my home servers: whats in it?

This summer, I created my own home server(s). 

I got into self-hosting due to a friend I met through the indieweb (hello kliaagu) mentioning it once. My first server was a raspberry pi 4 and an ssd enclosure plugged into it. It was rough, but it's a server! Raspberry pi's are great to use if you have them laying around, otherwise it's not worth the current cost. This model is a pi 4 with 4 gbs of ram, my uncle gave it to me a long time ago. I installed ubuntu server on it and ran mainly jellyfin. The ssd in the m.2 enclosure is a 1 tb ssd nvme. With how the prices of nvme ssd's right now, it felt like a waste to use it like this, but fortunately I checked the drive on crystal disk info when I removed it, and there were no flaws, it still said it was at 100%. 

 

I then upgraded came from a secondhand computer I had laying around. The motherboard is an hp elitedesk sff (small form factor) which means the motherboard came from a small desktop pcs. These guys are perfect because they are built to be power efficient. The CPU is a i7 4th gen, which is miles more powerful than the pi. I put in 32 gb ddr3, two 2 tb hdd, and it runs on a 256 gb sata ssd. 

 

By the way, I was completely new to linux before my pi server, it was over there where I learned how to use debian based unix in the command line with ubuntu server. During my time in taiwan, I brought a thinkpad laptop I had that I installed Kubuntu on. I was having a lot of fun ssh'ing into my pi server and playing around with light docker containers. But now with a way more powerful server, I set up Proxmox and laid out my server like this.

Proxmox
+-- vm100(ubuntu server lts)
|    +-- docker
|    |    +-- ngnix proxy manager (forward 443, dns-01 challenge because isp blocks port 80 lol)
|    |    +-- Jellyfin 
|    |    +-- plex (amp)
|    |    +-- authentik
|    |    +-- crowdsec
|    |    +-- Nextcloud    
|    |    +-- dashy
|    |    +-- immich
|    |    +-- portainer
|    |    +-- cadvisor

|    |    +-- borgbackup
|    +-- crafty controller (minecraft server)
|    +-- notes
|    +-- glances 
+-- vm1000(lxc tailscale)
+-- vm101(debian12)(off)
+-- vm102(windows11)(off) 

I really should use more lxc, but I don't have a need for them right now, besides tailscale, because I only have 1 primary vm which I do everything through. Heres a breakdown of all my services and what they do:

Services:

  

Jellyfin! One of the best services you can self-host. Downloading my own media like movies, tv shows, anime and streaming it from my own hardware. No need to pay annoying streaming subscription fees. Note: all media I have on my server is acquired legally without tormenting (hehe).

 

Plexamp is my spotify replacement. I use both plex and jellyfin because Plex is for music, mainly because plex has a mobile app. Plex has been going downhill-ish which is why I stray away from hosting media there. But plexamp has been great so far. If I eventually replace plexamp, it's because I've been using mp3 players to listen to music instead. 

 

Immich is google images replacement. The UI looks just like google images. 

Nextcloud is same as Immich, but for general files. Like google drive! 

Crafty is my minecraft server dashboard.  

 

Security and reverse proxy:

The only services I have revealed to the public are Jellyfin, Nextcloud, and immich. I run them through Ngnix proxy manager which was trivially easy to use and setup. I only port forward 443 on my router, because my ISP doesn't allow port 80 to be revealed unless you call them up. Because of this, I can't use standard http-01 challenge to get a ssl certificate with let's encrypt. Instead, I use dns-01 which is perfectly fine for me. 

My security is: crowdsec for ip-banning and monitoring bots that port scan, http probe, and potentially brute force attacks. Authentik which lets me set up multi factor authentication: password, one time password. And after that, a login page to nextcloud. Authentik mainly protects nextcloud and immich. After that, I use fail2ban for login bans. It's redundant to have both fail2ban and crowdsec but I'm just lazy and don't feel like removing fail2ban yet.  

 

 

Dashboard and monitoring:

I eventually want to have prometheus and grafana for really nice charts and dashboard monitoring. But something that I don't like is the UI for self-hosted apps is always kinda ugly. I'm not talking about minimalist, creator didn't feel like investing time in GUI ugly. I'm talking about vibe coded claude UI ugly. As of right now I have use dashy as my main dashboard because it has custom CSS, and of course I had to hop on it. 

 

Ignore the errors right now I got lazy and didn't feel like fixing it haha. And the ip is a tailscale ip so you can't do much with it. I also have uptime kuma, which my pi is running and constantly pinging my main server, and if anything goes down, I get a notification on my phone on either discord or an app called ntfy.  

