Hello folks! I am looking for some guidance or direction on how to make sure my "server" locked down as much as possible. I know there are several websites/guides out there but was hoping I could get someone to recommend some good ones to use that cover all the bases solidly.

There are just so much info out there, wading through looking for a solid guide when you ignorant is hazardous.

Server is running Mint and hosts my Plex/Radarr/Sonarr stack. Using a locally hosted reverse proxy for any outside connections.

This started as a project to learn linux, so things are a bit shaky on linux understanding but getting better. I used GPT assistance to lock it down to the best of my ability, making sure (or I think) that most obvious firewalls rules were setup...ect.

Thanks for your help :)

Love the new dashboard and status bar. IMO this is the best client out there, particularly if you're self-hosting and combining it in an organization and streaming workflow.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/49721314

I just discovered this. Has anyone tried it?

Basically, you install it on your home server and use it to stash your DRM-free games, and then install the client on your PC, Steam Deck, whatever... log in to your server and just use it like your own, selfhosted Steam app. Any PC gamer already running Jellyfin, RomM, or other selfhosted entertainment-related server might be interested in trying it, if you do... please share your experience! I'll try it myself when I have time and post back here. If you know of any other alternatives, please share!

• Self-hosted & open-source. Run Drop entirely on your own hardware. Your library, your data, your rules — all under the AGPLv3.

• Rich metadata editing. Customise names, descriptions, and icons with full Markdown and image support.

• Automatic imports. Pull cover art and game details straight from IGDB, GiantBomb, and PCGamingWiki.

• A built-in store. Let users browse, filter, and collect games through a fully featured store.

• Flexible authentication. Use simple accounts or hook into your existing SSO.

• Native desktop client. Download, install, and play your whole library through a cross-platform desktop client.

Available for Windows, Mac & Linux (their web page lists a deb, their github repo publishes packages for all major distros and also an Appimage)

Website:
https://droposs.org/

Docs:
https://droposs.org/docs/admin/quickstart/

This is the companion to I own my books, where I made the case for stripping DRM and actually owning what I buy. This post is the machinery overview: how I store, serve, and read all of it from my own homelab.

My books workflow

When I find a book I want to buy, I go to eBooks.com and search for it. They have most titles, but occasionally I will have to go to Kobo to find it; regardless, I purchase the book.

Note: This is just an overview of how this works and is not a technical, step-by-step walk-thru.

Calibre

If the book has DRM, the distributor gives me a file with the .acsm extension. If the book is DRM free, then they hand me the ePUB file directly. Either way, the next step is to import the downloaded file into Calibre. With the right plug-ins, Calibre will automatically download the book, remove the DRM (if any) and add the ePUB file to the Calibre books library.

Syncthing

Once the book is in Calibre as a DRM-free ePUB, Syncthing syncs it to one of my homelab instances that serves it with Calibre-Web.

Calibre-Web

I use Calibre-Web to then serve my Calibre books on my local network. Calibre-Web implements the same endpoints the Kobo store exposes: sync, library metadata, cover images, reading state. This is the first piece that allows me to connect my books library to my Kobo device.

DNS and certificates

Two things have to be in place to allow my Kobo to connect to Calibre-Web. My local DNS has to point an internal hostname at the server running Calibre-Web. And that server needs a real, publicly trusted TLS certificate, because the Kobo thinks it's talking to a commercial store and won't accept a self-signed one. Getting a legitimate certificate for a hostname that only exists inside my homelab is the fiddly part. I may write that up separately.

Kobo

Now I update the api_endpoint setting in the .kobo/Kobo/Kobo eReader.conf file on the Kobo itself so it points to the internal hostname from the DNS and certificates section above. I plug the Kobo into my computer over USB and it mounts as a drive, which is how I get at the file. There's no way to do this from the device's settings menus.

All together now

So my workflow looks like this in practice:

1. Buy and download the book.
2. Import the book into Calibre.
3. Open my Kobo device and download the new book to the reader.
4. Read.

The default software on the Kobo is a first-class reading experience. Connecting it to my Calibre-Web server keeps that experience intact while my whole library syncs down over my local network.

KOReader

I see many people talking about KOReader, so when I first started on this path, I had every intention of installing and using it. In my own tests, the software just felt a lot rougher and harder to make into a nice reading experience, and I still had to connect my device directly to my laptop to load books. No shade towards KOReader and all the people who seem to love it, but the Kobo reading software works perfectly for me, and I can't think of a feature that KOReader provides that isn't already in the Kobo software.

