Knowing which hardware to buy or which apps to run on that shiny new hardware can be hard. Chris and Alex discuss networking gear and where to find some of the best getting started documentation on the net.

Plex have been busy and launched two new apps, we cover that and more in this episode of Self-Hosted.

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Links:

• Self-Hosted now has a Discord server! — Join us over on Discord!
• Plex Blog - Two New Delicious Apps — A post from Plex about their two shiny new apps.
• Plex Dash — A Medium post from Plex about their new app Plex Dash.
• Plexamp — A Medium post from Plex about their new app Plexamp.
• Healthchecks.io — Simple and Effective Cron Job Monitoring
• Self-Hosted Healthchecks.io Container (from Linuxserver.io) — Receive alerts when your nightly backups, weekly reports, cron jobs and scheduled tasks don't run on time.
• Let's Encrypt Docker Starter Guide from Linuxserver.io — The goal of this guide is to give you ideas on what can be accomplished with the LinuxServer letsencrypt docker image and to get you started.
• Linuxserver.io Docker 101 Docs — A quick intro to the basics of getting started with Docker.
• serverbuilds.net — A site dedicated to helping you find the best deals on used Enterprise gear.
• Alex's cheap x86 pfsense build — A build log for a $150 x86 based pfsense router.
• Unmanaged vs Managed network switches — What's the difference and do you really need a managed switch?
• How to transfer accounts for a SmartHome when you sell up — How do you ensure future owners realize the value of your smart home devices?

We share some WiFi tips and essential network ideas.

And discuss one of our most significant compromises in the show so far.

Support Self-Hosted

Links:

• Self-Hosted Discord Server
• Rationale for using Discord — Let's grow a community around being the best place to discuss Self-Hosting.
• Barcodebuddy — Barcode system for Grocy
• Quarantine-o-meter Home Assistant Dashboard
• Apple acquires popular weather app Dark Sky and will shut down the Android version — The Android and Wear OS apps will work until July 1st
• Wyze firmware update lets you turn its security cameras into webcams — To solve webcam shortage issues if you’re stuck working from home

We have a neat self-hosted home inventory management system for preppers of any type, plus Chris' simple Home Assistant trick and Alex's valiant battle with the WebSockets daemon of the reverse proxies.

Also - we answer listener questions, and share updates.

Support Self-Hosted

Links:

• Grocy — ERP beyond your fridge - grocy is a web-based self-hosted groceries & household management solution for your home
• Home Assistant Community Add-on: Grocy
• Home Assistant External Reverse Proxy Setup with nginx — I was running into an issue for a while tonight where I could get Home Assistant itself working just fine but any add-ons that used web sockets wouldn't load properly.

Wendell Wilson is back, and he and Chris are struggling with their automation setups. Also, we chat about ideal home server hardware for a server or a pfSense box.

Plus Wendell's home-rolled presence detection rig, some 3D printing chat, and more.

Special Guest: Wendell Wilson.

Support Self-Hosted

Links:

• sshuttle — Where transparent proxy meets VPN meets ssh
• Fractal Design — Fractal Design is a leading designer and manufacturer of premium PC hardware including cases, cooling, power supplies and accessories.
• Tinkercad — Tinkercad is a free, easy-to-use app for 3D design, electronics, and coding. It's used by teachers, kids, hobbyists, and designers to imagine, design, and make anything!
• Fusion 360 — Integrated CAD, CAM, and CAE software.
• Pocket Rotary Cellphone — The 3D-printed case contains an ATmega2560V microcontroller and an Adafruit FONA 3G cell module, while a flexible mono eInk display adorns the outside.
• ASRock > DeskMini A300 Series
• LanCache.NET — Download your games once and serve them out to many people at your LAN.
• Level1Techs Forums
• Bluetooth Presence Detection for Home Automation — You might be here because you heard me mention my Bluetooth presence detection setup on the new SelfHosted podcast, or possibly because you want to subject yourself to an internet-of-things setup in your own home while desperately trying to escape the consequential corporate surveillance as a result of that action (soft chuckles for everyone). Let’s talk about what it is, why you might want it, and how you can minimize the downsides.

Self-Hosted IRC solutions are better than ever. Alan Pope joins us to make a case for the classic way to communicate online and tells us about a modern client for the web, mobile, and desktop you run on your server.

Plus, follow up on the new Self-Hosted wiki, and more.

