Hello everyone :)
My Linux learning and Homelab setup is going smoothly and after a long period of stagnation, I’m in a new learning curve :D ! I just learned the magic of hard links and implemented them with bind mounts (yeah hard links only work on the same file system :P) to my Qbittorrent scripting to automagically move them as hard links to a bind mount accessible to Sonarr, Radarr, Jellyfin… and move, rename and do all other things without even touching the original files: PUR MAGIC !
Everything is a file? Naah, everything is a hard link ! (Or inode? xD)
While I’m overjoyed I learned and have a better understanding of files, hard links, soft links, file system, docker, web, all kind of things related to IT… I’m getting kinda overwhelmed of what’s happening on my system !!
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I have a dozen docker compose on my server, all behind traefik resolved by my piHole DNS on a raspberry pi, some have a custom image made by myself for certificate purpose or some manual changes I added.
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I have some
.configfiles in my~/to improve mymicroexperience and make it more integrated over SSH with my Mac and Desktop. If also have some config files in my/rootdirectory for my miniCA for all my service with my personal local domain name and other config files like/etc/bash_aliasesand some changes in/etc/bash.bashrc -
I have some python
.venvfor learning and scripting with python -
I have a complex and long bash script backup for all my docker containers to back up my volumes, config files and media files separately
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Installed some useful and needed packages like
resolvconf,wireguard,samba… -
I have a few samba shares, all accessible in my LAN with sometimes some exotic configuration for Mac integration
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My docker containers have some bind mounts shared volumes
[…]
And now I also have some hard links lying around in the mix ! So I have to say it out loud: I’m OVERWHELMED !
Yes, I do keep some notes in Obsidian and also have a self-hosted Forgejo to keep my notes updated and have some kind of version control of changes in my scripts, but I do feel like I’m not sure anymore what I have… Not to say I didn’t mention all the other stuff related to my phone (baikal, ntfy…) or how to keep everything updated (WUD does the trick for containers :)) and tidy…
I guess I’m looking for something magic, something that could In ONE blink give me what’s doing what and where? And changes my life for an ever-growing IT space ? Preference something visual…?
I hope to hear from you guys on what I can do to take away this feel of being lost and not being able to fully track my systems and my LAN !
Thank you !
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I’m not sure if this what you’re after, but it sounded to me that you were describing monitoring. Might be worth your checking out librenms or zabbix or checkmk. Those would give you a good overview of the health of your stuff and keep track of what’s where.
It maybe off topic but I’ve been using coolify for my homelab setup and it’s been working great. It manages all the docker compose files for you and you can edit and deploy them, all from the nice webui it comes with. You can even access the terminal without leaving your browser. Drawback is that you well not get “hardlinking everything” type of flexibility.
This seems cool and is not off topic at all :) It does seem to answer to my “question” and seems a nice thing to have :) However, someone suggested Terraform but after some reading it’s not the tool I was looking for… Ansible seems more the like I guess ! But coolify seems also very interesting ! Different and more similar to my current setup.
I think Terraform, Ansible, Tofu are the next generation tool to solve my current issue… They are declarative tools ! But I don’t want to rush things and have another dead setup lying arround !
Thanks for your reply !
Edit: There’s also an alternative https://github.com/Dokploy/dokploy in case you didn’t know :) If you know, can you tell me why you choose on over the other?
I didn’t know about dokploy tbh, thanks. It seems to have more refurbished UI. If I knew this first I would have given it a try. The reason why I’m using coolify right now is that I saw it on Hackernews. I didn’t do much research because it was already opensource and self-hosted ( which are the most important features I require for a software).
Since Coolify is working fine on my environment for now, I’m not going to get rid of it immediately, but it’s always a good thing to have many other alternatives so that we can cope with enshittification (aka Plex)
Can you create both a physical diagram and a logical diagram?
Sorry, what do you mean by physical/logical diagrams :S! You mean something like Excalidraw ?
I did It for sometimes, but If I do some changes in my setup I always have to keep that update too… So I have to think about it… I do like drawing those diagrams, but keeping those updated is sometimes not directly possible and I can get forgetful !
Physical diagram shows the actual physical connections between devices.
A logical would show separate VMs and containers and virtual switches and how they connect to each other.
Diagrams do change but are helpful to understand your infrastructure
Might be a big change but look into unraid. Dead simple. I’ll never use anything else for self hosting.
Thanks for the pointer :). I’m more into open source, so TrueNAS is maybe more fitting, however I’m not sure I do understand it right… Those are OSes? Not some application I can host in a container right? More like Proxmox ?
They’re OSes sort of in the way a Linux Distro is.
Yes, not in a container. Unraid won’t work well in a VM (Proxmox), but TrueNAS will. Both are really intended to run on raw hardware though.
They’re both primarily systems for doing NAS - managing multi-drive storage, sharing with other hardware on your network. But also make it easy for you to deploy containers and VMs on the same hardware.