 

Just yesterday, I also added qbittorent and komga (self-hosted ebook reader)! And while a bit silly, my favorite part of this project is the fact I got to learn how to really use the linux terminal. Terminals always have that "hacking into the mainframe" idea stuck to it. What makes it great though, is 1. I am able to control a computer from hundreds of miles away, because text is very easy to send over the internet vs GUI, 2. You are controlling a computer the old fashion way, 3. It looks cool :3

 

Why I hate frutiger aero

The title is a lie. I love frutiger aero. One look at my neocities and personal website design philosophy will instantly prove it. But I hate what it's become post-2020; frutiger aero has become bastardized by a wrong form of nostalgia and a tiktok-isque community. Terms like "the future we were promised" and short form clips of a collage of frutiger aero images set me off. 

The other day, I was hate-watching this youtube video called "Frutiger Aero: How a Cruel Lie Stole Our Future." I've seen it and heard it all before: the video starts with praising the mixture of beautiful glossy design elements, with nature, and technology. It's a "throwback to a time where we were optimistic, and hopeful about new technology!" But alas, this was a lie, because now we have superflat design and awful new tech because of evil evil tech engineers at Microsoft! 

What makes me so irrationally mad at these slop videos that all parrot the same opinion is that I almost agree. I hate Microsoft and windows 11 with a burning passion, and I love frutiger aero in design principle so much I want to make my room, my computer, my electronics, all of it frutiger aero. What makes me so mad is the defeatist and hopeless attitudes that come from mass psychosis social media users. The same people who love frutiger aero so much that they are mass liking and scrolling on tiktotk, buying temu/tiktok shop (made by some child in china) products that are "frutiger aero themed" are the same ones who virtue signal about the environmentalism motifs in frutiger aero. The irony being, being on tiktok itself, buying slop things you did not need, is arguably one of the worst things you can do for the environment and is the opposite of the frutiger aero essence. 

People on tiktok and instagram reels are most tied down by their desires. The frutiger aero tiktok fanbase thrive off of little slop trinkets instead of playing around with operating systems on their computers. Have you met any of these people who treat frutiger aero as an "aesthetic" who actually have tried reinstalling windows xp, vista, or 7? Or even downloading linux desktop environments (like my favorite, KDE), following a tutorial on how to turn it skeuomorphic? Or even try window managers like enlightenment e16 or even window maker? 

There are companies, and there are mindless consumers. Companies love mindless consumers. Those who will just buy buy buy and use use use without a second thought. In capitalism, you get the option to choose your product. When I don't like the product, I don't buy it. Or I pirate it. Or I buy secondhand. The problem in the west, is that everyone is so rich, they throw their money and attention around like its nothing. And I don't want to hear the "You live in society, yet you participate in it" getback comic people always bring up. Tiktok is a luxury, starbucks is a luxury, temu is a luxury. You don't need any of these things in society. 

Corporations are only as strong as people make it. Corporations sell products, and since they clearly don't want to listen to us, then why not stop using... their product? If 10% of windows users just felt like leaving because their product fucking sucks, microsoft would have a full blown meltdown. You hate google? Try duckduckgo or brave. You like frutiger aero? Try any linux distro with KDE in a VM and give ricing a shot. 

I guess a better title would be "why I hate the frutiger aero community." I remember checking out the frutiger aero archive forums. And once again, I see the same problems. People all have the same 2 opinions. People talk about how awful the present day is, how much better the past was. Folks see frutiger aero as a sort of political/cultural movement, while what it really should be is a consumer movement. Quit throwing around phrases like "the future we were promised," because there is no divine intervention, if you want frutiger aero, make it yourself. You don't ACTUALLY trust microsoft to do it for you, do you? 

Begun sophomore year of college, considering transferring colleges

I just moved into my college. I'm starting my second year now, and I don't... believe I'm in the right place. I've been considering transferring since last year, in the middle of the first semester at this college. A wise man once said, "if you start thinking about transferring, then you're not satisfied with your current college, and you should probably transfer." My "I hate my uni" phase has long ended, but I still don't like this place very much. I attend a 4 year state school for Engineering. The main reasons I don't like it are: I don't fit in with the people/school culture here, it's not that good for my major, and I don't feel like I'm getting value for my money.  

So why did I pick this college? Unfortunately, the reason I picked this one is because I naively cared about the "college town" and "social life" this university "had." For any upcoming american college students that may read this blog: I learned quickly that when college students say "social life" they're talking about parties. And when they say "college town" they're talking about frat houses and bars. I don't care if people like partying and drinking, I enjoy both too. But a lot of students at this school center their entire social lives around partying. That's not really "social life". 

