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Cake day: Jun 23, 2023

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I’m a farmer that was an IT guy a decade or so ago, which I guess is a background in it, but that’s not why I do it. Self-hosting is a self-reliance thing. I like to fix my own equipment, metal and silicon.

When it comes apart, I want to know the reason, and I like to invent new ways to do things, which means I have to be able to control my infrastructure.



If you’re concerned about missing emails, you might want to sign up for a forwarder instead. I don’t see the point of running an email server that’s going to be off for long periods of time.

Generally it’s not going to put you on a blacklist if a sending server doesn’t manage to send, but some have very short queue times before they’ll drop it, so you’re going to miss a lot of mail that way.


The AIO is the way to go. It’s not really any more overhead, and the maintenance is so much simpler. I second running it on a Proxmox docker server, you can snapshot before updates if you’re concerned about the upgrade.


Pocketbase looks interesting for this.


Wordpress issues lie in using plugins that aren’t maintained or written well. The source and quality of plugins varies wildly.


Use a firewall like OPNsense and you’ll be fine. There’s a Crowdsec plugin to help against malicious actors, and for the most part, nothing you’re doing is worth the trouble to them.



I use the HACS integration in Home Assistant. Then I can build automation based on events to notify, restart VMs, etc.


That’s way better. Nice job.

I’ll see it on the next docker build release.


OK, sorry to discourage you, it wasn’t my intent. I updated to FF 125 during my evaluation and that didn’t fix anything, but switching to Chrome and things started working made me think this is just another project designed for Chrome. I’ve tried to help on projects like that and the attitude I’ve always gotten back is “then use Chrome like everyone else, weirdo”.

I used to project manage a programmer team, and UI is the biggest user complaint I would get hit by. So I’m pretty sensitive to non-intuitive UI design. At this point, I’d rather edit the conf file than use the Settings page. Not sure how to reload that conf file other than to restart the container.

I wish I had time to spend on this submitting actual code, because I like a lot of what I see. Best I could do is add to your list of todo’s by creating issues and it sounds like you have plenty on that list already. If you want a couple more, open the spoiler below. In any case, have fun on your project and don’t let assholes like me bring you down.

spoiler
  1. Remove Last: this isn’t great. A selectable list with Edit and Delete buttons is more usable and standard. I saw all those Remove Last buttons throughout the Settings, and it’s not much better than Remove All if you have to delete every entry after the faulty one to fix your list. There’s plenty of settings that have a dozen items in the list that would all have to be re-entered manually as text.

  2. Dropdowns pre-validate input. Making a box that you can put random additional arguments into means you have to chop up the input in arguments to validate, or maybe you aren’t validating it until you press Save, in which case you’re making it even tougher to validate the entire file. You can only show items in the dropdown that are valid for that input. Several pages of docker virtual interfaces and named networks is probably not what you want in the dropdown. Eth0 is not a standard interface name anymore in most distros.

  3. That bulk-editing workflow; so I pick items on one page, why would I expect that they’d be carried over when I go to a completely different page in another section of the application? And in that section, there’s nothing to indicate that clicking on the gray bar in the middle of the warning text orange box would pop up the list of devices so I can do things with them. What I typically see in things like this is checkboxable list items and a toolbar or menu at the top of the list on the Devices page to perform actions.


Edit: if you’re evaluating this, use a chromium based browser because there’s a pile of things not working if you use FF. That means I’m not going to use it, but you do you.

The hard to find ARP scan dialog box that is pretty much the starting point for anything here is very special. There’s no dropdown that lists the physical interfaces so you have to hunt around to find the listing for Network Hardware that for some reason is under the About top level menu item. Of course, that lists every virtual docker interface along with the physical network devices so you’d better know what you’re looking for.

Contrary to the poorly organized docs, the physical interface will rarely be eth0 or eth1, it’ll be something like “enp5s2”. So now you go back to edit the entries to the physical interface but you can’t, all you can do is Remove All. Well, better get your entries letter perfect, because if you make a mistake on a single character, you’re starting from scratch after another Remove All.

In your docs, you recommend not editing the app.conf file, but that would be way more forgiving than this. At least there you can add VLANs.

And there’s no way I can see to bulk add new devices to a known and/or trusted state. Go into each device and uncheck the “New Device” box. How do I add a device to My Devices? Who knows.

Publishers: Nothing to find in the Settings for each of the publishers. Every publishers settings section is blank.

UI will take to blinking randomly as it gets into a refresh loop. Have to close the window and reopen it to get it usable again. Sometimes all the text in each setting header goes away. No headings on the tables for the Devices, just the set order arrows that would be on each column, not lined up with anything correctly. Oh, now I’ve lost every setting on each setting section, just blank.

I’m reticent to get much more into the app because if this is the introduction, I’m scared of what other frustration I’m going to find. Not to mention having the arrows for the left menu tree expansion backwards to how nearly everyone else ever does it, but I guess that’s just my OCD.

Man, I want to like this because it looks like it could be a simple to use version of Nagios, but some of the design is pretty hard to take.


I run Mailcow-dockerized for my mail server and internal relay, and it’s a postfix based system. Never have any issues with it.



What’s really neat to do in Portainer is set up your compose stack off a git repo and set the webhook so it fires a pull and restart on the new docker-compose.yml when you update it in git.

I don’t use Portainer much anymore, I do my compose files manually with bind mounts locally to the compose file, and if I want an interface for the docker service, I run Lazydocker on the machine over SSH.


Yah, I just don’t think the SMB subsystem is robust enough to be used for that purpose. I can see pulling a few files on and off, but expecting the PHP backend to work with it to manage file locks etc on SMB is probably optimistic. Plus because docker is involved, I believe overlayfs would be involved there, unless it’s a bind mount. Then you have a layer between OMV managing the communication between it’s underlying filesystem to the samba server it implements. I’m really not 100% sure what the pipeline to the actual files would look like. But it seems horrendous.

