Technology

A glimpse of the past week and the few things that captivated my attention: Weather’s been pretty erratic this week. We also had a mild dusting yesterday out of the blue! Might consider heading out for a hike later today. I nudged Meena to write more. We’ve had some interesting discussions on Yoga and other things over the past week and I do think she has a ton to share! She’s also planning to train for a 50miler which I am super excited about! Oh and beyond all that marketing ploy, Happy Mothers’ day. ...

PS: For step-by-step instructions read this post instead I’ve had my eyes on Trilium notes since last year. Having setup a robust docker framework earlier this year, I decided to test Trilium out. Gave it a test run this morning and am way impressed with its’ functionalities! With docker, installation was super easy and I am strongly leaning towards using Trilium as my primary note application. The yml file to get this running on docker (swarm) is in my github gist. You’d obviously need to have docker installed, docker swarm running with the traefik container and the domain mapped as needed. My Jitsi post has this outlined further. ...

To migrate my php applications that did not have a handy docker-compose available, I needed a vanilla setup for my stack-based docker environment. Known is one of those apps and so the first step was to build that PHP environment. Setting up a Dockerhub repository and building a custom PHP image [If you decide to use my image, you would not have to build this yourself. Skip ahead to the Deploying Known section] ...

A glimpse of the past week and the few articles, podcasts, tools, videos and music that captivated my attention: This week I got a better handle at deploying and maintaining docker images. With that squared out, I decided to decommission the Digital Ocean servers that I had setup back in 2017 and migrate the applications over to my Hetzner server. I no longer have to rely on ServerPilot. All my applications are now deployed as docker containers fronted by #Traefik as a reverse proxy. ...

Appa, who’s very active on Facebook, recently wanted an easy way to sift through his old videos and photos that were up on his account. I decided to take a dump of his data from the network using the download your information section. I initiated the process with just a few clicks and after a few days, I was able to download the zipped files of all the content he had posted on FB. including the likes, messages, shares etc. If you haven’t already, I would strongly recommend you get a copy of your data. I rarely interact on Facebook these days so it was even more interesting to see all the information they collect on you. ...

Jit.si is a terrific, secure video-conferencing #alternative to #Zoom and obviously comes with all the open-source awesomeness. Call clarity is amazing and with a room capacity of 100+ (and potentially much more, driven by network and server capabilities), it’s an absolute no-brainer to switch over. Use Jitsi Meet on the desktop or use one of their slick android, F-droid or iPhone apps on hand-held devices to organise your video conferences. With the recent push to video-conferencing most meetings, I decided to setup my own instance. This was way more straightforward than I thought! I am currenty running it as a docker container, fronted with #Traefik for encryption. Configuration and installation steps mentioned below assume you have access to a domain name and server with docker already installed. ...

A quick rundown on the state of the home-servers I run or applications I host on the cloud. Last week I opened up my Nextcloud instance for external access. Now, since my brother’s RPi4 was already exposed on the same network, I had to setup a reverse proxy on another RPi3 to access both simultaneously behind the router. Here’s the current setup: Proxy server: An RPi3 running on Raspbian Buster Lite with HAProxy installed to handle the reverse proxy. Here’s the gist of the code that’s handling all the heavy lifting. Since SSL is handled by the other servers themselves, all I needed was a quick pass-through handshake from HAProxy. ...

I finally got my Shoebox server setup working! I now have three Single board Computer [SBC] working in tandem behind my home router to accomplish what I’ve been wanting to do for quite sometime now - Setting up an easy-to-maintain, in-house server for all my data and web hosting needs. Fixing this all together has been a tremendous learning experience. I still need to weed out some pesky issues but I believe I have the bearing right now. ...

Meena and my family gifted me an Odroid XU4 SBC earlier last month as a Christmas/B-day gift. One of my projects during the year-end holidays was to setup a robust home server; Essentially getting my webservers home from Digital Ocean, where they are currently hosted. This would be a terrific companion to the nextcloud fileserver that I setup earlier using a raspberry pi. Earlier this week, I chanced upon DietPi and decided to launch it on the eMMC chip. One of the first things I did was to install Pi-Hole. With uBlock addons’ that should be some good riddance to ads across my home network! Would be interesting to keep track of these network pings to see what devices are needlessly calling ‘home’. ...

Last year, I procured a Nextcloud box and moved part of my data to it. I’d just heard about Ubuntu Snappy Core OS and was keen on porting my install to that setup. I finally got around doing that last week and thought I’d quickly jot down the install steps for reference later. Essentially, I installed the Core OS on a 32GB microSD card and installed Nextcloud as a snap. Two 1TB hard drives service the Pi3 and are synced with rclone. Below is a crude outline of the setup: ...