The YaCy logo. It shows the YaCy name, with a star next to the final Y. Below it are the words 'Search Engine'.

Yacy Part 2: Crawling and Putting it on the Backburner

This is the second post in my series on the YaCy distributed, self-hosted search engine. The main topic this time is getting pages into the search index via crawling. In contrast to search engines like Google, Bing or Kagi, the content of the search index in YaCy is driven by its users. YaCy has an integrated web crawler to crawl pages and add them to the search index. It can be invoked in one of three ways: ...

June 21, 2026 · 12 min · Michael

I'm Frustrated about my Inability to Advise Homelab Newcomers

I’m going to vent a bit in this one, mostly about myself. Just a few minutes ago, the following post scrolled past me in my Fedi timeline: Anybody self host their blog on their sbc or pc at home? Is there a good tutorial I can follow? I’m especially concerned about opening up ports or exposing my home ip to randos. I read that post and immediately thought: Running my blog on an SBC at home? I’m doing that! Concern about opening ports and “exposing” the home IP to the wider internet? I’ve certainly got opinions on that! ...

June 16, 2026 · 3 min · Michael
The YaCy logo. It shows the YaCy name, with a star next to the final Y. Below it are the words 'Search Engine'.

Yacy Part 1: Deployment

Welcome to the newest rabbit hole I’ve found myself in. This post starts a new series where I’m taking a look at the YaCy self-hosted, distributed peer to peer search engine. And probably web crawling and search ranking algorithms. In this post, I will concentrate on how I deployed YaCy into my Kubernetes cluster, and a few pieces about my first steps with it. You won’t find answers to questions like “how good is it as a Google replacement?” in this post. There’s a lot more work ahead for me to actually make that judgment. ...

June 7, 2026 · 18 min · Michael

Mosquitto: Update to v2.1

As part of this weekend’s regular service update, I also came across Mosquitto’s new 2.1.2 release. This is my tale… I’m using Mosquitto as the MQTT broker for my IoT thermostats and smart plugs. If you’re interested, you can find more details on my setup in this and this post. The changelog of the new release contained a few interesting points: The acl_file option is deprecated in favour of the acl-file plugin, which is the same code but moved into a plugin. The acl_file option will be removed in 3.0. The password_file option is deprecated in favour of the password-file plugin, which is the same code but moved into a plugin. The password_file option will be removed in 3.0. I’m using both of these options, so because I was doing the update on a lazy Sunday morning instead of Friday evening after work, I decided to be a good sysadmin and replace the acl_file and password_file options now, instead of waiting for the update where they’re ultimately getting removed. ...

March 1, 2026 · 3 min · Michael

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? ...

February 2, 2026 · 12 min · Michael