Currently dealing with extraordinarily slow network interface speeds on my NAS. Did a quick IO test with dd, and the results were great. I’d troubleshot this before to no avail, let the device power cycle and network speeds were fine afterwards. No dice this time, so I’m just replacing most of the hardware aside from the drive pool since I’d planned to anyways. Will troubleshoot my router’s network card as well for sanity’s sake.

I got zfs-zed working again after hours spent on vanishing notifications that worked before a kernel update that replaced a config file.

Turns out I missed a $ in a bash function call.

It’s been fairly smooth lately, knock on wood!

My Valheim server that is set up for friends and family had some issues, but nothing in the logs so I assume it was a weird network issue that solved itself.

I also battled some problems with the Jellyfin temp/transcode folder ballooning in size, causing the whole server to crash as I hadn’t dedicated enough space to the container. Considered making a script to clear the folder at even intervals, but it would cock up streaming if the missus was watching while the purge happened.
Ended up just giving it 100 GB and let the daily clear be enough.
It ended up being the missus’ tablet suddenly requesting transcode of everything but H264, so I’m quietly hinting that she is due an upgrade anyways…

Next project planned: Caddy (I’ve been saying that for 6 months…)

2 problems this week

Accidentally had 2 Jellyfin pods trying to write to SQLite together and corrupted the DB. Not really anyway to fix it so just killed it and rebuilt the library.

Also, my son’s Minecraft server got corrupted. Longhorn backup to the rescue 🛟

Some of the things in my house were set up so long ago, and running so smoothly, i havent looked at them in years (other than auto updates) now i’m afraid i’ve accidentally left some security hole without realizing it

For example, i set up cerbot 10 years ago and back then there was no DNS challenge, so i had to open my webserver to port 80 to renew… well since everything was running from https/443, i decided to block port 80

so i edited the systemctl unit for certbot to temporarily open port 80 for the renewal, and close it right after…

It was only 5 years later i realized i made a mistake and port 80 had been open for 5 years to the open internet

Probably no harm since its a public server anyway… defense in depth is the key

One of my hard drives started randomly disconnecting.

I tried all the cables, but got nothing. I don’t have time to fix it before leaving for work, so I’ve set up a rightly reset and I’ll hope for the best. Angry family texts incoming!

I finally figured out it was a bad stick of RAM in my server that has been causing random freezes and not some stupid mistake on my part. Thankfully it’s DDR3 so I can keep both of my kidneys and still afford the replacement.

Got hit with this recently

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/15148

Just restored an old backup. Everything is behind a vpn and is working so ill give it a while and see if it gets sorted before resorting to swapping out the sqlite version for each update.

Recently obtained a free circa-2017 mac mini which I installed Linux on, to create a docker hosting environment. Current have Jellyfin, SearXNG, and Forgejo.

My much older NAS serves as the NFS drive for the Jellyfin media (formerly, I ran Plex directly on the NAS, but this was slow/unreliable as the NAS has only dual 1Ghz ARM cores).

One of the drives in the NAS died Thursday night, but no serious issue as its RAID 1. I wonder if the new load on it pushed it over the edge. (Also, I wonder if I could use the mac minis SSD as a sort of cache in front of the NAS, to reduce wear on it, if that would even help…)

Luckily I had some gift cards from recycling old tablets and phones, so I could get a replacement drive at minimal cost. I went with a cheap WD Blue drive instead of the 2.5x more expensive Seagate IronWolf drives I had used in the past. We will see how that fares over the next few years.

Upon replacing the drive yesterday, I found the one that failed was a 2017 mfg date, so its life was 8 years (from when I initially populated the NAS). The other drive was replaced in 2021 (but it actually failed in 2020, I just left the NAS unused for a year at that time, so it had a life of 3 years). Some insight into the life span of the Iron Wolf drives.

Things I’d like to add soon:

• kiwix instance
• normalize my ebook/magazine collection
• setup to download my youtube subscriptions to Jellyfin’s media directory so I can avoid the youtube app/website
• something for music to ditch that subscription

I’ve been hinking about infrastructure as code tools. Skimmed the very surface of opentofu, looked at the list of alternatives.

