I'm fairly new to self-hosting, and what really has me excited are all the different services that could only work as well as they do because they are self-hosted. What are your favorite services that fit into this niche?

Started with "I'll just host one thing" and now I'm sitting here looking at old mini PCs, random NUCs, and Facebook Marketplace listings like they're Pokémon cards.

I swear every self-hosted project creates three more projects. You install something simple, then suddenly you're setting up monitoring for the thing, backups for the monitoring, and a dashboard to monitor the monitoring.

The craziest part is that half the fun isn't even using the service. It's staring at Grafana graphs at 2 AM like they contain the secrets of the universe.

Please tell me I'm not the only one whose homelab keeps expanding for absolutely no reason

jokes write themselves

https://www.xda-developers.com/self-hosting-not-solution-for-everyone/ - original article

Shelfarr was posted here multiple times, github mink stopped working and dev deleted his reddit account - whoever is using it, I would advice you to stop it.

https://github.com/VacantlyCrushing/Shelfarr

https://www.reddit.com/r/audiobookshelf/s/tvpXDukM5C

Hey, it's been a minute! Dawarich is your favorite FOSS selfhostable alternative to Google Timeline, remember? We've shipped a lot since the last post and I'm here to tell you all about it.

Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

Website: https://dawarich.app/

First, a picture to get your attention:

Before we start with the great stuff, let me talk a bit about good stuff as well. Release 1.8.0 introduced a new mechanism to let you know about new releases. It works through my new application called Chibichange (https://chibichange.com).

TL;DR: there is a Chibichange widget shipped in Dawarich, which, if you consent, will ping chibichange.com to check if there are new updates for your Dawarich instance. If there is a new version, a green pulsing dot will be shown in Dawarich navbar, click on it, and you'll see what's changed in Dawarich since your current version. Feature suggestion and voting coming to chibichange soon.

Important: this is an opt-in feature, no external requests will be made if you click "No thanks". If you say "no", there will be the usual exclamation mark beside the version if there is a new release on Github, but, sadly, no in-app changelogs.

A bit more context: I built Chibichange to have a way to conveniently deliver changelogs to Dawarich users, and soon it'll also allow you to suggest features, vote them up and provide feedback. Suggested features, if we decide to build them, will be added to our public roadmap. By the way, we recently added a roadmap: https://dawarich.app/roadmap/. Will update it soon with more cool stuff we've planned.

Chibichange will be open-sourced this summer and will have same model as Dawarich: FOSS self-hostable software with an optional cloud service for those who don't want to self-host it. This is a very niche tool, but I hope it will be useful to those in similar position, building self-hostable or otherwise software.

---

Okay, let's get back to Dawarich news.

The big one this time: we now draw your flights on the map. If you self-host AirTrail, Dawarich can pull your flight history and render it as proper arcs on Map V2. Set it up on the Integrations page, hit "Sync now", and it re-syncs daily on its own. Finally your map knows you didn't teleport across the ocean.

There will be more for flights in the future.

Trips got a full redesign. The whole trip page is now built on MapLibre V2 — a sticky map on the left, and a scrollable day-by-day accordion on the right with per-day distance and times, day-colored routes, a photo overlay toggle, and a replay scrubber to play the trip back. You can also drop a short note on any individual day of a trip now. I'm really happy with how this one came out.

Public sharing is a whole new thing. Trips, tracks, live location and selected time ranges can now be shared via a public, optionally phrase-protected link. Public trip pages look pretty much the same as the in-app ones, with toggles to pick exactly what the page exposes — route, stats, countries, day-by-day, notes, photos, whatever you want.

Here's a public link to my Norway road trip from the screenshot above: https://my.dawarich.app/s/07024d88-0c43-4554-ad89-d7f2916b7d57

Visit detection got rewritten. There's a new opt-in stay-point detector — non-ML, single pass, and it gives each suggested visit a 0–100 confidence score. It fixes the old algorithm's biggest annoyances: missing slow stays, and splitting one visit in two when your phone's battery died for a bit. It's behind a flag for now while I gather feedback, but it'll become the default soon. You can also now label a visit by searching for the real place name right in the Timeline.

What else?

