Self Hosting

How I used the open-source cleanyourtv project and Claude Code to strip the ads and telemetry off a used Xiaomi TV Box S, then added Jellyfin, a photo screensaver from Immich, remapped remote buttons, Home Assistant control and an ESP32 Bluetooth keyboard that wakes the box.

A small Docker sidecar that pulls AdGuard's blocked-service definitions from GitHub, gives me per-VLAN on/off switches, and publishes the plain-text blocklists Technitium Advanced Blocking reads.

Adding ZFS replication and Proxmox HA to a two-container Technitium DNS setup, the order of operations that tripped me up, a real migration test, and Uptime Kuma monitoring.

Replacing five AdGuard Home instances with two clustered Technitium DNS servers: one DHCP server for every VLAN, separate blocking policies per network, and a few things that didn't work the first time.

How I moved four self-hosted websites from a home server behind an Oracle VPS to Cloudflare Pages, using GitHub Actions for the two Zola sites and Cloudflare's own Git integration for the two plain HTML sites, plus what bit me along the way.

Five years in, my self-hosted email archive gets cleaned up: four repos become one, Solr is replaced by Dovecot's built-in search, All Mail and Flagged folders finally work, and certificate renewals stop needing a manual restart.

Why I moved this blog from a WordPress container to a static Zola site, how the posts got converted straight out of the database, and what broke along the way.

A new version of the mbsync and Dovecot Docker images, now with Solr full-text search for fast IMAP searches.

Running the php-fpm Nextcloud Docker image directly behind Nginx Proxy Manager, without a second nginx container.

Replacing a discontinued Logitech Harmony with a cheap Bluetooth remote, a Python event listener, and Home Assistant automations, with no cloud involved.

Using an always-free Oracle Cloud VM and a WireGuard tunnel to OPNsense to expose self-hosted services publicly without opening ports at home.

Repackaging the mbsync and Dovecot setup from Parts 1 and 2 into a pair of Docker images, configured entirely through environment variables.

Adding self-signed SSL certificates to Dovecot and installing Roundcube, so the local mail archive is reachable from any browser on the network.

Automatically backing up a remote IMAP mailbox to a home server with mbsync, then serving the archive locally with Dovecot so any mail client can read it.