Showing 1—30 of 54.
My server boots off a pair of SSDs, tied together in a ZFS mirror. Proxmox supports ZFS boot (thanks to its Ubuntu kernel), and lets you configure it through the installer. When I installed my server, this is what I wanted, as it meant the OS and data disks for…
As part of some recent infrastructure changes, I migrated my home DNS to AdGuardHome, from Pi-Hole. Being a single, self-contained binary, it's far easier to install and manage (it's in the AUR too), and it's got a few nice modern features like DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS. Sure, the ad blocking features…
Self-hosting is a big hobby for me (and a big source of content for my website). Not only is it a great source of entertainment and fun, but I find it incredibly interesting, vaguely relevant to my job, and a good way to regain a little privacy. Over the last…
Software updates are a critical part of using any kind of electronic device nowadays, particularly if it's internet connected, and even more so if it has any security functionality. If you have any kind of computer online, whether it be a phone, laptop or a server, you should really be…
I spend a lot of time at my desk, whether it's actually doing my job, sitting in meetings or doing something else interesting. As a result, I want fast internet. Additionally, my server is also sat on my desk, so faster internet benefits me and anyone else who uses the…
Today is world backup day, a day to highlight the importance of backups, protecting data, and keeping systems secure (at least that's what Wikipedia says). I'm taking this day as a chance to review my backup strategy, and make sure I'm happy with the coverage I'm getting. I mentioned a…
It's that time of year again, time to steal some of Cortex's search rankings to talk about my own "State of the Apps" - the applications and setups I use to make my life what it is. Since my last post, and in fact in just the last few weeks,…
For a few years now, I've tried as hard as I can to run everything on servers I control, ideally servers I physically control. Partly in an attempt to regain my privacy, party because it's much more fun this way. Over the last year, things have stayed fairly stable hardware-wise…
Prometheus is a crazy powerful metrics and monitoring tool. Prometheus not only lets you scrape and collect metrics from other tools like Traefik and HomeAssistant, but also thanks to Blackbox, monitor the availability of other sites. Prometheus' main loop involves scraping a number of "exporters" over HTTP, looking at the…
Power bills in the UK are starting to skyrocket, and the costs of self-hosting are going up as a result. The average persons bills are going up pretty fast, and I suspect they don't have a server in their cupboard on 24/7. For a while now, I've wanted to swap…
Last night, the sky was filled with thunderstorms. For a few hours, there was some of the loudest thunder and brightest lightning I’d ever seen. At the time, this was quite interesting, and nicely helped cool down the air too. This morning however, less fun. Shortly after 07:30, my monitoring…
It’s something no one wants to see: You open up an important file, and are met with very different content to what you’re expecting. This weekend, that happened to me. Losing data is terrible, no matter what it is. To a bit of a perfectionist like me any loss of…
It’s a new year, so it’s time to reflect back on the tools I used last year, how they’ll change this year, and how they might change in future. It’s still an idea I’ve completely stolen from CGP Grey / Cortex, but I think it’s useful, fun and interesting. I’m…
For the last 7 years or so, I’ve had some form of server sitting in my house. Its size and utility have changed massively in this time, but I couldn’t imagine life without it. Both prefer to and enjoy running a number of applications for myself, in a (possibly futile)…
The cloud is just someone else’s computer. In my case, the cloud is usually just my computer. As an avid self-hoster, I like to run a lot of things myself, for learning, privacy, and of course fun. And it’s hard to host anything without servers. I have quite a few…
I’ve used Ansible for a number of years for the provisioning of both my servers and desktops. It’s versatile, it’s simple, it’s powerful, and has a number of great features. Personally, I make all of my “playbooks” public for all for all to see, but provisioning still requires some secrets.…
It’s no secret that GitLab is a beast of an application. As self-hosted git servers go, it’s easily the most powerful and feature complete. But that weight comes at a cost: resource usage. GitLab is no slouch, easily consuming upwards of 6GB of RAM by default without doing anything, and…
Both LXC and Docker are great containerization technologies, brought to you by the powers of the Linux kernel. At their core, they’re pretty similar, but the further out you look, the differences increase massively. At their heart, they’re both still containers - understanding the differences between the 2 takes a…
The internet is a pretty big place - a huge amount of data (approximately 131TB per second) is transferred over it every second of every day. The backbone of the internet is designed to transfer huge amounts of data, but people are impatient creatures, and want data as quick as…
Docker containers (like onions) have layers. In your Dockerfile, each new RUN, COPY or ADD line creates a new layer (so do the others, but not ones which affect the filesystem). Each layer contains only the files which changed from the previous layer, which allows layers to be shared between…
Docker is a great containerization technology for running applications. It keeps multiple applications completely isolated from each other, only allowing connections exactly when you tell them to. But what if you’re on a hypervisor? You want your host OS to be as lean as possible (else it defeats the point),…
My website is built with Hugo, a great static site generator with a bunch of features. One of the big missing features though is search. Hugo has documentation on a bunch of different integrations, but none of them quite did what I wanted. Over the last few months, I’ve been…
Static sites, ie those which are just files on disk rather than requiring a custom application or database to run, are incredibly simple to write. You can either do it yourself from scratch with a bunch of HTML, CSS and JS files, or use a generator like Hugo or Zola.…
As a developer I do basically everything in git and for fun I run my own git server on my home server. I’ve swapped around quite a lot between GitLab and Gitea, but finally settled on GitLab. It’s a bit heavy, but the deep CI integration is really nice. <update>…
Backups are critical to any systems longevity and reliability. If you’re not backing up your data, stop reading this now, go do it, then come back… Assuming none of you suddenly panicked and left, let’s keep going. You can keep telling yourself otherwise, but eventually, every system will experience some…
My website is a very important project to me. I’ve written a lot of content over the years, useful both to me and other internet folks. Currently, my website is a static site, powered by Hugo. Because it’s static, the content is served insanely quickly and handles any insane load…
Back in December, I fully rebuilt my home server from the ground up based on Proxmox. Being a hypervisor OS, it makes sense to run everything in VMs or LXC containers, not on the host. Therefore, there’s a huge amount of scope for opinions, lessons and customizations. I’ve had quite…
At some point, servers need to be put on the public internet. Whether that be a VPS in the cloud, or your new homelab. Once a server is on the internet, it’s subject to anything and everything the internet has to offer, from botnets to hackers and script kiddies. It’s…
Yesterday, I moved my Git server from GitLab to Gitea. There’s nothing wrong with GitLab, I actually quite like it, but it’s a rather large tool for my needs. Gitea is much more lightweight, faster, and provides all its features for free. Now, it’d be nice to add some analytics…
It’s that time of the year again: time to look back at how I work, the tools I use, and how the next year might look. I’ve been working from home basically full time since the UK went into lockdown 17th March. It’s been quite an adjustment barely leaving the…