Audiobooks

I listen to a fair amount of audiobooks, and my preference is to purchase them from Libro.fm. Their audiobooks are already DRM-free, so I just download the files from the Libro.fm website and boom, I have my backup.

Audible books do have DRM, but I can remove it. In order to make my backups, I use ffmpeg with credentials that audible-cli legitimately pulls from my authenticated account. I'm decrypting content I bought, using a key I'm entitled to, into a universally playable format (.m4b). So I can back up even Audible exclusives like Dungeon Crawler #8.

No matter how I purchased and backed up the audiobooks, I prefer to listen to them in Audiobookshelf, which is a self-hosted solution in my homelab.

Conclusion

And that's my books workflow and an overview of how I self-host all this. I'm really interested in hearing about others' book workflows too. Drop me a line if you've written something up and want to share.

Originally posted on my site: https://michaelharley.net/posts/2026/07/21/how-i-self-host-my-ebooks-and-audiobooks/

I'm considering Restic and Backblaze B2 as my backup solution. I'm a little worried having read about the potential for unexpected restore costs. For example, I've read restoring lots of little files adds to the cost (reference). What are the things to look out for when backing up and restoring that can add to the cost? Are there any best practices to keep costs down?

cross-posted from: https://lemy.lol/post/68848280

Hello,

I've been self hosting Nextcloud for the last half a year, and my family has been using Nextcloud Talk to communicate. However, as cool it is overall, we suffer from a lot of missed messages. I've been keeping an eye on (and contributing to) the Android app, but even with all the updates, it seems like they can't quite figure out the issue with notifications not appearing consistently. My wife is fed up, so I'm looking for alternatives.

It seems like Matrix is the next logical one to try, but the Android apps have pretty poor reviews. A lot of the self hosted messengers also seem to be more like Slack replacements, rather than focused on family & friend use.

Has anyone had a good experience with a self hosted messenger for family use?

Thanks!

Hey everyone! I'm sort of still green for selfhosting, but I wanted to share my setup so far:

The following services are selfhosted in docker

• Audiomuse (smart music tagging, mood based and all that)
• Navidrome for music hosting
• Jellyfin for TV shows (not a lot) and Films (not a lot again, but steadily increasing)
• Radicale for serving contacts/TODOs/calendar
• SFTPGo to act as my drive
• Kavita for ebooks and manga (I have tons of both)
• Glance for homepage
• forgejo for git forge hosting

The system specs are kind of visible in the homepage, so I won't spell them out here again. Mostly an old optiplex running arch, though I want to change it to nixos later on.

System tools:

• nushell for shell
• calibre for ebook management and tagging + fanficfare plugin to download fanfictions
• Caddy for reverse proxy (so I don't have to remember ports)
• netbird for VPN (also because it allows me to set wildcard DNS resolution for nodes, so I don't have to set up a dedicated pi-hole or adguard)
• Handbrake and ffmpeg for processing videos and such
• beets for tagging music
• a sysinfo script to generate system information for glance to consume
• Probably other things too, I'm forgetting

Everything is accessible only via netbird, and external inbound connections are firewalled off

Apart from that, I eventually plan on adding the following as well:

• Immich for photo hosting
• Vaultwarden for passwords
• Gollum (still debating on alternatives) for a webUI for my notes
• Paperless-NGX

I'm still thinking on more that I can add. Note that whatever I add should not need an inbound connection/stable IP address, since I don't intend to expose the server to the public. Any suggestions/tips? Thanks!

UPDATE: Forgot to add, I'd probably add homebox too, for inventory management 😅

UPDATE 2: I'm silly, I forgot that I'm also looking into self-hosted RSS feed readers 😆

What's your ebook download automation pipeline? And what do you use for library management — calibre, calibre-web, something else?

Hi! I've been thinking of setting up a Headscale control plane on my VPS and adding my NAS as a node so that I can install the tailscale client on my phone and laptop and access my services from outside of my network. I have navidrome, Immich and a few more things.

Right now I have AdGuard Home as my DNS server with DNS rewrites for my domain. *.mydomain.com points to my NAS and there I have NPMplus running that routes everything to the correct service/port.

Do I still need that with headscale? I've read the docs but I still don't understand the "MagicDNS" stuff. Does that bypass my DNS server when the client is connected to the tailnet? Should I still leave it on for local traffic? And if I'm connected to the tailnet from outside, how do I propagate all the addresses?