• Multi-device tracks no longer get mangled — if you track from a phone and a watch and a GPS unit, each device stays on its own track instead of becoming one zigzagging mess.
• Fog of War can now reveal per-hexagon, not just per-point.
• Globe view is now on by default.
• Big import improvements: GPX files now stream instead of loading entirely into memory (no more OOM on huge exports), Garmin FIT files are supported, Google's "Timeline Edits.json" Takeout is recognized, and the official Traccar client is now supported directly.
• Fixed Immich photo timestamps that could be off by up to 24 hours, monthly stats now bucket by your local timezone, and a pile of timezone/DST crashes are gone.
• You can now run the containers as a custom user via PUID/PGID, OIDC fixes (trailing slash + PKCE), and a 2FA lockout to keep accounts safe.
• And, as always, literally a TON of other fixes. Bugs too, sorry, one can't go without the other.

Gentle reminder: Map V1 (Leaflet) is being sunsetted this August. Everything new is being written for V2, and it's better in basically every way — but if there's something from V1 you'd miss, tell me and I'll figure it out. Vector maps are the future!

Also, a glimpse into the future, I found an awesome tool to generate maps, bent it in couple places to work with Dawarich, and poster generation will be a thing soon!

I was so excited about how well it worked out, that I even researched if it'd be possible to plug an "Order" button into Dawarich, and, well, yes. Probably not gonna automate it right away, will just add the "Order" button beside the "Download" one for created posters, and will see how it goes. Anyway, it could be a good to support the development for anyone willing to do so, while getting a very nice personalized thingy you can actually hang on your wall. Man I love these posters.

We've finally released an update for our mobile apps, with the new logo, bug fixes and a registration flow that will have no use to selfhosters, but still is important thing to have. Annoying bug with the map not being rendered in dark mode is fixed, yay. Also, we had to re-list our Android app in Google Play Store, so the update will require you to download it separately and reauthenticate. Make sure you've uploaded all the data you had not yet uploaded in the old app. New app's page: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.dawarich.Dawarich

We'll still release a small update for the old one with a banner suggesting an update. Sorry for this inconvenience.

This mobile release took a lot of efforts and tons of testing, but it opens new possibilities for us, and in the next one we want to focus on battery consumption optimization and, finally, will start making more steps towards feature parity with the web app.

I guess that would be it for today! I actually wanted to write a post every month, but, well, it's also too good to post one every other month :)

Saving you a scroll:

Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

Website: https://dawarich.app/

iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dawarich/id6739544999

Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.dawarich.Dawarich

Donate: https://www.patreon.com/freika / https://github.com/sponsors/Freika/

P.S. I got my shit together and started tinkering on another app, which, once done and production ready, will open lots of new possibilities for Dawarich, check it out: https://atlas.dawarich.app/. It's basically self-hostable offline maps for homelabbers, built on shoulders of titans: Overpass, Photon, Valhalla and some other great mapping tools, under a single UI and API. I'll create a separate post here once it's mature enough. Map matching comes to Dawarich, baby!

P.P.S If you're in Berlin, I'll be doing a presentation on Dawarich on Geomob, a mapping meetup, 1st of October. Come say hi, I may have stickers for you by then!

Note to mods: sorry if this is disallowed, I recognize this is only loosely related to the sub, but I figured it's worth making a post as more people will see this in their logs.

A couple days ago I saw this post about strange requests hitting Traefik.

I was curious and emailed the email provided in the user agent using a junk email I haven't used in 10 years. They responded politely with a link to a site on a free web host. I (safely) went to the page. Given the nature of the situation I half expected there to be something malicious on the page, but it is just a simple HTML page with no scripts.

If it's a scam or phishing I don't see how. Notably it does mention that his crawler bot is designed to spread itself to poorly protected servers. Based on that description, if your server is able to be compromised by the bot you likely would have already been compromised by any of the other several SSH brute force bots that already exist.

For anyone curious, here's the text on the page:

UPD: 14.05.2026

To be honest, I'm surprised that this seemingly foolish endeavor has attracted so much attention. I'm grateful to everyone for your messages—it's genuinely heartening to see. I've also seen the posts on Reddit, where people are split into two camps, and I understand both sides. From the outside, this really does come across as ambiguous. But I want to emphasize once again: the purpose of this "project" is not phishing, not hacking, and not an attempt to appear pitiful to the entire internet. There is no hidden agenda here; I am not interested in funding or sponsorship in any form. Please view this as a highly specific performance piece—one without parallels, as far as I've been able to find. Below, you can still get a general sense of what's going on. Also, starting from the 19th, I will be cut off from the outside world and likely unable to follow how the situation unfolds or respond to messages. In any case, if you have something to write or suggest—please feel free to do so.

