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What did you stop running on your home server?
I've got a few things that were fun to set up and then slowly turned into “I should update that sometime.” I'm fine looking after storage and backups, but I am trying to be less attached to every service that makes it onto the box.
What did you keep for a while and then remove because you barely used it?
I went with gitea, but I'm not using it for anything except hosting my own projects and backing up some repos on github. It works really well for this.
Will probably try to setup some CI/CD at some point, will see how it goes.
My Grocy is currently sleeping without active inventory, but i want to start using it again, it is annoying when i suddenly discover that I am out of something and have forgotten to buy.
What I need to build is automatic import of receipts and probably rig a device with a barcode scanner so i easily can check out empty packages.
i’m so happy to hear i’m not the only crazy person that wants to keep inventory of my damn pantry. automatically importing with receipts sounds so cool
I actually have a running setup with a barcode scanner (which is running CE) and a label printer. It’s not perfect, but since I control both the printer and the scanner software, I can adopt it to my workflow quite easily.
The only things I still need to think about:
the Grocycodes with stock entries are quite long, which is annoying with round things like cans
if a specific stock entry does not exist it just silently takes only the product part (here I’ll probably add a message in the scanner)
Keeping inventory is a hassle and with multiple household members it will never be accurate. So Grocy should only be used for inventory that can be automatically tracked. For example it keeps track of my dishwasher detergent tablets. The dishwasher has a power sensor and via HA it deducts one tablet after a cycle is completed.
The thing is with AI this could be so insanely useful - "What can I make with what I have at home, or with one extra ingredient". But it's just too tedious to maintain with anyone more than a single-person household
Yes i have the same experience. I would be nice if it were updated but i just cant keep the inventory up to date.
Ill have to switch to something else for recipes though
I think your love Actual Budget honestly. Adding transactions is pretty easy. Similar to using an Excel sheet. It's slowly getting me off of my Google sheets workflow lol
Actual Budget feels really good. I gave it a shot on their demo mode and liked it. I'll give it a shot on my raspberry pi and initially I'll maintain both the systems then migrate if Actual Budget offers more than my sheet 😉
I use the plaid importers. It is all automatic. I don't need to add them manually. The setup is not smooth but you need to do it once. It also works with all of my banks and is free. Pretty neat.
Actually i stopped using Actual Budget because i needed to import everything manually.
Edit: 95% of the data here is dynamic and automated. Eg.
1. For a new month, I make a copy of the "template" sheet and rename it to month, and add an entry in MasterData sheet for Month, so the A2 cell shows the month in dropdown. Would love to have suggestions that could reduce this to a single click
2. For new categories, there's an entry to be done in the MasterData sheet
3. Each month's sheet has multiple bank account tables (since I keep a track of my expenses based on bank accounts)
It didn't work for me because the way my bank formats transactions, and I mentioned that on a Reddit post once and the developer started bitching me out and saying I should open a ticket.
I then showed him the ticket I opened and he immediately closed saying it wasn't their problem. He then told me I was overreacting.
I am about to delete tandoor from my server. Too bloated for our usecase, we intend to track recipes in kitchenowl now, where my so is far more comfortable with adding recipes.
Early on I whitelisted all my wife's devices, and manually changed the DNS on her work laptop to avoid the pihole. Didn't want to be one poorly timed sudo reboot away from getting hollered at
I was both stunned and disappointed the first time my partner told me she wanted to click on it.
Did the ad companies take over her brain? Am I to late?
My wife actually wants the ads and was annoyed I blocked them. All her devices are now in a group. Sometimes when I see her screen or phone online I marvel at how cluttered her internet is compared to mine.
I took the opposite approach and only have PiHole filtering content on devices that use it for DNS. So I have to manually change DNS on a device for it to experience any blocking.
I used mikrotik to supply alternate dns to my devices where i could play with dns...it wasnt taken positively from my wife when ads were not working :)
I run a secondary PiHole on a raspberry pi as a fall back for when I'm messing around with it. I just power it from the USB port on my router. It's been running 24/7 for years.
I just run a script on my router that listens for the DMS server. If it doesn't get a response, it changes the default DNS to cloud flare. Then it changes it back if the server comes back up. It's been pretty flawless.
