Self-Hoster 🏡

• Fleet: 2–3 devices · 11–20 TB
• Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Fun / the hobby itself
• My MVPs: Home Assistant, Navidrome, Jellyfin

Depending on how you define multiple operating systems, you can use proxmox

My smartphone progression was as follows

• Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini (Don’t remember when I got this one. I wish companies still made phones this small…)
• Huawei P9 Lite (Bought in 2016 I think)
• Xiaomi Mi 9T (Bought in 2019)
• Google Pixel 7 (Bought in 2023)

So far, none of my phones had to be replaced due to hardware failure or damage luckily. The S3 Mini simply got too old. When I upgraded, it could not even play a Youtube video in the app without lagging due to severe RAM limitations. I remember having a screenshot of the RAM usage that said I had less than a MiB of RAM remaining at some point.

My P9 lite was fine. At some point my grandmother decided she wanted a smartphone though and instead of buying a new one for herself she told me to upgrade and give her the old one. When that one got to slow for her, the cycle repeated with me giving her my Xiaomi Mi 9T and upgrading to the Pixel 7 which I use to this day.

I usually tell me that I’ll be happy to have already done that thing later in the day whereas I will curse my earlier self if I still haven’t done it.

Sometimes it even works. Usually for small stuff like emptying the dish washer at least.

You can use a gps logging app (I use gps logger on android) to create gps tracks and sync them with your photos via the timestamp. Digikam has a tool for that built in, not sure what other software supports it.

This way I don’t have to manually tag every photo but instead only those where the gps failed because I was underground or where I forgot to turn it on

I believe the back to home VPN from MikroTik is also wireguard. At least it is on mine. No idea if you can use a different VPN solution with it.

The Fractal Design Define R cases can house a lot of hard drives, but they are kind of big. My Define R6 can theoretically house 11 3.5" drives iirc in addition to 4x 2.5" but it does not come with that many drive sleds out of the box. For the 2.5" drives only 2 sleds are included. I think for the 3.5" it was about 6.

Honestly, I’m really happy with the ability to just try out stuff with docker and then nuke the entire compose stack if it does not work. I also know perfectly where any possible leftovers from the attempt are (the bind mounts or volumes) and can be certain I deleted everything I “installed”.

Although I have to admit that I absolutely had some issues with containers in the past, mainly when there are two or more containers with dependencies on one another.

Never used k8s or the cloud so I have nothing to comment on that ;D

Depending on what router you use, setting up a VPN connection into your own home network may be the simplest solution and possibly also the most secure.

In germany at least, FritzBox seems to be the dominant router and they offer a very simple VPN setup which utilizes their own domain to initiate a connection.

I personally use a MikroTik router at home (still not sure if that was the best idea…) and they have a similar thing called Back To Home VPN. The Fritzbox gave me less trouble setting up though.

For phone <-> PC I use localsend. If I do PC to PC, possibly even large amounts of files or large files in general I put them on a network drive specifically intended for that purpose

I used to be on plex for similar reasons.

Remote login is still a hassle of course. I work around it with a VPN but that causes issues sometimes.

Plex Amp went great for a while for me until it suddenly didn’t. The app got incredibly laggy on my phone when I was playing playlists of a 1000 songs or more. I switched to navidrome + Symfonium as an alternative and set up remote access with a cloudflare tunnel.

I like to think I got my money out of mine as well, even though I only used it for like a year or two before switching to jellyfin.

I’m not that well informed on the specifics of the topic but I would say that AI has a lot of potential to do good in medical applications. I believe there was quite a bit of research into detecting various forms of cancer earlier and more reliably by using neural networks.

Two rack rails bolted together with a power strip and a tray holding my server mini PC. My router is bolted on as well to act as a switch for everything while also providing Wifi to my phone and laptop

I kind of railroaded myself into using calibre unfortunately.

I have a very specific filenaming scheme which I originally came up with back when I only used folders for organising my books in order to group together books that belong to a series but where the series is part of a larger universe.

Basically my folder structure is {World}/{Reading Order}; {Series} #{Series_Index} - {Title} - {Author}

On my kobo I have the autoshelf plugin installed which automatically parses this information when I add books and groups them together by world while filling out the series information.

In order to properly make use of this system I need to use Calibre custom columns and be able to export the books I want with this specific name format. I have yet to find a program other than calibre that would support this.

It would probably be smarter for me to reorganize my books at some point but I really like being able to basically drop a ton of books at once onto my reader using SFTP and as far as I can tell all common options rely on manually downloading the books, sending them directly to the reader or pulling them from their internal file storage in whatever form the application stores them…

I do like Audiobookshelf for the ability to add a book to multiple series, but the missing mass export functions stop me from switching

I name mine after greek and roman gods.

My NAS is bamed Hestia, the goddess of the bearth and home.

My docker server is called Poseidon due to the sea iconography of docker. My second iteration of my docker server where I tried playing around with podman I called Neptune.

I briefly had a Raspberry Pi for experimenting with some stuff which was called Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth.

My Proxmox machine on which pretty much all ky other servers are run as VMs is called Atlas, as the Titan holding up my personal network.

I also have a truenas VM which I boringly called truenas…

Quick question, the way you say server/agent architecture, does this mean that the server manages the backup schedule and pulls the backups from the systems or does the connected computer initiate the backups?

I’m currently using synology active backup for my server and used to also use it for my desktop. Linux support is not ideal though and I would like to move to something with similar capabilities that is also not vendor locked.

My personal usecase would be backing up a single server, a desktop and a laptop.

Good questions. Would like to know that too

I have a bare minimum of documentation as markdown files which I take care to keep in an accessible lovation, aka not on my server.

If my server does ever go down, I might really want to access the (admittedly limited) documentation for it

I read the title and this was literally the first thing that popped in my head