Added a 5060Ti into my server to run LLMs locally and had the fun time of trying to pass the PCI device through to my VM that I'm using for LLMs and getting drivers working. Then I replaced an old dumb switch with a Ubiquiti Flex 2.5G. Had to troubleshoot some network loops and remembered some things about switching priority from my old network days.

Another week of not updating my proxmox from proxmox 7 which is outdated for like 2 years now because I just can't be bothered tbh.

Before ya'll freak out, it's isolated and only two containers are accessible from outside, behind a proxy. So no need to panic.

I've crossed that threshold in Dunning-Kruger where I see how much I don't know, and it's simultaneously disheartening and stressful. But hell, what am I going to do now? Quit?

I'm trying to properly learn VLANs and set them up so that I've got "self-hosted services exposed to the internet" and "everything else". So far, the only thing I need to isolate is a NAS with Jellyfin and Komga, but I plan to add more services via a mini PC later. The thing that has made this whole journey frustrating is that every time I try to learn something, even laser targeted, I don't get the full answer from the first thing I find, and the next answer I find introduces more complexity. I think what I need is a managed switch from my local Micro Center like a Netgear GS108Tv3, to replace the switch currently in my office. Then, if I understand correctly, I think I need to put the NAS (and eventually mini PC) on their own subnet and use VLAN rules to allow traffic to that subnet but not from that subnet to the rest of my LAN. But it's hard to determine if I've even got that right.

I did the monthly arch upgrade and had to reboot to get some service to come up. Took an extra 5 minutes this month.

Just updated my cpu to a epyc 7852 and installed an intel 310 eco. Also just cried and bought 64gb of ddr4 ram to add to it.

Since last time, I've finally learned how to make rootless podman work on Alpine Linux and it's been pretty smooth so far.

My Pi4 is quietly running HomeAssistant and I like to leave that untouched so I don't have to worry about pooping in the dark. I learned that the container requires root in order to access the Zigbee USB dongle through dbus so I can't really run it as a rootless container. It's not web facing so it's locked down to my local network which is good enough for me.

My Pi5 is finally up and running again. Got a new, shorter domain name, managed to get the TLS set up in one go with Caddy which was nice. Right now I just have a bunch of wiki's hosted with Kiwix and a file server using Caddy.

I'm putting the final touches on my series of scripts I wrote meant for automating backups. rTransfer for the actual backup, remoff for rotating backups (I plan to keep 1 backup a week, over a months time), and containers-util(work in progress) to automatically start and stop containers in preparation for a backup.

A bit crazy but I've been working on this whole backup process on and off for about a year now. It's all POSIX portable except for a few commands like rsync and podman. Once I finish the last script, I'll set up a blog and then my server will be secure to my liking and very low maintenance (my keep-alive script I also wrote has been working better than expected).

I also wrote a Dynamic MOTD script which updates /etc/motd with some basic information about the machine so I can get a quick look at the machine I'm ssh'ing into. I'm quite happy with how it turned out too.

I've been trying to use as few programs as possible and building my own when I can. It's been quite the adventure this past year and a bit.

Everything's fucking terrible infested with AI slop I don't know what the fuck software to run everything is bad

I’m in the unenviable position of basically doing self hosting for work and all I want to do on the weekend is get greasy under my car.

Gonna change the oil later and replace a MAF

No real changes other than adding some more media to Plex that I need to watch

Part of me loves knowing that I own that media library and that I can't lose stuff at the whim of a company, the other part dreads having an endless backlog 😅

I bought an old QNAP 869 Pro and filled it full of 6TB drives, also old.

I'll start rotating the drives out one-by one over the rest of the year.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

15 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.

[Thread #247 for this comm, first seen 18th Apr 2026, 20:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

so this week I was getting ready for my workday when my Son tells me CraftyController is inaccessible, so I tried to SSH into the box that the service is pinned to.... nada, dead. tried to power cycle it, nada.

now this node was a B450M-A mobo Ryzen 7 2700X platform with some hodgepodge scrap RAM I've had running in it(RAM birthday was 2019). I hooked it up to a mini monitor and a keyboard, but it didn't post at all, so just a blue screen of no signal. unfortunately the B450M-A mobo didn't feature POST debug lights, nor did it use QLED, it apparently relied on PC Speaker, and my machine wasn't telling any tales. so since I had no real idea as to the root cause and after reseating the RAM and the GPU and fiddling with it got me nowhere, I got my partner to approve the outspend for replacement of the motherboard so that I could have actual Debug indicators.

Thursday the ROG B550-F Gaming WIFI II mobo arrived, as did the Ryzen 9 5900XT and the Nautilus 360RS cooler. I spent the evening assembling the mobo and CPU and the GPU, the RAM, and all the related wiring. figured I would do the Cooler the next day. Yesterday I got the cooler in place with some serious hardware acrobatics. I then fired it up and Yellow LED. DRAM issue, so I unseated all of the RAM, plugging in one of the hodgepodge sets(I had 4x8GB ram sticks) neither set worked, went to just trying a single stick. of the 4 sticks only 1 was able to get past the Yellow LED and into completed POST.

So the RAM was shot and I'm not going to run containers on a machine with only 8 GB of ram. so I ordered up some Vengeance LPX 2x16G sticks and they arrived this morning! I just finished slotting them and then wrestling with Gentoo's understanding of where all the hardware was. it was a lot of fiddling with the gentoo kernel config, and installing the nvidia drivers, but after all of that was done, the system booted up successfully! I've now got it back in its residence connected up to the UPS power, about to shunt docker containers back to the newly improved machine with 2x the CPU capacity.

Was a wild ride, but the cool part of it was when the system shat itself it was part of a 3 node Docker Swarm and I had recently migrated to a NAS for persistence of my container data. though the other 2 nodes aren't as overbuilt as this thing, so I did have to do some memory wrangling and disabling my lower priority services in order to restore service, but I was able to ensure all necessary services were able to run during the outage, and I got some learning in regards to a couple of the services that didn't port as cleanly as I would've liked. all in all fun times in system administration! lol.