Author: doozer

  • Video Encoding with HandBrake

    I’ve recently been organizing some of the video files I have and a few of them are larger than I would prefer. It occurred to me that I’m somewhat familiar with HandBrake so I should probably re-encode them. I’ve used HandBrake before but, if I’m being honest, I didn’t really understand what I was doing.…

  • Debian Has a Terrible Out-of-the-Box Experience

    In an earlier article I mentioned that I was going to switch to Linux and I’d selected KDE Neon as my distro of choice. After some thought I came to the conclusion that I’d be better off just going with Debian. Debian 12 (bookworm) has just been released and it comes with very nearly the…

  • Task Management with Vikunja

    Vikunja is a task / project management application. The unpronounceable name apparently comes from a relative of the llama, overlooking the name for a moment this appears to be a great application. Deployment is a little trickier than with most applications as it, at a minimum, comes as three parts. You have a database, the…

  • A Stupid Failure With a Home Lab – Out of Disk Space

    I’ve just had what is probably the most ridiculous failure in my home lab. I found that my media download server was not longer running properly, the services were coming up but they were failing left right and centre. I noticed that most of my SMB mounts weren’t mounted so I manually mounted them, that…

  • Setting up a Reverse Proxy for a Home Lab

    Once you start setting up a home lab you very quickly end up with a whole host of services and each one has it’s own port number and or host. To save you having to remember all of that you can set up a reverse proxy to bring everything together. The reverse proxy acts as…

  • Creating a Debian LXC Container on Proxmox

    I said previously that I wasn’t going to write this article but now I come to properly think about it I feel it’s worth it. Part of why I write these articles is to help beginners get started with tools that they would often be nervous about just diving into. If I can get someone…

  • Running Calibre on a Virtual Machine with a Network Library

    This article started out as just a guide on running Calibre with a network library, a difficult task at the best of times, it has since had to morph into a guide on running Calibre Web in the same way since that too is non-trivial. Calibre Calibre is certainly a powerful application, of that there…

  • Self Hosted Services

    This is a list of services that I self host on my personal network. This almost all runs on a Proxmox server which I mostly wrote a guide about putting together. It has a RAIDZ2 array of a bit over 40TB. Hosted Under Consideration Tried and Removed

  • Deploying a Jellyfin Server

    Today I’ll be deploying a Jellyfin server as a Docker container. I’ve used Jellyfin for several years now, and I find it to be an excellent media server. Prior to Jellyfin I use Plex. I have to admit, Plex is good, but Jellyfin is better. The set up I’m describing here is what I use…

  • Creating a Personal Music Server – Navidrome

    In this article I’ll be installing an configuring a personal music server based on Navidrome. The first part of the install will be specific to my home network setup which is covered in numerous other posts. Music Share Setup The step assumes that you have a file server configured as per the Building a NAS…

  • Mounting a Samba Share Under Debian

    In this article we’ll permanently mount a Samba share on a Debian based system, this process will be similar for other Linux distributions too. It is assumed that you have a share somewhere else already configured and ready to go. Start by installing the required utilities, this will install a few other utilities as well.…

  • Setting up Sudo on Debian

    In this article I’ll set up the sudo system on Debian. By default the Debian installer only sets up sudo if you don’t supply a root password at install time. You don’t need sudo on a machine to to use it effectively and I have used Debian machines without it for years. The problem is…