The program is expected to work with US and UK spy networks to help national security agencies better detect threats.

    Australia developing 'top secret' intelligence cloud computing system

    I assume this is the genesis of a Five Eyes cloud platform.

    Questions for me are which commercial partners are in the mix, and how will they ensure TS-level security?

    I guess we'll never truly know, but it's hard not to worry about the implications of this.

    10
    Nearly three weeks, and our lizard is still reclusive and hissing - normal?

    So, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote to this community, asking for some advice about our new blue tongue's eating. And the advice I got really helped us start to understand the lizard brain a little better.

    It's been nearly three weeks since we brought him home, and we've figured out he really likes tinned dog food, strawberries and raspberries. No luck with veggies just yet, but we're still trying new things. The important thing is he's not going hungry, and gets his calcium supplement with the dog food.

    But he's still very reclusive, and quite cranky with us. Most of the time, he'll hide under his basking log, or bury himself under some substrate. When we've reached in to try and pat him, he jerks suddenly and hisses.

    My daughter's been afraid to try patting him again herself so, the past week, we've just been getting her to hand feed him a small piece of fruit each day, to try and build some trust between them. It's gone well, and he's eaten out of her hand a few times now.

    My biggest concerns are that either his behaviour isn't that normal and we've not done something right, or that we're running the risk of letting this behaviour become his new "normal", and my daughter won't get to have a relationship with her pet.

    So I guess my question, without trying to sound too anxious or impatient, is if his behaviour at this stage would still be considered normal? Should we be doing anything different?

    Once again, thanks in advance for any knowledge and experience you can share.

    0
    Question from a first-time lizard owner

    We got our daughter (9yo) a blue tongue lizard for her birthday this week. We picked it up on Tuesday afternoon (it's now Saturday morning, here in Australia). The store says it's about 6 months old.

    We also bought a really nice enclosure for it, with all the bits and pieces: 4' wood enclosure with glass sliding doors; twin 75W ceramic heat emitters; thermostat (located around the mid-zone); UVB light (on 12hrs per day, from 7:30am); good substrate, a basking log, a hide-out, and some fake grasses and leaves to hide under.

    I'm not convinced the thermostat is particularly good, but I've kept a digital thermometer at the basking end, and the heat seems to consistently sit at around 30°-35°C (~86°-95°F) there, which at least tells me that zone is OK. I'm not sure the cool zone isn't too cool. I plan on buying another thermometer for that end.

    The problem is, it's not eating much. It tends to find a hiding spot near the cool end, and bury itself under the substrate. We gave it some diced strawberries on Wednesday. I ended up putting it right near the food, and it eventually ate about a strawberry's worth.

    The past couple of days we've tried some diced apple (freshly cut each day), but it hasn't gone near the food at all. Most of those two days, it stayed hidden and/or buried under the substrate. Per the store's instructions, we're taking the food away again around mid-afternoon - 3pm-ish.

    Today, we put some beef pet food out and moved the lizard next to the food bowl. It had a tiny, little munch, but didn't really eat what you might consider a meal.

    The store says it could take a week or so for it to settle into its new home, and I understand that. We're being disciplined and resisting the urge to take it out and hold it, to try and keep stress levels down.

    But, I'm a touch concerned at all the staying hidden/buried, and lack of eating, as we've been told juveniles should be fed daily. My daughter's starting to get really worried, and I've tried explaining that cold-blooded animals metabolise way slower than warm-blooded, so it's not like he's starving or anything. At least, I don't think he is.

    Should we be concerned at all? At which point should I start to seek professional assistance?

    Just looking for some reassurance that anything we're doing/not doing isn't causing any problems. Thanks.

    0
    Looking for/to create a sectional garage door position sensor

    Hi all - I have a sectional garage door, that I'm currently automating with a relay to trigger button press on the garage door motor, and a simple reed switch for open/closed state, using esphome on a Wemos D1 mini.

    Lately, I've been thinking about finding/building a door position sensor, instead of the reed switch.

    If I had position data being sent reliably, I could very easily determine if the door is opening, as well as open/close state. I have a number of automations in mind that would benefit from such data.

    So far, my searches for "garage door position sensor", and variations thereof, aren't bearing much fruit. I've been pondering of couple of home-brewed approaches:

    1. A series of reed switches on a track that a magnet on the door will trip as it moves along.

      I guess it's theoretically doable, but they'd have to be sensitive enough to be tripped by a moving magnet, but not so sensitive that too many of them are tripped at the same time, which might confuse my "moving mathematics" to determine door movement direction.

       

    2. An ultrasonic sensor could possibly do the job.

      I'm mulling over exact placement of it so it has a reliable surface to reflect off, to give me an accurate read on position. Nothing (yet) comes to mind on that front.

    It's not that I wouldn't enjoy going down the very enjoyable rabbit hole of prototyping something, but I thought I'd just ask first.