I’m in need of something that is both, deployment automation and (implicit) documentation of the thing that I call “the zoo”. Namely:

• network definition
• machine definitions (VMs, containers) and their configuration
• inventory: keeping track of third party resources

Now I think about which tool would be the right one for the job while I’m still not 100% sure what the job is. I don’t like added complexity, it is quite possible this could become a dead end for me, if I spend more time wrangling the tool than I gain in the end.

PS: If you haven’t already, please take a look at your openssl packages. Since this week there are two new CVEs rated as high: https://openssl-library.org/news/vulnerabilities/index.html

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

[Thread #51 for this comm, first seen 1st Feb 2026, 10:01] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Finally killed my Discord account and moved my monitoring notifications to a self-hosted ntfy server. Works well.

So much has been going on

I moved recently and had to change ISPs. I went from 2 Gbps symmetrical fiber to 90/3 Mbps satellite behind CGNAT.

Fastest place to get the WAN cable into the house was through the attic and into my guest room / office. But that caused some serious heat and noise issues.

Ran some structural Cat6, installed new electrical outlet, put in some keystone jacks, wired a new patch panel, then moved the rack to the basement.

Bought and installed a UPS which has already saved me twice in a month.

Up speeds were too slow and the high latency to the satellite constellation was causing issues, so I spun up a small VPS. But that means I have to sync content back to my local.

I’ve been wrestling with rsync for over a month… fiddling with flags to get the best results. I think I finally settled on a config yesterday and the service and timer are working well

CGNAT is messing with remote access, so I set up cloudflare tunnels. But the tunneling is not well suited for streaming. I was only getting ~100 Kbps on remote connections. Ran some iperf3 testing over tailscale and was slightly better.

My preferred audiobook app Prologue released a major update to v4.0 which broke Plex libraries on launch, so I had to quickly pivot to AudioBookShelf.

To achieve remote streaming and access for Prologue, I had to explain Tailscale set up and create new user accounts. Only halfway through my user base. Not looking forward to explaining it to my parents

Finally, I’m trying to set up Claude to run on my server rather than my locked down enterprise laptop. That’ll allow more tooling access like git rather than before when I was spending a lot of time downloading and uploading files manually. I need to figure out how to keep my session open. I’ll probably run tmux inside a docker container then run claude inside the tmux window. Hopefully that works

On the topic of dns, I still use GoDaddy. People ask why, it’s because GoDaddy seems like a good idea in 2003 when I got my first domain, and 2006 when I got my current one. At that point it’s just inertia, I tend to buy several years in advance because I don’t like annual payments, I know it makes me a weirdo. That means I’m locked in for several years and it’s not enough of a problem to do anything about.

Anyone who uses GoDaddy knows that they turned off their dynamic DNS option quite some time ago. My system is pretty stable so I don’t usually need to change it, but if I have a power failure at home or I need to reboot my router, I obviously need to change my DNS at those moments.

When I’m away from home, I end up having to use TeamViewer to hop into a jump box vm I have set up for that purpose. The two obvious problems with that are first of that TeamViewer is a proprietary product, and the second of all that they see me hopping into a jump box regularly and they assume that I’m a commercial customer. There is apparently a way to tell them that you’re just a hobbyist, but I haven’t gotten around to filing that.

What I did do is set up a script that compares the current IP to my DNS IP, and if they are different then I send myself an email that contains the old IP in the new IP. This way, I don’t need to hop into my network to find out what the new IP address is. I also added a little bit there to save the last successful IP address sent by email to /tmp/ so that if I lose my IP address but I’m doing something where I can’t hop onto the GoDaddy website to fix it, I don’t get 100,000 emails with my new IP address.

I killed my house power a couple weeks ago, and the whole system worked exactly as intended. I was pretty happy to see that.

Fixing a Nvidia driver mismatch that was causing the newest kernel module to not build properly (that might not be the right terminology) and not boot was on my list, as discovered after a node reboot that wouldn’t start.

It was fairly straightforward, though finding a way to fully remove some of the old DKMS stuff took a bit of digging (manually delete a couple files). The new driver installs went smoothly and the improved GPU passthrough in PVE 9 made the passthrough config tasks pretty quick.

I also got go2rtc set up and piped my cameras through that instead of having individual connections for things like Home Assistant and Blue Iris NVR. I’m still struggling to get the motion notifications in Home Assistant to work though. Followed a tutorial on (that other site) and got the MQTT message coming in just fine, but the node-red flow isn’t working…an issue with entities, so still some tinkering left to do there.