Homelab on Mike Bell - Blog & Stuff

Homelab Update March 2026

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 20:40:46 +0000

It’s been a few months since my last update as per usual! I try not to blog for the sake of it so I wait until I have a few things of value to update on.

External Backups
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I’ve been using Restic on my remote server to backup Forgejo repos for a while now so finally decided to roll it out to my homelab for Immich backups. Immich has some really nice backup and restore documentation and everything you need to backup its nicely stored in one folder (if you have a fairly default installation). Instead of using Restic cli I decided to look into a GUI solution in the form of Backrest, after a few days of testing it out I’m really impressed with it, it takes a lot of the hassle out of configure restic through the CLI. I like how to UI is set up into two distinct areas - plans and repos. I’d assumed in Restic you had one “plan” per repo but this makes it a lot clearer that you can backup multiple “things” to one repo which is awesome. For storage I’m using Backblaze B2, another service I’m not super familiar with but their storage seems pretty cheap and my 45gb Immich instance shouldn’t cost me too much per month and gives me a sense of security.

My next task is to actually test what a restore looks like. This will most likely be a migration to an external server which I’m then going to open up to the rest of my family.

Resound
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If you’ve come from my mastodon feed then you saw the post being automatically posted by my new CLI tool called Resound. It’s a go app that takes an RSS feed and Mastodon client and posts the last item to your feed. It does duplication checking and has a template that you can configure the content of the toot with. It was a really nice little project which I’m still building on. None of it was vibe coded either which was really nice, I love writing code and being able to do it without the assistance of AI.

This is the first thing I’ve built from scratch in a long while and it also uses 100% self hosted CI/CD pipelines.

ForgeJo Mobile Web UI
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Shout out the mobile web ui in ForgeJo, I’ve been using it on the go to review automated PRs and merge them in when I’m satisfied with the build output. It’s been really good to have a tool that works as you expect it and allows you to do stuff like this on the go.

Hetzner Price Increases
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Hetzner have upped their prices by 30-40% which sucks. My external server bill is pretty small (<20 Euros a month) but I have plans to increase the number of servers and existing servers power in the future.

My forgejo server needs more power, well the runners do. Building containers is taking longer than I would like. If I don’t up the server specs I could run the runners on other hardware I own but there’s networking issues with that (see Tailscale).

I need a new isolated server for a family Immich instance. I’m not sure what this will look like at the moment but it’s likely to cost a fair bit in storage space.

Tailscale
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I’ve been holding off using Tailscale for a while now, I like all my tools to be self hosted where possible but Tailscale solves a problem I’ve had for a long while now and I should probably spend a bit of time with it. I’ve also looked at Headscale which I’d be happy to selfhost but not until I’m comfortable with how Tailscale works, networking has never been one of my strengths.

That’s about it for this months/quarters homelab update. If your interested in more of these types of posts I have a category with all my updates in here.

I’m also on the look out for new monitors, my LG Ultragear Piece of Shit (tm) is finally getting on my nerves (burn in and random turn offs). I need 2 hybrid gaming/office monitors so if you have any suggestions please get in touch.

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Rebuilding my digital library

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 10:22:24 +0000

When I was a kid me and my brother read a lot, we devoured books so much so my mum had to keep taking us to the library to get more. Eventually when we got a bit older we started buying our own books and both our rooms became full of Terry Pratchett, JRR Tolkein and other amazing authors. I love reading it transports me to a better place.

As I grew up and got older I went off to University and my books stayed behind, I fell out of love with reading. This would continue for a long time afterwards. I moved back home after uni and never really picked up a book. Eventually I moved out and started life on my own on the other side of the country and my books stayed at home. When my brother finally left home he took them all with him.

Somewhere in that move away from from home I got a Kindle, the idea of being able to take a library of books with a compact form was very appealing. The added backlight meant I could read in bed properly as well which was a major plus since that’s where I do most of my reading these days. The Kindle store also was a great way to pick up cheap books here and there, this was before I really cared about digital ownership and freedom from DRM.

