Podman is not yet ready for mainstream, in my experience

My experience varies wildly from yours, so please don’t take this bit as gospel.

Have yet to find a container that doesn’t work perfectly well in podman. The options may not be the same. Most issues I’ve found with running containers boil down to things that would be equally a problem in docker. A sample:

• “rootless” containers are hard to configure. It can almost always be fixed with “–privileged” or some combination of permission flags. This would be equally true for docker; the only meaningful difference is podman tries to push everything into rootless. You don’t have to.
• network filesystems cause headaches, especially smbfs + sqlite app. I’ve had to use NFS or ext4 inside a network-mounted image for some apps. This problem is identical for docker.
• container networking–for specific cases–needs to managed carefully. These cases are identical for docker.

And that’s it. I generally run things once from the podman command line, then use podlet to create a quadlet out of that configuration, something you can’t do with docker. If you are having any trouble with running containers under podman, try the --privileged shortcut, see that it works, and then double back if you think you really need rootless.

I haven’t deployed Cloudflare but I’ve deployed Tailscale, which has many similarities to the CF tunnel.

• Is the tunnel solution appropriate for Jellyfin?

I assume you’re talking about speed/performance here. The overhead added by establishing the connection is mostly just once at the connection phase, and it’s not much. In the case of Tailscale there’s additional wireguard encryption overhead for active connections, but it remains fast enough for high-bandwidth video streams. (I download torrents over wireguard, and they download much faster than realtime.) Cloudflare’s solution is only adding encryption in the form of TLS to their edge. Everything these days uses TLS, you don’t have to sweat that performance-wise.

(You might want to sweat a little over the fact that cloudflare terminates TLS itself, meaning your data is transiting its network without encryption. Depending on your use case that might be okay.)

• I suppose it’s OK for vaultwarden as there isnt much data being transfered?

Performance wise, vaultwarden won’t care at all. But please note the above caveat about cloudflare and be sure you really want your vaultwarden TLS terminated by Cloudflare.

• Would it be better to run nginx proxy manager for everything or can I run both of the solutions?

There’s no conflict between the two technologies. A reverse proxy like nginx or caddy can run quite happily inside your network, fronting all of your homelab applications; this is how I do it, with caddy. Think of a reverse proxy as just a special website that branches out to every other website. With that model in mind, the tunnel is providing access to the reverse proxy, which is providing access to everything else on its own. This is what I’m doing with tailscale and caddy.

• General recs

Consider tailscale? Especially if you’re using vaultwarden from outside your home network. There are ways to set it up like cloudflare, but the usual way is to install tailscale on the devices you are going to use to access your network. Either way it’s fully encrypted in transit through tailscale’s network.

Wouldn’t even take a month, just prepay for those reserved instances.

Thanks! I’ll try this and report back. This sounds like a version of (#1) - merge accounts.

Home assistant’s main use case is showing you where your house is on a single map, though. Not sure how immich works, but if it’s one tile per photo with location data, that would be a MUCH bigger ask.

1. Seems like a very reasonable objection to me. I’d guess that most of us Immich users are using it in the first place because it improves the privacy of our photos, and a third party seeing our location data certainly undermines that.
2. I would have complained had I noticed, so you might be the first one to notice. Immich’s userbase isn’t huge right now, it’s definitely possible.
3. Featurewise, I’d like: a) a clearly documented way to disable map data leaving my server; b) a set of well-integrated choices (maybe even just two, as long as one of them is something like openstreetmap); c) the current configurability to be well documented.
4. I’d love it if all such outbound data streams are also documented. Many security and privacy-focused products give you a “quiet” mode of some kind, where you can turn off everything that sends your data somewhere else. It’s a requirement in many enterprise installations.

yw :)

Some troubleshooting thoughts:

What do you mean when you say SSH is “down”:

1. connection refused (fail2ban’s activity could result in a connection refused, but a VPN should have avoided that problem, as you said)
2. connection timeout. probably a failure at the port forwarding level.
3. connection succeeded but closed; this can happen for a few reasons, such as the system is in an early boot up state. there’s usually a message in this case.
4. connection succeeded but auth rejected. this can happen if your os failed to boot but came up in a fallback state of some kind.

Knowing which one of these it is can give you a lot more information about what’s wrong:

System can’t get past initial boot = Maybe your NAS is unplugged? Maybe your home DNS cache is down?

Connection refused = either fail2ban or possibly your home IP has moved and you’re trying to connect to somebody else’s computer? (nginx is very popular after all, it’s not impossible somebody else at your ISP has it running). This can also be a port forwarding failure = something’s wrong with your router.

Connection succeeded + closed is similar to “can’t get past initial boot”

Auth rejected might give you a fallback option if you can figure out a default username/password, although you should hope that’s not the case because it means anyone else can also get in when your system is in fallback.

Very few of these things are actually fixable remotely, btw. I suggest having your sister unplug everything related to your setup, one device at a time. Internet router, raspberry pi, NAS, your VM host, etc. Make sure to give them a minute to cool down. Hardware, particularly cheap hardware, tends to fail when it gets hot, and this can take a while to happen, and, well, it’s been hot.

