Selfhosting on Chrizzle23.net

The Art Of The Clunk

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In my opinion, the difference between a novice and an expert is that an expert has broken it before.

60% of the Time, It Works Every Time

My self-hosting and homelab experience is slowly shifting from installing and configuring servers to writing my own configs and scripts to build DIY “infrastructure”. I use the term lightly because right now it’s [not well] managed chaos. It works most of the time. The workflow is: hack, crash, patch, repeat.

The Ouroboros Of Writing About Self-Hosting

Wed, 21 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Writing is still hard

I am trying to document the build of a system from inside the system that I am building, while I am teaching myself to build that system. This method is, as the Irish would say, not the best. In the past I bemoaned trying to learn about git, VSCode, markdown, Caddy, and Hugo all at the same time. In the end I decided to abandon learning about git for another day.

Digital Sovereignty of the Self

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a followup to my rant about the Nerd Reich

One of the uses for this site is to catalog things. Sometimes that’s snippets of code or Linux commands, but sometimes I catalog my thoughts.

I have been thinking and talking about this general idea that the Internet as I knew it in the late 90s doesn’t really exist anymore. At first, I likened it to the gentrification of a neighborhood, whereby wealthy people, and the corporations that follow them, raise the prices in a neighborhood and displace the people who already live there. Then I learned about techno-feudalism which is the idea that a few giant tech firms (Google, Facebook, Twitter) control the entire digital landscape (the land) and we the users (the serfs) generate value by using these platforms:

Installing Docker on your Linux Virtual Machine

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A major piece of self-hosted infrastructure is https://www.docker.com/. I have a love/hate relationship with Docker. On the one hand, it makes installing and running applications easy, but on the other hand, it feels like wasteful abstraction. The point of virtualization and containerization is to make deploying applications easier. I like to do this with [https://www.turnkeylinux.org/](Turnkey Linux) containers and VMs. Like all application libraries, there is always some app that isn’t available in the flavor that you’d like. Docker has the largest library of things, so it’s basically a necessary evil.

Overlay Networks

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Running Proxmox on a cheap NAS appliance is great, but you know what’s better than that? Putting your Proxmox containers on the Internet!

Overlay networks

So far, the only private networking technologies that I have used are Neorouter and Tailscale. They both create a tunnel adapter in Linux that connects to a central server to provide secure links to devices that are not directly linked together.

I have used Neorouter a bunch in the past, and it works well. It lets me use VNC or Microsoft Remote Desktop to connect to computers at home while I am at work, school, or traveling. I have switched to Tailscale (for now) because it works better with Apple IOS devices for doing things like VOIP. Someday I will self host my own overlay network controller, like Headscale, Yggdrasil.

Setting up a Caddy Reverse Proxy

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have written a little about using Caddy as a web server. It is a super powerful tool. So far, I have just used it to host static websites on a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_server. Here are some of the basics on setting up Caddy, setting up the Caddyfile, and building a reverse proxy that we will ultimately use for connecting to your NAS appliance.

Installing Caddy

Every guide in the world for setting things up on Debian is full of sudo commands. Every Debian server that I have ever configured doesn’t use sudo. So here is a blob of Debian commands that have had sudo expunged from them:

Adding Infrastructure to Proxmox

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In a previous post, I talked about the “AK-fortyserver”, a cheap NAS appliance that I added Proxmox VE to. I named mine “Scratchy”.

I got my Synology NAS backed up to Scratchy, so that I could remove the disks in it and replace them. I was buying 8tb disks for it, but I decided to go in another direction. I will discuss the that larger project in another post. Right now let’s focus on the apps I am setting up on Scratchy.

An Introduction to how I use Proxmox VE

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In a previous post, I talked about the cheap NAS appliance as a component for self-hosting. For me, a server lab consists of two elements: storage and compute power. I have a Synology NAS that I use for the storage system. Once you get your storage centralized on a NAS, adding memory and CPU to your compute power is simply a matter of adding servers.

The AK-fortyServer

The AK47 is a symbol of revolution, so much so, that some countries have it on their flag. I like to think of a cheap mass produced server is a digital equivalent of the AK47, a tool for digital revolution.

More on the Gentrified Web

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 17:57:57 -0400

In my last writing about The Gentrified Web I spent too much time establishing that I am old. The writing sounded like I was saying that the web was better when it resembled New York City in a Charles Bronson film. I also didn’t write that much about why web gentrification is bad.

The thing about gentrification in the real world is that it displaces existing communities (often low income communities) in order to create financial opportunities for investors. On the web, sites like Google and Facebook stifle diverse voices and keep the flow of information under corporate control. It’s the digital version of those dystopian fictions where everyone lives in coffin-capsules, wears identical jumpsuits, and eats protein tablets instead of actual food.

Selfhosting My Blogs

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Goodbye Wordpress

I am not a web developer. I have done some web development and web server administration in the past, but the state of the art has missed me by at least 2 generations. I used Wordpress for a number of years, but using their hosting keeps getting more and more limited, and the idea of hosting WP myself makes me kind of queasy. I never really learned how to do that much with WP much less how to secure it or administer it. So it’s best to return to my unix shell account days and use a static site.