If you’ve read any of my other blog posts you’ll know I’m a huge fan of self hosting and getting away from big tech. So when Amazon announced that you’d no longer be able to download the files you “rent” from them I decided it was time to ditch them and move on.

First step was grabbing all my books from Amazon, this was a tedious manual task but I eventually managed to get around 150 books of there in a unfriendly DRMd format. I won’t go into the step by step details on how I got rid of the DRM but Calibre and some duck ducking (that just sounds wrong, I mean searching!) provides a very easy way to do it and also convert them into the much nicer EPUB format.

Next up was how do I read them? I already have a kindle so it makes sense to continue using that but I need to get away from the Amazon ecosphere. Luckily I started looking at this around the time Winterbreak was released but I’d missed the boat by literal days and my kindle had automatically updated patching that vulnerability. I put it into aircraft mode and used Calibre to send any new ebooks to the kindle. A few months later a new vulnerability was released called Adbreak which finally allowed me to jailbreak my kindle and be free!

Introducing KoReader. If you can and have the time/patience to jailbreak your kindle then I highly recommend it for KoReader. It’s a one stop amazing reading experience. You dump you epubs on there and start reading simple as that. It also has some absolutely amazing configuration options, my favourite so far is inverting the screen which makes it a lot nicer to read in low light conditions while having the backlight low. It’s also faster than the native kindle experience which is really interesting.

To organise and sort the metadata I used to use Calibre but switched over to Calibre-web instead. It looks nicer and I can create multiple users so I can share my library with my wife if she wants. It’s super easy to setup and you can easily import your existing Calibre library.

Another neat feature of KoReader is that it supports OPDS feeds couple this with Calibre-web and I can sync my library from my homelab to my kindle whenever I’m on my home wifi.

Overall I feel like I have a pretty good setup for my books now. Buying books in a drm format is getting easier and easier these days as well so there’s really no reason to be locked into Amazon now. When this kindle dies I’ll be looking for another e-ink reader that isn’t Amazon.

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Homelab Update January 2026

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 19:41:38 +0000

Happy new year homelabbers! I’m cheating a bit and rolling some of the work I got done in December 2025 into this update. I want to say my homelab is pretty boring now it just works which is awesome, only minor tinkering is required these days so I’ve decided to focus on observability for a bit. Knowing when and what things have gone wrong was sorely missing so I’ve finally gotten round to sorting a lot of that out which I’ll detail in a section below.

Chicken/Egg Docker Woes
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Ever since I migrated away from Ubuntu to Debian I’ve been unable to restart the VM and have all the containers come up again. Even after going through every compose file and making sure that restart: unless-stopped was set. It’s been driving me nuts that this has been happening. Well I finally figure out what was wrong. The hint was that the only container to consistently come back up was fluent-bit. When I migrated to Debian I decided to improve my logging so set up fluent-bit and OpenSearch. I also set the docker logging driver to fluent-bit. Can you spot the issue yet? When docker comes up all the other containers fail over refusing to connect to the fluent-bit socket, pretty obvious now, if docker isn’t running the fluent-bit container isn’t running so how can docker connect to the fluent-bit container? I could keep this sentence recursive. Eventually the fluent-bit container comes up but the rest of them containers have already stopped, restarting them all brings them up fine. I removed the fluent-bit container and ran it as a systemd unit instead. Docker restarts are perfectly fine now.

Uptime Kuma and Gotify
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A while ago I did have Uptime Kuma as part of my homelab but removed it since everything was on one physical server so if there was a huge problem UK would never pick it up since it was probably down as well. I’m now hosting it on my Media Server which while still a single point of failure it’s physically separate from my main homelab. As well as this I setup Gotify to send me notifications when services go down, these go straight to my phone so I can get near realtime downtime notifications. I’ve had to tune the thresholds in UK for some of my applications since some are less reliable than others (the ones not on my infra!).

Wireguard on Android
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For about 24 hours I lost all network connectivity on my phone (Pixel 7 Pro). It turns out that wireguard had crashed and completely nuked connectivity. After rebooting my phone it worked again. No idea why this happened but it was pretty annoying. I usually have my home wireguard VPN connected 24/7 even when on my home wifi but because my phone is silent all the time I didn’t notice, I guess I didn’t need to use my phone at all that day.

