this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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Noob having fun with Self-Hosting story (feddit.uk)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
33 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I'm a noob to all this, and love this server. I've recently set up Proxmox and Portainer, got Home Assistant transferred onto my new computer and set up an Arr stack on Windows VM.

I kept adding storage to that stack until it was talking half my internal storage so I bought a usb3 cable and hooked up an old 1tb HDD I had lying around.

I decided I wanted NAS storage with the HDD. I had already set up OMV but it was being a bit funny. Whenever I logged in to it I had no options, so I couldn't add the HDD to it.

So I did some looking around and found TrueNAS. Installed it and started fiddling. Jesus it's hard work to just add an SMB share from it!

After literally hours of tinkering I still was no closer so I gave up and went for a bath.

In the bath it occurred to me that maybe I was logging in to OMV wrong. I fired up the browser on my phone in the bath and instead of logging in with my name, I tried "admin" and lo and behold there is all the options I couldn't see before.

5 minutes later I had half a tb in an SMB share, and then it was a simple case of making network shared folders on all my windows machines.

Thought you guys may be amused by the noob error of logging in as Admin.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'm in a similar boat, maybe a few steps further down the line than you but not that far.

Something that is really fun is getting a dynamic DNS set up with duckdns, and then put a certificate on it from certbot and then give all of your containers and self-hosted servers am SSL certificate and name using nginx reverse proxy.

If you do that and your Wi-Fi router has a VPN option then you can easily get rid of all of the certificate errors on your locally hosted stuff and navigate directly to them with a name rather than typing in IP addresses.

For me this was daunting but once I actually got it up and running it all made sense.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

It's on my list. I've played with DuckDNS in my time with Home Assistant, I used to get external access through it and Nginx and honestly loathed it. I was SO HAPPY when I got Cloudflare working.

I am now working for a global company and I've noticed that the intranet here doesn't have valid SLL certificates at all, which I know is a security concern, so with a bit of research and tinkering I believe I can become more knowledgeable about this kind of thing than the IT manager of our factory. Might help me work up to a position that isn't on a line anymore.

So yeah, it's on my list.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
DNS Domain Name Service/System
HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
IP Internet Protocol
LXC Linux Containers
PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole)
Plex Brand of media server package
SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access
SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
VPN Virtual Private Network
ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
nginx Popular HTTP server

[Thread #591 for this sub, first seen 11th Mar 2024, 15:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I've been working on the same thing over the past month, with some minor differences. I skipped portainer and am just running LXCs on Proxmox, and built it from the beginning as a *arr/Plex box, so it has 4x4TB internal drives in ZFS RAID6, with the OS on an SSD. I still need to try out the TrueNAS thing, but I'm running a Minecraft server on it, and I just spent the better part of a day figuring out how to run Mullvad on it and force all my torrent traffic to use it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Also, look at Open Media Vault instead of TrueNAS, honestly so much easier

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Now then, you may be my new best friend:

I just spent the better part of a day figuring out how to run Mullvad on it and force all my torrent traffic to use it.

Mine all runs on a Windows machine because I could not work out how to get everything to talk to each other in containers. Then I tried to do the Mullvad thing too. I tried OpenWRT, OpenVPN (docker), Wireguard (Docker), Traffaek (Docker), and even Tailscale (Docker) and couldn't get anything running right.

ATM I just have Mullvad installed on the Windows machine and have it turn on when the VM starts up, but I'd like it all in containers instead.

Do you have any handy links as to how you get Mullvad working?

I think my next project is getting all my Arr working in containers, but I need to get them working through Mullvad to do that, or at least Prowlarr and my Real Debrid or qBittorrent through it

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I think when mullavad disabled port forwarding it kinda borked it. I ended up getting my *arr docker stack nested in an LXC along with one of those qbittorrent+VPN containers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Have a look at my reply to the other guy, I'm pretty sure I've got it working now

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Ugh, I wish I could be more help on that, but I couldn't get Mullvad to work that way either. I think what needs to be done is to use pfsense or something to create a virtual LAN, set the container running Mullvad to be the gateway on that network, then give each container a virtual network bridge connected to that virtual network. What I ended up doing was just installing Mullvad (through WireGuard) on the same container as qBitTorrent and telling qBitTorrent to use the virtual network device that Mullvad creates.
Fortunately, that's the only thing that really needs to run through it for me (I think your Real Debrid will need to as well). AFAIK, the *arr stuff doesn't need to be hidden.
As to getting things to talk to each other in containers, where were you having trouble? You should just be able to give all the *arr stuff the addresses where you reach the other ones. That may just be their IP address, or I run PiHole so I can have a local DNS and give them all their own hostnames.

Edit: I'm doing all this in Debian LXCs

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Well I've had another go this morning and believe I've managed it. My problem seemed to be that I already had 5 devices in Mullvad through my tinkering, so I deleted one and made a new one (just as an fyi in case you hit the same issue).

So I followed this guy on YouTube to set up an Openwrt router VM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mPbrunpjpk&t=897s

When you are able to route traffic through the VM stop following the tutorial and use this link instead to set up the VPN https://mullvad.net/en/help/running-wireguard-router

And apparently I'm now running the Openwrt router through Mullvad.

I did all the SSH parts in Console and I put my public key into the website through the Mullvad link above and copied the IP addresses from the same page.

