Noob having fun with Self-Hosting story
Noob having fun with Self-Hosting story
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.
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!
This is such an important message, I keep this on my phone:
Indeed, I've sucked at guitar and rubiks cubes in the last 5 years and now I'm good at both of them!
Our man is hard flexing on us mortals right now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is why I separate bedtime and tinkering time with something else
Strange electrical signal and high dopamine level flooding your brain 😍🤪
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Also, look at Open Media Vault instead of TrueNAS, honestly so much easier
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...
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.
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
If you want to rule out most everything software, you can use
ddandncto benchmark file transfers with minimal overhead.iperfalso your friend of course :)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.
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
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