• 0 Posts
  • 8 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: October 16th, 2023

help-circle

  • Choosing a service to NOT selfhost is a subjective descision.

    I host 18 Proxmox VMs and 20 Docker containers at home. I also was selfhosting a WebDAV server for synchronizing my Joplin notes between devices and Vaultwarden for managing my Bitwarden vault, but decided to push the Joplin synchronization target to Dropbox [free] and to use Bitwarden’s free cloud solution for my passwords and secure notes. I did this because I will need immediate access to these two critical sources of information should my house burn down, or get blown over by a tornado. I have extremely strong passcodes for these and trust the hosts.

    This was strictly a personal decision. YMMV.



  • In a nutshell, I have no interest in the feature bloat being introduced into Plex. I want a simple media server. Jellyfin provides this, and includes basic features like hardware transcoding and live-TV. I migrated from Plex [free] to Jellyfin a couple of years ago and haven’t looked back.

    I also am in the Apple ecosystem and pay $10 USD per year for the Infuse app, which is more polished IMO than both the native Jellyfin and Plex clients.


  • I use Homepage. There are plenty of other options, but I prefer Homepage because of it’s speed and simplicity. Many landing page apps allow for customizing on the page itself. Homepage is configured using YAML files, and therefore static, so family members will not be able to make changes, or accidentally break it, once you have it set up.

    Here is a screenshot of my… Homepage.

    I use custom images and icons uploaded to Dropbox in… icons-72x72-png.zip

    These are kept in volumes for persistence…

    --volume homepage_config:/app/config \
    --volume homepage_icons:/app/public/icons 
    --volume homepage_images:/app/public/images \
    

  • It may be me, or Reddit could be flaking out, but it appears that everyone except you and I have deleted their comments. I also cannot reply to your comment about N8N, so I am commenting again. Weird…

    I recommended Pushover in my previous comment. To address your initial question, I’m running Docker containers for Mailrise, which provides an SMTP gateway that embeds Apprise code, and also Apprise standalone. I use Mailrise for services that support only SMTP notifications (e.g. Proxmox). Mailrise translates an email message and, using Apprise code, submits it to Pushover. I use Apprise standalone for receiving notifications from Healthchecks, which monitors cron jobs. Healthchecks supports a number of notification services, but standalone Apprise was the best fit for me.

    As I understand, Apprise has its own light-weight HTML API for creating and configuring notification endpoints. It can create a webhook endpoint, but I don’t believe it receives messages as webhooks.

    Like me, you probably will need multiple services. I tossed up an N8N container out of curiosity. It can accept a webhook and then act on it. It also supports Pushover. So, it looks like a webhook to N8N can be translated to a Pushover notification. Using Mailrise (for SMTP messages) along with N8N (for webhook and other messages) should provide the extensibility you’re looking for.

    Again, I highly recommend Pushover. Receiving notifications from many different sources, that are organized into “applications” with their own icons, in one mobile app is a tremendous benefit… to me anyway.


  • I use Telegraf + InfluxDB + Grafana for monitoring my home network and systems. Grafana has a learning curve for building panels and dashboards, but is incredibly flexible. I use it for more than server performance. I have a dual-monitor “kiosk” (old Mac mini) in my office displaying two Grafana dashboards. These are:

    Network/Power/Storage showing:

    • firewall block events & sources for last 12 hrs (from pfSense via Elasticsearch),
    • current UPS statuses and power usage for last 12 hrs (Telegraf apcupsd plugin -> InfluxDB),
    • WAN traffic for last 12 hrs ( from pfSense via Telegraf -> InfluxDB),
    • current DHCP clients (custom Python script -> MySQL), and
    • current drive and RAID pool health (custom Python scripts -> MySQL)

    Server sensors and performance showing:

    • current status of important cron jobs (using Healthchecks -> Prometheus),
    • current server CPU usage and temps, and memory usage (Telegraf -> InfluxDB)
    • server host CPU usage and temps, and memory usage for last 3 hrs (Telegraf -> InfluxDB)
    • Proxmox VM CPU and memory usage for last 3 hrs (Proxmox -> InfluxDB)
    • Docker container CPU and memory usage for last 3 hrs (Telegraf Docker plugin -> InfluxDB)

    Netdata works really well for system performance for Linux and can be installed from the default repositories of major distributions.


  • I use Joplin every day for taking my own technical notes, often with screenshots. I use it across multiple devices and operating systems that sync through Dropbox. Notes are exported to PDF when there is a need to share them, which is infrequent.

    Zotero looks keenly focused on managing research information and creating bibliographies. I am not actively involved in research, but I just downloaded and installed it on my M1 MacBook Air out of curiosity.

    I opened the Zotero app, tried to create a new folder, and it immediately froze. It also looked outdated. Hope you have better luck with it.