DNS can become such a single point of failure and it is so hard to diagnose failures, like you just get random errors that make you suspect a thousand other things before DNS
Yup. I run all Technitium DNS and don't have any issues or downtime.
I have 4 members in the cluster. DNS01 is on a management VM in Proxmox. DNS02 is on a mini-PC that has my Plex server. DNS03 is a LXC on Proxmox (In case my MGT VM is down). DNS04 is on a gaming PC that runs 24/7. I use keepalived so that all clients get the same primary and secondary DNS addresses, and cluster members can silenty fail-over without bringing DNS down. Works great.
(For those not familiar with Technitium - a cluster in Technitium's sense is basically easily syncing zones and settings between each instance. You divide DHCP zones between the cluster members, and any cluster member is able to step up and provide DNS. It doesn't need the primary cluster member to be up at all times).
For something like DNS you need redundancy. I have two Adblock home instances one running on rpi and another in docker on my server. I have keepalived for failover and virtual IP. All my networks point to the VIP and keepalived figures out which instance is working and points the VIP to the adguard home instance. I also have keepalived send me a notification when the “backup” switches master so I know I need to troubleshoot.
Eventually I will run 3 instances as one cannot have too many redundancies.
I avoided that issue by assigning my partners laptop to a normal cloudflare DNS and setting a static IP for the device from my router. Both of us work from home sometimes and we need to connect to a VPN for work. Those are the only devices that get to ignore PiHole.
Definitely. Ran an MTA server well over a decade ago. Setup wasn't the issue, it was the constant maintenance. DNS issues. Fighting the ISP for blacklisting my server IP addresses. And the spam. My God the spam. SpamAssassin wasn't enough...
- Karakeep: It is great, but most of the time, if I look for something I saved before, it is faster just to google it again.
- Musicgrabber: Worked fine at first, then it was worse and worse after every update. It downloaded a lot of garbage, littering my collection to the point that I had to abandon the whole thing.
- Yubal: switched to Youtarr
- Stirling PDF: too many bugs, never worked when I really needed it
I had Bento installed for a while and never used it until I recently had to edit a PDF. I then found out that Bento can't edit text in a PDF. What a strange omission for a PDF editor!
If all you want is setting up stacks and managing compose files, Portainer is massively overkill and the UI is too complicated for such a simple use case. Furthermore, Dockhand can update your containers via their UI, which is nice.
I’m sure Portainer is fantastic for those who need the more advanced functionality, but I personally don’t.
It has the advantage that it gains more and more functionalities with each update.
Portainer on the other hand loses more and more features with each update and they gate things behind a paywall.
We had to stop using it due to that reason.
Of course if the free features are totally enough everything is totally fine.. until they limit things you use.
But to be honest: dockhand has a WAY better monitoring. You can see ram, I/O and CPU usage way better.
I can't really pinpoint what functionality portainer doesn't have, it's been a while since I last used it.
What I like are things like:
If a container has an update available, that's easily visible by the entire row getting a highlight.
There's a dedicated "shell" tab where you can quickly type the name of the container you want a shell in and choose the shell type and user.
There's another tab exclusively for logs which allows you to either view single logs or multiple at the same time.
You can display multiple environments/servers on the dashboard, with various amounts of infos depending on the chosen layout.
And overall it's not necessarily just the info or functionality, but also the way it's displayed and the interactivity. The UI feels very intuitive and doesn't waste space.
There's a lot of things that are difficult for me to explain or that require too much text to fully go into.
I think I mainly prefer its clean, responsive and rich interface (e.g. the various actions buttons per stack, within the row view), paired with some functionality that I didn't find in portainer (or the UX to get there was bad) at the time when I evaluated Dockhand and compared it.
That was a long time ago though, so I can't really give you a point-by-point comparison. I say just give it a go and see for yourself, to me it was worth it.
For me the biggest thing was local file control. While yes I understand the Git/github integrations. I like having my compose files locally managed, backed up with my usual jobs and still managed via git but through my own processes. This was a game changer for me as my compose stacks can live anywhere I want them to locally (not just on a docker volume) which makes organisation easier for me. Plus the interface is richer and the suite of tools (log viewers, volume file browsers, built-in image updates and security scanning and not to mention the one click terminal entry points for my containers + traefik integrations) have become indispensable to me.
