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.