IsoKiero

Just for comparison, my VPS server has ~20 active email boxes (postfix,dovecot,spamassassin,clamav), a few small-ish active wordpress sites (apahce,php-fpm,mariadb), radicale and some other smaller services running with 2 cores and 4GB RAM and it’s mostly just fine. Occasionally, specially during heavier updates on wordpress-sites, memory tends to get pretty full, but it’s still just fine. Tweaking memory cache for php (or running something else than php) would increase performance by a lot, but even without optimization the 5€/month VPS is quite capable to keep your internet presence around and on your own hands.

I wonder if I can hack this by soldering wires to the contacts of the encoder and touch two wires together to make it register a rotary step.

Yes, but there’s a spesific order which you need to touch the wires so that it registers movement in one way or the other. You could also solder wires to another rotary encoder and use that (assuming of course that the new part electrically matches the old part).

Spraying contact cleaner in the case might work too while rotating the knob. Just drowning it in something most likely won’t help much, but if you can get the encoder off the board then you can sink it in a isopropyl alcohol and rotate the knob around. Just let it dry properly before putting it back together, contacts may spark when used and if there’s alcohol vapours around that might cause some new and exciting problems.

Nothing wrong with good old ssh. My VMs are different enough that building and maintaining ansible playbooks or something similar would be a bigger task than actually doing it in the traditional way. Maybe I could benefit by building simple playbooks to populate user accounts, ssh keys, smtp relay settings and other common things, but I don’t really set up new servers that often that it would justify spending time to set up tools for that.

My ISP offers unauthenticated SMTP for their customer addresses. It’s pretty heavily rate limited, but well enough for the occasional status email my system throws out. At least around here they are pretty common for residential customers, so that might be an option.

Other possibility is to set up SMTP relay to your network and give it credentials to an actual email account (with SMTP support, which isn’t granted these days). It can take in emails from your network without credentials and throw them to the internet with your account. It’s pretty simple to set up, search for postfix + smarthost. Added bonus is that you can read the replies to that address too via your email provider services.

OrgAbuseHandle: ABUSE9107-ARIN OrgAbuseName: ABUSE OrgAbusePhone: +1-313-516-8908 OrgAbuseEmail: abuse@hostodo.com OrgAbuseRef: rdap.arin.net/registry/entity/ABUSE9107-ARIN

They have options. No idea if they actually do anything for the reports, but it’s worth a shot.

I’m running Dahua cameras. They can pull new firmware straight over the internet, but they don’t rely on any cloud services. All kinds of flavours available and they do run on POE.

Another recommendation for storagebox from here. Cheapest option I’ve found and they are pretty reliable. I use proxmox backup server to sync my VMs there (encrypted of course).

Immich itself is running on docker, so it’s the same than every other setup. For me it just makes more sense to run that on a separate VM than keeping all the docker containers in a same operating system due to backups, manageability, access control and so on, even if it costs a bit of memory to run a full operating system. Biggest consumers on the host process list are immich-api, postgres-processes and immich. Actual used memory is around 2,5GB for the whole system with ~5GB on buffers/cache.

But I often import hundreds of raw photos at a time from DSLR and/or 4K video footage from my drone and processing those takes quite a lot of memory. With less memory and slower drives the whole thing crashed when importing bigger batches to out of memory erros, but I suppose it could run just fine with even less than 4GB of memory, if the usage pattern is just to upload photos from your cellphone in a relatively slow pace.

It’s a full VM, so OS and docker creates some overhead, but before I upgraded the server it ran on far less resources and specially big imports were painfully slow. Also that’s just the number from proxmox console, so there’s likely some cache included, but stats show that the VM pulls over 10G every now and then with shorter spikes over 20GB of consumed RAM.

As I mentioned, it can run on way less, but it feels a lot more responsive when it has enough resources.

16GB of ram is a bit low for the load you’re planning. That can work, but Nextcloud and Immich are pretty hungry for memory. My immich instance right now is using 7GB of RAM and nextcloud uses a bit over 4. I have the hardware to give them pretty much all the memory they want, so those are not absolute minimum amounts, but I wouldn’t try to run either with less than 6GB allocated memory on my load (few users, about a terabyte of data on both).

