What are your personal opinions about having a deficated rss reader like miniflux (or others) vs just having a notification bot linked to a matrix room? The public matrix rss bots never worked for me and were essentially useless missing months of notifications, so now that I have my own homelab server, I finally want to take matters into my own hands. But I’m still unsure if I should want to stick with my own instance of matrix-rss bot or if something more, like miniflux is better. What are your opinions/experience?

Firstly: Yes, I like Synapse / Cinny / Element too...don't hate me...but needs must when the devil drives...

For reasons that are too complex to get into (TL;DR: hodge podge of equipment from the dawn of time, from intransigent family members, complexity over HTTP vs HTTPS...they usual nonsense when you volunteer to become the family sysadmin) I've been looking at different methods for a persistent, family chat experience that I can "self host".

Does anyone know much about Jami?

https://www.jami.net/

From what I can see, it has the following worthwhile features:

• FOSS/GPL
• Android, Windows, Linux, macOS and iOS.
• Text messaging ,group chats, video calls
• File sharing, E2EE etc etc
• It apparently works over a LAN with no Internet connection at all, which is particularly interesting to me.
• Federation not required.
• CA not required
• Transparent handoff with Tailscale

From what I can see, there's a headless jami-daemon for Linux. Jami's own docs specifically suggest putting an existing account on an always-online server to facilitate message exchange, with multiple servers possible for redundancy.

So...that's...good.

OTOH, there isn't a Synapse-equivalent central Jami server holding everyone's accounts and rooms. Accounts and conversations are distributed across the participating devices, though as I said above, it looks like Jami does support an always-online daemon/device to improve message availability.

I dunno what to make of it. It seems...too good to be true.

Has anyone use it? Particularly, is the always-online jami-daemon actually dependable for store-and-forward behavior in practice?

https://github.com/savoirfairelinux

Hey guys, since I got into hosting my own servers, any electronic device I see I wonder - can it become a server?

This is probably not a crazy and new idea with android phones, but I had to share it with you. If you don’t know, there’s this thing called postmarket OS, full linux experience on an android phone.

Of course, not all phones are supported, but a phone like Galaxy Note 9 is a great candidate - it supports LAN over usb, postmarket OS fully supports it (the Exinos version) and setting up a phone as a selfhosted server has it’s real perks. Pis got really expensive, not to mention they don’t have a built-in UPS (phones have batteries), they use slow SD cards, while phones have faster UFS memory, phones draw way less power.

What do you guys think? I will for sure get a used Galaxy Note 9 and explore this idea, and if all goes well, I might even buy more of them and create a cluster.

I just spent the past 2 weekends migrating from Lightroom CC with just under 1TB of photos, mostly RAWs, making up about 50,000 files. I kind of made it up as I went and I spent a lot of time testing and validating. I'm going to do a writeup here to hepefully help ayone else coming acrross this and/or in case someone has ideas.

My Requirements:

1. Move all photos off Lightroom and preserve both RAW files and snapshot renders at high quality. I intend on staying on Lightroom because it's my editor of choice. I've litigated Darktable in comments on Lemmy, and while I love the software and the concept, I use Lightroom for my semi-professional work
2. (The hard part) Metadata. I absolutely need my album organization, my picks, and my star ratings from Lightroom. More on this below
3. All data must move to my self-hosted Immich with a TrueNAS pool behind it. The stack is Proxmox running a Truenas VM and a Debain VM. The Debian VM runs docker where Immich runs. Connectivity is driven by Netbird mesh VPN. That is a limitation for sharing and I'm ok with it.

Getting your pictures out

• Adobe doesn't make this easy just below the surface. There are open source tools intended to help one migrate from Lighroom Classic catalogs to Immich, but CC is very different. The export options are very particular.
  • Adobe lets you export a massive dump of pictures and renders as a real export option. It's through their website and it will email you when a dump is ready. Said dump will contain multiple zip files each with RAWs and renders. NO Metada or structure is included and NO edit data.
• You can "Archive" from Lightroom CC (tested on Mac) and that will output originals + the edit file AND it will preserve the root album from which your photo came. But no metadata beyond that (no ratings, folder structure, picks). The bad part is that this deletes your files once it's done. You can still restore fromTrash but this is definitely a hostile action against users.
• You can just output EVERYTHING. This is for the truly insane as you sit there and wait for Lightroom to render each one of your pictures individually. If you do original + edits, that returns the same thing as Archive but without structure.
• The secret 4th option: you can (as of this writing) parse Lightroom's internal catalog and get Albums, picks, star ratings, and folder structure. This was a massive unlock for me. This file was at ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/

My solution going forward

Because I was discovering this as I went, I tried some version of all of the options above, but going forward, I have a process which should be much easier.