Regretfully, I fell for another college marketing traps: "prestige" and "selective-ness". My college has a low acceptance rate, and as a high school senior then I guess I thought "hard to get into = good". That's just not true for colleges. I got into another state school which has twice the acceptance rate but has one of the best programs for electrical engineering, and they gave me a scholarship. 

So where am I going now? I'm going to apply transfer to a couple state schools. One being the aforementioned school with a good electrical engineering program, and another one that is in my city and would allow me to live at home, basically cutting all the cost needed for dorming (I'll call it school B). My mom hates school B. She thinks it's "downgrading." I've been trying to explain to her that, it's not a "prestigious" school but it provides pretty good value for the price, and I'll be able to work real jobs for experience during the year. I'll be a commuter, so yeah "social life" will be nonexistent. But tbh, I don't think I'll see a difference, because my social awkwardness has been skyrocketing, and I've struggled to make friends for years. 

On better note, I got an internship for this fall! It starts next week, and I'll get paid 19-20 an hour. I'm planning on working 15 hours a week. 

Back from taiwan: beauty in taiwan mundane

I came back from taiwan 2 days ago, here's my obligatory return afterthoughts blog

Taiwan was fast this year... I was there for 5 weeks, and it passed in the blink of an eye. I think I did a lot on this trip. A lot of things I wouldn't traditionally do, like cafe hopping with a laptop and work on schoolwork/website/server. It was really mundane, but I really tried to enjoy every last bit of it. I wanted to enjoy the mundane little things and simple personality taiwan has. I don't actually like visiting very crowded and popular places like Ximending in Taiwan. My mom and sister actually went to Japan together for 4 days for a vacation while me and my dad stayed in taiwan. My sister is a part of the Jirai Kei subculture so she was happy to go and spend money lol. She's also my biggest influence for fashion since we have similar varying fashion tastes. She bought me some subcul clothing too! 

My sister asked me why I didn't go with them, well the main reason was that I was in class and school, but then something in the back of my head also caught my attention. I don't think I would have gone because the golden route of Tokyo (shinjuku, shibuya, akihabara), Osaka, Kyoto don't really interest me, it won't really feel like Japan. Similar to how Times Square is not NYC, Ximending is not Taiwan, and Paris is not France. 

This ties back into how I expressed feeling more enjoyment in the mundane things; like going to a local breakfast store run by kind elderly taiwanese at 6 am who will serve you the best 蛋餅 (egg pancake), 蔥油餅 (green onion pancake) 蘿蔔糕 (radish cake) and soy milk for great prices. Walking around my local area before the sun rises too high and it gets too hot to walk around. By the way, I personally believe Taiwanese breakfast should start being spread around the world. I love taiwanese breakfast, you have many options and many of them are bread-y with egg, meat, and plenty of good flavors. I like the taiwan that is not trying very hard to be something else. Taiwan has an identity problem: a country that was native, Chinese, Japanese, and then Chinese again. When going to the Financial district, you can see a lot of western influence, while going to Taichung, you see Japanese influence. Sometimes, I feel like Taiwan is trying to hard to be Japan, or trying too hard to be China. Taiwan is far too rude to be Japan, and Taiwan doesn't slap LEDs on our deteriorating buildings and call ourselves Cyberpunk to be china. And that's good, because there is a perfect imperfection in Taiwan. Yes, the ugly buildings and ton of power lines, make taiwan seem very frozen in time. Like it is still the 90s. And that's all great.  

 

 

 

 

A month in taiwan, petty pet peeves

 I've been in taiwan for nearly a month now, which is crazy to think about how fast time went. The classes I'm taking are very easy. For the most part, I spend most my time with my family like it's a normal family getaway. When I was way younger I would return to taiwan and stay there for way longer. This place is a second home to me, it's really different from the city I live in america because I live in a more rural area in Taiwan. But it only takes a 15 minute bus ride and I am in the main bustling city of Taipei! 

Now... some of my pet peeves...

First of all, goodness the heat. I can never get used to it. Since my mom was a teacher we came back during summer break during the american school year, which is the months of June, July, and August. Also known as the hottest months of all time. Taiwan heat is especially awful. Daily temperatures of 90-100 F (33 to 36 C) and 70-90 % humidity. Your sweat will stick to you. Now, I can wear long pants in taiwan, but when I was 5 years old I threw tantrums a lot. Thinking about it now I feel very bad for my mom. Because of the heat and where we live, there are a lot of bugs too. Certain bugs I don't care much about, but roaches I can't stand. Thank god for AC nowadays tho! A lot of places blow strong AC. 