That’s it for this update, there’s still work in my todo list that I need to get around to but that can wait for a bit.

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My Music in 2025/26

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 21:13:11 +0000

Spurred on by this great article from Jessica Journals I’ve decided to document how I handle my music collection in 2025/26. I’ve split the post up into what seem like logical sections.

Getting Music
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Bandcamp is still my primary means of getting music at the moment, I’ve spent a lot of money on music over the year. It feels good knowing that the artists are getting something for their work. A by-product of this is that I also get notified when new releases come out so I can keep up to date with my favourite artists and labels. It’s meant I can pick up releases like “||cↄc||oo3|| by CONDUIT” which was only available for a limited time for charity.

Storing Music
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All music goes on my NAS, I don’t back it up yet, I’m going to make it a priority for 2026 since I have a second smaller NAS at a remote location now.

Organising Music
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I did used to use beets but I was never really happy with the results, it’s too opinionated for me and I never got around to configuring all the different plugins to make it work exactly how I wanted it. Instead I use Musicbrainz Picard which I is a really powerful tool (it’s incredibly dangerous as well so take backups first!). I just point the app to my music share mounted and then go through every album I have to update the metadata. Some more obscure releases are a bit difficult to identify but it’s managed a large part of my library with really good results.

Library
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Late 2025 I was managing three music libraries:

Navidrome
Jellyfin
Moode

As of 2026 I’ve ditched Jellyfin and Moode for music playing and managing for Symfonium more on that later. My goal when designing this whole setup was to have one canonical source for my library and I’ve finally achieved it.

Software Player
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For software players I use Feishin on Mac/Linux (I use Arch btw) and on Android I use Symfonium. Both support the subsonic api which is what Navidrome uses meaning that I have one source of music but multiple methods of playing. Today I found out that Symfonium also has an Android TV app which works really well meaning I can finally ditch Jellyfin (amazing for TV and Movies!) and Moode. Even my wife likes the look of Symfonium on the tv shame she doesn’t like my taste in music.

Hardware Player
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Early in 2025 I was using my Pixel 7 Pro and a Qudelix-5K and while it was a really good setup I found the distractions of having music on my phone annoying.

I ended up getting a Hiby R4 digital audio player so I have a dedicated way to listen to music. I really like it but it’s a bit slow and janky in places. I use Symfonium set to download any new albums from Navidrome onto the SD card (no transcoding, pure flac!) so I can have high quality music with me whether I have an internet connection or not. I’m currently looking into buying a Fiio M21 because an audiophiles journey is never over!

I finally got rid of my Raspberry Pi Zero w2 and hifiberry dac in favour of playing through my TV to my Cambridge Audio Azur 540a via optical to dac. I’m really happy with this setup.

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Homelab Update July 2025

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 12:49:52 +0000

Oh wow how things change in a month! I now have 3.5 homelabs, It’s an odd number but hear me out:

OG Proxmox Server
Parents Proxmox Server
Mediaserver (I don’t classify this as a full lab)
New Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 Kubernetes Cluster

Migration to Kubernetes
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For a while now I’ve wanted my own cluster, I’ve even built a few in Proxmox but none of them have ever stuck around long enough for me to really grow attached to them. For those that don’t know what I do for my day job I manage a k8s cluster with around a 1000 namespaces it’s quite challenging! The problem is I don’t use k8s, I can talk for hours on how our cluster is built and how all the components fit together but I can count on one hand the amount of time I’ve actually deployed any applications to it. I have a hole in my knowledge when it comes to actually using k8s as an end user. Building a physical cluster and migrating my existing apps over to it should hopefully cover that.

Hardware
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I have a DeskPi Super6c carrier board and 2 Raspberry Pi Computer Module 5s with 8gb RAM and 16gb EMMC. I intend to fill this completely with a mix of more RPis and other manufacturers that offer drop in replacements. I’ve been quite critical of RPi in the past and continue to be so will see how things go with the new hardware.

