My long term plan is to show temperature and humidity on screen, add the ability to turn my fan on via infrared LEDs, and connect it all up to Home Assistant. In the short term, I want to get the basics working, being able to upload code, with a temperature display if I can. The device The device I have was from an AliExpress listing. I thought the screen would be great for quick feedback, and I think that is definitely true here. ...
I tried to use Docker Swarm to expand my self-hosting capabilities. My thinking was that I have my current hosting in a docker-compose.yml file, so I should easily be able to use Swarm. Right? I span up 3 VMs in Proxmox and added them to a swarm (relatively easy - I found a great tutorial that I half followed here so I’m not going to rehash it). I didn’t follow it exactly (as the example was using Docker-in-Docker). I setup the swarm manually then wrote a script to add in a registry proxy (I almost immediately ran into the Docker Hub pull limit when experimenting with Swarm). ...
I’m self hosting multiple services at home, and in the past my main way of doing this has been to expose port 443 on my home internet, and use Traefik as an SSL terminator and proxy to route to multiple services with different subdomains. It works great, and in general I’d recommend that approach as a way of exposing services if you’re happy with the security implications of exposing a port from your home internet connection. ...
A quick article on how I got Pihole working on Debian 11 AKA Bullseye. It’s not an officially supported OS yet, but I wanted to try getting it working. It took a bit of digging to work out some of the weird cases, but after debugging the issues I’ve got it working. Sources https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/573152/how-to-troubleshoot-lighttpd-service-not-starting-up https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/issues/1401 https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/pi-hole-on-debian-bullseye/43464/8 # install packages that we seem to need sudo apt-get install wget curl net-tools gamin lighttpd lighttpd-mod-deflate # Install Pihole. Piping to bash is controversial so download the file # if you feel the need to review the script before running. curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | PIHOLE_SKIP_OS_CHECK=true sudo -E bash # How to change the admin password (I like to do this immediately) PIHOLE_SKIP_OS_CHECK=true sudo -E pihole -a -p Some of my debugging steps included needing to restart or see the status of services, so if you run into issues these commands may help you debug: ...
The next step for me getting started with Proxmox was to add a bit more storage. The bundled 256GB SSDs are great for the basics, but I’m mainly concerned with the longevity of them (considering they are already well used!) and generally the fact that it’s not really that much space. Amazon to the rescue with some 1TB NVMe drives on sale for £59 which is an absolute bargain. I had to go with NVMe drives as it was the only spare slot for storage available in the miniature nodes I picked up (covered in my last article). They are not high performance drives but they will suffice for my use cases. ...
So I’ve been wanting to expand my home server hosting capabilities. I’ve got a load of things I host at home. Just a few of them are: I run the controller for my home SDN (software defined network), which probably warrants a post of it’s own, in Docker! I personally run TP-Link Omada hardware. I host a GitLab runner, to allow me to run CI for my jobs in GitLab for free! I run Owncloud so I can have my own ‘Dropbox’ at home (with terabytes of storage!) Tautulli which is a monitor for my Plex server. So to that end… I bought a job lot of mini PCs off eBay. I was partially inspired by the ServeTheHome Project TinyMiniMicro series (one of their excellent articles is here), as well as some YouTubers experience with Raspberry Pi clusters. I thought about picking up one of the Raspberry Pi racks available for 4-5 Pis (I had my eye on this one for a while…) but at the end of the day, I feel I need more power than is available in your standard Raspberry Pi. ...
Having a website can be a bit of a chore. Some people don’t bother at all and I get that. It can be a chore to host, maintain, keep secure, deploy etc. Of course there are options such as Squarespace and Wix, which give you the ‘drag and drop’ site and could offer things like payments and shop fronts. Then there are blogging sites of which Medium is the one I see used the most. And this probably works for the less tech savvy or people that are just wanting to get content ‘out there’ in a text format; other formats like video and podcasts are of course also popular. ...