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Hi! i have a mixed set of containers (a few, not too many) and bare-metal services (quite a few) and i would like to monitor them.

I am using good old "monit" that monitors my network interfaces, filesystems status and traditional services (via pid files). It's not pretty, but get the work done. It seems i cannot find a way to have it also monitor my containers. Consider that i use podman and have a strict one service, one user policy (all containers are rootless).

I also run "netdata" but i find it overwhelming, too much data, too much graphics, just too much for my needs.

I need something that:

• let me monitor service status
• let me monitor containers status
• let me restart services or containers (not mandatory, but preferred)
• has a nice web GUI
• the web gui is also mobile friendly (not mandatory, but appreciated)
• Can print some history data (not manatory, but interesting)
• Can monitor CPU usage (mandatory)
• Can monitor filesystem usage (mandatory)

I don't care for authentication features, since it will be behind a reverse proxy with HTTPS and proxy authentication already.

I am not looking for a fancy and comples dashboard, but for something i can host on a secondary page that i open if/when i want to check stuff. Also, if the tool can be scripted or accessed via an API could be useful, so i would write some extractors to print something in a summary page in my own dashboard.

I have spent quite a lot of time trying to find the best photo management solution for my use case, and i think i have finally got a solution in mind. Please follow me and help me understanding what could be improved.

The use case: I took, over the decades, thousand of pictures with manual, film based SLR, digital DSLR and many other devices. Today i mostly only take pictures with my phone and occasionally (like 1-5 rolls per year) B/W film photos. I like to have all the pictures neatly organized per album. Albums are events, trips, occasion or just a collection of photos for any good reason together. I have always organized albums my folders and stored metadata either in the photo or in sidecar files. Over the decades i changed many management tools (the longest has been Digikam) but they all faded away for one reason or the other. I do not want to change organization since it proved solid over decades. I do not trust putting all eggs in a database or a proprietary tool format.

The needs: backup photos from family phones. Organize photos in albums (format as stated above), share & show pictures with family (maybe broader public too), archive for long term availability. Possibly small edits like rotation. Face recognition is a good plus, geographical mapping and reverse geotagging is a great plus. General object recognition could be useful but not a noticeable plus. Also i need multi-user support for family members both on backup and gallery-like browsing. My galleries need to be all shared (or better one big gallery, plus individual backups for users)

What i don't need: complex editing / elaboration (would be done offline with darktable)

Non-negotiable needs: storing photos in album-based subfolders structure with all metadata inside photos or sidecar files. No other solution will ever stand the test of time.

I tried many tools and none fits the bill. Here are my experiences:

• Immich: by far the most polished, great for phone backup&sync, not good for album organization (photos cannot be sorted into folders, albums are logical only). Has the best face detection and reverse geocoding.
• Photoprism: given up because i don't like open-source with money tags (devs have all the rights to ask for money, but i distrust a model where they might give up support unless they make money)
• Librephoto: feels abandoned and UI & Face detection is subpar with immich
• PiGallery2: blazing fast and great UI, but cannot be used for backups nor organization. But can cope well with my long lasting collections of photos.
• Piwigo: i used this decades ago. By today standards feels ugly bloated and slow as hell. No benefits anyway for my use case that compensate slugginesh. And my server is powerfull.
• Damselfly: great tool and super friendly dev, unfortunately i could not fit into my use case. It can work on folders, but it's actions are too limited and beside downloads and exports and tagging... not much else. Not even backups from phone. I understand it's use case is totally different from mine. Still a great piece of software.

My solution: more of the idea of how i want to proceed from here on...

Backup: keep the great Immich for phone backups. Limitations: requiring emails as user logins breaks my home server authentication scheme but i can live with it. The impossibility to organize photos in folders is a deal breaker but luckily, you can define "logical" albums and download them.

Organization: good old filesystem stuff, i don't need any specific tools. Existing photos are already sorted in subfolders, new albums can be created from Immich, downloaded, and stored on new subfolders on the server. Non-phone albums (DSLR, film cameras...) can just be added as well directly on filesystem

Viewing: PiGallery2 pointed at the subfolders, blazing fast viewing online for all family members.