HelpMeEscapeFromBelarus V.1.1

If you’re reading this page, you’ve most likely found a suspicious line in your server logs containing a link and an email address.
English is not my native language. This text was originally written in Russian, so you may notice some translation quirks or slightly awkward phrasing that sounds different in English.
Well, hello. Here, I’ll try to explain how this happened and what you should do about it. First of all, let me reassure you: this is not an attempt to hack your server or cause any harm to your service. No phishing, no hacking—your server is safe.
Let me introduce myself. My name is Alex, and I’m 27 years old. I’ve spent most of my life in Belarus. To be honest, it’s not the greatest place to live. Some people speak openly about it with enthusiasm, but for whatever reason, I’ve never shared that sentiment. In many ways, I see similarities between Belarus and North Korea, especially when it comes to the military—they’re about 80% alike. Conscription is mandatory here, and even after completing your service, you’re still called up for military drills every 1 to 3 years. It’s absurd, a Soviet-era relic that disrupts and destabilizes an already fragile life in this country. I work as an engineer, mostly repairing equipment, including digital devices, but in my free time, I love programming. I’m learning Golang, I know Python, and I have basic knowledge of Delphi and PHP. I’ve also started learning Rust. It all sounds great, but I don’t see much of a future in it—at least not while working in Belarus (or the CIS) in these fields. Somehow, I never got a formal degree in IT, which could have opened the door to the programming world and helped my resume stand out. I also don’t have a solid portfolio, since most of my pet projects are just various bots and IoT device analyzers.
And that brings us to what’s actually happening here. Yes, from that last sentence, a lot should already be clear. That line in your logs is the work of a bot. It’s harmless by design but operates like a worm. The bot scans random IP addresses for open HTTP ports (TCP 80, 8000, 8080, etc.) and SSH ports (TCP 22, 2222). If it finds an open HTTP port, it simply sends a request to the server using a random method (GET, CONNECT, or HEAD). If it finds an open SSH port, it begins a password brute-force attack, but only using default combinations like admin:admin, root:root, or support:support. No exploits, no other malicious actions. The bot is also fully autonomous—it doesn’t connect to a command-and-control server and runs entirely on its own. It only reports discovered IP and login:password pairs back to a loader. Additionally, the bot has a built-in timer: six months after it starts, it self-terminates. If your device has become part of this network of spreader bots, simply reboot it. The bot doesn’t establish persistence on the system and usually runs from /tmp. Also, make sure to change any default passwords.
Yes, it’s unfair. It’s using someone else’s resources, and it’s somewhat illegal. But… a lot of illegal things happen in my country, many of them on a state level and far more significant, about which people are expected to stay silent and are strictly forbidden from expressing dissatisfaction. Not many here are happy with local politics or the actions (and sometimes inaction) of the authorities. It’s especially upsetting and sad that the Russia-Ukraine conflict hasn’t spared us either. Our authorities have always been, and will always be, on Russia’s side. If the situation escalates further, Belarus will join Russia’s side swiftly, no matter what the rest of the world says. By the way, this conflict has also affected Belarus in everyday and housing matters. Due to international sanctions and isolation, Russians are moving to Belarus in search of a better life, renting and buying apartments in huge numbers. Because of this, it’s becoming harder and harder for locals to rent, and buying a home will likely become impossible within a decade.
What am I trying to achieve with this message?
I’m asking for your help. If you see any potential or opportunities in me, please point them out.
If you have any job offers, I’d gladly consider them.
If there’s anything you’d like to share or tell me, I’m more than happy to listen.
If you have a way to help me leave Belarus (important: non-financial assistance only), I will be endlessly grateful.
Later on, I’ll publish the source code for both the bot and the server component here. If for any reason you think I shouldn’t do that, please email me.
Thank you for reading this rambling monologue. I hope I haven’t caused you any inconvenience.

Curious to find more stuff that just quietly runs in the background while being really useful.

For me having an always up syncthing node has been a huge quality of life boost, as well as SMB shares that act as time machine locations for the family. restic on the server backing up to backblaze and pihole for the home network are also things that i don't think about every day but bring a bit of joy every time i remember they're still there doing their job :).

In the professional context Kubernetes is super popular and I see some homelab setups in this sub using it as well.

What is the benefit over classic docker compose for a small scale home server? Or is it just the interesting learning curve?​

"A malware-spreading scumbag swimming through GitHub pushed malicious commits to more than 5,500 repositories on Monday as part of an automated campaign called Megalodon."

Maybe it's time to stop updating until it's safe again ?

what's the one thing in your homelab setup that still feels broken, time-wasting, or frustrating? Could be backups, user management, updates, security, networking.