Software
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I’m using Armbian as my base OS which has been ok so far. I’m new to the whole Compute Module scene so getting the boards setup with an OS is manual at the moment. I keep meaning to look into cloud-init but I don’t think Armbian supports it, they do have something similar but the documentation is quite lacking. Also configuring anything other than hostname in raspberry pi imager flat out doesn’t work in Armbian. For k8s itself I’m using k3s and their ansible playbook which is really nice. It’s super easy to uninstall it and rebuild if I do something wrong.

Next Steps
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I’m currently setting things up, I’ve already reinstalled k3s twice and will probably nuke it again by the end of the day. I’m trying to automate as much as I can so I’m using Ansible to do most of the heavy lifting. I’ve still to get provision the actual Pis more automated but it’s fine for the time being.

I need to setup Traefik and Metallb then I should be able to start looking into moving workloads over. I also need to start buying a few more NVME drives so I can add CEPH into the mix for PV storage with backups to my NAS.

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Homelab Update June 2025

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 20:25:00 +0000

Bye bye Ubuntu Server 20.04
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I moved all my apps from Ubuntu Server to Debian 12 after testing it out for a few months. It’s faster and uses less resources. There’s also no snap which is great! Migration went fine it was tedious but gave me an opportunity to clean up some tech debt I’d made when I first set the vm up. Running sudo shutdown -P now was very satisfying. I still have a backup of the vm if I need to restore though.

Migrated ingresses to Traefik in LXC
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For a while I was running 3 different Traefik setups:

primary docker vm on Ubuntu
secondary docker vm (now primary) on Debain
lxc in proxmox

Once I moved everything to file provider in lxc I could start moving everything off the old server and turn off the old ingresses. It also allowed me to setup a wildcard cert for my homelab instead of having traefik provision a new one every time I bring up a new service.

Another advantage of having traefik in lxc is that I’ve configure it in Proxmox to boot first after reboot. So I should always be able to access friendly urls as soon as possible.

NAS Cleanup
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Another chore was cleaning out some old config on my NAS, I want to try and cut down the raw read/writes. It also means it can go into power saving mode more often (hopefully).

Update power saving is working, I can tell because it sounds like a sound effect from a science fiction movie every time it spins up!

Next steps
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I’m looking at more hardware now, I want a physical k8s setup running Talos. I’m looking at a few different options including the TurinPi and Sipeed Nanocluster but the cost of compute modules is just insane for the performance they give. If anyone has any suggestions then send them my way!

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Homelab update October/November/December

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 13:25:24 +0000

Potentially a long one this time round. Lot’s of changes/updates/additions to my homelab. I’m also still managing a second homelab for my parents which brings it’s own set of challenges but is a lot of fun.

New Jellyfin Server
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The Jellyfin android tv app is going through some awesome updates at the moment (just landed in v18!) namely trickplay images and support for skipping intros/outros. These are both features I’ve wanted for a while. The only issue is they’re quite computationally expensive. With my old VM based setup I didn’t have access to a GPU to offload these tasks to, generating trickplay images for 3% of my library took 5 days! Not really acceptable even after tweaking to use 100% cpu. My solution was to buy a second mini pc a GMTek G3, it came with an Alder Lake (checkout Quicksync capability, future proof for a long while!) N100 with 16GB of ram. It runs debian with with Jellyfin running in docker with GPU passthrough. Generating trickplay images took around 3-4 days for my entire library using the GPU which is much better. I also have transcoding support if I ever need it.

Migration to Debian
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I’m in the process of moving all my VMs to Debian, it’s a slow process but all new applications will be spun up on a second vm instead of my old Ubuntu vm. I’m finding Debian to be much much faster than Ubuntu which is great. This one is going to take quite a while so at the moment I only have OpenSearch running on it.

Opensearch
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Finally I have OpenSearch sort of working, it’s currently aggregating Jellyfin logs for the time being. I’ve yet to properly play around with it but it seems to be working a lot better than my first attempt! Only major issue so far is that my saved indexes patterns aren’t persisting. I’m sure I’m doing something wrong so will figure it out at some point. I’m using fluent-bit to pass Jellyfin logs to OS, I’ll be using fb for all my VMs eventually as it’s really simple to setup and use.