Global workflow: take photos from phones, upload automatically to immich, then manually go sort them in albums, download albums and create appropriate subfolders on the server (if needed to save space, delete downloaded photos from immich). Upload/unzip and enjoy from PiGallery2. -- OR -- take photos with other cameras, scan/process on PC (darktable), create appropriate subfolders on the server, upload and enjoy from PiGallery2.

All in all what pisses me off of all this is:

• Immich requiring a fucking email address to login (not a privacy concern here, but my users will need to remember a different login for this specific part)
• Immich not supporting subpaths, i will need two subdomains to achieve this workflow, while just one would have been less complex for the users (something like photos.mydomain.org/gallery and photos.mydomain.org/backup, instead of photobackup.mydomain.org and photogallery.mydomain.org, you get the idea). I know all the blah blah on subdomains being better and such, i don't care, this is an usability issue for dumb users and, in general, it's the way i prefer it to be.

Of course, the best course would be to have Immich support folders (not external libraries, but actually folder based albums which is totally different approach) and it being able to move photos to folders, but hey, it wouldn't be fun in that case :)

Amy thoughts?

UPDATE: Immich storage templates seems to be the missing link. Using that properly would cut out the manual download/reupload approach. Need to experiment a bit, but looks promising.

I am setting up my notes approach which is using dedicated apps on my devices plus syncthing.

I tried lots of tools like Joplin obsidian etc but are too overkill or had something I don't like.

So I am using markor on android and another dedicated app on Linux and so on.

I would like to add also a web app to edit the MD files directly on my server when I don't have any way to install syncthing or an editor app.

The web GUI would need to list the MD files local on the server and let me edit/view/save them. Upload and download is not required as I already have that setup via filebrowser.

Any hints?

Edit: to be clear, i am not looking for an IDE or anything fancy, i only need to edit some notes online on my server. I do not want to spin containers or deploy full VS solutions just for this, all i need is a web gui editor for MD with the capability to load files on the server

Second edit: i ended up selfhosting Silverbullet.md which made my day. Exactly what i was looking for, even more than that. Thanks all!

I have finally got my selfhost wiki up to a satisfying shape. Its here: https://wiki.gardiol.org

Take a look i hope it can help somebody.

I am open to any suggestions about it.

Note: the most original part is the one about multi-homed routing and failbacks and advanced routing.

Hi fellow sailors,

i have lots of downloaded... ISOs... that i need to converto to save space. I would like to make them all of the same size, let's say 720p, and same format, let's say h265.

I am on linux and the... ISOs... are sorted into a neatly named hierarchy of sub-folderds, which i want to preserve too. What is the best tool (CLI) for the scope? I can use ffmpeg with a bash script, but is there anything better suited?

Let's say i download an iso for my latest favourite distro and, after unpacking the rar (usenet) i find the right contents but all the filenames are a bunch of hexadecimal strings. The files are legit, but how do i "decode" the names to know which one is file n.1, file n.2 and so on?

I use Joplin and I do like it very much, but I would like to be able to at least view (not edit) the notes from web browser... Which is not supported.

Are there good alternatives that are:

• fully open source
• have android client
• have web client or viewer
• can be synched VOA WebDAV or native method

I can also settle for a Joplin web viewer of sorts!

UPDATE: i opened up a can of worms. I would have never tought there would be so many tools for this task, and so many different shades of how it can be done. Even excluding ALL the non-truly-FOSS solutions out there, there are still tons of tools with good points and bad points. Of course, NONE fits my bill so i will spin mine… Joking, i have no time for that.

Using joplib-webview feels too much. Spinning containers just for that meh. Will try tough. The joplin .md files are only "sync" files, from which yo ucan probably extract the notes. But that would be not the best idea. Maybe some kind of link to Joplin terminal would be the way forward. I will see.