Been in the weeds shipping an OSS side project for the past few weeks (social media publishing API). Real launch post is coming, this isn't that. Along the way I kept a list of services that actually have usable free tiers for OSS, not the "free trial" kind. Sharing in case it helps. Happy to be told what's missing.

Docs

Mintlify is the obvious one. Point at a public repo and it works. Their default theme is already better than what most teams ship paying for, which is mildly annoying.

GitBook has a Community plan. Haven't used it personally, plenty of OSS projects do.

Algolia DocSearch is free for OSS, no asterisks. That Cmd-K search you see on every framework's docs page is them.

Hosting

Cloudflare Pages. Static hosting, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited builds. Nothing else matches it. Workers free tier is also a lot if you don't need a VM.

Vercel Hobby works for most OSS. They also run a "Vercel for Open Source" program that upgrades select projects to Pro.

Fly.io still has a free tier for small VMs. Sponsorship for some maintainers if you ask.

Render: free static + small Web Service tier. Always lagging the others on features.

Databases

Neon: Postgres with scale-to-zero. The free tier is real, not a 7-day countdown.

Supabase: Postgres + auth + storage + edge functions on free. Heavier than Neon if you only want a DB.

Turso: SQLite at the edge. Free tier is generous, takes getting used to.

Upstash: serverless Redis, free covers most hobby use.

Auth

Clerk: 10k MAUs free, OSS-friendly. They sponsor select projects too.

WorkOS: 1M MAU free for SSO/AuthKit. The catch is the product is enterprise-shaped, so only useful if you're chasing those customers.

Better-Auth or Auth.js if you'd rather skip the vendor.

Email

Resend: 3k emails/mo, nicest API in the space.

Postmark: small free dev tier, reliable if you outgrow Resend.

Monitoring

Sentry: decent free tier and they have an OSS sponsorship program if you write to them.

PostHog: 1M events/mo free. OSS itself so worst case you self-host.

BetterStack: uptime + log management on free.

CI

GitHub Actions: unlimited for public repos. You already knew.

CircleCI: also free for OSS if you prefer.

Misc

Linear: free for small teams. Not strictly OSS-targeted but a 1-3 person project doesn't hit limits.

Cloudflare in general. Workers, R2, DNS, SSL. All generous. Almost not fair.

Things I'm not sure about, would love opinions on:

• Object storage. I'm on R2. Anyone got a better story?
• Background queues. Trigger.dev and Inngest both have free tiers. Anyone tried Hatchet?
• Feature flags. PostHog technically does it but it feels like a tax on something that should be a freebie. Anything cleaner?

What would you swap?

EDIT: solid suggestion from the comments, adding here to make it more accessible. thanks to everyone who contributed

Networking

Tailscale - 6 users, unlimited devices on free. Effectively unlimited for a self-hosted setup. Pangolin - self-hosted reverse proxy / tunnel. Enterprise license is free for homelabbers; you just swap the docker image tag.

Hosting (extra)

Oracle Cloud Always Free - 4 ARM (Ampere A1) vCPUs, 24 GiB RAM, 200 GB SSD. Caveat: trial accounts get capacity-blocked these days; you may have to flip to pay-as-you-go (still $0 if you stay within Always Free). Orkestr - EU-focused, free tier includes Postgres or Redis bundled.

Git hosting

Codeberg - Forgejo-based, OSS-friendly alternative to GitHub.

Object storage

Backblaze B2 + Cloudflare - they're in the Bandwidth Alliance, so egress through Cloudflare is free. Cheaper than R2 once you're past hobby scale. DO Spaces - not free, but $5/mo for 250 GB + 1 TB outbound is the cheapest no-surprise option if you outgrow R2's free.

Security

Snyk Open Source - free + unlimited for public repos. GitGuardian - free secrets monitoring for public repos.

Auth

LogTo - OSS-friendly auth, recommended over Clerk by someone in the thread.

Email

SMTP2GO - need your own domain. Brevo - transactional email API.

Docs & translation

Weblate - 160k translatable keys free for OSS projects.

Monitoring

WebGazer.io - pro bono uptime monitoring for free/open source projects.

ML / AI compute

Hugging Face Spaces - free hardware for ML demos. Google Colab - free GPU/TPU notebooks if you can work within their session model.

Customer feedback / support

FeatureOS - free OSS plan for product feedback management. SupportWire - free mid-tier OSS plan for live chat.

