Getting myself into trouble, one commit at a time.
A few months ago, I bought a home server, with the intention of de-cloud-ing as much as I could manage, as well as setting up some nice services for around the house. Things like a media server for my digital library, or a home setup for tracking various DVCS repos and associated CI, but without having to be tied to either making things public on github, putting up with Atlassian’s… shenanigans’, or forking over cash for the ability to make a private repo.
Cloud services are well and good, and even in my most radical dreams, I suspect I’ll always have a few online services (at least email, but ProtonMail makes that convenient and privacy-oriented).
Some other requirements: I want this to run on Gentoo, and I want to run a setup that does not use SystemD.
Gentoo, partly for nostalgia (I ran a gentoo as my daily linux distro driver before college, and have fond memories of it), partly because I finally have the compute to run a from-source distro easily, and reap the speed benefits of compiling for my specific CPU. As for choosing OpenRC over SystemD, I really prefer the modular/”do one thing, do it well”/keep things mechanically simple as much as possible approach of Linux circa the 70s to late 90s.
There’s also some reason to speculate at the underlying motives behind the maintainers of SystemD, which others have covered at length.
So far, I’ve gotten Jellyfin and NextCloud up and running, and storing/serving data off a dual 20TB ZFS mirror, which has been quite lovely. I’ve had partial success with Sandstorm, which looks very appealing, but has a few quirks about it.
First and foremost, it really expects you to be installing this from a server with a public IP. My home server does not have such, by choice – I’m planning on accessing it via OpenVPN or WireGuard when I’m not at home, and having it sit behind my router on the local network, otherwise. Second, having a certificate for SSL traffic is rather non-negotiable, as well as having a wildcard DNS entry for the domain the server will eventually sit on.
Well, after a lot of educational, trial-and-error footwork with both bind and OpenSSL, I have those things. I’ve also imported the signing certificate public key to my laptop’s Firefox install, so it doesn’t bleet at me saying that someone has compromised the domain. I also set up my router to refer to the afore-mentioned bind/named instance, so I can just type in my server’s name into Firefox and be on my merry.
So far, so good. All this snaps into place for Jellyfin, NextCloud, and Sandstorm.
Except, something-or-other is going wrong with some of the grains in Sandstorm.
I can run an instance of Gogs (a git web UI) with no problem. Same with FileDrop. Occasionally I’ll have to hard-refresh if the grain is loading up for the first time in a session, but after that it’s smooth sailing.
Gitlab, Etherpad, or ShareLaTeX, on the other hand, stall and refuse to successfully load, no matter how long you wait.
Traditional wisdom among the Sandstorm wise say that I’ve configured my wildcard host URL, DNS wildcard, or self-signed cert incorrectly, but as far as I can tell, all of this is set up and working correctly.
So, I’m working on getting that up and running. Overall, however, I’m really happy with the setup. I love having a ZFS mirror set up, and having NextCloud upload to it, and JellyFin manage libraries from it is quite elegant. I need to make both run as the same user (or add each to the other’s group ID) so that uploaded media can be managed by JellyFin.
Gentoo has been, overall, a blast to use. Packages aren’t quite as ubiquitous as they are on Debian or Red Hat based distros, but I love having this level of fine-grained control over what fetaures are enabled, and how packages are compiled has been a blast.
Working with OpenRC has also been a blast. My next to-do on that front is to get process monitoring set up (there’s a guide for it, I just need to follow it). It’s been very pleasant to work with something… simple, again.
In any case. Next up is getting GitLab up and running, either natively on the Gentoo box, or by debugging whatever’s going on with Sandstorm.
If this sort of thing appeals to you, I highly encourage you to tinker with it. It’s my opinion that the internet was better when it was owner-operated, and I’m hoping things go back to that model in the future.