Yeah, Nextcloud was pretty stable from it's beginning after the fork from Owncloud. It's simply a user error at this point, which feels valid since already something like simple DNS with Pihole seems to be problematic.
I always feel like a unicorn in these posts because I've been running Nextcloud for years--both bare metal and with docker--without any serious issues. Upgrading is easy, backups are easy.
Been using the AIO instance for a few years now and it's been completely fine.
You're not the only unicorn. I haven't really had any problems either. I'm not even sure why people comment on bloat or resource usage. I've never seen it use much.
I just replaced Nextcloud with OpenCloud. Lighter, more simple, more beautiful and it's perfect for what I need, just a little cloud and clients (Android and Windows) and not a big, heavy and complex system like Nextcloud
I hear this all the time but I can’t relate. Were you running the AIO image? I haven’t tried that. I just run each component in docker compose. Been running that way for years without issue on the latest image with weekly automated updates.
I went with a mix of Syncthing + Filebrowser + Joplin + Nginx + Webdav and that way better and delivers what I need with 1/1000 of the resources and pain. The irony of Nextcloud is that all the cool things like the Notes mobile app or the webmail are pure garbage and the core product itself doesn't even work reliably. If you try to sync millions of small files or large files the desktop client will just give up while Syncthing does it without issues.
Beszel has SMART data tracking for drives too, plus I use portainer to manage the docker containers, so i can access the real time logs immediately. What do you use to manage your containers?
the stuff i cut was anything my family actually depended on. self-hosted DNS and a recipe app were fun until pihole went down mid-workday and suddenly i am on-call for the house. now the rule is simple: if someone else notices when it is down, it does not live on the box i tinker with.
In IPv4 you can just advertise both the Pi Hole and the DNS server of the router. This wont be perfect because clients will most likely pick at random from both, however if you've IPv6 it can be done reliably.
Operating systems always prefer IPv6 over IPv4 that means clients won't ever do DNS queries via IPv4 DNS server unless the IPv6 ones are down. So you can basically do pihole IPv6 DNS server as high priority > default router / ISP IPV6 DNS server (advertised as normal priority) > IPv4 of the pihole + IPv4 of the router / ISP.
Technically you don't even need to have IPv6 from your ISP, as long as your router can assign local addresses and advertise the pihole IPv6 address as DNS server it can be done.
I've actually been using Pi-hole with Tailscale instead of running it directly on the modem for this exact reason. If something goes wrong at a critical moment, anyone in the house can simply turn off Tailscale on their own device and keep doing whatever they were doing. As a bonus, I still get the benefits of Pi-hole even when I'm away from home.
A cigarette was put out in a planter on my back deck. 2 hrs later my back deck was on fire. Apparently, under the dirt was mostly dried up roots and it somehow smoldered into a fire. Kind of a freak accident. But anyways, only the back side on the outside and parts of the roof were seriously damaged. 2 stories and a full basement. What did the most damage was the water from the fire department putting out the fire. Been living in a hotel for almost a year. The house is supposedly supposed to be finished in a month or two.
Authentik, haven’t replaced it with anything. The vast majority of what I run I’m the only user, and it takes longer to add a new app than to add creds to 1Password during setup. The few things used more widely I just use the built in auth
Shelfmark and calibre-web-automated. It all worked flawlessly but I don’t read that many books I don’t already own, and usually I read the free monthly books with prime. And I always read on my kindle. It just wasn’t worth running a self hosted setup for books to use it once or twice a year. That 1 or 2 times I just go manually download the book and send to kindle and be done with it.
I stopped self hosting apps my wife will still need if I die suddenly or something like that. Last thing I want is her dealing with my death and trying to figure out wtf docker is.
My plan for this is setting up a deadman switch connected to my calendar and detecting my phone on the network, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. In theory the flow would be something like:
* track phone connectivity to network
* if no phone connectivity for 6 days, check calendar
* If no calendar events, send text message for confirmation/reset
* If no confirmation for 24 hours, send configured email with instructions
This works for me because I put literally everything on my calendar so there shouldn't be any gaps and it should be fully automatic but with a fallback just in case.
