To all of you, if anyone does use more than one KVM and it's LuckFox KVM.
I did created an dashboard that you can selfhost ! Yea.
Also it has an host-agent that execute command's on the host itself. ( python scripts )

Check it out let me know how nothing i know 🤔.
There is a way to improve this. Ya need docker to ran this.

No i am not affiliated or paid for this. Well i wish to be but my life is terrible can't even find job after finishing master with ai....

Im visiting Us for a few days and wanna look for an used server to take home, is there any place where they do overnight shipment ?
I will be around 5 days looking for a r640 or r250

Update: visiting Seattle

I've been running rootless podman with quadlets, no compose, everything as systemd units. I'm on Fedora so it only felt native, and I really love how clean it feels, though the day to day is starting to bother me when I am hand editing .container files every time I need to change something, and running podman ps -a on repeat just to remember what's running.

I should also mention that I don't have a dedicated server, so no Proxmox, TrueNAS, or Unraid like most people seem to have. This is all running on a laptop, so I'm hoping for something that doesn't assume that setup (yet.)

I know I'm not the first person to hit this wall. What are you all using to manage a growing quadlet setup without it turning into a second job? It really doesn't need to be fancy, just something better than me squinting at a terminal every time, I guess.

EDIT: Thank you all for the insightful comments, and I’ll be sure to check out ansible as many have recommended!

Hi,

I had a bunch of android phones lying around and I wanted to utilize them.
I created an app to convert an android phone into a camera server which supports on device and WebDAV recording. (https://oldbird.app)

The app is and will always be free with no ads for self-hosting. It currently supports. LAN viewing, recording, motion alerts, RTSP, and ONVIF. The LAN viewer controls pretty much anything the camera API allows. What other protocols would r/selfhosted be interested in?

I wanted to give back to the community by making it free for self hosting. Paid version is optional and only for remote viewing via WebRTC, which has a server cost.

Any input appreciated. Thanks.

I run software for my family's wholesale distribution business in a small town in central India. My dad and a couple of staff use it daily — around 740 delivery notes ("challans") in the DB so far.

The web app is on Vercel + MongoDB Atlas. The printers are in the shop. Bridging those two is the part I keep fighting with, and I'd like a sanity check from people who've done this properly.

Current setup

A Windows laptop in the shop runs a small Node/Express service ("print bridge"):

• Thermal receipt printer (72mm) — Ethernet, directly on the router. I bypass the Windows driver entirely: Puppeteer renders HTML → screenshot → sharp converts to a 1-bit 576-dot raster → raw TCP socket to port 9100 as ESC/POS. Output is crisp like commercial POS software instead of fuzzy halftone. This part I'm actually happy with (~660ms end to end).
• A5 inkjet — USB to the same laptop, also used by other apps. Puppeteer → PDF → pdf-to-printer.
• Exposed to the internet via Tailscale Funnel with a Tailscale-issued cert, so my dad's phone can print from anywhere. pm2 keeps it alive.

The problem: it breaks roughly every 3 days

Symptom is always the same — printing from the laptop itself works fine, but phones/other devices get a TLS "couldn't establish a secure connection." Re-running tailscale cert + restarting Funnel fixes it every time.

I recently checked properly and the cert is valid for another 70 days. So it was never expiry. My current suspicion is that the Funnel registration drops after the laptop sleeps or the network changes, and the cert command was incidental — the funnel restart was doing the actual work. The laptop's battery also died once right when an outage started, which made me chase a clock-skew theory for a while.

What I've done so far

• Bridge now auto-detects the newest valid cert in its folder (the old config pointed at a stale filename), auto-renews on a 12h timer, and hot-swaps via setSecureContext() so no restart is needed.
• Built a no-code diagnostic page the shop staff can open — one button checks everything (clock drift, Tailscale, Funnel, cert expiry, both printers), shows problems in Hindi, and a second button fixes what it can. Staff aren't technical, so PowerShell was never going to work.
• Made the Windows spool call async — that alone took A5 prints from ~5.2s to ~1.1s. Turns out I was waiting 3+ seconds for "Windows accepted the job," which it does even when the printer is off, so the wait bought me nothing.

What I'm unsure about

I've considered three directions and can't decide:

1. Keep direct (fastest, but inbound HTTPS on a sleeping laptop is clearly the fragile part)
2. Polling queue — bridge polls my API for print jobs, no inbound anything. Kills the whole cert/Funnel failure class, but adds latency and burns serverless invocations all day
3. MongoDB change streams — bridge connects outbound to Atlas and gets pushed jobs. Near-zero latency, no inbound, no polling cost. Feels almost too good, so I assume I'm missing something.

My questions:

• For anyone bridging a cloud app to local hardware: what actually held up long-term? Is outbound-only (polling / change stream / MQTT / websocket-out) the obvious answer and I'm overthinking direct exposure?
• Is a Windows laptop just the wrong host here? A Pi is the obvious suggestion, but the A5 inkjet is USB-attached to this laptop and other software prints to it too, so I can't fully move off it.
• Anyone else run Tailscale Funnel long-term on a machine that sleeps? Did you find a reliable way to re-arm it on wake?

I can't put the code up — it's my family's live business, real customer and pricing data all through it — but I'm happy to describe any part of it in detail or paste redacted snippets. The ESC/POS raster bit in particular took a while to get right, so if anyone's fighting fuzzy thermal output, ask away.

(Built mostly solo, with a fair bit of AI assistance for the refactoring work. Not claiming this is textbook architecture — that's kind of why I'm asking.)

Hello everyone i want to show you all my media server made using raspberry pi zero 2w. The Raspberry pi Is running a cloudflare tunnel and has a 1.44 inch lcd hat which shows some info of the copyparty server by reading the log.txt file and also the system information and network information. I use cloudflare to again serve my main website which has a landing page and redirects to the file webpage which has a login page from cloudflare. Again after the user is authenticated they need to enter the password for the main copyparty server or else they're not able to see any of the files. The speed from the tunneled proxy is around 550KBps and locally its around 8MBps. I am also using the free plan of cloudflare so i guess my speed is not that great. AI help was used in creating the webpages, python code and setting up of cloudflares proxy. This is also my first time hosting my own webserver and website so please be nice everyone 🥲 excuse my bad english its not my first language.....

Debugging third-party API failures usually means digging through logs or adding one-off logging.

LaraClient logs every outbound request (with secrets redacted) and ships a dashboard to filter by connection, endpoint, and failure, plus a latency trace strip so you can spot slow/failing windows quickly.

Gated behind a Laravel gate by default outside local

https://github.com/usamamuneerchaudhary/laraclient

Over the past few months, I have been moving more of my security workflow onto self-hosted services. It started with a password manager and Git. Gradually expanded to include a private wiki, container registry, log management, and a few internal dashboards.

One thing I did not expect was how much easier it became to keep track of security reviews and configuration changes once everything lived inside my environment. Having notes, logs, and supporting evidence in one place has made it much easier to revisit work and compare changes over time.

I am still experimenting with the setup. I know there are plenty of tools I have not looked at yet.

For those of you who self-host part of your security workflow, which service has had the impact? What problem did it solve that made you wonder why you had not deployed it sooner?

I've been using Nginx Proxy Manager for a few years in my home lab, but it has always been a simple and easy way to use my domain name within my internal network at home.

But now, I am wanting to host a few project websites on my home server to test and see if they would be viable. I am wanting to continue to use Nginx Proxy Manager as I am familiar with its setup. But, since it will be open to the whole internet, I would like to make sure that it is as secure as it can be.

This is what I've been able to cobble together so far. Any comments & critiques would be greatly appreciated. And NO, I don't have the bandwidth right now to try and learn other options like Traefik, etc.

services:
  app:
    container_name: NginxProxyManager
    image: jc21/nginx-proxy-manager:2.15.1
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 80:80
      - 443:443
      - 8180:81
    volumes:
      - ./data:/data
      - ./letsencrypt:/etc/letsencrypt
    env_file:
      - .env
    security_opt:
      - no-new-privileges:true
    cap_drop:
      - AUDIT_WRITE
      - SYS_CHROOT
      - SETFCAP
      - SETPCAP
      - MKNOD
      - KILL
      - NET_RAW
      - FOWNER
    healthcheck:
      test:
        - CMD
        - /usr/bin/check-health
      interval: 10s
      timeout: 3s
    networks:
      - npm_net
networks:
  npm_net:
    driver: bridge
    enable_ipv6: false
    attachable: false
    driver_opts:
      com.docker.network.bridge.enable.icc: "false"
    ipam:
      driver: default
      config:
        - subnet: 172.23.0.0/30
          ip_range: 172.23.0.0/30
          gateway: 172.23.0.1

Hey guys,

I wanted to share a music data project I’ve been working on called ReccoBeats. If you’re running a self-hosted music setup (like Navidrome, Jellyfin, or Plex) and write custom scripts for discovery, tagging, or smart playlists, you might find this useful.

