In this post I’m going to talk about how I went from a single server running all my self-hosted services to a small fleet of “servers” that I manage with Komodo, XCP-NG, and unRAID. The scenario that prompted me to divest in a single machine running the services I use every day was prompted by a spat of unexpected downtime to install/fix/replace something in my unRAID server (it doesn’t matter what it is because that’s not important to this post). In doing so, I lost access to all of my Homebridge devices in the Home app which meant I couldn’t turn off some devices or even see my security camera feeds, my Plex server then became inaccessible for myself and the remote users who stream from it, and I couldn’t read my news feeds from FreshRSS, among losing access to the many other services.
To some this scenario might seem like a minor annoyance, but to me… well, in my quest for data-privacy and independance, encountering this situation felt awfully devastating considering the time I’d invested in not only my abilities but to have everything running smoothly for so long. Self-hosting the services I need to accomplish tasks, or waste time, is something I take a lot of pride in but extended periods of downtime started to boil my blood.
In my day job I work with all manner of software development hijinks and I’ve seen “single-source” failures happen first hand in a production environments when unseasoned people build “scalable” systems. This got me thinking: what if I brought fault tolerance and resiliency to my homelab to mitigate these situations? I had enough hardware on hand to build out infrastructure to support it, and I had the knowhow to make it happen.
After sketching a quick breakdown of what I thought was needed, I began to split up the services running on my monolith unRAID server across multiple servers. Now that I’ve gone through this exercise I can pull one, or even two, servers offline and still have service availability (for the most part). One of the other benefits to doing this is that my infrastructure can be declarative in code and I can spin up new infrastructure more easily with the push of a single git commit. It’s not as simple as running an Ansible playbook where I could spin up or even orchestrate the creation of fully configured servers themselves, but it eliminates a class of error I would definitely encounter having to remember all the steps required to get a working set of services running again from scratch.
In my last post I talked about starting to build out a homelab for virtualization after diving into unRAID which had gotten me interested in the topic. While I’d read about Proxmox being good to start with, ultimately I started building out some infrastructure using XCP-NG and Xen Orchestra instead. I was quite pleased with the experience and decided it needed to be shared here.
It’s been over a year and a half since I posted about my unRAID server and in that post I talked about rebuilding my aging Windows-based media server. Since then, my mind has been expanded by the ease at which I can spin up containerized self-hosted open-source services to use wherever and whenever I please.
I continue experimenting with this unRAID server and used it as a kicking off point, diving into some projects to increase my skills for both my personal and professional life. This includes planning and building out a proper backup system, as well as dipping my toes into virtualization with XCP-NG, but I’ll save that for a future post.
On September 22, 2024 my wife, our two dogs, and I embarked on a multi-week road trip to camp at some of BC and Alberta’s National and Provincial Parks. Our planned stops were in Revelstoke, Banff, Yoho National Parks, and Mount Robson Provincial Park with our travel trailer. Along the way we planned to visit some family and friends near 100 Mile House, BC.
Since I haven’t posted much on my blog in the last few years, and have been slowly waning myself off posting my content on social media sites that are not owned by me, it was decided that I should leverage my own site to catalog our road trip journey. What follows is something of a daily journal of our trip; my wife also wants us to commemorate our trip with a “smash book” that she picked up almost a decade ago and finally has a use for it.
This is an image-heavy post, you have been warned.
[August 2024 Update] I’ve been running this server very stable for several months. In that time I’ve explored adding more services to my self-hosted life, namely:
running my own custom-built dockerized Discord bot
hosting my own Gitea instance for version control (accompanied by Gitea Actions for CI/CD) to reduce my reliance on GitHub
Nextcloud was removed entirely from my stack not long after using it because it does not play well with Apple devices and the UI is very janky which is a shame for a project as mature as it is.
I’m constantly evaluating third-party services that I can remove and bring in-house, and I’m sure more will be self-hosted as time marches forward. I will update this space every few months to catalog my changes until it gets to be it’s own post.
Maintenance is a word that can strike fear in even the most seasoned administrators; it is also the bane of my existence. Sometimes we spend countless hours maintaining something for very little return.
In this post I talk about building a new machine to replace my aging media server and how you can take back some control over the data you constantly give out to services and products on the internet by bringing some of these in-house to your own network.
If you care about your privacy, using a trusted VPN is a requirement for doing anything on the internet these days. I have used ExpressVPN for over 7 years and after reading the TorrentFreak 2025 review of VPN providers who do not log, I think you should too. If you sign up with my referral link, we BOTH get 1 month of free service 😁!
This is an affiliate link; it helps support keeping my website content up to date.
This is a follow up to my last post about getting my Amateur Radio Basic Qualification (with Honours) and being interested in APRS. Since then, I’ve made some progress in my ham radio journey and setup my own APRS tracker that I run in my truck! This allows me to go explore our back-country roads without fear that I will get lost.
What lies beyond is mostly a brain dump of notes I made over the course of putting this project together so that in the future I can refer back to it when I forget some things about the setup. I’m hoping that it helps you when setting up your own APRS tracker using some open-source software called Dire Wolf and some other relatively inexpensive hardware.
It’s worth noting that this post does not cover any of the hardware setup required with a VHF radio, antenna, power requirements, etc.; In the future I may put together a part two post outlining my setup and how I have everything configured.
tldr; In November of this year I took an Amateur Radio (aka “ham” radio) course with the local Cowichan Valley Amateur Radio Society (CVARS) club, studied for 5 weeks straight every night, and passed my Basic Qualification exam on November 14 2021 with honours! I scored 91% which was the highest in the cohort 🥳
If you care about your privacy, using a trusted VPN is a requirement for doing anything on the internet these days. I have used ExpressVPN for over 7 years and after reading the TorrentFreak 2025 review of VPN providers who do not log, I think you should too. If you sign up with my referral link, we BOTH get 1 month of free service 😁!
This is an affiliate link; it helps support keeping my website content up to date.