If anyone has a pointer or experience with a similar setup I'd really appreciate some help.

I have started moving away from gmail and have started exporting my older e-mails via the takeout option. This generates .mbox files. I don't really use any e-mail clients on my computer and do most of my e-mailing on my phone, so I don't have a way of viewing/searching those files.

Therefore I was wondering if there is any selfhosted option for some kind of e-mail archive/viewer with decent search function that anyone can recommend? Specifically something capable of handling those .mbox files. I found a few projects that sounded promising, but they seemed either dead, weren't setup for selfhosting or could only connect directly to the mailboxes. So I thought I'd ask here if anyone has experience with this, maybe some recommendations?

Also open to alternative approaches what to do with those files. I just would like to delete these mails from gmail entirely, but that requires I can search them with as much ease as I can on gmail with a local option.

Thanks!

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/63691946

Looking for advice on setting up a new whole home network and the direction to take of MoCA over existing cabling vs running new Ethernet Cat6A:

Recently in a new space that has an existing HomeConnect CSMAPDU9VPI with coax cables run throughout the home, which seems like a great candidate to just use MoCA and get up and running faster:

But I am also interested in "future proofing" the network setup and replacing the coax cables that are already run with Cat6A Ethernet, all connecting to a central 10G switch / homelab setup.

Is it worth the effort to re-run all of the cables and swap out the wall plates or just go with the simple thing an run with a MoCA setup? I'd really prefer to not spend on one setup with the plan to update in the future, but maybe that's the compromise solution to get setup and running sooner.

The CSMAPDU9VPI is currently completely isolated from the cable line to the modem (picture above is old and shows a cable connected to the IN port, this cable is no longer connected) so I don't think I have to worry about interference with my DOCSIS 3.1 service / modem.

I'm looking for a tool that monitors a YouTube channel, then downloads only new videos into a folder.

I found ChannelHoarder, and was wondering if anyone had any experience with it and/or if anyone had any other suggestions?

Also, sorry if this is not the right place for this question. Mods, feel free to remove if this isn't the right place.

Anyone have experience hosting LRCLIB?

I've been trying to move away from pocketcasts and started using AntennaPod + selfhosting GPoddersync for syncing. Which works great between Android devices.

However, I've been struggling to find a good Podcast for Windows that can also sync with Gpoddersync. Any suggestions?

Greetings Lemmings!

I am not new to self hosting; been at it for a few years. And I have neglected a very important part of my home lab; MUSIC!

So I stream music from Navidrome to all of my devices.

My music library has grown organically over the years, for probably the past 17 years. And a few times I had manually organized and fixed up some of the tags. But ultimately I ended up with a mess of a library.

I am working on cleaning that up. Though I absolutely should have cleaned it up before I created 2 backup scripts.

In short, I have a script that is called from a systemd service on a timer that runs my backup script that essentially more or less uses rsync to mirror the files in LiveMusicDir to MusicArchive1. This happens on my docker host where my Navidrome lives. The Music is on an NFS share hosted outside of the docker host.

The next step I run another similar setup on my desktop; systemd service running a script on a timer that uses rsync and other dependencies to track changes.

What I plan to do is organize the source. I am using beets, and learning as I go.

What methods do you use for managing a large music library?

WordPress and ActivityPub: my first fail

@selfhosted

I've already posted about my success and fail in the past, but I have something else to talk about: ActivityPub fails in my self hosted WordPress (hostinger vps).

Setup: YunoHost, WordPress multisite. For a multisite network, YunoHost requires WordPress to reside in a folder. Such as "domain .ext /folder" and not "site1 . domain .ext" or "site2 .domain .ext"

Started setup, the site apparently works. But, before involving a co-worker to help me with theme, I wanted to try installing ActivityPub plugin first.

Immediately WordPress health system, warned that endpoint webfinger wasn't accessible.

Watching the logs, it was YunoHost ssowat and I tried to comment it on domain's nginx file - /etc/nginx/config.d/domain.ext.conf

Result, from 302 error, it returned 500. "error establishing database connection".

The .well-known stays on /var/www/.well-known, while WordPress lives on /var/www/wordpress__3

I set all YunoHost's permissions to "visitors"

I really don't know where to go, at the moment.

#ActivityPub #AskFedi #FediHelp #selfhost #selfhosting #WordPress #YunoHost

CookTrace is a self-hosted recipe manager. Runs in a single Docker container, PWA + native Android app, no accounts on external services, no data leaving your network, AGPL-3.0.