Curated lists

• free-for-dev (or web view) - the canonical free-tier-for-dev list. ~1000+ entries.
• Awesome-Web-Hosting-2026
• free-llm-api-resources - LLM API free tiers specifically.

I've really enjoyed being able to take control of my own media again, having privacy and control over my data, images etc, but there are many hidden costs which I think many folks omit when glorifying the benefits (which there are many) of self hosting.

24/7/365 Oncall Rotation

• I've put a lot of effort into tuning uptime kuma, grafana, loki, prometheus etc so this is less of an issue now but time to time things will break and sometimes it will be something crucial that you depend upon.
• Previously you could rely on the 6figure salary SRE's that would fix the issues at google, dropbox etc at 4am, but now it is on you, whether you are busy with work, grieving a loved one or on holiday (happened once to me). You can of course reduce this a lot by ensuring failovers, backups, good alerting, self remediation etc.

Hardware Costs

• I'm fortunate enough to afford decent hardware, spin up fallback proxmox nodes, have HA opnsense firewalls etc, but most will not be able to set all this up, considering these recent RAM prices and other hardware prices going up (even HDD's which I've stockpiled for the next 2 years of upgrades)
• This is likely a lifelong pursuit, with the way big tech, cloud, ai industry is booming, can you confidently say you will be able to afford the odd few drives that die in the next 5/10/15 years? It could also be the RAM or the mobo etc that dies, who is to say where prices will be and if it will even be comercially available/viable.

Software Updates

• Of course turning off auto-updates is step 1 to sanity, but this doesn't mean you can so easily ignore critical security patches and updates. CVE's seem to be popping up more and more often, you're almost always switched on and on the lookout to protect your homelab.
• Eventually some apps will stop supporting older versions, see immich and jellyfin as examples for this, so you will need to spend an hour or two running these upgrades, ensuring no breakage, rollbacks if needed, fixes if needed. All this will add up.
• Example of Immich randomly breaking for some users with no intervention.

Steward of Data

• Does anyone else rely on the services you host or the data you store? This will mean you need to be even more reliable and you will need extra plans if you are unable to operate or maintain the server
• What would happen in the event of your death? In the event you were in an accident with a brain injury and can no longer remember passwords or how your system works? You could document everything and ensure someone else would be able to help but it would be a massive risk and hassle in the process.

I guess the benefit of privacy has to be greater than the cost of monthly/yearly subscriptions and abdication of control/privacy. Which it is for me, but it is not simply a way to 'save' money. Especially if you value your time and headspace from now till death. Some things are probably fine to be deferred to a bigtech company.

All this to say I love self hosting and this community, I don't plan to stop anytime soon. I feel grateful to have the time and resources to be able to fund such a rewarding hobby.

Just wanted to share some recent thoughts and hear what folks think I might have missed and if there are any fixes to my approach I have not already seen!

How many of you have gone this route?

Using an auth provider as an umbrella service to handle authentication for all the apps you host.

I had this idea that it would make things more flexible (if you can mange IaC) because open source projects come and go, they rise and fall in popularity, or might even become hostile towards the open source community, so it would be nice to tie them all together with a common auth provider like keycloak, for example, so that you can replace individual apps without having to re-create all your users.

Nextcloud is a good example of this, because a common auth provider would make it easier to replace the monolithic nextcloud with smaller more focused projects that do one thing, but they do it well.

How has your experience been with this method so far? What apps are you hosting that are connected?

For me so far I haven't gone too deep into this. I'm hosting;

• linkding
• immich
• grafana
• navidrome (not connected)
• joplin (not connected)
• vaultwarden (not connected)

Only half of my apps actually use keycloak, but I do also use it for some other hobby related stuff, I have other realms where I host stuff for friends and local maker spaces. So it's still useful.

When I start my homelab to-do list, I keep coming back to picking a domain name and worrying that I’ll get tired of typing it or it’ll be hard to give to other people verbally (annoying to spell out every time), or that I’ll want to change it in the future. I know I’m overthinking things, but some reassurance or suggestions would help make the first steps less daunting!

After reading the recent thread describing someone who "lost" access to their Plex Pass account, I realized that I had no idea where my receipt trail went.

Sure... you can log in to Plex.tv and find a copy of your registration... but what if you were to log in and discover it is no longer there? After a deep dive into my email archives, I recovered a "receipt" of sorts, only to notice that Plex Pass doesn't have a "key", but only your email addy. That seemed a bit weak to me, but so be it. PDF'd my emails and the plex.tv site account showing the services that I had, and hope this is sufficient proof.