    Is anyone aware of an off-the shelf sensor that might give me what I'm looking for, please? If it needs something beefier than an ESP board, I've got a couple of RasPis lying around doing nothing.

    Cheers in advance for any suggestions.

    13
    How are you keeping on top of fleet updates?

    Just wondering what tools and techniques people are using to keep on top of updates, particularly security-related updates, for their self-hosting fleet.

    I'm not talking about docker containers - that's relatively easy. I have Watchtower pull (not update) latest images once per week. My Saturday mornings are usually spent combing through Portainer and hitting the recreate button for those containers with updated images. After checking the service is good, I manually delete the old images.

    But, I don't have a centralised, automated solution for all my Linux hosts. I have a few RasPis and a bunch of LXCs on a pair of Proxmox nodes, all running their respective variation of Debian.

    Not a lot of this stuff is exposed direct to the internet - less than a handful of services, with the rest only accessible over Wireguard. I'm also running OPNsense with IPS enabled, so this problem isn't exactly keeping me up at night right now. But, as we all know, security is about layers.

    Some time ago, on one of my RasPis, I did setup Unattended Upgrades and it works OK, but there was a little bit of work involved in getting it setup just right. I don't relish the idea of doing that another 40 or so times for the rest of my fleet.

    I also don't want all of those hosts grabbing updates at around the same time, smashing my internet link (yes, I could randomise the cron job within a time range, but I'd rather not have to).

    I have a fledgling Ansible setup that I'm just starting to wrap my head around. Is that the answer? Is there something better?

    Would love to hear how others are dealing with this.

    Cheers!

    26
    [advice sought] NAS for Proxmox HA

    So I recently (a couple months ago) moved my fragmented docker-on-raspberry-pi architecture over to a Proxmox cluster. I'm running it on a pair of HP DL360 G6s, and I couldn't be happier.

    Except, well, I could be happier with just one more thing: high availability.

    In particular, I want HA for my OPNsense firewall/router, but eventually for more of the workloads my family are depending on for life in general - Home Assistant, Plex, Overseerr, Immich, etc etc.

    My current storage setup is a couple ratty old ARM-based NASes - an ancient Netgear ReadyNAS and an even more ancient Qnap TS-410. They're both populated with 4 x 4TB (max raw size they can take) using RAID5, so I get about 22TB usable across the pair of them. They mostly store media for my Plex setup, but also support my 2N+C backup strategy for stuff like Immich, Paperless, and other important data.

    My high-level plan is to grab another DL360, so I can have a quorum, then introduce a new storage system that:

    • provides an iSCSI target for my Proxmox cluster; and
    • can eventually grow to replace my old NASes.

    The two solutions I'm pondering are:

    1. Build a TrueNAS setup from scratch - mini ITX case, board - the lot
    2. Pickup something tried, true and proven in the market, like a Synology

    Up front cost is a consideration - I have a family to feed, so I can't just run out and buy an 8-bay enclosure and fully populate it with 16TB disks.

    Whatever I get, I'm likely to want to start with, say, 3 disks and grow it over time.

    So, I guess this is a call out to the community to share any and all successes, war stories, and other advice. The more technical, the better. I want to make a sound, data-based decision here, and anecdotes from others who think like me are the best way to set my compass.

    Cheers for anything you can offer!

    6
    OPNsense on Proxmox WAN speeds

    This weekend, I cutover my home network to OPNsense on Proxmox.

    So far, it's been... OK. I'm having some issues with state tracking on a couple of VLANs, so need to dig into some pcaps from my switch and see what's going on there.

    But one question I have is how to get the best out of my hardware, as it seems my WAN speed is a lot less than it should be.

    I'm running Proxmox on a HP DL360 G6, with the pair of built-in 1Gbps NICs. One NIC is dedicated to my WAN connection, using a bridge in Proxmox, and it's plugged in directly to my 1Gbps fibre internet.

    The OPNsense VM has 4 cores, 8GB of RAM, and a 40GB volume.

    Using my previous hardware router/firewall (Draytek VIgor 2865), I was easily getting some decent speeds - 500Mbps to 700Mbps+. But, I'm lucky if I can get speeds any higher than about 120Mbps right now through OPNsense.

    I've disabled hardware checksum offload and hardware TCP segmentation in the OPNsense firewall. Then I found this post that suggested doing the same to the NIC and bridge in Proxmox as well.

    I've even tried rate limiting the interfaces on the OPNsense VM to 1000Mbps (OPNsense says they're 10Gbps), but nothing's made a difference.

    So, throwing out to my newfound Lemmy network: does anyone have any suggestions on what to try, or look at, next, please? Kinda worried I might have to go back to the Draytek, which would be a real shame. OPNsense has already proven to be far superior in every other way.

    3
    DeltaTangoLima DeltaTangoLima @reddrefuge.com

    Just an Aussie tech guy - home automation, ESP gadgets, networking. Also love my camping and 4WDing.

    Be a good motherfucker. Peace.

    Posts 15
    Comments 808