First, I will parse the catalog which is a SQLite db and extract the newest "version" of each picture and the content I care about. I will store it in a CSV for long-term holding.

Once metadata is stored, I'll go and request the archive through the website. That will take a few hours to possibly days (it took me about 2 hours on a Friday night). Once that's done, you get an email and a link to a personalized site. You have to parse the (for me) 50+ links and download them sequentially. It took me a few hours to download 1 TB limited by my local bandwidth (for which I'm eternally grateful). With my TrueNAS storage, I have the luxury of landing the data and uploading it to Immich separately.

For XMPs, the edit data, you have to get that from a local source so either export originals or the desktop app "Archive All" option.

You'll have to decide what you need and maybe you have fewer requirements than me.

Landing the Pictures

The next challenge is grabbing all of that data, pictures and ratings and applyhing them in Immich. Luckily, it has a fantastic API so I can script the whole thing. Most of the mapping happened by picture name and there were a few times where I had to dig into exif to identify a picture. Overall, i think I had 40 or so files out of 50k+ which couldn't be mapped.

Encountered Problems:

• As mentioned before, this was a try-it-until-it-works situation for me. I had to download all of my pictures 2 times by 2 different methods (I didn't document this but there was an SMB share involved).
• Stars are a new object and I had to manually enable it in Immich
• I couldn't replicated nested album functionality in Immich and chose to keep the root album name + a tag of the folder structure. That worked well for me
• Lightroom tags could not be exported. I don't use them a lot but that could be a blocker for some.

Disclaimer

• Every word in this write up was written by me on my keyboard
• I used a self-hosted local AI to do this work.
• I know enough to be in control even at a technical level, but the time savings on this project with AI really made it possible
• The AI found the catalog and parsed the data out of it. It would not have occurred to me.

Future

• I have all of this work on my personal Forgejo and if there's enough interest, I may post publicly, though this write-up should serve as a starting point for anyone who wants to replicate my process

As much as I love Google (not even a little, my love for that company is negative and becoming more negative per second) I would love to run far far away from it. Here's another ball and chain I need to break.

Where can I find a simple parental control access system for my phone and or computer that I allow my kids to use?

Good news selfhosted crowd! I pitched the idea of setting up a server, and she is down with the idea!

I want to run Linux and host things like Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, Navidrome, maybe Plex (I currently host it off my Mac desktop but would move it to a dedicated server).

I know you can host Plex et al on something like a Raspberry Pi, but I want a bit more power. I want something that can push at least 2-3 4K streams.

I'm considering targeting 12th gen i5 with 16GB DDR4. Maybe 32GB if I can swing it. Is that overkill? I know you want 8th gen Intel for hardware transcoding of either x265/HEVC or AV1 (probably the former as the latter is newer).

There are other projects I'd like to run. I'd like to be able to host my own LLM/AI but I'm not trying to go performance overkill here. This would be my first server.

I am somewhat comfortable using the command line, and I would be remoting into the server via my Macs (I have a desktop and a MacBook). However, Linux can run Windows games via Proton and that's something I'm interested in for some older titles that aren't on Xbox (like Deus Ex, which came out in 2000 and should run on integrated graphics). I'm not inexperienced with Linux and have been using it off and on (mostly off unfortunately) for over 30 years. My go-to would be Ubuntu, but I've heard great things about KDE lately and I know the Internet is in love with Mint these days. Would the distro really matter all that much as long as I have the required services?

hi. i'm looking for an extremely simple selfhosted photo gallery software. i have photos from my laptop, a camera, and my phone. they are all rsync'ed onto my server. so on the server I have ~/Pictures/Laptop ~/Pictures/Camera ~/Pictures/Phone filled with JPEG/PNG/HEICs and no subdirectories.

i want to view photos from all three directories on a single timeline/feed, from the web (and if possible, via a mobile app). currently I VNC onto the server to run XnView and check each directory and this is a terrible user experience especially on a phone.

i don't want to run a separate database or anything complex, so things like Immich or Photoprism are not an option. would be nice to be able to assign a tag to some images ("work", "computer", ...) but it's not a necessity. and i don't need the ability to edit/remove images from the gallery.

i've considered rolling my own solution but thought there might be something already available.

thanks!

