Hi TCP users,

Currently, I have a homelab server that runs Jellyfin with direct access to local media content and a reverse proxy point to it. While it works well for people in Europe (where the server is), it is quite slow for some of my friends who are living in Asia. I am having some options in mind:

• Hire a VPS in Asia and set up another Jellyfin instance there. This works but I don't really want to have two Jellyfin instances with two databases and also accessing to local media content will be curbersome to manage.
• Hire a VPS in Asia and set up a CDN but I am not sure if it will ever work with Jellyfin ?

So I would like to ask do you know any things about this and any idea to improve this situation ?

Thank you very much!

Edit: Thanks for all of your response. Based on my experience, I think the slowness is caused by the fact that there are too many hops to jump through before reaching the final client. So I think I will try to do several things:

• Try to optimize my upload speed, it is fast enough but not very stable recently so it could have some impact
• Set up a second Jellyfin instance and sync a part of my library there for my friends.

Hey all, I'm searching for something self hosted that lets me access, read, and edit .md and spreadsheets. I don't need functionality for presentations, word docs, or photos; really just spreadsheets and markdown, and a good mobile experience.

Opencloud is fast, simple, lightweight, and works great for multi-user editing, but Collabora is just so-so on desktop and borderline unsuable on mobile. Also, the build in split-view markdown editor is effectively unusable on mobile. Nextcloud has more features, but I mostly don't use them. It's markdown editor is better, but it has the same Collabora problem. I'm probably about 50% desktop and 50% mobile use.

Any recommendations?

I’ve been getting more into self hosting lately, grabbed an optiplex 3050 for everything and I’m running Mint currently. Looking more into things though, I saw Debian come up as a more barebones distro and now I’m wondering if there is a lot of benefit to going more barebones. I’m not having any issues with my current setup but now I can’t stop thinking about it. I am newer to Linux but having to learn new things doesn’t wig me out much if there is a lot more involvement with Debian

Edit: I appreciate the responses. I do see where I could just end up creating problems that don’t exist by experimenting with it more. Debian does sound enticing so it’s definitely something I’ll mess about with virtually for now and see how I like it in comparison. But I definitely have to agree on the “don’t mess with a good thing” if it’s working for me. All your answers have definitely given me something to play with now as well, I want the problems to solve but doing it in a separate environment would suit me better to learn a few things. This community rocks.

I currently have Nextcloud running, and it's stable, performant...no issues whatsoever. But it's also a LOT more than what I need, and stores files in an "unusable" state if I want to look at them outside of Nextcloud. The real kicker is that the linux client wants to download the entire cloud drive, which simply doesn't work for me.

For most cases, I think a samba share is all I need, but I do have times when I don't have internet access, so the ability to save specific files locally to sync back when I'm home would be great. Nextcloud and OneDrive have a "always keep on this device" option which has been perfect in the past.

I use Syncthing for some specific cases, but it adds extra steps I don't want to deal with all the time.

Specifically, I'm looking for something with these requirements:

• provide a virtual drive for Linux and Windows
• can keep specific files/folders from that drive offline
• point the server to a folder (or folders), and that's what it shares

And "would be nice, but not required"

• web interface to view/download files
• user-level access
• web and virtual drive can be accessed via reverse proxy

I've tried poking around, and can't find anything that seems to fit. I'm surprised there isn't a webdav client or samba config option that would do what I want, but I may also be in a mental rut and missing a key term.

I was hoping you guys could help me with a bit of a more out-of-the-ordinary situation. My older father, who has very little technical knowledge, is the owner of a local news outlet and is in the process of modernizing the whole website and its infrastructure. He is in talks with a local developer (just one guy) who has been maintaining everything for the past 5 years to transfer everything to a new dedicated server and make some much-needed software and design changes. He is currently running everything on an older Hetzner dedicated server, which we decided to upgrade very soon to the Hetzner AX102 (Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 128 GB DDR5 ECC, 2 × 1.92 TB NVMe SSD Datacenter Edition, and a 1 Gbit/s port with unlimited bandwidth). He has asked me to try to help him achieve a favorable outcome because he is aware that, due to his lack of technical knowledge, he might be taken advantage of or, at the very least, the developer will only do the bare minimum because no one will check his work, even though this process is not exactly cheap, at least by our country’s standards.

I only possess a basic understanding of most of what hosting such a site optimally on a dedicated server entails, as this is not my area of expertise, but I am willing to learn in order to help my father, at least to the point where we don’t get scammed and we are able to take full advantage of the new hardware to make the site load instantly.