Rebuilt ADSB Setup
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I came across SDR Enthusiasts docker setup and absolutely loved it. For a long time I’ve only been feeding FR24 but this makes it so much easier to add more feeders to the setup. I’ve created a new vm for this, no real reason to do this but it meant I could play around with it without effecting my other applications. Now I’m feeding FR24 and ADSB Exchange, if your wanting to play around with this sort of stuff I highly recommend checking out the link above. I’ll be duplicating this setup for my parents sometime in the future.

Even smarter smart home
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I’ve replaced a few of the lights in the lounge with RGB ones, all the RGB bulbs and light strips are linked together as a group in Home Assistant so we can easily set the mood of the lounge, with all the extra work we’ve done in the lounge it’s really made it a nice place to chill out in again.

We’ve also had smart meters fitted, information should be coming into Home Assistant now. It’ll be interesting to see how much my homelab costs (sample 1 hour over night) although I’m slightly worried I’ll become obsessed with every penny we spend on electricity and gas.

Orange Pi and SBCs
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At the same time I bought the GMTek mini pc I also got an Orange Pi, I’m not really sure why I bothered, it was more expensive and not as powerful. Overall I’m really disappointed with SBCs now, there’s no point in getting them when you can buy an x64 arch mini pc cheaper. I’ll be using it for my parents ADSB setup at some point just so it doesn’t go to waste.

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Homelab Update August/September 2024

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 10:05:11 +0000

August/September update on my Homelab

Kubernetes
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Finally fixed an annoying config issue on my local machine, 10.0.4.1 != 10.0.40.1, that’s a few months of on an off debugging wasted! Not had chance to get things up and running yet, I’m a bit unsure of whether to use ArgoCD or Flux, I have used ArgoCD in my previous iteration.

Parents Homelab
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I finally handed off the server to my dad an he installed it. After some remote setup from me it was ready to go. My dad managed to restore his old Home Assistant setup with only one issue (HA OS out of date) which was great. There’s an issue with letsencrypt and AWS Route 53 which I haven’t figured out yet, it’s a mirrored setup from my local so not sure why it doesn’t work, it did work when I first set it up but after letting the certs expire it’s erroring.

Commafeed is gone
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I’ve removed commafeed now in favour of FreshRSS, I prefer the desktop and mobile interface. This reminds me the container is a few versions old now so need to update at some point.

Paperless NGX
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I’ve installed Paperless NGX now in order to get on top of masses of paper documents around the house. I’m super impressed with it and need to start using it a bit more.

Immich
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I’ve moved all my photos from Google Photos to Immich now as a backup but I’m unable to move 100% over because of the mobile app duplicating deleted photos. Currently I have about 6000 duplicate photos that I did dedupe only for them to be re-added! Frustrating but I’m waiting to see what happens with the github issue.

That’s about it for both homelabs. Will hopefully get to spend a bit more time doing stuff.

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Homelab Update July 2024

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 06:40:50 +0000

June/July update on my Homelab

June
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Not much happened in june, I spent most of it on holiday and I “cleaned” up my ssh keys so locked myself out from my phone and tablet. I really need to figure out a better solution for managing ssh keys. I’ve been talking about doing it for years but haven’t gotten around to putting a solution in place.

Changelog
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New k3s server running on Debian 12
New VM running on Debian 12

Migration to Debian 12
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All new VMs are now running on Debian 12 as a replacement of whatever stupidly named Ubuntu Server is the latest LTS. I really like Debian, it just works without any bloat, I’ve finally got out of the habit of apt update && apt upgrade every 5 seconds like I used to do on Ubuntu Server. It has it’s quirks and I’m still getting my head around some of it’s nuances. I’ll most likely create my own Debian 12 image with a few extra utils installed by default soon.

K3S
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Kubernetes is back in the homelab! It’s not doing anything yet, there’s an issue with accessing port 6443 outside of the VM so kubectl isn’t working from my main dev machine. It’s probably a firewall issue but not had time to look into it and sort it out.

