• 3 Posts
  • 26 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I don’t know about other homeserver implementations but synapse kinda sucks. It used to randomly eat 100% of 1 or 2 CPU cores (including the database) until I tracked it down to 3 rooms having a messed up state which caused costly SQL queries. I removed the rooms from my server (using a third party admin panel because there’s no proper admin GUI built in, the documentation just mentions curl commands to hit the admin API, with placeholders to manually replace). It has been fine since I did it, but I’m the only user on my server. And I expect other issues to come up at any time…

    It also eats a lot of storage, mostly the database. It grew very large quickly, but it’s more stable now










  • Your ISP might make you go through another layer of NAT. Can you find the WAN IP address of your router and compare it to your public IP address from a website such as ipinfo.io ?

    If they do not match, you’re probably out of luck and will need to forward your port from an actually public IP in order to achieve what you want

    More details : CGNAT (Carrier Grade Network Address Translation) is basically a second router between your router and the public internet. This second router is configured in the same way as your personal one, the main difference being that your ISP fully manages it. From the viewpoint of this second router, your WAN IP is a private IP, and you share one actual public IP with several other customers (the same way all devices on you LAN share one single WAN IP)

    Performing port forwarding from the public internet to your LAN, when behind a CGNAT, would require you to be able to configure a forwarding rule in the ISP’s NAT, which you usually cannot do.



  • I can recommend some stuff I’ve been using myself :

    • Dolibarr as an ERP + CRM : requires some work to configure initially. As most (if not all) features are disabled by default, it requires enabling them based on what you need. It also has a marketplace with a bunch of modules you can buy
    • Gitea to manage codebases for customer projects. It can also do CI but I’ve not looked into it yet
    • Prometheus and its ecosystem (mostly promtail and grafana) for monitoring and alerting
    • docker mail server : makes it quite easy to self host a full mail server. The guides in their doc made it painless for me to configure dmarc/SPF/other stuff that make e-mail notoriously hard to host
    • Cal.com as a self hostable alternative to calendly
    • Authentik for single sign-on and centralized permission management
    • plausible for lightweight analytics
    • a mix of wireguard, iptables and nginx to basically achieve the same as cloudflare proxying and tunnels

    I design, deploy and maintain such infrastructures for my own customers, so feel free to DM me with more details about your business if you need help with this



  • They told me about hosting their own tile server earlier today. I’m really impressed by how fast they moved !

    A pull request for a privacy page during the onboarding is in the works, and I’ve been working with them to update the settings page and documentation (with the goal of providing an easy way to switch map providers). They are also working on a privacy policy, and want to ship all of this in a few weeks as part of a single release.

    Once again, I’m really impressed with how well they’re handling this



  • I used to wonder what kind of nerd notices this kind of thing, now I’m one of them

    Edit : If you want to join us :

    • you can run Pi-hole which is a self-hosted DNS server that allow monitoring/blocking DNS requests from devices configured to use it. In its default configuration, it acts as a network wide ad/tracker blocker.
    • On Android, you can install Rethink DNS. This will configure itself as a VPN on your device, forcing all traffic to go through it. This allows it to act as an on-device firewall that allow monitoring/blocking DNS requests and TCP/UDP connections. This is similar to the features of Pi-hole, but the fact that it’s on-device allows it to be app aware : the logs will detail which app is responsible for which connection, and the allow/block rules can be app-dependent. The app honestly goes beyond all my expectations :
      • it does a good job at being easy to use by default
      • it is very configurable which gives you a lot of control if you want/need/can handle it
      • You can configure it to route traffic (after applying firewall rules) to a Wireguard VPN or through Orbot. (Apps that act as VPNs are not compatible with each other : you can only have one active at a time)
      • You can even configure several Wireguard interfaces at the same time, and route specific apps through specific tunnels




  • Thanks for the detailed feedback. According to one Immich dev, they used to use OSM’s raster tile provider but switched away from it since they were causing too much load on OSM’s servers.

    There does not seem to be any non-commercial vector-tile provider at the moment (though OSM seems to be currently working on it), and it seems really overkill to try and self-host a tile provider (at least with the default level of details). Maybe the way is to find a balanced level of details that makes it reasonable to self host