And then, old people can be very rude. This is very common for asian countries, particularly those with any sort of Chinese Confucian influence that old people can be quite the assholes! In my experience, all the old people who just chill at home or going on walks in your local area are super friendly and will say good morning and chat, especially if they recognize you. But the moment you get on public transport and the main city, it's like completely different group of old people. Pushing, shoving, staring. 

Anyways I don't have internet at home (My parent's don't pay for it because they don't need it), so I've been enjoying going to cafes and libraries, getting free wifi and torrenting anime and music in Taipei. I've been torrenting anime to add to my server database, and selfhost a media server using Jellyfin. As I write this, I'm sitting in a Louisa Coffee and coding. By the way, I've been experiencing with Linux a lot. On this laptop, I'm using KDE Plasma on Linux Mint (weird combo, I know.) Linux is great! On my thinkpad T490s, everything runs incredibly, and the terminal, which I used to be really scared of, is now my best friend. The terminal is just super powerful. Anything from converting videos, downloading videos, moving files (moving 30 gb folders in an instant), sorting files, accessing my server from 7000 miles away, even updating my website on neocities, it's just really easy to do on the terminal. And most importantly, the terminal looks really really cool! 

 

Use duckduckgo!

The other day, I was peeking over at my dad's phone when I noticed that when he searched something on safari, he didn't get any "AI overview" like what has become commonplace on google. I noticed he was using Duckduckgo, and I asked him about it. He told me it felt nicer to use so he has been using it. Here are some of the pros and cons for me as I've been using it on my phone and laptop for the past 2 weeks. 

The first main features that I think will make most people very excited is the ability to turn off AI search overview AND filter AI images. Duckduckgo allows you to set how often you want AI overview to pop up. That's the best part, that you get the choice. You're able to completely turn it off or leave it on demand, or just show up naturally. The next part, is the ability to filter AI images. As far as I'm concerned, this feature relies on users reporting images as AI, which is a good reason why I'm writing this blog. It would be great if people read this blog, became users of Duckduckgo, and passively reported images that are AI during their time using it. 

Also, duckduckgo pushes significantly less reddit that google. Something I've noticed after using duckduckgo is just how much google pushes reddit. The first or second result on google is almost always something on reddit. Reddit is no longer the "front page of the internet." It's one of the most polarized platforms of all time, with plenty misinformation, bitter people and mods with superiority complexes on it, and a lot of bots. Not to mention, a lot of AI is trained on reddit (reddit sold tons of user content to OpenAI to train with). When searching something on duckduckgo I usually get an article that would've been the 4th or 5th result on google search. It feels like how old google was, when it worked. 

Duckduckgo also prides themself on privacy. In all honestly, I don't completely trust that any search browser doesn't have some sort of trackers in it. It's just how search engines and SEO works. Despite this, Duckduckgo still feels miles ahead of Google and Bing. The best bet is to use uBlock origin alongside duckduckgo for maximum security. You also get customization options too.  

 

The primary con is people use duckduckgo less. Because of this, search results might not be as polished as google. Google is simply the default for a lot of people now. So google simply has more traffic and can fine tune their searches exceptionally. 

Switching to duckduckgo is really easy too. For my phone, all I needed to do was go to safari settings and switch my primary search engine to duckduckgo. On my laptop, it's even easier. I use firefox, and the option to switch is right there on the search bar. If you're reading this, give duckduckgo a shot for a day or two! You likely wouldn't need to download anything, because most browsers have a setting you can switch to it instantly. 

Highschool was the worse

I would do a lot of things to be able to go to high school 10 years earlier. 

There are a lot of things I would sacrifice to be able to go to high school without the existence of instagram, tiktok, mobile smartphones. Having now taken the full step to not just delete the instagram app, which I did 4 months ago, but to also deactivate both my accounts, let me write about just how shit highschool was; and how long I have been lying to myself. 

I started my website and subsequently my blog in my senior year of high school. In my earliest blog posts, you can see the remnants of phony optimism in the words I typed. I say 'phony', because I still consider myself pretty optimistic, but in those posts I can clearly see me lying to myself in order to feel a little less of a loser. 

