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:

For those following my post the last couple of weeks, you’d know I’ve been obsessed with building up my home server system, so much so that I made the grave mistake of exposing my computer to the world wide web through the use of DMZ (De-Militarized Zone).

Long story shot.

I’ve been hacked.

And $3,000 was stolen from my wife’s MasterCard.

What’s done is done, I’m here to tell you about what exactly what went down, how the attacker did it and how you can avoid the same mistake I did.

Let’s get started

1. Reverse Proxy: Setting up Caddy and write a proper caddyfile for reverse proxying to different endpoints within my local network.
2. Personal DDNS: dynamically update my domain(s) A records to point to my home’s public IP so I never have to worry about Viettel’s shitty service changing my IP every 2 damn days. This is done by setting up a cronjob and utilizes CloudFlare’s public API.
3. AIO Clientless SSH/RDP/VNC solution: I’m sure most of you already figured it out just by reading that sentence, yes it’s Apache Guacamole, and yes I know it’s been around for a while, but I’ve only discovered it last week, and it basically changed my life forever. I’ve been kicking myself for not looking into it sooner. I can’t even remember how much time I wasted setting up TeamViewer/Anydesk/Putty on new machines. This thing just makes it feel so effortless, and it runs directly in your browser so no corporate firewall should stand in your way.