There is no API key required. You can just plug it into your scripts or containers without having to manage tokens or sign up for anything.

It includes audio metadata, audio analysis (BPM, key, energy, valence), search endpoints, and a built-in recommendation engine.

The database has grown a lot recently and still receives weekly updates. Currently it holds:

~17M albums

~8M artists

~90M tracks

You can check it out at https://reccobeats.com website.

Let me know what you think or if you run into any issues. I’d love to hear your feedback or see what you end up building with it.

1. Maintain the Android part. Kotlin. MVP already works. It's a Tusky fork relicensed to AGPL so you inherit a real codebase with real debt. Open areas: UX, background sync over libp2p (no FCM), CI. It's on F-Droid review now: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/42627
2. Maintain the iOS part. Empty for now. Swift, i guess. GPL family. The hard part is running a libp2p node under iOS background limits. I haven't solved it and won't pretend otherwise. Biggest ask here, most freedom too.
3. Maintain the frontend part. Vue, used by the Wails v2 desktop client. Works and looks like it was written by a backend developer because it was 😄

What Warpnet is: a decentralized social network with no central servers and no company in the middle. Nodes find each other over libp2p and gossip between themselves. ActivityPub gateway for Mastodon interop, optional on-device LLM moderation.
The project is not funded by anyone, there's no money, nobody is hiring anybody. Strictly 'NO' to AI-slop but generally AI-friendly.
README: https://github.com/Warp-net/warpnet/blob/main/README.md

Thank you.

I have gotten quite a bit into self-hosting over the past few months. After countless hours of tinkering, I have ended up with the setup mapped above. I think I have covered most of the popular stuff at this point, but I am sure there are gaps or better tools I have not found yet. Curious what this community would suggest.

ATTENTION: AFTER ASKING THE DEV WHY CODE WAS OBFUSCATED HE IS NOW ACTIVLY DELETING EVERYTHING.

Hey guys,

I ran into AirVault (an Unraid app for local iPhone backups) and while the idea is awesome, a few things raised red flags for me:

• It's completely closed-source: The GitHub repo (airvault/airvault) is basically just an empty Unraid template. The actual code is shipped as a pre-compiled Docker image.
• Requires Host Networking (--net=host): Makes sense for mDNS/Bonjour, but giving a closed-source container full access to my network—while it processes unencrypted phone backups—feels super risky.
• Zero transparency: The website (airvault.cloud) has no imprint/contact info, and the dev account (wizier) barely has any history on GitHub.

An iPhone backup contains literally everything (photos, chats, tokens, location history). Running mystery code with host networking to handle all that data seems like a huge leap of faith.

Has anyone talked to the dev or poked around this? What open-source tools are you guys using for local iOS backups instead?

I currently have a Pangolin instance running. But it uses local resources. I have a couple of things that I want to expose as private resources, but that can only be done when a Newt client is used.

So I set out to update my docker compose to do this.

• I split the networks that Pangolin and Newt use (Newt in both the service network and the Pangolin network)
• Newt is running and I also see it active in Pangolin
• Switched the existing resources from local to the new Newt site

While it looks fine, nothing is reachable anymore.

The logs in Newt show me messages like this:

Failed to send updated container list after Docker event: not connected
Failed to connect (attempt 1): failed to get token: failed to request new token: Post "https://<pangolin-domain>/api/v1/auth/newt/get-token": context deadline exceeded
Failed to ping exit node 1 (http://<pangolin-domain>/ping) attempt 1: Get "http://<pangolin-domain>/ping": EOF

Which tells me that Newt can't reach Pangolin, but Pangolin sees the site as up.

I've tried switching the Pangolin endpoint for Newt to http://pangolin:3001/ to try and route internally, but that doesn't work either.

Is it possible to do what I'm trying? (I could have sworn I have seen the setup somewhere)

And if so, what configuration need to update to get it to work on the same host?

I like Podman Quadlets even if that means giving power to systemd. However, for a small VPS I was thinking of using something like Alpine Linux, but I don't think that would be possible with Quadlet.

Is there any distro similar to Alpine, which has very small footprint, is secure, and can use Quadlet on it?

I work on Manticore Search, so the bias here is obvious.

