This thread is for discussing self-hosted services, whether it's a password manager like Bitwarden, a media service like Plex, or a full-blown cloud suite like Nextcloud.
Some resources for the top post:
- Self Hosting Guide
- Reddit /r/SelfHosted
- Awesome-Selfhosted, massive list of self-hostable software services
Mostly created this thread to talk about my latest self-hosting obsession, Paperless-ngx, a system of organizing and managing scanned documents.
As part of my current house decluttering kick, I am trying to reduce the amount of paper crap that I'm holding onto down to as close to zero as possible. So I set up Paperless and bought a used document scanner on eBay, and am starting the process of scanning old receipts, invoices, account statements, etc.
One thing that was important to me was that whatever system I used stored scans as plain files in a normal, human-readable file/folder structure (and not in a custom database), so that even if I stopped using the system, I would still be left with an organized and browsable set of files.
I had a little bit of frustration with my used scanner (Brother ADS-1500W) because I bought it with the intention of using its ability to scan directly to a SMB share. For whatever reason, it isn't able to login to my Unraid shares (probably due to its SMB version being too old and/or my server side not having sufficiently old ciphers enabled). I probably could work around that, but it also supports Scan to FTP, and so I set up an FTP server on my Unraid for the scanner to use, and that works flawlessly.
Other than that, I'm super impressed with the ADS-1500W, which is probably why they still sell for like $400 new even though they're 10 years old. I managed to scoop mine up for $50 (before tax/shipping) on eBay, plus another $40 for brand-new replacements for the roller and the document separator. I could have gone cheaper with just a flatbed scanner, but I wanted something that's both more compact, and can take a feed of multi-page documents.
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"The golden shower threw me off." -- garion333
Made an important Unraid discovery today.
I often came up against an issue where the web UI would become unresponsive for certain things, eg. no output in the Docker update window, unable to bring up a web console, etc. But the UI would not be completely unavailable.
Turns out, this is related to having the web UI open in a browser tab for a long time. If you check the logs, you'll see a bunch of entries for nginx that say something like, "nchan: Out of shared memory while allocating (something or other)".
When it gets into this state, one should SSH into the server and restart nginx: /etc/rc.d/rc.nginx restart
But to avoid it in the first place, don't keep the admin UI open in a tab when not being used. Which is annoying, because I liked keeping a pinned tab to the UI for easy access. I have to stop doing that now, but at least the UI will be usable when I got to use it.
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"The golden shower threw me off." -- garion333
Any consensus on something that does what Plex used to do so well?
I mean Plex still works “fine” but every time anyone uses it I have to search through the increasingly bloated UI to find our local media files for them.
We don’t stream outside the house. We just want to watch our own things on a Samsung Smart TV, iPads and Chromebooks.
Any chance you paired this with a cloud backup service that is working well? I chased a home brew scanned doc solution + CrashPlan several years back and wound up in no end of hell with how they did versioning of stuff in directories (basically it worked fine for situations where my NAS was teleported into another dimension and had to do a recovery, but it did really bad things when volumes on the NAS were temporarily invisible/appeared empty). Wound up having to just bag the whole thing because I had no confidence that my docs would still be present unless I sanity checked them on CrashPlan every couple weeks, which wasn't practical.
Given that it's you, I expect that your backup plan is a bespoke solution that heavily features "bro I use rsync to...", but maybe I'll get lucky and you're actually doing something plug-and-play
Even greater is my need for some kind of low-maintenance incinerator which looks like a cheerful USPS mailbox but just greedily demolishes all the shit I receive on this horribly antiquated system which serves no purpose but to provide attackers with convenient shortcuts for stealing my identity.
I feel very seen.
Crashplan was a good service until it wasn't.
Hey, I know of a well battle-tested file synchronization utility which handles that kind of periodically-unavailable data situation nicely because it does no deletion by default...
Well....
There's the bash script which runs some rsync commands to clone certain folders to a physical drive, which gets taken offsite and stuck in my safe deposit box. Then I periodically bring the drive back, slap it into an open drive bay on the server, and rsync copies over only what's missing.