I host my own instance of invidious behind a reverse proxy. It's awesome. I use Redirector for Firefox so that when I'm on the interwebs, YouTube videos and embeds redirect automagically to my self-hosted invidious instance. I used the setup instructions in the Invidious-Redirector documentation.

Recently, I was on a new website and the embed didn't redirect. I tried to figure it out, but couldn't. The best I could do was try changing /embed/* to /oembed/* but that didn't work.

So I thought I'd ask here: How would you go about setting up a rule or multiple rules to sort this?

Edit to add: If you go to the new website, make sure you either have AI chatbots blocked in uBO or create a rule ||autonomoustechnology.ai^. Otherwise there is an annoying AI chatbot that pops up that you'll want to block.

i have been following Chinese models for about two years now because they are open-weight and qwen is fun to run on my kubernetes cluster, the news about this Apache licensed model complete with a recipe to make it again with potentially different ingredients is making we want to abandon them for something more ideologically sound and way more interesting

this new model, couldn't universities rebuild it with different contexts and study it in ways you can't reproduce in other models? like, is k2 horizons a good scientific foundation on which to study machine learning?

or am i just lacking way too much context and falling for hype?

I had an old Google Pixel 3a XL sitting around and decided to see if it could handle running as a fully offline, self-contained web server.

I flashed postmarketOS 26.06 (headless Alpine Linux base) to it and set up a portable media node that broadcasts its own Wi-Fi AP, serves static pages, and streams video over a captive portal - no cell data or upstream internet needed.

Quick Hardware/Tech Stack Breakdown:

• Device: Google Pixel 3a XL (2019)
• OS: postmarketOS 26.06 (CLI base with OpenRC)
• Networking/AP: hostapd for the AP, dnsmasq for DHCP & wildcard DNS routing
• Firewall: nftables redirecting port 80 requests to trigger the captive portal popup automatically
• Web Server: Lighttpd handling HTTP requests and MP4 video range requests

Performance & Power Draw: Under a test load streaming 720p video to 4 concurrent devices, total CPU usage averaged around 5% (load avg 0.51). Power draw stayed around ~2.4W off the internal battery, with temps holding steady at 54°C.

Why build this? Mainly as an offline entertainment and information node. I run a non-profit foundation providing SCUBA training to young survivors of childhood abuse, and having a tiny, battery-powered web node lets us provide offline information and videos to people while traveling. I will also be able to use it to provide training videos if I am teaching in a location that does not have internet access available.

I wrote up a complete overview covering the setup, and performance metrics if anyone wants to replicate it or build something similar. Over the coming weeks I will be posting configs and some other information to Github with a link from my site.

https://www.muttmutt.us/geeky-stuff/portable-web-server-on-an-android-phone-for-offline-access/

Happy to answer any questions about postmarketOS setup or the networking config!

I know that I can simply make my own private certificate authority that only I and my family trust. But is there some public provider like letsencrypt that is in a free-er part of the world than the US?

I've been using Planka (https://planka.app/) for years, to manage my to-do lists and other general lists of things (like gifts given, movies I want to watch and so on). But it's been ages since I looked around for other, better apps. I really like the kanban board / trello approach they use as the lists are easy to maintain, add items to, and I can see the whole list in one glance.

I don't need fancy stuff (teams features, sharing, advanced triggers or other automation). It's just for me, running on my home server. Apps should be FOSS and installable via docker, ideally. I've looked at a few of the apps on selfh.st ( https://selfh.st/apps/?search=to-do ) but nothing stood out as really interesting.

Any apps you think of as new and interesting in this area?

Thanks!

EDIT: I've installed Vikunja and I'm giving it a try. So far, it was super easy to install and get started with. We'll see how it looks after a few days, but thanks all for the ideas shared here. 👋🙂

It is so difficult to find modern electronics without telemetry and ads. Smartphones, laptops, TVs, home routers, security cameras, cars, game consoles, e-readers, projectors, 3D printers, fitness trackers, speakers, and even some printers. Why can’t customers be free from this data collection and advertising? It’s not that we don’t care about it. There simply aren’t many alternatives, and the few that do exist are either more expensive or offer fewer features. Seriously, we need a list of products we can buy and use directly without worrying about telemetry or advertising.

The following list is updated at https://lemmy.ml/post/52706206. Please note that this list may contain errors.

• Laptop: Framework Laptop, System76, MNT
• Anything else that doesn’t come with ads or telemetry built in?