New D12 VM and Forgejo
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I’ve spun up a fairly hefty VM to run Forgejo on just need to get around to installing it and the runners. The plan here is to move my Github organisation into my homelab instead of running it on Github. I rely quite heavily on Github Actions for running my none homelab infrastructure and don’t want to have to worry about running out of free minutes for private repos.

One of the reasons I’m procrastinating on installing Forgejo on this server is that I should install it on the K3S server. I’m just not sure I can be bothered with the headache. My day job is k8s which is amazing but my homelab is all about making things as simple and easy as possible for me. That’s not to say k8s isn’t worthwhile I just want to spend my time wisely.

Docker server HDD space increase
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My main docker VM went from 100GB to 150GB this week in preparation for Trick Play on Jellyfin. Unfortunately I won’t be able to use it until the Android TV client supports it but hopefully that will be soon.

That’s it for the update this month, there’s been the usual container updates but nothing of note.

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Homelab Update May 2024

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Fri, 17 May 2024 07:40:18 +0000

Here’s a very quick update on my homelab.

Changelog
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Deprecated Homer
Implemented gethomepage.dev
Update all the containers
Implemented FreshRSS
Semi-deprecated Commafeed

gethomepage.dev
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Not sure where I picked this up from but it’s been really cool so far. I really like the service discovery using docker labels and widgets that pull in additional information.

FreshRSS
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I looked at FreshRSS before I went with commafeed but dismissed it for some reason. I’ve enjoyed using commafeed for a while but found it’s mobile and tablet ui not amazing. With FreshRSS I can use a third party client with it although I’ve not found I’ve needed to yet. The baked in Nord colour scheme is really nice as well.

Future
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I’m looking into setting up Nextcloud and Immich. I want Nextcloud as a replacement for Google Drive and Immich to replace Google Photos. All of this is part of a longer term de-googling. Another step forward will be to remove SSO from as many places as possible.

Other News
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🚢.it.com

Discuss at
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Homelab Update March 2024

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 10:27:54 +0000

This is a replacement for my Kubernetes Homelab Pt0. I figured that it was best to write about my homelab in general since I’m not running k8s at the moment.

Temporary 2nd homelab
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I temporarily have 2 servers, ones provisioned and ready for installation at my parents place to replace their aging Raspberry Pi Home Assistant setup. Here are the specs:

FIREBAT T8 Pro Plus Mini PC
Intel N100
16GB ram
512gb hd

It came to around £123 after shipping from AliExpress. After confirming everything was working I formatted it and installed Proxmox. It now mirrors pretty much how I have my main server setup so it should be easy remote to manage in case there are any problems.

I did spend a while looking at SBCs but there’s just no point in using them any more, there too expensive for the performance. It’s a real shame as I used to really like playing around with Raspberry Pis.

New router
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I’ve replace my Banana Pi BPIR3 with a Ubiquiti UniFi UCG-Ultra. I never quite managed to figure out how to get OpenWRT installed on the main EMMC board, the dip switch switching didn’t seem to work for me. The UCG-Ultra fits in nicely with the rest of my UB hardware and is ticking along nicely after setting it up and moving all my devices from my selfhosted controller to the UCG.

If your interested in buying the Banana Pi then get in touch, I’d prefer to sell to someone I know than put it on ebay.

Faster broadband
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I’ll be getting faster broadband this Monday, going from 220/30 to 550/75 with Cloudscape Connect. After shopping around for a while I decided to stick with them as their support is really good and it’s nice not to be with a huge corp. I still want to look into Zen when this 12 month contract runs out, hopefully gig fttp will be a bit more affordable, although I’ll have to look at rebuilding my networking stack as it’s not built for that speed (the UCG Ultra can’t support 1 gig with IDS).

Changelog
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I’ve removed my unifi controller in favour of the built in updated Network Controller in the UCG-Ultra, migrating devices was a bit fiddly with the factory reset but it took about 15 minutes in total.
Wireguard Easy is also gone in favour of the built in wireguard.
My Mealie setup got deleted and rebuilt to move to their latest version. All recipes are back in and I need to look into the meal planning side of things.

