Hey :) I’m not giving you any recommendations but want to give you my personal experience !

5 years ago I had absolutely no clue about Linux/CLI/networking/docker… You name it ! And I also wanted to repurposed and old laptop as a server.

The first distro I installed on my server was Debian ! Why? Because I remembered my brother said something along the line: “Every server infrastructure is run by Debian or a Debian derivative”. So this sounded like the perfect thing to install as a server distro :) !

5 years later I’m still running Debian on this old laptop and it’s going strong ! Never did it failed me except if I did something wrong over the CLI !

As you guessed it, you will need some degree of proficiency on the command line specially if you install your distro without a graphical user interface, which I would recommend… Yes, the CLI isn’t easy to beginning with and you will do some mistakes that will need a full reinstall of your system… But before you learn to move, you learn to stay up right on your legs and this involves a lot a failing !!

It’s not mandatory, you can install a lightweight GUI and take your time. There are a lot of application with good UI which will help you out ! However, not once did I regret to take the harder route and learned so many things along the way ! After this amount of time in the CLI, I can say I’m getting quite good In navigating my system, keeping it healthy and alive :p !

Okay, If it’s a matter of time I get it ! We only have 24h a day and most of this time is already spend at work/school, family time, friends, sleep, eat ! If you’re lucky enough to have 2 hours to spare to tinker arround, a UI is a good idea to keep a healthy balance between all your personal activities ! But keep in mind, both are thorny and have their fair share of issues and debug time.

Last words, have fun with your system :)

While I do agree on the general sentiment to not overcomplicate things, homebox seems rather easy to use and intuitive.

Being able to create qr code to put them on boxes and also have them directly accessible through the web interface is neat !

However, there’s one thing that’s quite cumbersome… There isn’t a one button move everything to a new location. Someone already posted a feature request and got some traction :) so cross fingers this going be implemented in the near futur !!

The solution here is to use a wireguard (or similar technology) server and use it on all your devices. People already use VPNs for everything, so adding this layer isn’t that much of a hassle !

Just try to smile when there’s something good.

That’s so true and do agree on that ! But just beeing happy with breadcrums is something we experience like forever?

It’s way to slow and people are way to much brainfucked by big tech/GAFAMs and other shit…

So yeah, put your happy face mask on but don’t rejoice until we actually win somthing…

France is such a bizare country… They enforce E2E encryption and at the same time try to break E2E encryption?

:/

Not self-hosted so I doesn’t really answer your question… However, if you’re still a student consider the switch to Zotero.

Things you can self-host though, to make your books available everywhere, is some webdav sever to link your books directly to zotero and access them on every device.

If you’re serious about book reading and study, nothing beats Zotero !

Oh yeah sorry ! For the ease of use part I ment the NAS stuff which already comes bundled with all the necessary software to keep things easy but less customizable !

Yeah if you get IT enterprise hardware for free it’s kinda similar to repurposing, sooo that’s a great deal and lucky you !!!

But I would never put 1$ myself into specific server stuff ! Except if one day I want to contribute to the self-hosted/opensource community and host something like newpipe that needs to be publicly available.Then yeah, proper hardware and software stuff is mandatory !

Sorry if my comment came by rude, that wasn’t my purpose !

Yeah… Never had a specific “server” certified hardware and always repurpose my hold hardware stuff. Never failed me !!

However, there are some functions specific to NAS’ like low power and other stuff people mention but I already forgot.

IMO all this NAS and certified server stuff is good for Enterprise shit and the like… But for homelabbing it’s probably overkill and way to much overpriced for the little gain…

Except maybe for the ease of use and plug and play function? Each one it’s own I guess !

Yeah maybe, I’m not sure anymore ! Maybe both had some mental break down with some strange political and cultural view 🤷‍♂️ Long time I haven’t been in the gaming piracy scene… But if you confirm it was Empress rather than FitGirl I will edit my comment !

Edit: After some search on the web you’re right :) I ment Empress. Edited !

This reads like Empresse’s* mental breakdown xD

Ohhhhh ! Sometimes I just need to sh*up !

Thanks for the clarification.

Huh? Yeah it is… It’s a self-signed intermediate CA, signed by a self-signed rootCA.

In my case a miniCA in my lan.

Jellyfin doesn’t accept self-signed certs.

Huh?? My jellyfin.home.lab self-signed certificate would like a word… Just put everything behind a reverse proxy (in a self-hosted community you will sooner or later be confronted to one anyway…) And you get all your services behind self-signed certs. Doesn’t matter if Jellyfin accept or not… It’s encrypted through your reverse proxy !

I don’t get that…

I have self-signed SSL certificate and intermediateCA installed on all my devices and works flawlessly with every application that accept those (on android the manifest.XML has to allow user based certificate which is in most cases).

One exception on Android was the use of MPV which doesn’t do that and never will? However, the web player video type from official application works without issues…

I have navidrome, jellyfin, Ironfox, LibreTube, KoReader, Findroid… All work flawlessly with self-signed certs !

The issue here (as said in the second answer of his linked jellyfin post) is that them needs a reverse proxy that takes care of the SSL handshake and not jellyfin directly. So OP was missing a lot of good information in them’s first post…

I though that the recommended swap partition was to double until 16 GB? So at 32GB of ram use 32GB of swap?

Production is my testing lab, but only in my homelab ! I guess I don’t care to perfectly secure my services (really dumb and easy passwords, no 2fa, not hiding plain sight passwords…) because I’m not directly exposing them to the web and accessing them externally via Wireguard ! That’s really bad practice though, but any time soon will probably clean up that mess, but right now I can’t, I have to cook some eggs…

There are 2 things though I actually do have some more complex workflow:

• Rather complex incremental automated backup script for my docker container volumes, databases, config files, compose files.

• Self-hosted mini-CA to access all my services via a nice .lab domain and get rid of that pesky warning on my devices.

I always do some tests if my backups are working on a VM on my personal desktop computer, because no backup means that all those years of tinkering for nothing… This will bring up some nasty depression…

Edit: If have a rather small homelab, everything on an old laptop, still quite happy with the result and works as expected.

Just create a wildcard domain certificate !

I access all my services in my lan through https://servicename.home.lab/ I just had to add the rootCA certificat (actually the intermediate certificate) into my trust store on every device. That’s what they actually do, just in automated way !

Never had an issue to access my services with my self-signed certs, neither on Android, iOS, windows, linux ! Everything served from my server via my reverse proxy of choice (Treafik).

However I do remember that there was something of importance to make my Android device accept the certificate (something in certificate itself and the extension).

If you’re interested I can send you the snipped of a book to fully host your own CA :). It’s a great read and easy to follow !

Ohhh thanks for the clarification ! As you guessed I’m not into dev/programming so I wasn’t aware of this kind of detail !

Thank you :)

Edit: Now semver makes sense !

I mean, where else should they show that warning? It’s also posted in the forum. They also edited the documentation page.

Maybe you’re more into mailing list or the like? I’m genuine curious on what/ how/ where you expected getting this kind of information.

Really cool stuff !! Something I need to try out for sure !

Just to bad they didn’t add a multiuser setup example :( !

If you are doing any kind of multiuser mail node, you should have a separate SMTP system in front of this one that performs any necessary validation.