More context:

• The site is based on WordPress, and we plan to keep it that way when we make the transfer. The developer told me he would strongly prefer running AlmaLinux 10 with NGINX for our particular context and will likely use Bricks as a page builder. I would prefer not to change these, since it would likely create unneeded friction with him.
• There are about 150k–250k average monthly users according to Google Analytics, depending on the time of year and different events, most of them from our area.
• About 80% of readers are using smartphones.
• There are a few writers who publish multiple articles daily (20–25 in a 24-hour window). The articles always contain at least text and some images. There’s a strong dependency on Facebook, as most of the readers access those articles from our Facebook page. This might be relevant for caching strategies and other settings.

For now, as a caching strategy for optimal speed, Gemini analyzed my requirements and recommended a tiered “in-memory” caching strategy to handle high traffic without a CDN. Could you validate whether these specific recommendations are optimal, since I am highly skeptical of AIs?

Page Cache: it suggests mapping Nginx FastCGI Cache directly to RAM (tmpfs). It recommends using ngx_cache_purge with the Nginx Helper plugin to instantly invalidate only the Homepage and Categories upon publishing. It also advises stripping tracking parameters (e.g., fbclid) to prevent cache fragmentation.

1. Object Cache: It proposes using Valkey (Server-side) paired with the Redis Object Cache plugin. The specific advice is to connect them via Unix Socket (instead of TCP) for the lowest possible latency.
2. PHP Layer: It recommends PHP 8.5 with OPcache and JIT (Tracing mode) enabled, optimized to keep the runtime entirely in memory.

**I’d appreciate any thoughts or advice you might have on the overall situation, not just the caching side of things. The caching is just what I managed to study so far since the AI insisted it was particular important for this setup. **😊

Hi I got home assistant, immich, jellyfin and recently tried to set up next cloud with helm. Not everything is as smooth as I expected.

Do you guys have any other ideas for similiar setup on local kubernetes cluster?

Hey there!

I know Yunohost is perfectly fine for beginners while being limiting to advanced users. I think I am somewhere in the middle. Right now, I hope you maybe have some advice for me on how you could set something like this up:

Yunohost has Sonarr, Lidarr and Prowlarr installed and configured. Inside these, there are working connections to a qBittorrent client.

Disclaimer: for legal reasons I want to use a VPN for torrenting purposes. In Germany, seeding is what can get you in big trouble, so I’ll just say I want to use a VPN to protect my privacy. Not because I want to torrent copyrighted material of course.

This whole *arr apps in Yunohost in connection with a qBittorrent client, also installed via yunohost, works very well, but I don’t know/can’t figure out how to setup a VPN together with it. When just add my Mullvad wireguard config, my whole setup goes behind the VPN obviously, so my Immich and Nextcloud will also be gone for my other apps while in the VPN. I would like to be able to just put the qBittorrent in a vpn, but couldn’t figure out how. In a next step, I uninstalled the qBittorrent client and started it as a docker container to connect gluetun to it as a network interface. Both services started fine using the recommended docker-compose files and so on. But qBittorrent wouldn’t connect to any trackers, I think they were blocked or something.

Anyways, does anyone have any recommendations on where to go from here or how to maybe setup this whole thing in a different way? For now, Yunohost is very comfortable for me since I don’t have much free time for this project and it lets me make a lot of progress fast. So completely switching away from it might be too big of a hurdle, so for now I’d probably just give up on the *arr stack magic, I don’t know.

Thanks for reading and happy hosting.

Is simplematrixbotlib the way to go or are there other better alternatives?

MyBot

I want a bot that sends me one message per day. It shall be a message to kick off thoughts / reflection / meditation / contemplation. I already have lots of questions in a csv. It's as simple as take a random note and send it to me at 06:00.

In a second step I could add commands like \question and \q to prompt a random question. I could add "users", i.e. me, and vote on the questions with smileys to increase/decrease the likelihood of the question appearing the next time.

actual goal

I want to write a diary / journal every day and having a random question boosts my brain. I tried journiv and I love it but it is not open source, so I have to build something on my own. I am no kotlin dev, but I can use python. I already have a shell version but a UI would be great. Moreover, in a matrix room I can add pictures, videos, and voice memos. That sounds great. Maybe, I can search questions with hashtags.

advice

Is there another tool better suited to do this?

Hey there,

I'm on the search for an alternative to Mattermost for a small institution I'm working with. Mattermost was the strongest contender for our needs, yet they changed their policy regarding self-hosted instances. The factor that killed it for us, is the hard cap on 250 registered users, as we potentially might need to commodate more than that.

Rocket.Chat has similar caps.

We found Zulip, and it seems as it might be what we are looking for, but we haven't tested yet. Nonetheless, I wanted to address this community, as you may have another good idea?