With 16GB you can pretty much forget using ZFS, but that’s not a big loss. LVM works just fine and with thin provisioning you can use snapshots too just fine. Bigger SSD/NVME for drive cache would be good. And of course all-SSD setup would be nice, but that gets expensive pretty fast. Second ethernet port might be nice to have, depends on how you’re planning to build your setup. Otherwise that hardware looks pretty good, altough I’d search for something second hand. CPU is most likely a bit overkill for what you need, I have Xeon E5-2620 v3 @ 2.40GHz and it’s running on around 10% load most of the time.

Don’t send spam, behave nicely, have proper configuration on postfix and dovecot, set up SPF and preferably DKIM, keep your domains reputation clean and so on. You’ll likely still end up on some lists, so you need to manually dig them trough and ask nicely for removal.

Self hosting email has a pretty bad reputation and many will strongly advice against it, but in reality it’s really not that bad. But email as a whole is more complex beast to manage than simple website or running Jellyfin for your family and friends. You need to understand how the mail routing side of things work (SMTP itself, authentication for it encryption included and so on) and also you need to understand how DNS works and how various entries are related to mail transport. Then you’ll likely want at least some kind of spam filtering and so on. And with email you’ll need to have proper backup scenario too so that you don’t lose the likely pretty important data. All of that is perfectly doable and it’s not as difficult as many claim it to be, but there’s a bunch of stuff you need to understand and implement all of them correctly.

There’s various permission errors on the log file, I’d start from those. Also your dovecot configs seem a bit funny to me, usually mails are not stored to user home directories with dovecot, but instead somewhere under /var, likely you’ll want /var/vmail. Logfiles are pretty good with these tools, so pay close attention to those.

And take your time to understand what the config options actually do. Too permissive configurations will get your sever to every spamlist on the world pretty quickly.

In the grand scheme of things the only thing on my server stack that’s really worth anything is immich. The rest will have very little value to anyone once I’m gone. Plan is to create printed books from the photos and those should stay accessible for the future generations, our archive just needs a ton of work on creating those photos and possibly adding descriptions on who’s on the pictures and when they’re taken.

I don’t really plan for ww3 nor solar flare frying half of the planet, but one thing that’s a real problem is that if something happens to myself. My wife or kids don’t know how to manage/access a majority of the stuff there is even if their everyday digital life is using network and services in it I’ve built. They’ll be just fine without pihole or jellyfin, but data in immich/nextcloud is valuable and bus factor for the digital environment is pretty low.

I should at least verify that all server passwords are on my bitwarden vault and set up dead mans switch on that. Then they can at least get someone to pull the data out of the systems or even hire someone to maintain them. Best option would be if one of the kids would learn the ropes, but so far it doesn’t seem like they’re interested on anything like that.

Obviously there’s a ton in successful email hosting since it’s not just configuring few services. Proper DNS-records and privilege controls are mandatory, you need to occasionally clear up your domain/IP from spamlists (specially at the start) and single mistake can ruin your DNS reputation quite quickly which then takes time to build back.

But it’s still perfectly doable and, when you have proper knowledge on how the whole circus actually runs, not too difficult either. Only problem is that there’s no longer money on just email hosting since cloud hosting offers much more than just emails for the price a small gamer can’t just compete with. At least around here.

I flagree that hosting email servers on residential IPs is a recipe for being filtered and blocked

Unless your ISP gives you a static address and agrees to change PTR record to your server address. Then it’s no different than any other server on the internet. Obviously odds are that you’re not getting one or if it’s an option they’ll likely charge more than VPS is going to cost you, but it’s not unheard of.

But for the actual topic, I don’t get the myth either. I’ve got a good old postfix+dovecot setup running and the only problem I have is that spam filtering isn’t quite as good as with commercial providers, but the handful of trash coming trough is easy enough to take care of manually.

Sounds reasonable approach to me. Also I’d include VPS and other cloud services too. “Is this VPS enough to run NextCloud” is a perfectly reasonable question for this community just like “is my old thinkpad good for…”. I don’t think there should (nor can) be a hard rule about what hardware to use. Questions obviously outside of self hosting (e.g. “what GPU I should by to play minecraft”) should go elsewhere but otherwise I don’t think there’s even a real need to limit activity.

And also there’s a half a dozen of posts here daily (unless mods remove posts really efficiently). My opinion is that even if the post could go to some other community but leans to self-hosting side of things it can stay. Maybe if there was tens or hundreds of posts daily it would make more sense to limit what goes, but as things are now I don’t think any kind of (in a lack of a better word) gatekeeping is beneficial to this community nor anyone else.