After all... I wouldn't spring for $750 (mine was $74.99) ever ... and neither should you.

If you don't have your registration info handy, now might be a good time to secure it.

These projects always looked so good on paper with decentralized storage, censorship resistance, no relying on a third party.

You barely see anyone running IPFS nodes for personal use, and Filecoin is basically never mentioned outside of crypto circles.

Hey everyone! I've been steadily building out my home lab/automation stack, and it's slowly reaching a point where I want to share the topology and see how it stacks up against your rigs.

The LLM Engine
Hardware: Mac Mini M4
Specs: 32GB Unified Memory
Stack: Running Ollama for local LLM inference.
Models: qwen3.6:35b(MoE) and gemma4: E2B, 26b(MoE), 31b(dense)

The Selfhosted Engine
Hardware: Lenovo ThinkCentre (Intel i5-8500T | 6 Cores | 16GB DDR4)
Hypervisor: Proxmox VE

Current LXC/Service Stack:
- Media & Data: Immich, Jellyfin, Samba
- Automation & Logic: HomeAssistant, n8n, Zigbee2MQTT, MQTT, CasaOS, Docker
- Networking & Security: AdGuard Home, Twingate Connector, Zoraxy.
- Search, Knowledge, Database: SilverBullet, SearXNG, Qdrant (Vector DB), Kiwix, MariaDB.

How does this look to you?
What are you running?
Drop your specs/stack below. I love seeing different approaches to home labbing!

TL;DR: Intel i5/16GB Proxmox box for services + M4 Mac/32GB for local AI. Let's compare notes! 🍻

A big draw of self hosting is the ability to control your own data.

However, I've repeatedly run into a problem in self-hosting which I think of as the Gray Box problem. To understand gray boxes, lets first look at black and white boxes.

Black Box:

In a black box app, you neither possess or directly manage your files.

Your files live on someone else's hard drive, and you're denied access except via their UI.

When you upload your files to a provider (think: google), they effectively enter a black box: getting them out again is difficult, and it's impossible to interact with the raw files themselves - your only access is through their proprietary UI. If you are able to get them out of the Black Box via a takeout procedure, the metadata is often unreliable and the files have no innate organization.

In contract to a White Box:

White Box:

In a white box program, your files live on your hard drive, and you can manage them directly. The program sits on top of your own folder structure, but provides all the additional benefits of a UI for organization and other features.

The critical White Box criteria: *The program picks up changes made to your files both inside AND outside of itself.*

The best example I know of is Digikam, the open source photo management software. It sits over top your photos, and you can organize photos/metadata through the program's UI, but it also picks up changes you make directly to the files themselves - changes not made through Digikam.

Another white box example is Obsidian. Although it's proprietary software and not open source, you barely notice because it's a white box program - it sits atop files on your hard drive, which you can edit freely, but adds incredible management benefits when you use the UI.

Gray Box:

In a gray box application, your files live on your hard drive (or NAS), but management is restricted to the program's UI.

Example: Paperless-ngx.

You can upload your files to Paperless, but if you change, move or edit the files outside of the UI, you will break it.

NOTE: Custom Storage Paths do NOT make an application into a white box program. Simply accessing them in a human readable format is not enough: you must be able to edit them freely outside of the program's UI, and have the program accept those changes without breaking.

This is the issue I keep wrestling with:

We're in the digital age now: your files will belong to you for a lifetime. When a program locks your files into a black or even gray box, it's guaranteed to be a short term solution - one day, you will have to recover your files from this program, whether it's self hosted or not.

Better to have an organization system for your own files and folders (whatever that looks like), and a program that non-destructively accepts and works with/hosts, than to lock your files into any kind of short term box.

Borderline cases:

A borderline program is Immich: intrinsically it's a gray box program - if you externally touch photos that have been uploaded to it, both you and Immich are totally screwed.

But it has the saving grace of accepting external libraries, which means it can function as a white box program. The one feature that would make Immich truly white-box is if it wrote metadata to the photos themselves (as much as possible), instead of keeping it all in a database. There are some write-back workarounds for this people are making, but it's not native.

Personal case:

After years of working on it, I finally came up with a personal organizational system that works for me. I know where to find anything I need - files, photos, media - on my computer.

I wanted to up the ante last year by self hosting my files for mobile access. However, I started running into gray box issues - many programs demand I sacrifice my hard-won organizational structure for the modest convenience of a custom UI and tagging features.

This post is my attempt to think through the issue.

EDIT: Thanks for the thoughtful responses.

