Legacy projects often support legacy methods of alerting users that their home labs are in jeopardy — in email. Only that this method no longer flies. Not only do the notifications often get stopped by the automated spam filter, but these emails are also sent out by an anonymous SMTP server, not a certified known…
Tagged Self-Hosting
The Murky Rabbit Hole of DIY NAS
My NAS is reaching the end of its design. Twenty terabytes usable across five bays, a few hundred gigabytes left, and it’s warned me twice now that I’m nearly out. I’ve bought time where I could, moving what I can to the pool meant for cold archive. But the design is aging out on more…
App to Restart Unhealthy Docker Container
One of the odd features left out of the Docker ecosystem is restart on unhealthy. Docker knows the status of individual containers, but it somehow does not natively support the feature. There are yaml tricks to have a container kill itself if unhealthy, so the Docker engine restarts it based on the policy. The tool…
How to Remedy SERVFAIL during Caddy + DuckDNS Certificate Challenge
Caddy is a tool I use for home lab HTTPS management. However, the tool is not bulletproof. It’s not a simple GUI tool to add services and forget. One such problem Caddy can introduce with HTTPS is during the challenge to obtain a certificate. Because the certificate has to be renewed periodically, even if it…
How to Band-aid Fix Seerr “Movie Not Found” Error
My Seerr started acting up after the migration. In the web UI, it threw “Movie Not Found” errors — not on everything, but, evidently, only on some of the movies in the library and some of the entries in trending. Both LAN and WAN were working fine. The errors weren’t persistent. They came and went,…
Raspberry Pi, RAM, and Home Labs
Most of my Raspberry Pis have been decommissioned. I had used Docker and Docker only on Pis, so much of the effort was on focused compatibility and reliability of single machine (Synology NAS) doing all the work. For the record, Synology couldn’t do everything off the shelves. I had to upgrade the RAM from default…
How to Pass Brackets in URL Query for Komga
One of the reasons why I am still in the process of writing a piece on Komga is its weird quirks like this. As a comics and graphic novels manager, Komga has what I would consider Calibre has for graphical publications: lots of metadata managements, different lists that handle series and books, and more. But…
App to Manage Streaming Contents and Self-Hosted Media Discoveries
I know the title can be mouthful. So let me start by describing the problem first. There are different services available on the internet showing what streaming services in your region carry the contents you are after. The problem I had with these services were: one. it often fails to parse the localized titles used…
App to Import and Download Films for Plex
This is a related post from yesterday’s. Both Plex and *arr platforms share the same categorization of video contents. They are either films or series. Sonarr handles series, Radarr handles films or theatrical runs. One would think films would have less an issue fetching metadata, but managing media libraries can create some extreme edge cases.…
App to Import and Download Series for Plex
One of the automation self-hosting streaming aims to achieve is matching and fetching metadata. Plex handles both rather well and is quite forgiving with file names on average. I suppose the emphasis is on average. Plex divides medias into two major categories: films (or theater) or series (TV shows, and others). If Plex fails to…
How to Setup Multi-user Plex without Subscription
As I was saying about Plex, and it would apply to any other self-hosted streaming, my goal — and most people’s, no doubt — is to fill in the gaps between what mainstream streaming services offer and the contents that fell through licensing since we signed up for it. It’s pointless to argue that the…
App to Self-Host Media Streaming Server
I had heard about Plex before, but I had never seriously put a thought into it. That is, until I realized how vulnerable of a geolocation I was in. If you are reading this in North America or Europe, it might not affect you as much; but geoblocking, coupled with intentional licensing lapse, it becomes…