Cross posted from: https://lemmy.nocturnal.garden/post/913747

NoteTrace is a self-hosted alternative to Google Keep, Evernote and Apple Notes: notes, checklists and reminders in a card grid, on your own server. AGPL-3.0, a single Docker container, a web app that works offline, a native Android app, and a Wear OS app. No telemetry, no cloud. This is the first stable release.

Part of the TraceApps family: NutriTrace (nutrition), CookTrace (recipes / pantry / shopping), LiftTrace (strength / lifting).

What it does

• Notes and checklists. Pins, colors, nested labels, archive, trash, version history, and full-text search that also finds words in voice transcripts and in photos.
• Reminders and Tasks. Repeating reminders that keep their local time, exact alarms on Android, and one view of everything that's due.
• Offline everywhere. The installed web app keeps editing with no connection and syncs later; Android and the watch work offline too.
• Wear OS. Tick off lists, read notes, see what's due, and speak a note ("call the plumber tomorrow at nine" sets the reminder), with a tile and a watch face complication.
• Voice notes and drawings. Record with the screen off and get a transcript you can tap to jump to.
• Bring your notes with you. Import from Google Keep, Evernote, Memos, Blinko and Markdown vaults; export everything as Markdown with images.
• Optional AI. Tidy up, summarise, or turn a note into a checklist, with the provider of your choice. Off unless you set it up.

Links

• Repo: https://github.com/TraceApps/notetrace
• Docs: https://traceapps.github.io/docs/notetrace/
• Release notes + signed APKs (phone and watch): https://github.com/TraceApps/notetrace/releases/tag/v1.0.0
• Docker: ghcr.io/traceapps/notetrace:latest (mirror: traceapps/notetrace:latest)

AI Disclosure

Per Rule 7 / [AIP] disclosure requirements AI was used during development as a coding assistant. Level per category:

• Design (architecture, system design): Hint: I make the architectural calls; AI suggests trade-offs and edge cases I might have missed.
• Implementation (production code): Pair: roughly 50/50. AI drafts, I review, adjust, test on real hardware, and only commit what I've verified. Every commit is manually reviewed before it goes to my dev repo.
• Testing (writing tests, test plans, QA): Assisted: real-device testing is manual (I test on my own PC and mobile devices before every release). AI helps draft test plans and think through edge cases.
• Documentation (docs, comments, README, CHANGELOG): Pair: release notes and changelog entries are drafted with AI then edited for tone; comments and code docs are mostly Pair as well.
• Review (code review, PR feedback): Assisted: I'm the reviewer; AI helps with security sweeps, audit passes on complex changes, and consistency checks.
• Deployment (CI/CD config): Hint: Docker/GitHub Actions/release pipeline is largely conventional; AI-suggested improvements only.

I have a server with desktop hardware (microATX motherboard and Core Ultra 7 265K CPU) which I use to run a Minecraft server. Its current physical location isn't ideal, so I'd like to put it in a rack mount chassis and move it to a server room I have access to through my university. However rack space in the room is limited, so it would be best if I can fit it into a 1U space.

From what I've heard the biggest issue with 1U is cooling, especially as the 265K can draw up to 250W. It seems like 1U microATX chassis do exist, like this one, but they don't look like they have good airflow, and I'm not sure where I would get a short enough heatsink. Could I realistically make 1U work, and if so what should I look for in terms of hardware? Or am I going to have to go with 2U?

Several of my self hosted services need to be able to send minor occasional emails for things like changing passwords or other notifications.

I've never been interested in the hassle of self-hosting my personal email, since I've heard about it being difficult. But for my little local services to have one admin@ or noreply@ to send from, with just a small handful of friends and family as users, maybe it's simpler than a full personal email replacement would be? I'm not too concerned, for example, if they have to check their spam folders. As long as the email still lands. And probably wouldn't need to worry about incoming emails.

What are you using for this type of thing? Hoping to have something not too complicated, and FOSS.

Edit: I also would like it to come from ____@mydomain.com

Hey everyone!

I have been building and maintaining my own infrastructure around self-hosted Linux services for months. Eventually I got annoyed with editing and deploying everything manually and having difficulties sharing what I'm doing with others. So I solved both of these problems with Infrastructure as Code.

Everyone is free to study this repository. Ever wanted to see IaC in practice? Curious how to self-host certain services, automate website deployment from Git to server, make TLS SNI-based router or automate container provisioning? Then this repository is for you.

Want to know how much CPU, RAM or other resources a certain service has? You can see it yourself on my own public dashboard.