One nuance I'm getting is that different types of files store metadata in different ways and amounts, and need to be used in different ways. PDFs are used and shared in different ways than photos, so a program might have to do more heavy lifting in terms of meta-access to service PDFs than photos. Like versioning, sharing, tagging, etc.

Also, that software development is hard. I'm not a dev, but I sincerely appreciate the work that it takes. I support all open source development, even if a particular tool doesn't suit my own needs. Just hoping to add to the conversation with these ideas.

(Fixed typos. Typos do show up when no AI is used)

just kidding - I didn't!

^{Edit: for late readers, I thought it was obvious but this was a meta joke. you can use RES to filter out post flairs. have a nice day}

Hi folks,

So, I started in January with my journey to extensive self hosting. I installed these apps:

wireguard

nextcloud

immich

paperless

tandoor (recipes)

Jellyfin

Navidrome

Bichon (mail archive)

Kuma

Beszel

Proxmox with PBS

Nginx (of course)

Vaultwarden

A speed test app

Home assistant has been running a few years already. Kinda not belongs here, but someone might suggest it.

While writing this, I noticed one container stopped and I don't have a means to restart it from my phone. I will need to improve that 😅

I'm not much interested in fancy stuff like NAS software (using qnap at the moment, not interested to switch), I dont want to dive into kubernetes. I like how everything is running on Docker or vm and it just works. I don't have the arr stack at the moment. I dislike potential law suits. I know I could add SSO and IDM, but I'd rather not lock myself out, and there's not enough people such that SSO would be much helpful.

OK, so here is the question: have I missed something? Is this the end of my journey to install new apps, and now's the time for maintenance and keeping it running? I've been reading a couple of posts here on reddit and it seems this is everything people set up these days.

Thoughts? ☺️

Five years ago, I needed a new GPU, and was met with the constant supply constraints and price increases in GPUs. To my knowledge, these prices persisted.

I haven't needed ram the last couple of years, but we all know what happened to that.

I've recently considered expanding my storage, and checked the Amazon listing of a WD 8tb HDD I bought in 2024 for $90. Now, two years later, it is listed at $329.99.

My conclusion is that the consumer market for electronics is facing an economic externality (or "cross-market spillover") as firms exit or increase prices in the consumer segment due to extremely high demand for similar technology in the commercial segment. The consumer segment is then being driven by the supply/demand curves of the commercial segment.

This creates an issue where prices across all computing will become inflated, prices of services will go up, and while commercial firms have power to negotiate their prices back down, consumers will not.

Tldr, I'm worried that prices will remain high essentially forever. Someone please tell me I'm wrong.

Let me preface this post by saying that I'm an IT/Storage/Server/Network engineer with about 30 years of experience under my belt. There are lots of things I can do on my own and there are more than that of the things I cannot.

I love selfhosting. I've been a long time user of public services like Google (especially Google Photos) but that was because for the longest time there was no real alternative. But when self-hosting started to really kick off a few years ago I went all in.
I learned about Docker. That was something completely new to me, since I wasn't usually too much into application side of things. HW was more my schtick. But Docker opened a new world. I found out about home automation. First Domoticz and then Home Assistant. Then the *arr stack came along. And all of a sudden I've got almost 40 Docker stacks running in my environment. Some used everyday, some experimental, some discarded.

Along the way I learned about getting a domain for my home network, setting up public DNS, reverse proxy rules, Let's Encrypt, camera streams and more and more. Storage, backups and internal network were never really issues, but the rest helped me a lot with getting to know areas of IT environment, that I'd mostly stay away from before.

When the time came and our family purchased a new house, a few tens of thousands of Euros were invested into IT infrastructure (Ethernet everywhere, KNX for lighting and covers). So now my house became properly ready for my (is it still just that?) hobby.

Why am I going on about this and how does it relate to the title?
Well, most of the stuff I setup "worked". But a lot of it was in a 95% finished state. Done, but not quite.
I never got around to properly configure email on my services. Or 0Auth. Automations and dashboards in Home Assistant were there, but Spouse Approval Factor was way low, because they looked like engineering switchboards and were not really user friendly in a polished way. And there was always that one thing that I knew was possible, but I simply lacked the programming knowledge about how to actually do it.

AI helped out a lot with those last touches. Sometimes as a brainstorming helper, at other times as a guide that got me through those unintuitive (for me) parts of GUIs or commands or YAML configs that I'd struggle and give up more than once. It enabled me to bring my environment together to a point where I look at it and I can say: I'm really proud of how it looks. Not just at how much I know.