But in addition to that, I am using the Docker template from the Unraid app store which runs Backblaze in WINE. This is an experiment at this point, an attempt at adding a more "plug and play" cloud storage layer to my solution. It's kinda weedy, and I haven't done a lot of restore testing, but like I said, it's an experiment for now. I've definitely shoved a lot of data onto their service for cheap.
Duplicacy looks cool as a self-hosted "manage backing up my stuff to various cloud storage services" project. If they get around to adding Proton Drive as a supported storage service, I'll have to try them out.
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"The golden shower threw me off." -- garion333
Obligatory Backblaze referral link so you can try it for a month: https://secure.backblaze.com/r/01hguc
I have used it for years as well and it works great.
I have also been dismayed by Plex's bloat the last couple of years. I have managed it by turning off everything I can on the server side and it is still pretty streamlined. On the server under Settings go to Online Media Sources and turnoff everything under there and it cuts down a lot of the crap.
Jellyfin is a newer competitor that is getting attention out there, if you want to check it out.
When setting up my NAS I used Plex initially because that's the one everyone recommends, but I switched to Jellyfin when I discovered Plex wanted me to pay to be able to stream to my iPad (I'm sure there's a way around that restriction, but I was annoyed enough that I didn't even bother looking for it).
Jellyfin has been great, but the few long-time Plex users I've heard talk about trying to switch have all had various issues with how Jellyfin does things and all ended up back with Plex.
I've experimented with both Jellyfin and Emby and neither has had a good enough top-to-bottom user experience for me to consider ditching Plex yet.
You should follow me on Mastodon: @[email protected]
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"The golden shower threw me off." -- garion333
I've been using Jellyfin since I installed Unraid at the end of last year. It's been running great for me. I watch movies and series on my Roku devices as well as my google tv devices. No issues so far. I have it connected with sonarr, radarr, etc.
I started dabbling with RPi, a two disk Synology and then some Zimabaords about a year or so ago, and then I fell off a cliff...
I got a new gaming PC in February, so I took the old one, added some RAM (96GB total) and installed Proxmox. Two NvME drives for ZFS Pool for containers and VMs. NFS back to Synology for container/VM backups. Running 7 containers with, Pihole, the Arrs, PaperlessNGX, Mylar/Komga, and a TrueNAS core VM. I've got 4 drives on the secondary SATA passed through to the VM, with around 14TB storage.
I just replaced the Zimaboard 832 i was running OPNsense with a N100 Ali Express box. Put 16GB DDR5 and a 1TB NvME gen 3 I had lying around and restored from backup. That went smoothly as soon as I re-added the extra packages (DDNS, Nginx, etc..). I want to tinker with some intrusion detection, and I noticed on the ZB 832, it would get killed when I enabled it. Plus, this little box looks cleaner than the ZB with an Intel 2.5Gb nic hanging off the side.
I also finally received the ZimaBlade I had ordered, so that put the nail in the ZB 432 and Pi 4. I'm running CasaOS on that one. Pihole (2nd one), Ntfy, UptimeKuma, and Jellyfin there.
I was having challenges on the Proxmox passing the video through to container for hardware transcoding. In all honesty, I think I just needed to blacklist the driver and I would have been good, but I was hesitant to do that. I had some issues with bad RAM early on that also corresponded with me trying to enable iommu and pass through to containers and VMs. The ZimaBlade has an Intel 500 and should support out of the box. I'll see how it goes.
ClockworkHouse: He means the comic The Dark Knight Returns, where Batman and Superman get in a fistfight over Gotham. Not The Dark Knight Rises, where Batman and a loudly farting orchestra get in a fistfight over your attention.
Ha, I just ordered one of those N100 boxes for a new Proxmox/OPNsense build, to upgrade the J4125 box running bare metal PFSense that I have running my home network right now.
You should follow me on Mastodon: @[email protected]
You should follow me on Bluesky: @legion.bsky.social
"The golden shower threw me off." -- garion333
Great minds and all that...
ClockworkHouse: He means the comic The Dark Knight Returns, where Batman and Superman get in a fistfight over Gotham. Not The Dark Knight Rises, where Batman and a loudly farting orchestra get in a fistfight over your attention.