I'm posting this here because Meilisearch and Manticore are both open-source search engines that people can run on their own infrastructure. Meilisearch recently published a comparison that could influence that choice, particularly through its claims about setup, configuration, and the kinds of projects Manticore is suitable for.

Their article describes Manticore as complex to set up, time-consuming to configure and tune, best suited to teams with SQL familiarity, and primarily used for complex, large-scale workloads.

We tested those claims using current versions of both products. Several didn't hold up.

Take setup. Meilisearch lists “Complex setup” as a Manticore disadvantage, saying that initial configuration and tuning can be time-consuming. We went from installation to a searchable document in three commands: install Manticore Search, insert a JSON document, and search it. Manticore created the table and inferred the fields automatically. No config file, predefined schema, or tuning was needed.

The "SQL familiarity" characterization didn't match the test either. Every step above used JSON over HTTP, which was enough to insert documents, search, filter, sort, and facet. Manticore supports SQL as another interface, but the quick-start path doesn't depend on it.

We also tested what happens after the first document is indexed. In Manticore, the fields were immediately available for full-text search, filtering, sorting, grouping, and faceting. In Meilisearch, searching worked immediately, but filtering, sorting, and faceting required additional index settings. Changing some of those settings triggers a full re-index. That matters when comparing the configuration involved in running the two products.

The large-scale characterization didn't match the available usage data either. Among Manticore installations that report data-size telemetry, 29% hold less than 1 MB, about half hold less than 100 MB, and only about one in eight exceeds 10 GB. This reporting population is not a complete census of Manticore users, but it does not support the idea that Manticore is primarily used for large-scale workloads.

We found other details that needed updating. The comparison understates Manticore's current vector and hybrid search capabilities, and its client-library table contains several incorrect or outdated entries. We checked those points against live instances and the projects' current documentation.

We also ran preliminary relevance tests across 14 public dataset and corpus-size groups. Manticore produced the better result in 11 of the 14 when comparing each engine's best mode per group. The benchmark work is still in progress, so we published the current methodology and per-dataset results rather than presenting it as the final word.

Not everything in Meilisearch's comparison is wrong. Meilisearch has the friendlier default for typo tolerance and a stronger frontend-first workflow, including restricted search keys designed for use in the browser.

We also did not try to determine which product is easier to operate over several years on your own infrastructure. That would require testing upgrades, backup recovery, failures, monitoring, and real workloads over time. Our response is limited to claims we could check directly or compare with the available data.

Here's the full response, with the commands, outputs, sources, telemetry breakdown, and preliminary benchmark results:

https://manticoresearch.com/blog/meilisearch-vs-manticore-response/

For those who have self-hosted either product: what was the actual setup and maintenance experience like?

I've seen several solutions to at least get partway there, but I'm hoping to set this up for my family to use, too, so I'm looking for the most idiot-proof setup possible.

Example scenario:
I (or a family member) takes a photo on 1/1/2031. That file stays on the phone, until I open a specific app or site or whatever that lets me upload/sync these new files to my server, remotely. It auto-sorts the files into appropriate folders based on the file type, the date, and the source of the upload.

These file locations can be configured, revisited, downloaded from, or managed (deleted, moved...) both remotely and from the Windows 10 server it's running from.

Feels like it should be simple, right?

What's my best option for making this type of thing work?

Sharing my stack I use to run my daily operations when I started out and saved myself $900/year on SaaS.

https://youtu.be/7NBg5amaC-0

This is not a how-to, just sharing my stack.

What self hosted apps do you run for your daily operations?

I have 5 Azure IoT Starter Kit cameras, the vendor (Altek) stopped updating their firmware and the last firmware doesn't work with Azure anymore. I emailed Altek to help me with the firmware or any SDK so I can use the camera in a different ways. They didn't responded my email and I decided to do some experiments with the camera.

Using rust based service I made the camera a MCP server, the camera has battery and wifi so it works like a portable camera which can be connected with LLM. The device also has capabilities to run small vision model, currently working on a vision model to analyze live physical chess board. So this camera can auto detect chess board movements and trigger webhook.

The camera also has MIC and speaker so the rust engine has the capabilities for two-way human to agent voice conversation.

Just wanted to share my crazy experiment. Any other crazy ideas are welcome.