I’d really just try it stock before you throw that baby out, because I’ve run NC every way you can possibly imagine since about V.8, and I’ve not had so little problems with it as with using the AIO. It’s head and shoulders above straight installation, somewhat better than NC-Pi. Snap was by far the worst for management and upgrade. And I would avoid Ubuntu as the host system, because I have no idea how docker snap got installed, but I don’t trust that it wouldn’t happen again. I sure as hell didn’t install the snap version, but there it was.

Also, with the AIO, I would avoid managing anything outside the interface of the master container, like by using portainer on the child containers.


How are you running Docker on your Ubuntu host? I had weird errors happening and realized that while I had installed Docker manually using the convenience script, at some point the Snap version got installed and that was a mess.

Switched to Debian, docker installed with convenience script, Nextcloud AIO has worked like a top since. All running as a VM on Proxmox as well, the host runs dozens of containers including a mailcow instance and several other stack beside the AIO, zero issues. I snapshot the VM before I do anything major like update NC so I can rollback easily. I might lose a few emails if I had to roll back, but never had to. Besides, everything is backed up via PBS hourly, so if I had to restore just the NC stack, that wouldn’t be hard.

I would also do the storage for NC locally, you can mount another dataset/virtual drive into the instance, but using Openmediavault Samba shares for your data store seems like a recipe for disaster. Samba on Linux is a convenience for interoperability with Windows, but using it as a backend for an app as complicated as NC is really not going to end well. I’m surprised you get it to work for more than a few hours, and I could see it losing data so easily.


Ah, the docs reference V.7.0.0 so that’s what I was trying with.

TY, that got her transitioned. The config actually pops a notice that 1.21.9 is available but I don’t see that it’s in the registry yet. I do like the :latest tag because then I can use watchtower, but I can understand why some people would want to specify the version.


Huh, using their instructions for docker compose, I use docker pull codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo:7.0.0 and it errors for manifest unknown. Removing the version tag so it default to latest doesn’t help.

Do I need to make an account and docker login? That seems like it should be unnecessary for a simple pull.



Interesting. Is there a migration path?


So, why Forgejo over Gitea? I’ve been pretty happy with Gitea.


ITT: where the hell is Owncloud coming from? It’s barely maintained, its now owned by some shitbirds, and it’s like a poor version of Nextcloud.

I haven’t heard anyone talk of Owncloud in years, it’s like the OpenOffice of sync suites.


Take backups, I’ve heard reports of them randomly shutting everything off and deleting the account.

Frankly, Oracle isn’t worth free, but fill your boots.


And I guarantee every one of those passwords are written on a piece of paper at the desk under the keyboard.


I don’t think you can via the mobile app. It’s more for management of existing stuff. I think it would be really complicated to replicate the UI for machine creation.



Where does running VMs compare in any way to what Kubernetes does?


That’s still a good machine, I’d get some more RAM and make a proxmox server out of it. Even with 8GB it’s usable for a few VMs at a time. Use a single disk ZFS pool when installing it.


Proxmox is quite simple. As a former VCP, I find Proxmox more intuitive to use.

If you need specific help with Proxmox and/or ZFS, you might also look at posting on https://www.practicalzfs.com

And +1 for using OPNsense



While you can do a lot of the stuff that PM does via Unraid and other tools, it’s all there in one spot. I love taking snapshots before upgrades, migrating machines between nodes live while I upgrade the nodes, having HA for my OPNsense and other important boxes, and the PBS backup system. I know you could do all this with other tools, but it’s damn convenient in PM and “just works”.

You can install a NAS vm in PM, just give it raw access to the disks you’re looking to use for data, and back them up independently. Don’t try to do something like overlay ZFS on ZFS.


Use zfs sync instead of rsync. If it’s still slow, it’s probably SMR drives.



I’m just going to say, I shit on them all along. ARM is relatively expensive, bespoke and difficult to compile for because of that. Anyone can puke out a binary for amd64 that works everywhere. And way, way faster than some sad little SOC. Especially weird is spending $1000 on a clusterboard with CMs that had half of the power of a 5 year old X86 SFF desktop you could pick up for $75 and attach some actual storage to.

Maybe RISC-V will change all that, but I doubt it. Sure hope so though. The price factor has already leaned the right way to make it worthwhile.


How many servers are you connecting to on the outside? You might have to stagger them for connections and keep the number under their radar.

Though I have to wonder how a primary mirror would handle this for some large distro like Arch.


You’ve done a nice job in a short time. I’d give it a spin as a jump server sort of application I could use in a browser. I currently use KasmWeb for this sort of thing, because I like having a vanilla Linux experience in a browser, but it’s kinda heavy, though faster than something like VNC and easier to poke a hole in a firewall with basic auth for access.


I run everything on a 2 node proxmox cluster with ZFS mirror volumes and replication of the VMs and CTs between them, run PBS with hourly snapshots, and sync that to multuple USB drives I swap off site.

The docker VM can be ZFS snapshotted before major updates so I can rollback.


Also: OPNsense. That wasn’t even a case of going closed, it was Netgate making weird decisions regarding hardware encryption support. Of course, since then, Netgate has fallen completely off the wagon and done some incredibly stupid and harmful things.


Where do you get that from? I have no love for tankies, but from what I’ve seen, they’ve built a product that’s free of their biases, opensourced it and thrown it over the wall with no strings attached.

If you want to make a rooten-tooten white supremacist nazi instance with Lemmy, you can do exactly that. Nobody has to federate with you, and you don’t have to federate with them.

Strange take.