I agree. Get a domain name, point it to the internal address of your NGINX Proxy manager (or other reverse proxy that manages certificates that you are used to). A bit of work initially, then trivial to add services afterwards.

I didn’t really need encryption for my internal services (although I guess that’s good), but I kept getting papercuts with browser warnings, not being able to save passwords, and some services (eg container repository on Forgejo) just flat out refusing to trust a http connection.

My step-up from Pi was to ebay HP 800 G1 minis then G2’s. They are really well made, there’s full repair manuals available, and they are just a pleasure to swap bits in and out. I’ve heard good things about, and expect similar build quality from the 1 liter Lenovos.

I agree that RAM is a likely constraint rather than processor for self-hosting workloads. Particularly in my case as I’m on Proxmox and run all my docker containers in separate LXCs. I run 32GB in the G2’s which was a straightforward upgrade (they take laptop like memory). One some of them I’ve upgraded the SSDs, or if not, I’ve added M.2 NVME drives (that the G2’s have a slot for).

+1 for the main risk to my service reliability being me getting distracted by some other shiny thing and getting behind on maintenance.

Ah. I felt like a x.x.3 version was long enough to wait for things to be shaken out, and had decided to update to 10.9.x, but I might leave it for a little bit.

Yep, shoutout to the contributors, they are certainly not dragging their feet on all these bugfixes.

The Debian thong made me laugh. Who is buying this? For themselves, their partners? I’m imagining Christmas morning when I’m trying to explain the value of this gift you’ve just opened.

My ‘good reason’ is just that it’s super convenient - for backups and painlessly moving apps around between nodes with all their data.

I would run plain LXCs if people nicely packaged up their web apps as LXC templates and made them available on LXCHub for me to run with lxc compose up, but they generally don’t.

I guess another alternate future would be if Proxmox added docker container supervision to their web interface, but you’re still not going to have the self-contained neat snapshot system that includes the data.

In theory you should be able to convert an OCI container layer by layer into an LXC, so I bet there’s projects out there that attempt this.

No answer, but just to say I run most of my services with this setup - Docker in a Debian LXC under Proxmox, and don’t have this issue. The containers are ‘privileged’, and I have ‘nesting’ ticked on, but apart from that all defaults.

There are a heap of general “Linux Administration” courses which will patch a lot of holes in the knowledge of almost all self-taught self hosters. I’d been using Linux for a while but didn’t know you could tab to complete file names in commands till I learned it on Udemy ¯_(ツ)_/¯

The two extremes:

1. Keep it alive on ZFS with frequent scrubbing. Review best practice every couple of years in case it’s time to migrate it to holograms or whatever,
2. Clay tablets.

I read somewhere that GoPros and other action cameras are one of the least used purchases, so I figured “that should mean there’s plenty on eBay”. So grabbed up second hand bargain, played around with it for a couple of weeks, bought some extra batteries and other accessories, and since then it’s sat in the cupboard except for a single occasion.

Turns out you don’t need an action cam if you’re not getting any action.

Or SyncThing + Filebrowser

Agreed. video link

If this is a question about how to access your server at home from devices anywhere, securely, with a simple setup, then the answer is turn off all that port forwarding, and use Tailscale.

With a somewhat similar usecase, I ended up using Kavita.

Absolutely Tailscale - I use it for this exact situation of Syncthing from my NAS. Simple to set up, and secure.

Thanks - I thought it would be something like this I just hadn’t made the effort. Calibre-web just runs as a server?

Bare metal servers, VPSs, or VM’s you host? If it’s for VM’s you host, then consider Proxmox as hypervisor and use VM templates. I’m sure old school sysops could to the same with QEMU and Virtmanager or something. But basically, I just set up a VM exactly how I like it, then convert it to a template and cookie cutter it out.

I can sense the Nix guys shaking their heads - it’s on my list to try :- )

I’ve just been down this exact journey, and ended up settling on Kavita. It has all the browse, search and library stuff you’d expect. You can download or read things in the web interface. I’m only using it for epub and PDF books, but its focus is comics and manga so I expect it to shine there.

I don’t think it does mobi, but since I use Calibre on my laptop to neaten up covers and metadata before I drop books on to the server it’s a simple matter to convert the odd mobi I end up with. Installation (using docker inside an LXC) was simple.

It’s been a really straightforward, good experience. Highly recommend. I like it better than AudioBookshelf (which I’m already hosting for audio books) which I also tried, but didn’t like as much for inexplicable reasons. I also considered Calibre-Web, but that seemed a bit messy since I guess I’d use Calibre on my laptop to manage my books on a NAS share then serve it headless from the server with Calibre-Web? I might have that completely wrong, I didn’t spend any time looking into it because Kavita was the second thing I tried and it did exactly what I wanted.

It has a practical element (Hello Jellyfin, Kavita, AudioBookshelf & Syncthing), but for the rest of it, it’s about 60% hobby and 20% learning stuff that could be potentially career enhancing.

Gnu/Linux absolutely annihilating server operating systems means that I can run the same stack, and use the same tools, that giant companies are based on. All for free. In my spare room. 1L x86 computers cost less than two packs of cigarettes! Little SSD’s are ridiculously cheap. And you don’t even need that stuff - that old laptop in your cupboard will do. Even if you kick in to donate for your software (and I recommend you do if you can) it’s a cheap hobby compared to golf or skating or whatever. Anything you need to learn there’s blog posts and videos available.

We live in an amazing time in this hobby. I know there’s companies that would like to take it away from us, but Open Source just keeps kicking goals. Thank you FOSS developers, Gnu, Linus, FSM, Cthulhu and the other forces in the universe that make this possible.