So theoretically I just have to set vmbr1 as my bridge to containers and VMS that I want to run through my VPN and set up port forwarding for them in the OpenWRT interface and they'll route through Mullvad

Hope this helps.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Nice! Glad to hear that works. I'll have to give it another go. I had spent the whole day trying to get Mullvad (without WireGuard) working, but it kept failing to create the tun device, so by the time I got it working with WireGuard I didn't really feel like trying to figure out the VLAN thing too lol.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

This is with Wireguard too, it's just inside OpenWRT.

I've put my Windows VM behind it and checked it's working and it is, but now I can't access Plex and SMB lol, more tinkering when I finish work I guess

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://www.piped.video/watch?v=3mPbrunpjpk&t=897s

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I probably can get the container way working now I've had some time with it. The problem is routing it through Mullvad. Prowlarr deffo needs to go through it, otherwise it can't see the indexers (I've been using Prowlarr without a VPN for a while and it's much better with it). Debrid doesn't need a VPN I just prefer it to be there

I watched a YouTube tutorial to get an OpenWRT container set up to route traffic through ,and managed to get it working. I struggled however to set the VPN up through it, I feel like I was in spitting distance!

The bonus of using that method was that I could have multiple containers use the OpenWRT container, meaning they would all share the same IP address and just have different ports, so all my Self Hosted containers would be in the same place on my network.

I'll keep plugging away and give pfsense a look. Now that I have OMV running I can kill my Windows server without losing the media

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Woah I've just had my mind blown a little. I did not realise that using Tailscale I'd be able to smb into my server on my phone, but I can!

[–] [email protected] 44 points 8 months ago (3 children)

In the immortal words of Jake the Dog:

Dude, suckin’ at something is the first step to being sorta good at something.

We are or were all noobs once. Going away from the keyboard is often an undervalued step in the solution-finding process. Kudos!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Agreed! I had a math professor once say that epiphanies usually happen in one of the three B's: Bed, Bathroom, and Bus. There really is something magical about stepping away to let your brain chew on a problem.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago

This is such an important message, I keep this on my phone:

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Indeed, I've sucked at guitar and rubiks cubes in the last 5 years and now I'm good at both of them!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

Our man is hard flexing on us mortals right now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Now I just need to work out why I'm only getting 6MBps transfer speeds. All my research has gained me a whole 2MBps which is a 50% increase, but all things online say they're getting over 100...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If you want to rule out most everything software, you can use dd and nc to benchmark file transfers with minimal overhead. iperf also your friend of course :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I will have to have a research about what all of those things mean lol. Thanks.

This is why I love this community, really helpful but speak in a language I'm not fluent in yet.

It's like when I learned guitar, I had no clue what people were talking about half the time on /R/learnguitar, same in /R/homeassistant, but I lurked enough that I learned loads and ended up contributing to both communities after a spell of time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Just to share my experience. I was part of r/HomeAssistant for a year or so and I had no effing clue what it was or what it does. One day I was scrolling through YouTube and there was a guy talking about HomeAssistant. Only then I realised this is not some "Alexa/Siri" kinda home assistant. This is a home automation kinda thing.

Haha, I still laugh at my self for being an idiot for the whole 1 1.5 years.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Yeah I get it, I started home automation using Google Assistant and Tasker on my phone to make everything work. I spent HOURS writing Tasker automations because the Wifey hated it all because it all worked based on my phone.

Whenever I couldn't get something working I'd see Home Assistant as the solution. Maybe for a year or more...

COVID happened and I bought a Pi to play with. Did some shit with it and eventually gave Home Assistant a go and never looked back.

My home automation has come along leaps and bounds since then. I had a friend on the weekend comment that I'll finally know I'm living in the future when I walk through the door and my house welcomes me home. It's been doing that for over a year already...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You've got a single, old HDD attached via USB. There's plenty of places that could be the bottleneck here, but that's among the first I'd check. Can you actually read from that HDD significantly faster than your network transfer speed? Check that locally first. No use in optimizing anything network-related when your underlying disk IO is slow.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I have transferred a file from another container on the same computer to it and get 40+MBps. So there's something going on on the network.

That said, "The Network" is an old powerline adapter running up a floor through a wired router, so it's probably something to do with that. Not a big deal, it still works and tbh I don't see myself moving too many big files between the server and my PC so I can live with 40MBps between my containers

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I'm a fellow noob, maybe that's why I found the bath side of it more amusing. I can relate to the pervasive obsession and unexpected eureka moments.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Another newbie here.

It's worse when you go to bed and get your clarity as you're trying to sleep.

Now you gotta decide if you wanna wake up, stay up or get up... I try to settle for writing a note.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

This is why I separate bedtime and tinkering time with something else

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah I get a little obsessive about my new hobbies to the point where a whole day of tinkering goes by and I barely notice.

I had an 11hr messing about session a couple weeks ago then we had to go out for a family meal because of some important occasion (my 40th birthday) and I got to the meal with a massive headache from staring at a screen all day, only to find it was a surprise party.

My Wife could not understand how on earth I hadn't worked out it was a surprise party beforehand, but my head was in setting Proxmox up and getting things working.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

There's a quote from 1908's Wind in the Willows: Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing–absolutely nothing–half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.

Fill in your own hobby, and it reads just as well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Strange electrical signal and high dopamine level flooding your brain 😍🤪