Selfhosted
I recently switched to Brave after getting sick of trying to configure media playback to work in a reasonable way on Firefox. I don’t like everything about Brave, but with a bit of tweaking, it makes for a good, relatively Google-free, browser.
There’s little to no documentation on how to self-host the Brave Sync Server, which allows to synchronize bookmarks, tabs, settings and much more between devices.
The sync server, like the browser itself, is open source and can be found here: https://github.com/brave/go-sync.
Notes, besides photos, are the pieces of data I care most about. I want to review them even after years, have them available on the go and make sure I never lose them. Up until now, I stored my Notes in iCloud alongside Apples Notes app. This article is part of the byeCloud series in which I try to replace iCloud with self-hosted services.
The Apple Approach To Notes
Initially, I wanted to retain this app and thought of going with IMAP Notes, which is what Apple does: They basically devote one IMAP folder to a list of mails with special headers. Those mails store the notes. While this would also work on a self-hosted mail server, I had many problems over the years, including:
While building my new NAS, I came across the question how to install a fileserver based on Samba on FreeBSD.
Here’s how…
In this article I will show you how to set up a Firefox Sync Server as a Docker container. In my case this will replace iCloud Bookmark / Tab synchronization. This article is part of the byeCloud series in which I try to replace iCloud with self-hosted services.
I’ve evaluated different solutions to synchronize tabs and bookmarks, but none of them seemed to satisfy my needs. Firefox Sync almost does. Originally, I wanted to use Chromium with some plugin that would allow me to self-host a bookmark sync service. While there is a working solution called Unmark which also has a Chrome extension that works in general, the open source version lacks HTML bookmark import functionality and seems not to be the best possible software quality after a quick review (in fact I implemented a HTML bookmark to Unmark JSON converter to import my bookmarks but even their JSON import code drove me crazy).
iCloud Keychain has always been a love-hate relationship for me. I loved the simplicity of just being able to generate passwords right from the
registration form of every page while it would also autofill passwords when I try to log in again. But I hated not being in charge of telling
this thing to sync. Sometimes when I got a new device, the Keychain would just not start synching. Or passwords that I just created wouldn’t show up.
Not to mention secure notes created in Keychain Access.app on the Mac that would not be visible on iOS.
For some months now I’m running a private GitLab server. I really enjoy using it, especially with all the great
features like the Docker Container Registry and GitLab Pages to host static pages, even with own domains.
Normally I would prefer a more lightweight solution, such as Gitea but GitLab has so many
advantages that, at least for me, this is currently the only way to go.
However, it felt tedious setting it up, even with Docker. You have to configure GitLab to serve stuff using plain HTTP,
provide different ports for different apps to be able to create own vhosts in the reverse proxy and so on.
So I decided to quickly write up what I did to get it working. Maybe I’m wrong and there’s a much easier way to do it
but I couldn’t find it. Additionally, in the meanwhile I switched from Caddy as a reverse proxy to
Traefik since it can attach directly to the Docker daemon, listens to changes in the domain
configuration, request new HTTPS certificates on the fly while new containers are spawned and - best of all - I don’t need
a separate configuration file. So the guide this time is still using Docker and docker-compose, but Traefik instead of Caddy.
But you can basically use any reverse proxy to set it up, like nginx-proxy.
In this article I will show you how to set up your own RSS feed aggregator with sync support for many third-party clients through the Fever API as a replacement for Apple News/Google News/Feedly. This article is part of the byeCloud series in which I try to replace iCloud with self-hosted services.
Choosing the right software
I fiddled around for a while with the News app for Nextcloud, ttr-rss and a few other alternatives, but ended up with Miniflux (now in version 2) because it is simple and lightweight and provides the most important thing for me, a Fever-compatible API without any plugins. Fever is a self-hosted but closed-source and paid RSS feed aggregator that has integration in quite a few third-party clients. Luckily, Miniflux provides a API that implements the Fever specs, meaning that it can be used with clients that support Fever, in my case this is Reeder for macOS and iOS, probably the best news reader you can get ;-)
UPDATE Apr, 17 2018: Update imapsync to run as standalone docker container to make deployment easier.
In this article I will show you how to set up a fully-featured mail server including webmail as a Docker container. This article is part of the byeCloud series in which I try to replace iCloud with self-hosted services.
Let’s be honest: Setting up a mailserver really is a pain in the ass. Always. There are so many components involved, on a pretty standard setup starting from Dovecot and Postfix to Amavis, OpenDKIM, ClamAV, postgrey and much more. Getting all those components working together and, even more important, create a secure configuration for a mailserver is a work that often takes days to weeks until you have a final setup. And if you have gotten everything running, it’s a mess to update because you are in dependency hell, versions will conflict and stop working while in production.