Special Guest: Alan Pope.

Support Self-Hosted

Links:

• World's Worst Best Drone Retrieval Device - YouTube — Having some fun watching my local flying crew/friends use the World's Worst Best Drone Retrieval Device.
• You don't need a UI for docker containers — You really don't. Managing small deployments of containers from the command line is easier, faster and 'commit-able'. We're not talking about vast fleets of  containers here but in this article I'll cover how I use docker-compose to manage over 30 docker containers in a simple, scalable and faster way than if you were using a UI.
• awesome-selfhosted: A list of Free Software network services and web applications which can be hosted locally. — A list of Free Software network services and web applications which can be hosted locally. Selfhosting is the process of hosting and managing applications instead of renting from Software-as-a-Service providers
• Linux Server Image Status
• Quasseldroid IRC Client — Quassel makes IRC fun again – open a client anywhere, connect to your core, and have all your favourite channels and networks right there.
• The Lounge — A web-based IRC client for the modern world! Once configured and started, users can access it from their browser or mobile device.
• Install theloungeirc for Linux using the Snap Store
• IRCCloud
• Self-Hosted Show Wiki — Here you will find an open source, living and breathing repository of resources that we talk about on the Self Hosted podcast.

We try out the top self-hosted Wikis and tell you which we like best, and Chris has a major project off-grid update.

Plus Alex tells us about his robot vacuum that runs Ubuntu.

Support Self-Hosted

Links:

• Going Solar — Work, Life, and RV Podcast — It's a huge investment! So we lay out our rationale for going solar after four years in our RV. Why we think who and how it gets installed is so critical, exactly HOW MUCH we spent, and how this new set up will keep us working from the road.
• Chris' Blog: Going Solar
• Alex's Blog: ktz.
• Developing on Remote Machines using SSH and Visual Studio Code — The Visual Studio Code Remote - SSH extension allows you to open a remote folder on any remote machine, virtual machine, or container with a running SSH server and take full advantage of VS Code's feature set. Once connected to a server, you can interact with files and folders anywhere on the remote filesystem.
• Don't blindly trust Docker for the selfhosted stuff — It is my strong belief that you shouldn't go crazy with all-things-docker when deploying selfhosted services at home. Online forums, especially r/selfhosted, seem to foster an opinion that providing a Dockerfile or better yet a docker-compose.yml or even prebuilt public images on Docker Hub is an acceptable way to distribute software targeting the selfhosting crowd.
• TiddlyWiki — a non-linear personal web notebook — Welcome to TiddlyWiki, a unique non-linear notebook for capturing, organising and sharing complex information.
• Wiki.js — The most powerful and extensible open source Wiki software.
• BookStack — BookStack is a simple, self-hosted, easy-to-use platform for organising and storing information.
• Material for MkDocs — Material is a theme for MkDocs, an excellent static site generator geared towards project documentation. It is built using Google's Material Design guidelines.
• Roborock S5 Robot Vacuum Cleaner
• Valetudo: Self-contained control webinterface for xiaomi vacuum robots — Self-contained control webinterface for xiaomi vacuum robots
• clarifies mi home app version requirement by IronicBadger · Pull Request #11401 · home-assistant/home-assistant.io · GitHub

We each like different blogging platforms, and share why. Then our tips for keeping your server secure.

Plus a great way to score cheap drives, a Project Off-Grid update, making your household light switches smart, and Alex's review of the HDHomeRun.

Support Self-Hosted

Links:

• Telegram: Contact @hddsale — HDD Sales Telegram Channel
• What SMART Stats Are Telling Us About Hard Drive Reliability — As of September 30, 2019, Backblaze had 115,151 spinning hard drives spread across four data centers on two continents. Of that number, there were 2,098 boot drives and 113,053 data drives.
• How to disable the 3.3v pin on Western Digital USB White Label Drives - YouTube — This is an amazing way to get super cheap storage for your #Plex Media Server. The catch? The shucked #Western #Digital White label drives may not work right out of the box. Don't worry, the fix is simple..
• Amazon.com: StarTech.com 4X SATA Power Splitter Adapter Cable (PYO4SATA): Home Audio & Theater — The PYO4SATA SATA power splitter cable (1-to-4) features a SATA male power connector that connects to a single computer power supply SATA connector and breaks out into four SATA female power connectors.
• OpenLiteSpeed-WordPress - Linode Manager — Blazing-fast WordPress with LSCache, 300+ times faster than regular WordPress
• LinuxServer.io Blog
• ktz. - Alex's Blog
• Shelly 2.5 - Shelly Cloud — Shelly 2.5 comes with a programming/debug header which can be used to flash alternative firmware on the device. It has an ESP8266 inside, with a 2MB flash chip. A USB-to-UART adapter is needed as well as a reliable 3.3V with at least 350 mA drive capability.

