Welcome!

On here, you will mostly find articles on running my home lab, in the hopes that others can benefit from my own trials and tribulations.

A Few Thoughts On Self-Hosting and its Viability as a Solution

Please allow me to ramble a bit about a Fediverse post I saw around this time last year, and a few blog posts discussing self-hosting as a solution to the dominance of big tech. It all started with this post scrolling through my timeline last year. Are there any guides on self hosting for complete beginners out there? Especially those that have choice paralysis and care about privacy. Ones that walk you through buying a domain name, setting the DNS or whatever it’s called for it, setting up a hosting server (and which to choose), what OS to use on it etc? Or are you just expected to know all this? ...

A picture of the Volla tablet package sitting on my desk. It is a black rectangle with a picture of the tablet on the front, with the slogan 'Volla Tablet' and 'Erlebe mehr' (meaning 'Experience more' in German) below that. The tablet itself is a very archetypical black rectangle. In the picture, it shows the dawn over a hilly and wooded area. In short, if you've ever seen an Android tablet, you know exactly what this one looks like.

Volla Tablet Part 1: Volla OS

I needed to replace my old tablet, and decided to buy the Volla Tablet from a German company. Let’s start with where I’m coming from, a Lenovo Yoga Tab: My old Lenovo Yoga Tab ...

S3 Performance and Homelab Hardware Musings

Wherein I figure out why my Ceph S3 is so slow and think about potential hardware upgrades. As part of my goaccess post, I had to copy around almost 60 GB of logs, from my laptop to my desktop. I decided to do that via my Ceph S3. And it was very, very slow. There were 185 files to copy, with a total size just shy of 60 GiB. The majority of that size comes from two Traefik log files, both around 30 GiB in size. I used Rclone to sync the files to an empty directory on my desktop with this command: ...

FreshRSS: An RSS/Atom Feed Reader

Wherein I end up replacing my Brief setup for RSS with FreshRSS. Over the holidays, I visited my family and only had my laptop with me. While I have most things properly synced, my RSS feed subscriptions are not. Up to now, I’ve been using the Brief Firefox extension. It looks like this: Example of the Brief UI ...

A screenshot of a terminal window. It shows the top of goaccess' dashboard, indicating that 28 million requests have been analyzed. Below that general overview comes a table of hits and visitors per day. Showing for example 28k hits for December 25th. Below that table is another one showing the requested files. It shows that 8 million hits, 44% of the total, were GET requests for /inbox, which is part of the API of my Mastodon instance. I will describe the UI and data in more detail in the main text.

Goaccess: A CLI Tool for Webserver Access Log Analysis

Wherein I talk about a small tool for access log analysis on the terminal. I recently re-discovered a small tool I already came across a while ago, but never wrote a post about: Goaccess. It’s a command line tool which can be used to do quick analysis of web server access logs. It understands some of the standard formats from e.g. Apache out of the box, but also provides facilities to parse other log formats. In this post, I will use it to parse 30 GB worth of logs from my public-facing Traefik instance and see what I can get out of it. ...