Here’s a few things with a high likelihood of failing when you’re away from home:

• heat, as previously mentioned.
• running out of disk space. Maybe you’re logging too much, throw some more disk in there and tune down the logging. This can definitely affect SSH, and definitely won’t be fixed by a reboot.
• OOM failures (or other resource leaks). This isn’t likely to affect your bare metal ssh, but it could. Some things leak memory, and this can lead to cascading process destruction by the OS. In this scenario you’d probably be able to connect to things in the first few minutes after a reboot, though.
• shitty cabling. Sometimes stuff just falls out of the socket, if it wasn’t plugged in perfectly to begin with. (Heat can also contribute to this one.)
• reliance on a cloud service that’s currently down. (This can include: you didn’t pay the bill.) Hopefully your OS boot doesn’t fail due to a cloud service, but I’ve definitely seen setups that could.

This kid’s full name is Fortran Sucksdontlearnit Johnson. His parents actually hated Fortran. Imagine the disappointment they’re about to experience.

I probably won’t switch to Plex because of what they did with sharing all your activity without your consent, but I’m curious what you liked better about it as a music backend?

Good suggestion! I intend to mess with finamp and symfonium. I had no idea jellyfin was so popular as a music backend so I’ll just keep using that.

Yeah, I’ll probably just buy a few more albums than I used to. Streaming payments has always been a way to wring dollars out of artists, so I’d rather find other ways anyhow.

Gluetun is kind of a wrapper around wireguard or openvpn, that greatly simplifies setup and configurability.

I have a VM that runs wireguard to airvpn, in a container made of gluetun. Then you share that container’s network with a qbittorrent container (or pick your torrent) and an nzbget container (or pick your nzb downloader). Tada, your downloaders are VPN’d forever.

Thanks! Yeah, figuring out how to get gluetun working properly with a vpn and downloaders was a chore and a half. Glad I got that sorted, now I feel pretty confident I can punch a mobile app through into the network pretty easily.

See, that’s a cool symbol. Make the right angle part of that symbol into a snake, you’re done. 1000% better than the AI’s mess.

When we say LLMs don’t know or understand anything, this is what we mean. This is a perfect example of an “AI” just not having any idea what it’s doing.

• I’ll start with a bit of praise: It does do a fairly good job of decomposing the elements of Python and the actuary profession into bits that would be representative of those realms.

But:

• In the text version of the response, there are already far too many elements for a good tattoo, demonstrating it doesn’t understand tattoo design or even just design
• In the drawn version, the design uses big blocks of color with no detail, which (even if they looked good on a white background; and they don’t;) would look like shit inked on someone’s skin. So again, no understand of tattoo art.
• It produces a “simplified version” of the python logo. I assume those elements are the blue and yellow hexagons, which are at least the correct colors. But it doesn’t understand that, for this to be PART OF THE SAME DESIGN, they must be visually connected, not just near each other. It also doesn’t understand that the design is more like a plus; nor that the design is composed of two snakes; nor that the Python logo is ALREADY VERY SIMPLE, nor that the logo, lacking snakes, loses any meaning in its role of representing Python.
• It says there’s a briefcase and glasses in there. Maybe the brown rectangle? Or is the gray rectangle meant to be a briefcase lying on its side so the handle is visible? No understanding here of how humans process visual information, or what makes a visual representation recognizable to a human brain.
• Math stuff can be very visually interesting. Lots of mathematical constructs have compelling visuals that go with them. A competent designer could even tie them into the Python stuff in a unified way; like, imagine a bar graph where the bars were snakes, twining around each other in a double helix. You got math, you got Python, you got data analysis. None of this ties together, or is even made to look good on its own. No understanding of what makes something interesting.
• Everything is just randomly scattered. Once again, no understanding of what design is.

AIs do not understand anything. They just regurgitate in ways that the algorithm chooses. There’s no attempt to make the algorithm right, or smart, or relevant, or anything except an algorithm that’s just mashing up strings and vectors.

Fair enough. I guess I’m not saying “there’s no point in --” because I know people do these things. (Man, I wish I had the attention span to read as much as you.) I’m just saying I’m not going to host something just to keep track with no recommendations or interaction because that doesn’t click for me personally.

Same. I don’t really see the point of tracking what you read if you’re not interested in connecting it to other peoples’ readings. Storygraph has been great.

Sorry, I didn’t know we might be hurting the LLM’s feelings.

Seriously, why be an apologist for the software? There’s no effective difference between blaming the technology and blaming the companies who are using it uncritically. I could just as easily be an apologist for the company: not their fault they’re using software they were told would produce accurate information out of nonsense on the Internet.

Neither the tech nor the corps deploying it are blameless here. I’m well aware than an algorithm only does exactly what it’s told to do, but the people who made it are also lying to us about it.

Leaving my chicken for 10 minutes near a window on a warm summer day and then digging in