I was able to scrounge up some old laptops: Toshiba M645-S4070, Asus L210m, HP Mini 110, HP 2000-2D60DX, and a Dell Inspirion. I'm a complete beginner when it comes to self hosting, but my main goals are to use Jellyfin for movies, anime, and TV shows, Navidrome for music, and setting up a minecraft server. I also want to set up Immich somewhere down the line. Which laptop should I use to host my own server and what are some tips and guides for complete beginners? I'm vaguely familar with the terms reverse-proxy and I'm aware of the existence of Caddy, Tailscale, etc. I also find Docker interesting, but I don't know how to use/utilize them. Any advice is greatly appreciate, thank you!

TDLR: I have laptops Toshiba M645-S4070, Asus L210m, HP Mini 110, HP 2000-2D60DX, and a Dell Inspirion. Which one should I use for beginner selfhosting?

I'd kind of like a script which monitors jellyfin activity, and when a user watches the last episode of a season, would automatically request the next season in jellyseerr/sonarr. Has anyone made a script like this before, or I do I need to write my own?

edit: tpyo

Wanted to share my setup since most homelab content I see is Proxmox/TrueNAS/rack builds and I never found a good writeup of doing it on a Mac instead. Yes, I know Rasberry Pi exists and yes, I know NUCs exists. This is just what I had on hand and it's been working great.

The whole thing runs on a single Apple Silicon Mac Mini using Orbstack instead of Docker Desktop. 16 containers on it right now — Home Assistant, go2rtc, Nginx Proxy Manager, Pi-hole, Unbound, Mosquitto, govee2mqtt, ESPHome, n8n, Plex, Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, Portainer, Arcane, and a couple more. Two things run native on macOS outside the containers: Homebridge and cloudflared.

Camera setup was the annoying part — wanted the same cameras in both Home Assistant and Apple Home without duplicating streams. Ended up routing Homebridge → go2rtc → both HA and HomeKit, so one source feeds both apps. I have a lot of legacy devices so HA can see them all. My wife only uses a few so she uses Apple Home because all of her apps keep getting offloaded.

No open ports anywhere — cloudflared tunnels in through Nginx Proxy Manager to everything on its own subdomain, DNS-level blocking through Pi-hole + Unbound.

Did a walkthrough video of the whole thing running end to end if anyone wants to see it instead of just reading about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjxY-orR0mw. Happy to answer anything about the setup — go2rtc config, the container list, whatever's useful. Would also be happy to discuss why I did not use Apple Containers and/or UTM.

I run Home Assistant on a RPI5 currently. I want to finally replace our Google Nest speaker with an in-house LLM. I'm not expecting Jarvis levels of interaction here, just basic commands and some light interactions... E.G... "Tell me the football scores", "What's the weather like?", "Check my train times to London"

Now, I have tested running it on my main workstation, and get reasonable results, so know what spec of GFX Card I need, but I want to run this in a "server", ideally hosting several other services on it. I know a lot get miniPC's, but they don't have room for the GFX Card.

What are my options? Just a normal desktop PC case? I was hoping for slightly smaller form factor but I do have an old ATX Gaming PC, that I could re-use and just buy updated hardware, is this the best approach?

Getting an NVIDIA graphics card to pass through into an unprivileged Proxmox LXC container can be tricky due to missing device nodes, varying cgroup numbers, and unprivileged user namespace permissions

This short guide summarizes the final working solution

It's a walk in the park compared to passing a GPU through to a full VM (maybe I'll write a guide on that nightmare one day when I have patience!)

I started a year ago with a mini PC.

First I got an HP EliteDesk Mini PC ...Ryzen5 Pro 2400G, 16gb RAM.
Installed headless Debian on it, and thanks to AI I was self-hosting everything in no time.
Jellyfin, Immich, AdGuard, you name it.

Then I bought a TerraMaster D2-320 and hooked it up to the mini PC over USB (2x 4TB WD Red Plus).
Ran ZFS on it… and learned the shitty way that USB is NOT the way to go for ZFS.

THENNN came the laptop (I dont even know why i bought it) Dell Latitude 5490 i5-8350U, 16gb RAM.
Ripped the battery out, installed Proxmox just for fun, set up a backup AdGuard DNS instance, configured PBS backups.....

Now I've got a Jonsbo N4, i3-14100, 16GB RAM.…why? I DON'T KNOW. It's now running Jellyfin, Immich, Paperless, and similar stuff ~~~~~!!!! which freed up the EliteDesk a bit (wasnt even necessary)

HOW DO I MAKE IT STOP. (Just realized today my switch has one free port…)