Samsung Smart TV owners can now use Jellyfin natively, as the open-source media server is now available on the Tizen platform.

Hey Home-labbers/ self hosters.

This weekend my 10 year old processing machine finally bit the dust (RIP 🗿 💀 ; old system76 laptop, won't even post, not the topic of this thread but if you've got ideas, I'm all ears), and as part of figuring out what happened and coming to the realization its time for a new machine. And as part of getting/ pricing a new machine (not looking forward to the consequences of the RAM-pocalypse), I've been reviewing/ thinking about the "structure" of what we as a household currently use our self-hosted/ home-labbed system for.

Myself and my partner are researchers, and as such, we regularly collaborate/ work together on manuscripts, and the reality is, we rely on windows because we're also collaborating with other authors who also rely on MS word to write in. Now I'm a 100% FOSS advocate, but this is a sticking point my partner has had, and I agree with them, at least in practice that realistically, we need a windows machine laying around specifically for this one, particular use case.

Now my thinking here is to use proxmox to spin up a windows machine as a VM, something we can remote into. Is there any best practice for something like this? How would this work with licensing? I personally haven't installed windows on something since like windows 7, and I know they've enshittified beyond recognition.

I personally don't want windows on my machines. But realistically, I recognize its necessity for this one particular use case. Thoughts?

So, I am soon going to finally set up my first home server. Exams are not that far away, I am motivated as shit, my first own domain is bought and I want to level up my sysadmin skills.

Currently my plans look like this:

• Host Jellyfin
• Host my own NAS
• Some form of hosted musicstreaming integration with my local music
• Automate Backups and push them on my server
• make all of the above things available where ever I want using my own self hosted domain.
• run my own dns

In the long term I also want to be able to host my own webapps, since I will soon start to develop one for someone.

Now I want to know what suggestions do you have, for stuff thats really cool and that I can selfhost.

Edit: thanks for all the replies. Definitely going to look into this.

I was given a server running on an XR9Si-3F. I was initially thrown off with the lack of video output but realized where I was confused concerning interacting with the machine through the web console.

Unfortunately, as cool as completely managing a server through a web console is, it just won't work for me as I have only one machine that can "reliably" run the old Java app to give input to the server. So I dug into understanding how to redirect the console to the VGA and got that setup through BIOS. Unfortunately, I neglected to ensure legacy USB support was enabled so I could use the keyboard attached to my KVM switch.

Now, I'm in BIOS to try and enable that, but BIOS is not registering any keyboard input through the Java app. Neither my physical laptop keyboard or the OSK are working. Both input options work in the booted OS, as well as to get me into BIOS, but I cannot navigate once I'm in BIOS.

Does anyone have any experience with this type of issue, or any suggestions I could try to get some form of keyboard input working so I can enable USB support and use my KVM switch?

I am getting started with self hosting and one of the things I would love to host is a Signal TLS proxy using Docker.

Problem is that I have ports 80 and 443 taken by Nginx Proxy Manager (also in a Docker container), through which I forward to different services depending on the subdomain.

I tried modifying the docker-compose.yml file to use ports 9443 and 980 and have it working using a certificate created on NPM, but to no avail.

Being a beginner, it can well be that I don't understand reverse proxies well enough, but that's why, with your help I would love to take this opportunity to learn more.

Thanks in advance.

Does anyone else proudly display the what they self host on their laptop? The hardest part is removing old stickers when you port from one project to another (Trilium and Obsidian for example). People ask me all the time what's this or that sticker. I'm impressed when they can pick one out on their own.

FOSS source is here.

I have an old pc on which I run jellyfin and some other stuff. It's only connected through lan. I used to use window's remotedesktop to connect to it, but that stopped working.

Now I'm looking for a good remote desktop. Because it s tucked away in a corner, fysical acces to it is cumbersome.

My server runs mint with xfce. My laptop runs windows 11, because of work reasons.

I'm inclined to use something like anydesk, but I'm unsure how to trust that company.

Edit: I got rustdesk up and running and it's a good solution for my usecase. Thanks for all the tips and suggestions.

It's been a while, let's go! Any major fuckups lately or smooth sailing?

I had to change the local DNS setup yesterday. I finally installed my wife Linux Mint and wanted to set her up for Vaultwarden real quick which became an hour long debug session since apparently CNAME entries for hostnames don't work as I thought. Never came up the recent year as all my machines took it, but resolved refused to and so I eventually deleted the entries in the Pihole and created them as A records pointing to the VM with the reverse proxy, hoping I won't need to change the IP anytime soon. It's always DNS!

In other news I think I moved all my local dockered services to forgejo+komodo now and applying updates by merging renovate MRs still feels super smooth. I just updated my calibre web automated with a single click. Only exception is home assistant where I have yet to find a good split in what to throw in a docker volume and what to check in git and bindmount.