Yeah, high school was the worse. I was invisible. I wasn't even a background character. I was non-existent. To other people, I may have been just okay to be around in school, wanting to do anything outside of school with me was not even a consideration. And no matter what I did to at least become background character B, it just was never really my time to shine. High school is always portrayed as the best time of your life. Even before I was in high school, I already knew it was all bullshit, there was no high school musical, and I was fine with not having a flashy, eventful life. But what really hurt, was not having any of the mundane. There were no train rides chatting with a friend home. There were no detours to stop by a place instead of going straight home. There were no spontaneous hangouts, stopping by a friends house, or late night chats. No long text message conversations right after something happened, and no phone calls. At least for me. Normal highschool activities, I feel like I completely missed out on. 

I lied, actually, in my first year, there was train rides, detours, hangouts, and chats. For about 6 months in freshman year. I still had friends from people who went to the same middle school as me. And then I didn't. Calling it a falling out is too dramatic, but calling it drifting away is too understated. It wasn't a falling out because there wasn't some big fight that split everyone, and it wasn't a drift away because the group continued to be relatively close. It was just me. I don't know what started it, but one day you aren't invited to a hangout. Then, the group chats you're in go silent. Then, when you ask what they're doing they go silent. "The best years of my life" are words I thought of when I tried to invite one of those 'friends' to a christmas hangout, and he just starts walking away faster and faster. I never really celebrated my birthday. I hated that day. Opening my phone and seeing no notifications. In modern teenage culture, on someones birthday, people would post happy birthday wishes on their instagram stories, and tag the person. That person would then repost it. It was always a force of flaunting to me. "Look at how many friends I have, who want to wish me happy birthday!" 

I can't even blame them for not wanting to be friends with me anymore. I was awful to be around. Always angry, always negative, always insecure, and argued with everyone over stupid shit. I was not interesting in the slightest, I had zero hobbies or interests outside of studying and playing video games, and being on discord. I probably deserved it. 

To be split from that group was one thing, but I think I rather have just spent my entirety of high school alone than to know that for the next 3 years, they were laughing at me. Because of how insecure I felt about this, I tried to compensate in other ways to lie to myself that, I was doing ok. In the rare times I hung out, it was mainly to convince myself that "see! I'm doing normal high school things too! Like hanging out with friends!" Needless to say, I didn't enjoy those times. I did not like the people I was hanging out with. I tried clubs. Forced myself to stay in the godforsaken high school building for another 2 hours just to try to see if I would fit in. It was even worse because I knew it was bad, but I kept telling myself that it wasn't. I found myself within the fence of many groups. Not really particularly part of any of them, but just there so I could be less lonely during lunchtime. I didn't have that much fun because I had 0 connection with any of these people, but I pretended and adjusted to every single conversation, every single person, just to feel like absolute shit at the end of it because they would never reciprocate the effort I put in. Any efforts into hanging out was just "I'm busy." I never talked to them outside of the 45 minutes of a lunch period. Yeah, I ate lunch alone for most of high school. Actually, I didn't even eat lunch for the first half. I was far too insecure to take off my mask in freshman and sophomore year. That's how I dropped to 90 pounds. There was a retarded social media thing called "mask fishing" where people would say you looked way better with the mask on and ugly as fuck with it off. Insecure me, who was already insecure with my face since elementary school, started to get more and more pimples, and there was just nothing I could do about it. 

I'm still in a 6 year battle between me and my skin. I have some of the most painful and bad hormonal acne, face, chest and back acne, that I can't do anything about. I've been using tretinoin for my face and body for 2-3 years now, where it did help clear up the worse of my face, but my body is still left awful. Some of my old shirts have blood stains on the back because of my acne. The derm said it typically lasts up until 19-22. 

High school was the worst. I hate smartphones. Every interaction was spent between the phone. Sometimes they'd get distracted as we talked and start scrolling. Get a notification and start texting. Instagram and tiktok made it hell. It was always about who's attractive, who's smart, this and that. I never had tiktok, and not having it felt like being 10 miles behind in a marathon I didn't want to run in. It interfered with everything. It changed everything. People didn't even have hobbies anymore. All they wanted to do was scroll.

Interestingly, the year after I graduated they banned smartphones in schools in my state. I was in support of it, but everyone else I knew complained. They need it. The ban is a good thing 

I wish I could restart highschool. Click play and restart as many times as I want to. In particular, choose a time, any time before smartphones. It ruined me. It changed everything. It changed how people talked, how people treated each others, how people viewed things. I wasted my high school years, having nothing and in denial about everything. I was never happy and hate myself so much. So many actions I wish I never did, so many words I wish I never/should've said. Hearing how my millennial cousins describe their time in school made me so envious. Is the grass really always greener on the other side if the grass on my side is dead and withered by famine, and the other side so luscious and gorgeous?