This is the first time I share my infrastructure with anyone. I'd be more than happy to discuss it, receive feedback and answer question. In the meantime, I'm writing an article to complement the code with architecture, decisions and thought behind it.

So I recently quitted Google Drive and downloaded all my data and hoping to keep it on Hard drives myself, They are external plug in types and I want the files synced like it was on my computer. So when I plug it in it copies/syncs the things on my computer, anyone knows somethign like that?

I work with a mutual aid group that currently handles communications with Signal. This is acceptable from a security and privacy perspective, but severely lacking from a discoverability and reference perspective.

I'm looking for a text chat (it's okay if it also supports voice and or video, but we don't really need that) that is kinda similar to Slack or Discord regarding rooms, but that can be self hosted (obviously). Our general workflow is to allow new volunteers to join our "General chat" and then either be invited or join via open link any of the working groups they fancy. What I'm hoping for is a software that can allow us to have all those working groups in a side bar to increase engagement with some of the more behind the scenes options. I'd also love to have the ability to easily retain posts or bookmarks so we can build up quick references where we actually communicate. I haven't found a clean way to handle the general chat for 2 reasons: 1) we would like to keep it open in such a way that anyone who wants to can join, and 2) there's currently over 800 people and we regularly add more.

All told that makes the bulleted requirements for what I'm hoping for be:

• text chat software
• rooms/channels
• ability to pin posts
• ability to add arbitrary bookmarks or links
• ability to have rooms either public or private
• ability to have at least one room anyone can join without prior approval or invite
• ability to support at least 1000 users (not necessarily concurrent client connections--that can probably be about 50)
• ideally the communications can be encrypted

What I don't need but might be nice:

• voice
• video
• file share
• polling
• reminders
• plugins

We value data ownership extremely highly hence looking for self hosting options over Slack or Discord. It's okay if the general chat exists in a separate server so long as the main server with all the other rooms can federate with it somehow.

We do have some people with IT experience, and I am software engineer of over a decade so technical barriers in setting it up shouldn't be an issue, but account creation and use for volunteers needs to be dead simple.

If anyone knows of something like this (or even a FOSS tool we may be able to extend functionally to fit the last 1 or 2 bullet points) I would love to hear your suggestions.

Thanks so much!

What setups/softwares do you use to secure your server?

All I do is run the process as user with no login shell.

The topic came to mind after reading this post Is Authelia enough without fail2ban or crowdsec?

I'm posting this in case it'll help anyone else out that may have access to some of the old Datto switches.

I work for a business that previously used Datto extensively (before they were sold to Kaseya) and we had a lot of old Datto hardware because of that. We've since moved on to other hardware solutions for clients but we kinda got stuck with this old hardware and I ended up taking some of the switches we had (an S24 and a E48) - I took them with the expectation that I'll just use them as dumb unmanaged PoE switches. My employer tried to give these away for free through facebook marketplace and other similar sites just to get them out of their hair and would get people asking about them but nobody ultimately took them.

Well I did use them as unmanaged switches for a bit; I blocked internet access for them on my firewall just in case it was reaching out to the cloud, so nothing could potentially be modified suddenly. I recently spent some time looking into the console access on them to see if there's anything there. After a bit of searching I found that if you factory reset them and prevent access to the cloud, they have a default openmesh password ( 0p3nm3$h! ) on the admin account which you can use to gain full access to the CLI and thus some level of management of the switch.

I then examined the running config and discovered they have a local web interface (and ssh and telnet) which is disabled by default and you can enable, you can also create other users on it for management. So, through the console I obviously enabled those to see if they function and to my surprise they indeed do function. So now I have proper 24 and 48 port managed PoE switches at my disposal which made me pretty happy.

Anyway, if anyone happens to stumble upon these switches (at least the S24 and E48 models) and you can use them, know that you can now fully manage them on your own if you so desire. The console connection requires a baud rate of 115200 and then you can just login with username admin and password 0p3nm3$h!. From there you can use the contextual help (?) to figure out the commands. To enable the web interface, after logging in you can do this:

configure  
ip https  
exit  
save  

then you can simply access it in a browser at https://{ip-address-of-switch} using an existing user account. For reference, to create an account you can use a command like this:

configure  
username {USERNAMEHERE} secret {PASSWORDHERE}  
exit  
save  

I did verify that changes made via the web interface do actually work and change the configuration, I half-expected it wouldn't work but was pleasantly surprised it does.