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/45042331

Hello again!!

Sorry for the big delay in the announcements. I know it has been a long time I have not made any announcements but I will try my best next time this doesn't happen again.

So, through the medium of this post I would like to share with you all the v1.24.36 major release version of the websurfx project which was released on the 26th of January.

If you are new, and you don't know what is websurfx then I would suggest taking a look at my previous post here:

https://programming.dev/post/2678496

Which covers in depth about what the project is and why it exists.

Credits

Before I share with you the changelog, what this release version means and a preview on what we are planning to work on for the next major release v2.0.0. I would first like to thank all our contributors and maintainers because of whom this was all possible. Specially I would like to thank spencerjibz, MickLesk and SchweGELBin who have been invaluable to the project. Also, Websurfx would not have been possible without alamin655 and xffxff early involvement.

Thanks 💖 to all the people involved in the project

Now, let's dive straight into what this release version actually means.

What does this release version means

This new release version v1.24.36 updates the hybrid caching api to take advantage of the two layer caching solution which eliminates the round trip time delay of fetching the same results from the cache.

Changelog

The changelog of all the changes can be found here:

https://github.com/neon-mmd/websurfx/releases/tag/v1.24.36

Preview of the goals for the next major release

• Different levels of privacy to choose from with the help of rust's conditional compiling features (In progress).
• Even more engines will be supported.
• Categories would be added to search results like images, news, etc.
• More themes will be provided by default
• More animations for the websurfx frontend will be supported.
• Multi language support would be added.
• I2p and tor support will be provided.
• Reduce animations would be added for those who don't want animations and effects on the frontend.
• And lots more ✨.

Call To Action

If you love our project and want to see it move ahead and progress in the direction you want, then we would suggest contributing at our project

I need to run my own email server for some of my domains, because the providers that I usually use don't support them (they use Unicode characters, and not everyone supports that yet). I have a small VPS that I run a few Docker containers on, and I'm wanting to try and run an email server on it as well. What containers are good for a low-hassle email setup? I don't need a mailbox webui (ex: round cube), but it would be nice to have a UI for management. I do need multi-domain support, however.

Finally ditched my ISP’s router and installed my own opnsense firewall with my own Access Point. I have crowdsec running on opnsense to block attacks + adguard to block ads and malicious domains. My network is segmented between my homelab that is exposed and my AP.

Finally feels quite safe in my network 😅

On my homelab, the CPU usage spiked yesterday and calmed down after I updated it. Looks like it's related to changes from Calibre v9

For those unfamiliar with this project, here is the note from their README:

Why does this project exist?

Calibre, while a fantastic tool for its age, has several problems when containerised, including its reliance on a KasmVNC server instance for the UI, which is near impossible to use on mobile and is relatively resource-heavy if you're running a small, lower power server like I am.

For many, Calibre-Web has really swooped in to save the day, offering an alternative to a containerised Calibre instance that's resource-light and with a much more modern UI to boot.

However, when compared to full-fat Calibre, it unfortunately lacks a few core features leading many to run both services in parallel, each serving to fill in where the other lacks, resulting in an often clunky, imperfect solution.

Calibre-Web Automated aims to be an all-in-one solution, combining the modern lightweight web UI from Calibre-Web with the robust, versatile feature set of Calibre, with a slew of extra features and automations thrown in on top.

Here are excerpts from the changelog with the most recent update:

Release Notes: v4.0.2

🚨 Critical Updates

These changes are essential for database stability and compatibility with Calibre 9.

• Calibre 9 Metadata Compatibility: Fixed critical UI crashes (500 errors) caused by Calibre 9's removal of books.isbn, books.flags, and books.lccn.
  • The system now dynamically detects schema versions at startup.
  • For Calibre 9+, ISBNs are now correctly pulled from the identifiers table.
  • Maintained full backward compatibility for users on older Calibre versions.
• SQLAlchemy 2.x Migration Fix: Resolved InvalidRequestError during database migrations by utilizing engine.begin(). This prevents nested transaction failures when PRAGMA triggers autobegin.
• Initialization Fix: Fixed a regression causing AttributeError during login. The system now ensures minimal config fields (like config_books_per_page) are loaded even during background initialization.

[...]

The v.4.0.0 update had all the other snazzy new features. You can find them below:

Version 4.0.0 - Smart Automatic Duplicate Handling & Resolution 🔍, a Gorgeous & Powerful New Stats Centre 📊, Magic Shelves ✨, Robust OAuth, Auto-Send & Auto-Fetch ✈️ Huge Performance Uplifts and more!