• Repo: https://github.com/TraceApps/cooktrace
• Docker: ghcr.io/traceapps/cooktrace:latest

Retiring -rc.N and moving to strict semver. Docker images now publish under multiple tags so you can pin :1.0, :1, or :latest depending on how aggressively you want updates. Also delivers a real Send Test email flow with recipient dialog, fixes two Android bugs (recipes showing the wrong creation date, SMTP settings loading blank), patches a high-severity adm-zip CVE in the backup restore path, and adds public contributor docs.

Every future release uses strict semver: PATCH for bug fixes, MINOR for new features, MAJOR for breaking changes. Existing rc.N image tags and release assets stay live indefinitely; anyone pinned to a specific rc release is unaffected.

Added

• Multi-Tag Docker Publishing. :1.0.0, :1.0, :1, :latest. Pin :1.0 to auto-receive patches without opting into future 1.1.0 features.
• :dev Docker Tag. Rolling image built from the dev branch.
• Send Test Email Dialog. Asks where to send the test, pre-filled with your account email.

Changed

• Retired the -rc.N suffix.
• Send Test actually sends an email now (was just verifying SMTP auth).
• Email section moved under Admin.
• Password field uses a Change button when the server has a stored value.

Fixed

• Recipes on Android showed the first-connect date instead of the real creation date. Heals on next sync after upgrade.
• Email settings blank on the Android app.
• Trace AI chef hat clipped at the top of the FAB.

Security

• adm-zip 0.5.x → 0.6.0 (CVE-2026-39244, high). Crafted ZIP file could trigger a 4GB memory allocation during full-backup restore.

• Signed APK: https://github.com/TraceApps/cooktrace/releases/tag/v1.0.0
• Docker: docker compose pull && docker compose up -d
• Discussion: https://github.com/TraceApps/cooktrace/discussions/16

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.

Hello everyone!

I've been hosting Ente on my server for a year or so, and it has been going well. But last month I discovered that some images and video's on both my own and shared albums are blacked out and I cannot click on them directly.

For the ones I could download, I deleted the original ones afterwards and uploaded them again. This did fix the issue, but there are way too many images for this to be done manually, not to mention the ones that error out when downloading. There are also some images that do display correctly on my Android phone and my family's iPhones. Though the latter issue might be explained away by the (lack of) needed codecs on my Fedora system.

I checked my hard drive's health using smartctl. The self test completed with no errors, and the SMART test passed. I also updated the Ente containers but the issue persisted.

There is no agency or anything. I have a cold backups for the volume from two months ago and an a simple plaintext one from last year. So it's luckily not a major issue, but I am a bit worried the issue may reappear after reverting.

Has anyone else had this issue? Or some pointers to where I could be looking?

Cheers!

I am using home assistant as the trigger, telling mealie to add random meal plans for X amount of days. One for a dinner and two sides.

All that is left is to have mealie's rules set up a little better, or perhaps tag food in new ways i haven't thought of yet.

either way, who else out there is enjoying having mealie take some decision paralysis off their hands?

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/53556505

Git repo

Convert Outlooks' horrendous .pst file to standard .vcf vCard and import to any vCard compatible client (your phone, radicale, thunderbird, etc.)

Why I made this?

I decided to move my whole org to ThunderBird to be free from forced proprietary formats. And I created this Java CLI app (Because Java had the java-libpst to work with PST files) to do it. I converted ~500 contacts successfully and we are free from Outlook at last.

This has worked for us, and I tried to make it as robust as possible. If you see any issues, please open an issue or PR.

LLM disclaimer: I used OpenCode + BigPickle to create this but I wouldn't call it vibecoded. I spent ~2 days on it so far and let the LLM help me. Hope it helps.

AI Disclosure:

• Implementation - Generated
• Testing - Generated
• Review - Assisted
• Deployment - Pair

Hi guys! I've been self hosting for a while and been using am 2 tb HDD I bought on aliexpress two years ago to host movies and series.. I bought a second drive to separate them and organize my media.

For 2 months everything went awesome but suddenly I started getting IO errors from my old drive. specially when I download and watch a movie at the same time.

Is my drive going die or could it be something else?

Dmesg showed these messages

[345778.390949] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#23 access beyond end of device

I/O error, dev sda, sector 3833662344 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x3000 phys_seg 1 prio class 2

The weird part is the sda device stops showing unless I turn the PC off and take the sata cables from it and restart the PC. Then I can watch movies for a while before getting this error again... Regular reboot does not work.