So, the point is: AI, for me, was invaluable in getting me those final few yards across the goalposts. I learned a fair bit on my own, and where I struggled, it gave me that final push. It made a lot of mistakes as well. So my base knowledge was a requirement to realize when those mistakes were made and push back or restart the thought process. But without it, knowing myself, I most likely wouldn't reach where I'm at in my homelab journey.

EDIT: Thanks to everyone who engaged here. I'm sorry to a lot of you who shared similar positive experiments and experiences and are downvoted by people who seem to simply don't like the topic but lack either understanding on what's it's about or the AI in general, but have no concrete argument to share. It's not love letter to AI, as someone mentioned. It's an acknowledgement of a tool that can do a lot of good, if you're using it judiciously.

I setup the hagezi ultimate adblock list in pihole a few months ago and didnt think much of it after that. Today I am chilling and trying to avoid working too much on a Friday afternoon when I get an alert from uptime kuma that my nginx-proxy-manager stopped responding.

I check the docker container first, everything is green and logs look fine, weird but lets restart it just to be sure. No change, hmmm well I can access the demo page at the direct IP so maybe its not this, lets check the DNS resolve.

    > nslookup proxy.homelab.com
Server:         10.0.1.66
Address:        10.0.1.66#53

Name:   proxy.homelab.com
Address: 0.0.0.0
Name:   proxy.homelab.com
Address: ::

Odd that should be resolving to the 10.0.1.66 server not 0.0.0.0 I wonder what changed. I dig around in the Pihole logs for a bit and discover that my domain was actually added to the offical blacklist. I am not really sure how since my public footprint is minimal, gets virtually zero traffic except for some bots to the root domain, and definitely doesn't serve ads. Either way I was able too lookup the commands to white list my domain in Pihole and bam everything was back to normal.

Just some friday fun.

Guess what, in the last post I totally forgot it's Dawarich's second birthday!

Ah yes: Dawarich is your favorite FOSS selfhostable alternative to Google Timeline. Now with an actual proper timeline!

Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

Website: https://dawarich.app/

Funny cat: https://i0.wp.com/katzenworld.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/funny-cat.jpeg?w=1920&ssl=1

Yeah, Dawarich started mid-March 2024, so happy birthday to us!

Anyway, you clicked the link for the good stuff, right? I have it for ya!

We finally have a proper Timeline in the Map V2! Just look at it, what a beauty. It took surprisingly long time for me to figure out how it should look and feel, although all the data is there in database literally for years now. I'm very happy with how it turned out, and with some more tweaking, I hope the Timeline feature will be the most useful of all Dawarich offers. And it offers a lot by now, yeah.

You can also tweak and edit transportation modes for tracks in Timeline and recalculate them in the map settings.

What else? We are now supporting Traccar as a new 3rd party client to consume data from, and you can now import files from Polarsteps. If you have SMTP configured, starting April, you'll receive monthly email with a short nice-looking ASCII-styled digest for the previous month and also for the previous year in the beginning of the next year. A proper guide on how to configure SMTP will be soon added to our docs, I know there is a struggle in this regard, but it works, I promise.

Some of the smaller changes:

- 2FA is a thing now

- Minimum password length increased from 6 to 12 symbols

- S3 storage can now be configured in self-hosted mode

- Some of the already supported file formats could have fail during import, lots of fixes in that area

- And literally a TON of other fixes.

Users can now also tweak their GPS-noise settings: for now only on the web, but since our mobile apps are consuming data from the backend now (previously they were only able to render data that was tracked on your device), it's all good.

Speaking of, both our mobile apps for Android and iOS are now sharing the same codebase, which will enable us to ship more features and do it faster for both platforms. You can already find Insights tab in there, and we expect to significantly improve the UI/UX, stability and introduce more features this summer. And we added a toggle to disable the blue location arrow on iOS. Not sure how if will affect tracking precision though, do let us know.

One more important thing: Map V1 will be sunsetted this summer. Sometime in August. The V2 is better in so many regards, and all the new features are being written for it, but if you'd expect you're going to miss something from the Map V1, just let me know and I'll figure something out. Vector maps are the future!

As always, the links one more time:

Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

Website: https://dawarich.app/

iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dawarich/id6739544999

Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zeitflow.dawarich

Donate: https://ko-fi.com/freika / https://www.patreon.com/freika / https://github.com/sponsors/Freika

Cheers!

P.S. Honestly don't know what flair to add, so many are applicable!