In this article I will show you how I set up my photo synchronization using Nextcloud. This article is part of the byeCloud series in which I try to replace iCloud with self-hosted services.
One of the most important things in my setup is a solid and reliable way to synchronize Photos and videos I take. In one of the previous parts of this series I set up my Nextcloud instance. So this this time is easy: It’s just about getting all of files out of the new Photos.app and uploading it using the ownCloud sync client.
In this article I will describe how I set up my Nextcloud instance aiming to replace iCloud Drive. This article is part of the byeCloud series in which I try to replace iCloud with self-hosted services.
The goals for a file syncing infrastructure are simple
- I want a reliable solution that syncs files as-is,
- that does not corrupt them
- and does not cancel uploads all the time.
- Additionally, I want to be able to access my files on the go using a mobile app, as well as having files on my local hard disk to also be able to use it offline, just in case I have no network connection.
- Files should be stored again as raw files on the file system so that I can back them up easily.
As it turns out, Nextcloud offers a solid file syncing mechanism. There are many people that say it is somehow unreliable and slow. I cannot reproduce that properties, for me it works great - maybe because I’m not syncing files of the size of modern hard drives. For me, it’s more about documents, images, some videos shot on my phone and so on.
Introduction
Some years ago I already played with ownCloud, trying to set up my personal cloud and get rid of third party services for keeping my stuff in sync across multiple devices. And while I already liked it at that time, there still were things I couldn’t do with it, so I eventually gave up on it.
Some months ago I decided to give it another shot and installed ownCloud (which is now migrated to Nextcloud) as well as some other services aiming to replace iCloud, the cloud service by Apple that I used until then. But this was not only about curiosity and being independent of third-party services, it also had real-world values, including better troubleshooting and a more file-aware synchronisation of data, getting rid of the vendor lock in, better service quality (e.g. syncing Photos to iCloud is a pain in the ass 4 out of 5 times).
If you encounter any problems, please check the up-to-date documentation at https://github.com/dprandzioch/docker-ddns .
In some projects I need access to various hosts with a dynamic IP from time to time. Dyndns services offer a great solution by providing a DNS with records that are updated by the clients once their IP addresses change.
There are various existing services out there that are either free or paid, but if you want to self-host a dyndns service, you have to set up a DNS by your own as well as some endpoint that your clients can connect to in order to update their records.
In Part 1 of this series I already explained my goals building a new NAS.
In this post I show how I assembled the hardware in order to ensure reliance and redundancy.
FreeBSD is the ideal system to use when building a server. It’s reliable and rock-solid and it’s file system ZFS not
only offers anything you would expect from a file system but is also easy to set up and to maintain. This is why I chose
it to power my NAS. In Part 1 and Part 2
of this series I already described my intentions and the hardware assembly. Now it’s time to bring it to life.
In Part 3 of this series I described how to install FreeBSD and set it up properly. Now that the base system setup is
complete, we can start providing services…
forked-daapd allows you to set up an iTunes Media server that hosts all music, podcasts and audiobooks and shows
up in iTunes like a shared library. While other daapd implementations don’t work anymore with the current iTunes
versions, forked-daapd does.
While building my new NAS, I came across the question how to provide a Time Machine backup solution for my OS X clients.
As I run OS X on all my machines I want to back up all data to my NAS. netatalk allows to create file shares for OS X
to provide a simple solution for system backups.
After a long while I finally decided to build a new NAS / home server for my various needs. Though there are many
solutions available, I chose to build one on my own as I want as much flexibility as possible. So I set out to buy
all components needed for the system with upgradability and budget in mind.
FreeBSD is shipped with sendmail as the default MTA, which is configured to local delivery on a vanilla installation.
Therefore many people don’t even recognize one of FreeBSDs great features for system administrators: FreeBSD sends
system status emails through periodic(8)…
It’s more than likely that your email provider of choice, especially the ones
that offer mail services free of charge, will not support receiving email to
custom domain names like, in my case, davd.net. Running your own mail server would
solve this problem but running a fully featured mail stack including POP, IMAP,
Sieve filters et cetera requires a fairly powerful machine.
Additionally, if not configured properly, there’s big potential for abuse,
e.g. spam.
As an alternative, it’s possible to just run a MTA which redirects all incoming email
to an external mail server.
This can be ran on almost any machine, even on a low-budget computer like the
Raspberry Pi or a cheap virtual server.
During the last few months I managed to automate many recurring tasks on my NAS.
One good example for those task is updating my podcast archive. I tried to accomplish
this using a lightweight shell script which, running as a cronjob, would hold my
podcast archive up to date and notify me about new episodes via push notifications.