Wyze and Xiaomi suffer major cloud hosted blunders, so Alex tells us about his new fully offline camera security system, tied into Shinobi.

Plus Chris gets ready for Project Off-Grid's solar upgrade, our new favorite self-hosted speed test app, and a Ring alternative.

Support Self-Hosted

Links:

• Employee error to blame for massive data leak, Wyze says — The database in question was basically a copy of the production database that Wyze created to work with
• When I load the Xiaomi camera in my Google home hub I get stills from other people's homes!
• Alex Kretzschmar on Twitter — "Another item off the Todo list. Self-hosted cameras using @AmcrestSecurity 4k IP8M-T2499EW
• Self-hosted Speedtest — Self-hosted Speedtest for HTML5 and more. Easy setup, examples, configurable, mobile friendly. Supports PHP, Node, Multiple servers, and more
• Alex's docker-compose snippet for LibreSpeedTest
• Statping: Status Page for monitoring your websites — An easy to use Status Page for your websites and applications. Statping will automatically fetch the application and render a beautiful status page with tons of features for you to build an even better status page. This Status Page generator allows you to use MySQL, Postgres, or SQLite on multiple operating systems.
• Amazon.com : Nelly's Security 3MP WiFi Video Doorbell Camera — W/ 2 Way Audio, Onvif Compliant, PIR Motion Sensor, Night Vision, 16GB SD Card Pre-Installed.
• Smart Power Strip TECKIN WiFi Surge Protector

Master of details, open source advocate and YouTuber, Quindor from Intermittent.Tech joins us for a chat about tuya-convert to avoid planned hardware obsolescence, his new 100TB server build, highly available home setups, and his DIY LED project.

Special Guest: Andries Faassen.

Support Self-Hosted

Links:

• Intermit.Tech - YouTube
• Intermittent Technology - My personal blog
• Home Assistant: Cheap multi-room Temperature Sensors
• Home Networking: 100TB 10Gbit Server - Last server bits
• QuinLED.info - WiFi controllable DIY LED dimmer
• Tuya-convert: A collection of scripts to flash Tuya IoT devices to alternative firmwares
• Tasmota Device Templates Repository — Tasmota Device Templates Repository

Sometimes one project can lead to a hundred more. We celebrate Home Assistant's new release, the inclusion of the WLED integration and fall down the DIY project rabbit hole.

Plus some clever power solutions, cheap LED light strips, and a test drive of Project Off-Grid.

We recorded our first ever live stream to accompany this where we flash an ESP8266 board in seconds using WLED and esptool. This can be found on YouTube.

Support Self-Hosted

Links:

• Hass.io - Home Assistant — Hass.io turns your Raspberry Pi (or another device) into the ultimate home automation hub powered by Home Assistant. With Hass.io you can focus on integrating your devices and writing automations.
• Home Assistant Community Store — HACS gives you a powerful UI to handle downloads of custom needs.
• Omni 20c+ 100W USB-C/Wireless Charging — Portable Power Bank with USB Hub
• ESPHome — ESPHome is a system to control your ESP8266/ESP32 by simple yet powerful configuration files and control them remotely through Home Automation systems.
• Home Assistant Smart LEDs using WLED and ESP8266 — A platinum level Home Assistant integration for the WLED project was released with version 0.120 on Nov 20th 2019. I'm going to walk you through flashing a D1 Mini (though the same steps apply for a NodeMCU too) using Linux. You can probably expect this process to take about 5-10 minutes.
• WLED: Control WS2812B RGB LEDs with an ESP8266 over WiFi! — A fast and feature-rich implementation of an ESP8266/ESP32 webserver to control NeoPixel (WS2812B, WS2811, SK6812, APA102) LEDs!
• LED strips - Google Sheets
• 0.102: Official Android App, Almond, Scene editor
• Self-Hosted Live Hack Livestream Recording — DIY ESP device based LEDs just got a whole lot easier.