A few years ago I got a laptop with a busted video output, installed CasaOS and that kicked off a learning experience that continues to this day. I’m now running a 2 node proxmox deployment with several LXC containers and a HomeAssistant VM. I self-host most of my stuff for me and my family.

If it wasn’t for CasaOS, I’d probably had tried proxmox and fled in horror of the difficulty to grasp what it’s doing.

Also IIRC Casa now uses proper docker-compose exports, while I was using it, it was a self-rolled json file you couldn’t really import on other platforms. So enjoy Casa, and when you feel like it’s hindering your learning or desires, jump to portainer and import your stuff with just a few clicks.

For reference, here’s some of the stuff I’ve been hosting:

• NextCloud AIO for document syncing across machines, backups and contacts/calendars/todo via DavX5 on android devices

• immich replaces google Photos so I don’t have to ever “solve” a storage issue for any family member getting those googleOne popups

• HomeAssistant is still a rabbit hole on it’s own, but I love tinkering and automating stuff

• Paperless-ngx solved my download folder always full of random invoice PDFs as well as referencing documents and manuals

• Jellyfin is not only on my main TV but also my hifi music source for mobile devices and standalone speakers

• Portainer makes it super easy to spin up game servers for me and my friends in a few clicks

• PiHole+Unbound makes surfing the web bareable again

And a bunch more I use on and off, like NetAlertX to map and check on my network stats, Navidrome for older devices (like iPad2) music streaming, etc

Cool! Thanks for the tip!

Try duckdns, it doesnt nag you every month and it just works

I dragged my feet for over 2 years after building my homelab and not putting proxmox. I highly recommend you start out with proxmox right away. It has its quirks and learning curve, but it’s been a breeze after “getting it”.

At first I didn’t want the files inside LXC filesystems because I was used to manually poking at folders and such. But the periodic backup and restoration that gives you its the best, bar none.

I rebuilt my setup after a faulty data cable destroyed my btrfs raid0 filesystem (I know, I knew it was dumb, but I had 8tb at my disposal and I wanted to use it dangit!). Long story short, my borg-based Nextcloud AIO backups were borked and took like 3 days of research and external drive juggling to get some of the stuff out of them. With proxmox it’s a single click to get the whole thing back up and running.

Also you can use helper scripts as a sort of appstore, including turnkey appliances

You could try a download manager like DownThemAll on Firefox, set a queue with all the links and a depth of 1 download at a time.

DtA has been a godsend when I had shitty ADSL. It splits download in multiple parts and manages to survive micro interruptions in the service

Fair enough, though FUTO already has an anti-rugpull licence AFAIK

I don’t really get what’s the fuss about… We’ve all ran unlicensed trial software (like WinRAR) for years and nobody bat an eye.

Tell me about it. I’ve got movies with the Spanish title, and the LatAm cover art with yet another title. Ended up switching Jellyfin to English just to be able to find my movies

Holy crap thats genius, i’ll do just that!

Nice, I might give that a go. So instead of doing Artist/Album/songfile.ext you just have all albums in the same level? e.g. Band - Album1/song1.mp3 Band - Album2/song1.flac

If that’s so, I might be able to batch sort them to that structure and give Jellyfin another try

tried jellyfin even before Navidrome: the problem with Jellyfin is that as good as it is tagging and managing movies and tv shows, it’s atrocious at music management. Even though I painstakingly tagged and sorted my music using MusicBrainz Picard, there are tons of albums misplaced, or entire artists catalogs set as a single album. Same music collection on Navidrome worked OOTB and was perfectly sorted.

Indeed, tailscale/wireguard/zerotier are excellent options to keep only the bare minimum (or even nothing!) exposed to the world.

I just checked and at least on LineageOS 21 (android 14) you indeed can add specific apps (and notification categories, eg calls) to bypass do not disturb

Maybe a bit of a low tech solution, but I have an older RPI 3B running a second instance of PiHole.

No idea if its better, its the thing I tried and it was pretty seamless to set up. With my aging hardware and AMD GPU, I have been pretty much sitting in the sidelines with this whole LLM thing

There’s a dockerized version if you need those

https://github.com/Mintplex-Labs/anything-llm/blob/master/docker/HOW_TO_USE_DOCKER.md

Check AnythingLLM out, its just an appimage

Tasks.org and logseq here, ended up being the simplest way after bouncing off grocy and other overly detailed systems.

Tip: before going through with hosting NextCloud, you could get /e/ accounts, they don’t give much space but since it’s just rebranded NextCloud, you can try it out and see if it works for you.

Currently we use several tasks boards so chores are separate by type (shopping list, maintenance, bills, chores) and logseq’s journal on the app makes it flexible to take notes or whatever you need (audio notes, pics, links, etc)

While I was researching I found out about Squeezebox, as there are people using it in combination with HomeAssistant. Both solutions you and @cfi provided seem pretty doable, and I’ve already been tinkering with Mopidy on armbian. Snapcast is something I’ve never heard of, and I’m definetly going to tinker around it, I’d love to be able to sync several speakers around the house, specially for parties and gatherings.

That being said I think they are a bit overkill for the usecase, and I’m looking for something even simpler, maybe repurposing the guts of a cheap BT speaker I have lying around, see if I can find somewhere on the PCB where I can tap line level audio output and solder it directly inside the amp/sub box, along with a small power supply to run without batteries. (I know there are ready-made BT modules for this, but where’s the fun in that!)

Holy crap thanks for the detailed walkthrough! Im going to set it up as soon as I can!!