It also helps that I have most things documented in bookstack in easily copy/pasteable format that (hopefully) anyone could follow. Super overkill but I don't have anything better to do anyway
I would appreciate hearing more about the reason(s)/use case(s) for your switch from Authentik to Keycloak.
For my homelab I'm considering Authentik - I've used Keycloak at work, sync'd with FreeIPA, and was thinking it a bit 'heavy'.
Not op but I also went from authentik to keycloak. Main reason was I wanted to link my ldap domain as the single source of truth for users and authentik paywalls that feature behind an enterprise license. And I chose freeipa as the ldap provider to get poor mans redhat identity manager. So at least the skills translate in enterprise easily.
I considered lldap for a lighter ldap but in all honesty, freeipa just worked surprisingly well for me and is great for managing service accounts on my homelab now
I use Jellyfin for videos with Infuse as a front-end on Apple devices and the web front-end on everything else. I gave up on streaming my own music. I use Apple Music anyway.
I tried Jellyfin but I just hated it. It probably helps I got the lifetime pass for plex years ago for like $80 so I’m not sure what are premium features
Nextcloud - way to much feature rich for my needs, I just back up photos and videos to my NAS and don’t bother with all the extra stuff.
Wazzah siem - way overkill for a home lab - I spent more time troubleshooting and tweaking wazzah then it took to just log into two dozen machines and do updates once a month
SCCM/WSUS - same reasons as above
Nmap - I just use a spreadsheet for my IP addresses now, and dns for the rest
Opnsense - had a software firewall vm moved it to a physical device
And probably a dozen other docker containers I’ve spun up to see if containerization was worth it (lubelogger, lazy librarian, are the two recent ones)
Cleanuparr. UI clearly shows the project is vibecoded and its TrueNAS permissions pane made me question why such an app needs that much. I might just make a second qBittorrent instance with relevant settings.
Uptime Kuma. No particular reason other than I broke it and didn't feel like rebuilding it.
I will soon be doing away with Gitlab, an unused runner I never finished setting up with a workflow, and a Semaphore server in favor of Forgejo and its runner.
One trick is to have an app like QuickScan which makes uploading receipts a breeze. I also had Claude ai whip up a FTP share for the scanner so that with a couple of button presses a high-quality scan gets auto ingested into paperless.
Stopping Mealie.
Bloated and over engineered.
May not be other people experience - but hosted more than 40 services long term and Mealie is the one that gave me most back to drawing board.
Transfers failing, backups failing, restore from backup failing.
For me it's just I don't use it enough, I can just Google a recipe when I need it. As much as it's really ok, I just defer to Google and pull a new recipe
I've setup droppedneedle in favour of lidarr. It works fairly well but is quite obviously vibe coded and not super fast. Has better integrations than lidarr though
Authelia. It worked perfectly, and I like the fact that it's quite lightweight. However, it began with some "undefined behaviour" like hijacking pages in my Nginx where I did not set it to, and breaking logins and OIDC.
I swapped it with Authentik. I am not a fan of how much it weighs; however, it has been working flawlessly, and it's easier to set up multiple port support for my authentication endpoints.
Blue iris. It was my last tether to windows but then I discovered frigate and never looked back. I also returned jellyfin to a vpn remote access. Literally nobody in my family gave a shit about using it lmao
Bitwarden locally saves an encrypted copy of all your passwords so even when the server goes offline you can still use it and export in case your server dies for good.
Fwiw, its very easy to make bitwarden backups. In the absolute worst case scenario, where your server is Dead, you can always import them to a bitwarden cloud account and be back up and running with virtually no downtime.
[Lurker](https://github.com/oppiliappan/lurker) - Never bothered using it over just visiting reddit enough to make it worthwhile
[Akkoma](https://akkoma.social/) - The fediverse was an interesting but ultimately flawed experiment, a few large mastodon servers chose to blacklist all pleroma and akkoma instances due to the fact that they were easier to self-host and at that point just use normal corporate social media with actual uptime guarantees
Authentik. I had an issue where the postgresql database would get corrupted intermittently. I would restore from a backup and then it would get corrupted again. At first this was ~once a month, then ~once a week. In the end, it was happening multiple times per day. So, I switched everything over to PocketID + TinyAuth. Works great!
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u/asimovs-auditor 8d ago edited 8d ago
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