https://lemmy.world/post/49663813

My old post from my old account.

Since then, I’ve been moving my PC (not server) from arch to nix, and discovered that I was relying on fundamentally broken DNS resolution behaviour on netbird.

Fixed that and also changed my Caddy config to use FQDNs as well.

Apart from that, added Gollum as a wiki server, and the experience has been perfectly amazing!

Still waiting to get my own mini-PC and use that, current shitbox is a desktop in my college.

I have so many irons in the fire I can never quit…

Right now I am tinkering with a local only HomeAssistant AI voice assistant. I have an Ubuntu VM running docker on my TrueNAS which has an ARC A310. The reason I’m running a VM is because I’m using A Dual Edge TPU module for FrigateNVR while using the ARC A310 for video decoding. Ollama is running Qwen2.5 3B. I’m also running Wyoming Whisper and open-webui for the voice AI. I’m using a ESP32-S3 AI Smart Speaker Dev Board for voice control.

I found a project on GitHub that looked really good but was designed to always pull files and so I forked that to create a local only version and setup a small docker container for the audio files. Still working on modifications of the repository but the setup is working OK but I’m trying to work out the bugs.

I’m also working on a Halloween project. I have a plastic pumpkin with a big red arcade button for a nose, LED’s for eyes, a speaker, some car horns, proximity sensors, and a temper… I call it my Doom Pumpkin. It will go outside a week before Halloween and complain about people touching it’s buttons or lack there of during the day and stay quiet at night. On Halloween it will keep going till later and when someone presses the button it will randomly honk horns in different ways. When someone steps in front it will say funny things to get them to press the button. If they walk behind it will warn them something bad might happen (like saying it farts fireballs.) It’s all setup in ESPHome and will be controlled by HomeAssistant and NodeRed. There is also a theft prevention mode built in that will cause it to just spazz out and blow the horns.

I’ve still gotta pull another 500 feet or so of ethernet then get those and some others dropped into the server closet and shift some stuff around so it feeds into the rack. I’ve also got to pull my current camera lines from my POE injector and run them into my POE switch.

This is all on top of building and installing racking for solar, getting the solar installed, pulling a wall in a couple inches at the top where it pulled away during an earthquake before we bought the place, and fixing a bunch of other stuff.

I completed a 300 mile move yesterday, and my homelab was one of the least stressful parts thanks to my pre-emptive downsizing from a half rack to just a Synology + Intel nuc. I also pre-emptively switched from forwarded ports to a reverse proxy because I didn’t want to be thinking about what isp I would end up with. Even further, I linked the nas and nuc directly with Ethernet so that I wouldn’t need to rely on static IPs or router-assisted local hostnames, mdns, avahi, whatever because I wanted to be able to transplant my lab onto any network just in case of emergency - thankfully I haven’t had to test that out but it’s nice knowing my lab should work on any network where both boxes can reach the internet / my reverse proxy. I was thinking worst case if we ended up in some apartment complex with some crappy provided setup that had broken local discovery then it would be 1 less thing to worry about.

Finally moved everything to the basement.

Spent years with everything in the office with me. Used to run some pretty old and noisy devices too lol. I always wanted to move everything somewhere else to cut down on noise but that means cables to run and total disassembly. Finally bit the bullet and moved it all last Saturday. The office has never been so peaceful

I just set up an orange pi as an off-site restic backup!

I use restic for backups in my homelab onsite to my NAS. I’ve been doing this for about a year but I don’t have off-site backups. I’ve set up the orange pi with just a small HDD and set up wireguard on it so I can still access the pi when it is outside my network.

Then I added a restic copy command to copy my repo from my NAS to the remote, and it’s working!

Now I’ll leave it in my house for about a month or two to test that it’s still working, then take it to a family member’s house!

Fiddling around with Renovate Bot on my Forgejo instance. It’s not working perfectly yet, but it’s getting there.

Also I began using LubeLogger to track my car expenses and fuel efficiency. Works beautifully.

I found the best thing to deal with a device that won’t work…

I’m trying to get the 3.5" adafruit touchscreen working and it’s being stubborn…

So… I went outside and split a large pile of logs.

Problem still not fixed, but I feel a hellofalot better

I have been on vacation and not a single alert has come through. I count that as a win.

I built a dashboard themed around my dog. It uses the Home Assistant API to get various stats from the house. I’m pleased with it!

got a busted Lenovo Ideapad 520ISK out of a dumpster, missing screen but otherwise perfectly functional. the thing has i5-7200u, 8 GB, two SATA ports inside and this prompted me to look up converting the thing into a server, specifically figuring out how to run 3.5" drives off it; I’m very anti-friendly towards using USB solutions for such a task.

searching was arduous, both web and yotube, and except one lonely forum post (remember those?) didn’t find anyone attempting let alone succeeding in running it thus. the 2.5" and 3.5" connectors are identical (there are micro SATA to SATA adapters for the DVD port) but the drives will need 12 V that the 2.5" ports ain’t got.

what I’ve concluded is that all that’s needed is a M/F SATA extension cable which I have trouble sourcing locally; the power will come from a separate ATX PSU for the time being, although I’m sure I can pull 12 V from somewhere on the board.

don’t got no 3d printing nor fabricating options, so it’ll likely look super-janky, but that’s not a huge concern for me now. I’ll do a write-up if I succeed.

I set up oauth for my sites

Not to brag but everything’s working fine, clean as a whistle. Upgraded forgejo to the latest version. I’m still helping maintain the awesome-selfhosted list, and get inspiration from selfh.st a lot (big shoutout!) Hope to make sure some postgres dbs are up to date at some point, all of my dockhand instances that i set up have been a big help :)

Not working on anything particular, but I’m going on a road trip on Tuesday to this regional airport that is giving away two racks perfect for my use case. Deep enough for my larger machines, sound proofed and 42U tall.

Finally my hardware can have a proper rack instead of being in a stack/pile in this harrypotteresque locker under my stairs.

spent some time last week adding metadata to my mp3 music obtained with yt-dlp. used musicbrainz Picard.

I’m actually really surprised how comprehensive that database is, and how easy it was to manually tag the tracks that didn’t get picked up automatically.

I finally got my immich docker running again. I lost all my meta data in the process but oh well, it works again.