I will stay on Joplin, it's the closest i could find to what i need, the only lacking is a web viewer, which i can live without for the time being after all.

Thank you all, and to anybody still chiming in!

After all the amazing reviews and post i read immich I decided to give it a try.

To be honest I am quite impressed, it's fast and polished, it just works.

But I found a few quirks, and hit a wall with the developer that doesn't seems kind to listen to users that much (on these issues at least!)

Maybe you guys have suggestions?

Here I go:

One: it does not support base URLs, witch means that I had to spin a dedicated sub domain to be able to access it over internet while all my other services are on a single sub domain. I can work with that, but why. Dev already shut this request down in the past as "insecure". Which I find baffling. (I mean use mydomain/immich instead of immich.mydomain)

Two: auth cannot be tied to reverse proxy. I get it, it provides OAuth. But it's much more complex than proxy based auth... And overkill for many cases, mine for sure.

Three: impossible to disable authentication at all, which would just work fine in my use case. There is a switch that seems for that, but no, it's only for using OAuth.

Four: I cannot find a way to browse by location, only by map. (Locations list seems to be half baked unless I am missing something).

Five: no way to deploy on bare metal, and I tried! due to lack of documentation (only info I found where very very outdated), and no willingness to provide info about that either. Seems that docker is so much better that supporting bare metal is a waste of time.

Six: basically impossible to manage easily public albums. like a public landing page. I get this might be outside immich scope.

Seven: even if now you can import existing libraries, it still does not detect albums withinbthem (sub folders) which is very annoying.

So, overall its a great project and very promising, faster and more reliable than Libre Photos in my use case, but still lacking some basic features that the Dev seems not interested in adding. He developed it to please his wife, I get it :) - no pun intended, doing all this take lots of time, I know.

These are the alternatives I know of:

Photo prism requires a subscription for reverse Geo coding.

LibrePhotos feels sluggish and kind if abandoned.

Are there any others? (Piwigo and Lytchee are great tools, but different kind of tools)

Let's hope for immich, Dev is working a lit, let's hope for the best.

Hi! Question in the title.

I get that its super easy to setup. But its really worthwhile to have something that:

• runs everything as root (not many well built images with proper useranagement it seems)
• you cannot really know which stuff is in the images: you must trust who built it
• lots of mess in the system (mounts, fake networks, rules...)

I always host on bare metal when I can, but sometimes (immich, I look at you!) Seems almost impossible.

I get docker in a work environment, but on self hosted? Is it really worth while? I would like to hear your opinions fellow hosters.

tabula rasa registration is open

:::

Sono cliente FWA Vodafone da un anno, ogni volta che c'è un problema e chiamo il 190 (successo tre volte) nei giorni seguenti vengo bombardato di chiamate fastidiose e ripetitive da un callcenter (lo stesso?) che mi propone di passare a TIM perché tanto Vodafone non funzionerà mai per (... Motivi improbabili e tecnicamente assurdi... ). Solo dopo che li mando a vagare più volte viene pii risolto il problema su Vodafone.

Sono paranoico o è capitato ad altri?

(Sono sempre tutti call center che rispondono dall'Albania)

PS: dal 26/12 ho 0.03mb/sec, il ticket di supporto tecnico Vodafone "va avanti" solamente dopo che ho risposto a bestemmie alle gentili operatrici del call center Albanese di TIM... Secondo me sono lo stesso call center del 190 che fa il doppio lavoro...)

Aggiornamento: ho candidamente chiesto al call center. Mi hanno detto che lo stesso call center gestisce entrambi gli operatori tramite lo stesso software, per cui vedono le segnalazioni aperte e to chiamano sperando che tu cambi operatore, loro guadagnano a commissione sui contratti chiusi...

Bella serietà da parte di Vodafone e TIM servirsi di call center cosi "shady".

Well, i decided to brush up my simple HTML page and created a fully linked wiki on the subject. Please take a look, in the hope it will be useful for at least one fellow one-eyed leg-pegged passionate data hoarder.

Any hints or suggestions is appreciated.