It is no secret that I am a major self-hosting fanatic, but people have been asking specifically about what it is that I host my home “server” (which is a glorified term really, it’s only an old Pavillion laptop running a 4th gen core i5 and 8GB of DDR3 memory). Still

1. Authelia (Authentication and Authorization gateway)

Authelia is an authentication gateway. You only need to sign in once and you’ll get access to the whole server, but it’s not really SSO. You still need separate accounts for their respective applications. Still, having an additional layer of security in front of your services does provide peace of mind, especially when you combine it with Duo Security as a MFA method.

2. NGINX Proxy Manager (Reverse proxy)

There’s many reverse proxies out there, like Traefik and Caddy, which is actually what I started it. But I choose NPM due to its simplicity. Sure Traefik and Caddy may offer more fine tune controls and is more suitable for power users, but NPM just works™ with minimal configuration. It also handles SSL (via Let’s Encrypt) and its default configuration covers most of my need.

3. Jellyfin (Media Server)

This is it, this is what sent me down this self-hosting rabbit hole. Those who followed me would remember that I run a small movie club called Phimhub, and I started out with a WordPress website much like namvu.net, that listed (NOT hosted) a number of interesting movie titles for our group. Much to our dismay Google, in their infinite wisdom, decided they didn’t like the site and axed my account (no specific reason given). So I did what any reasonable person would do, and host my own media server, with blackjack and hookers.

As you may know, I run a little movie club, which started out as a Netflix group buy a year ago, which later led to me setting up my own Netflix (with Jellyfin) eventually leading to me going down the /r/selfhosted rabbit hole, learning a ton of stuffs about personal server deployment along the way.

It served us well, albeit with some annoyances. For starter, it only runs from 8am to 11.30pm everyday, mainly because I hosted it from my personal desktop, which is only powered on during those period. Another drawback of running it from my personal PC is the lack of space. I only had a single 3TB HDD installed, and Phimhub’s library had long exceeded that. I tried to work around it by using Google Drive File Stream (now simply known as Google Drive) to keep only a fraction of the files offline, and leave the rest on the cloud. This effectively means that only around 30% of Phimhub’s library was ready to play at any time.

Well, today I’m proud to say those annoyances should be gone. I’ve finished building a DIY NAS running Xpenology with a whopping 64TB of storage (2x WD Ultrastar 16Tb, 2x Seagate Exos 16Tb, all enterprise class, datacenter ready drives). I’ve also procured a more powerful laptop to act as the resident server, hosting every single services in one place (containerized of course). A bump from N3060 to an i5-4200M means now I can move Jellyfin to the laptop itself instead of running it from my PC. While the i5 does consume quite a bit more power than the Celeron (37w vs 6w), but it’s still better than running my power hungry desktop PC for 16 hours a day for sure.

Essentially, instead of hosting Jellyfin AND the media library on my own PC, now Jellyfin will be moved into a docker container on my laptop server, and the media library will reside on the family NAS. You do need to mount the SMB share as a local mount on your server of course. One drawback of this approach is that you can no longer delete media from the Web UI, since I didn’t give the docker container write permission to the SMB share. I could do that but I figure it’s better this way, since I’ll be the only one managing the media files anyway, I can just do it from my local computer.

Reddit knows!

I was gonna post this on my Linkedin by decided against it, trying to keep it professional, ya know.

So I’ve been fiddling around with remote management tools for my home server recently, after accidentally discovering Cockpit after installing Fedora (it comes preinstalled with Fedora Server 34), I started looking around for alternatives. Don’t get me wrong Cockpit is great but being a DIY I always wanted to see what kind of options are out there.

During my search I came across a vaguely familiar name: Webmin. I had limited experience with Webmin before when I was searching for a decent web panel for my VPS since it is the basis on which Virtualmin is based on. I quickly dropped it due to the horribly outdated UI (it’s a designer’s quirk, don’t ask).

Revisiting it a few years later, I just couldn’t believe my eyes when I first fire up the program, the difference is like Night and Day! Even literally more so since the current version even includes a proper dark mode that can be toggled in real time! How awesome is that?

Check out this before-after comparison: