149: Notify Thyself

[hardy condor]

https://selfhosted.show/149

[rough laurel]

Working on my ucore while listening to ucore takes. sweet

[rough laurel]

Oh, and a mention of the broken-by-design Tailscale integration in Unraid :/

[pure charm]

Aw man, Alex is moving after building that sweet sweet recording studio in the attic?!

[neon pecan]

I have moved a couple of times myself, and totally agree in leaving the bulky things behind. you're doing the right thing.

[tardy sandal]

Do you think that may mean more UK based self hosted meetups? I realise the podcast is ending, but hopefully not the hobby

FYI for @trail peak ^

[trail peak]

likely!

[trail peak]

sad but true

[tardy sandal]

Are you keeping the servers? I saw the rack is going, but thats one of those bulky things you cant easily take

[trail peak]

i’m sending one to @trim wigeon in canada. i will keep one to take with. the rest are going to be sold.

[tardy sandal]

You'll have to start thinking what servers you want to build back in the UK! I for one would be interested to see what the best places to get hardware from as we dont have microcentre. Heard good stuff of bargainhardware for server stuff, but never used them myself

[trail peak]

i’m going to scale things back big time for the foreseeable as we will eventually build a house but likely will be in between places for 1-5 years as we do

[tardy sandal]

Well, best of luck for the sale and move! I seem to remember mention you were originally from the east anglia region, I'm there myself, so if you need help with anything happy to be dm'ed 🙂

So, I'm listening to the episode, and I felt like everyone was a bit down, like something was up... Then I noticed it was becase I was using the web player, and usually I use my podcast app and play at 1.5x which I guess makes things sound different 😂

Also, on the notifications question, I know some apps make use of update notifications. So the service will send a push to your phone, then when the phone receives it, it pings the service to get the content of the update. So Apple/Google only see an "update" notification

[trim wigeon]

That's me!

[rugged glade]

fun shiny toys for you!

[trail peak]

keep an eye on #1372896708396318770 (it is public for now)

[stray pendant]

I was aware of bootc images, but I had no idea about ucore. Even ZFS is included, fantastic news. I'll certainly try it. Thank you.

[rough laurel]

i have been really been liking playing with it this week, started to extend it with my own stuff

[still kernel]

Didn't alex just build a studio too? F to pay respects

Also, idk why everyone has such a love for ntfy and none for gotify

[sudden aurora]

if any listeners are interested in setting up a ucore home server, check out my helper script that can be used during installation to help generate your ignition (system config) file! https://github.com/gabeklavans/ucore-turnkey

(here’s a relevant forum post with more explanation https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/a-helper-script-for-completing-a-one-off-ucore-installation/8383)

[still kernel]

I didn't like that ntfy was completely sans authentication

[still kernel]

Im actually attempting to get a VM for ucore set up in proxmox right now

Its been an experience

[sudden aurora]

Yeah the worst part for me was learning what the heck ignition was and how it worked. My tool is designed to hopefully remove 90% of that friction

beyond that, it was a pretty smooth experience to set up in VM and play around with

[still kernel]

The coreos docs do a good job of explaining butane

I'm sad that they don't support cloud-init

[rough laurel]

did you really find it that cumbersome? ucore has a sample butane file, whouch you just need to run a container against

[still kernel]

Once I get it up and running I may try my hand at creating a template via packer

[rough laurel]

You dont want the packer or cloud-init mentality for this

[sudden aurora]

i definitely mean it in a relative sense. i’m used to the flow of

1. flash iso
2. boot into installer
3. be guided through os installation

I got to step 2. and then I had to go read some docs, and set up local http server and run a bunch of commands on a different machine, which was a bit odd to me,

the actual effort was low but the mental overhead was unexpected. and I immediately came up with how to just automate the whole thing interactively with a one liner script, so I did! might as well

My hope is that it will help adoption, cuz I think ucore is just really cool for home labbers

[rough laurel]

It might be unexpected, but it is not like its useless for actual use.

[sudden aurora]

Definitely not useless! But for someone who is used to installing linux distros and wants to mess around with ucore, I think my tool can just help bridge the gap for people. I also emphasize that you can break out and learn what’s going on very easily by looking at the butane and ignition file that it generates and saving it somewhere else

But I think the ability to use it to just get into a coreos installation media, run a small one liner, then have a home server set up interactively is neat

[rough laurel]

ive opted to make a justfile for it, as that conserves the commands

[sudden aurora]

as an aside, part of what drew me to ublue as opposed to nixos is that I actively do not want to declare my system, I just want an opinionated stable base that I can add my apps to. And ignition files brings me a step towards nixos in the sense that I’m declaring the start state (or if I wanna get crazy, the whole end state) of my system. Having the ignition file be a simple one off brings me closer back to my original intention with ucore

But I totally get jamming out on a custom setup file

(sorry for rambling about this in the show discussion thread)

[rough laurel]

My appeal is that it gives me a way of extending that i am very familiar with, as its OCI. It makes it trivial for me to extend, without having strong opinions pushed down my throat.
Ive built on top of the hci image to add ie komodo, as well as secret management with onepassword

[sudden aurora]

that’s honestly really cool. I would say it’s different from what appeals me, but that sounds like a rabbit hole I could totally go down lol

[rough laurel]

https://github.com/rostvik/ucore this week has been fun

[still kernel]

well i got ucore to boot

success!

now to figure out how to actually use it for something

[rough laurel]

if you havent yet, look into podman quadlets

[trail peak]

yes indeed. that one hurts.

luckily financially it should work out in our favour as we had it permitted as an extra bedroom

[sudden aurora]

these blew my mind

[still kernel]

u sure about that?

cause I did read the docs

it's possible that I missed it

idk, I'm pretty deep on Gotify now so I am not switching XD

[knotty scarab]

https://docs.ntfy.sh/config/?h=default+access#example-private-instance

[still kernel]

I stand corrected

[knotty scarab]

It should be the default no idea why it's not

[rugged glade]

Ntfy has authentication. Not sure what you mean

[plucky pagoda]

It makes me happy that some kid out there is about to get the best Internet connected bedroom they've ever had

[trail peak]

lol absolutely

fibers to most of the rooms here

i feel like i should write a leaving note explaining it all

[still kernel]

"yeah so this is an LC fiber connector..."

I'm assuming you had fiber run to that room

[neon pecan]

I did that in my last house. Lots of smart stuff behind walls.

[plucky pagoda]

You'll write it, give it to them, and they'll plop their $300 laptop running Windows11 (barely) on it, and then stream youtube videos a few times a day and watch tiktok. And all that untapped potential will just sit there, waiting.

[trail peak]

i know i know

[tardy sandal]

Gotify doesn't have ios, it also requires constant connection to the server to receive messages (as opposed to using the PUSH infrastructure) so it uses more battery for the same effectiveness

[sudden aurora]

ios is actually the reason I stopped using ntfy. both for self hosted and hosted, notifications just do not stay working for the app, and only stay working for some time when using the PWA, basically until I get signed out of the webapp (which seems to occur every week or so for the hosted version and I couldn't figure out how to configure it) https://docs.ntfy.sh/known-issues/#ios-app-not-refreshing-see-267

I think the PWA signing out thing might not be an issue for self hosted, but I was drawn to the hosted version so I would always have notifications no matter which piece of my infra might go down. So here's hoping the iOS stuff will be figured out by some benevolent dev some day

[tardy sandal]

I seem to remember there being a setting you can enable that makes use of the public ntfy server to tell your client to check for updates from your local instance, I'll see if I can find it

https://docs.ntfy.sh/config/#ios-instant-notifications

[sudden aurora]

yup that was one of the pitfalls in my journey to set it up. tho typing up that last message prompted me to give the hosted PWA another try and it seems like it might actually work persistently now. I don't have to actually log in to see my protected channels in the PWA now, it just stores the credentials somewhere in the localstorage. maybe there was an update since last I tried

[plucky pagoda]

Wait you can use PWAs on iOS now?

[sudden aurora]

yeah.... they're still second-class support but system notifications do in fact work!

[late fiber]

Very late to the party, but I have NTFY installed as a .deb on a VPS and use an nginx reverse proxy for the SSL termination.

I configured the server to require credentials to both push and pull notifications because I wanted the privacy and to prevent abuse.

You can totally hook the ntfy app on Android into Tasker to automate all the things, including launching applications or any other actions Tasker can perform.

For those pesky apps which only offer email notifications, there is a companion project called Mailrise which presents a local SMTP server as a front-end to apprise. You can then configure your app to email your notifications to your configured "mailbox" which then packages it up and delivers it to ntfy directly. Then all of your subs get it as normal. I used this when I was using Duplicity for backups on a couple of Windows clients when I wanted alerts for backup failures.

@trail peak and Chris, thanks for all the episodes and all the ideas. I wish it could continue, but I totally understand that seasons in life end and new ones begin. Good luck to both of you in the new chapters of your lives!

[pure charm]

Its not only that, but its a soundproof bedroom 😉

[rancid tide]

Does anyone have a link to the Home Assistant or Netdata scripts that were mentioned in the episode?

[still kernel]

Did you look in the show notes?