Kubernetes
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As the opening paragraph states I’m not running k8s at the moment, I don’t need it right now. Any learning I need to do happens at $work where we run enough clusters to keep me happy! I left off with an issue in fluent-bit causing 100% CPU usage across all nodes and gigs of error messages in Opensearch. I’ll come back to it eventually, I think the second iteration of it will be a single node instead of the 4 I had. I can re-provision it easily with ArgoCD as well.

NAS Upgrade
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I’m in the process of upgrading drives in my 4 bay Synology NAS, I currently have 2 x 8tb and 2 x 16tb giving me a usable space of 20.9tb. It’s turning out to be very expensive and it’s a hell of a lot louder now. There isn’t any ethernet routing in the house so I run everything in my lounge, it’s about time I got that sorted.

That’s about it for now. Lot’s done and even more still to do.

Discuss at
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Moving Away from Spotify

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 09:51:56 +0000

Spotifys quality sucks, it’s UX is horrible and it pays it’s artists pretty much sod all so it’s time to move away and build my own cloud music service. It’s a lot easier than it sounds!

How do I get my data?
#

Replacing each and every album I have saved on Spotify is no mean feat, I have hundreds saved on there. My first problem was getting all that data out of Spotify into something easy to understand, you can request all your data from Spotify here. You request your data then wait a few days for it to show up, you get a boat load of badly organised JSON which isn’t great.

Parsing all that data is the next job, I ended up using Your Spotify. It connects to your existing Spotify account and downloads the last 30 days (I think) of data. You can also import your existing data from the json files you got earlier. This then builds up an accurate picture of what you’ve been listening to over your entire Spotify existence, in my case around 10 years.

Where does the music come from?
#

This is where Your Spotify comes in really handy I can search around my data and find albums that I want to buy first. Most of my music is purchased from Bandcamp, it turns out that supporting artists properly (ish) is quite a lot more than £17.99 a month. It’s a slow process as I’m not quite ready to drop thousands on all the music from my Spotify account but I’m getting there. I reckon it’ll probably take me around 5-10 years at the rate I’m going to fully rebuild my collection. I’m ok with this.

Where do I store it?
#

I’ve lost my music collection once before many many years ago and it’s heartbreaking so this time everything is a bit more secure. I have a 20tb NAS which has redundancies in case of failure, I’m also planning some form of cloud backup in the future.

How do I sort it?
#

For this I’m using Beets a CLI tool has plugin support. When I grab an album I use beet import to import which renames the files and if possible downloads a cover.jpg file. Navidrome scans my music folder once an hour for new music, although I can do this manually.

How do I listen to it all?
#

I have an NFS share from my NAS to my Proxmox server which then connects to a dockerised Navidrome setup. This acts as my music server. I can play music through Navidrome but prefer to have third party clients connect:

Windows 11 and OSX - Supersonic
Android TV - Jellyfin
Android - Symfonium

All these apps (apart from Jellyfin) connect to Navidrome.

Symfonium and transcoding
#

The neat thing about Synfonium and Navidrome is that it transcodes on the fly so when I’m out and about and I don’t want to use gigs of mobile data it transcodes down to Opus Audio:

ffmpeg -i %s -map 0:0 -b:a %bk -v 0 -c:a libopus -f opus -

I need to play around with Opus Audio to get an idea of what it’s capable but the file size vs quality is pretty damned good at the moment.

Conclusion
#

I’m really happy with this setup, I’m not tied to any one application and any component can be swapped out at any time giving me the freedom to try different things.

Discuss at
#

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Kubernetes Homelab Journey Pt0

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 17:10:06 +0000

I’m going to attempt to document my journey migrating from my current homelab setup to kubernetes. I can’t promise when these posts will come as I’m finding I have less time and energy outside of work to do these things but here goes!

Where are we now?
#

Currently I have two main setups:

Ubuntu Server - this serves as my docker-compose vm
k8s server and 3 agents

The Ubuntu Server contains all my docker-compose files and mounts to my NAS. There is no CI/CD so updates are done manually and setting up a new application is a case of modifying files directly on the filesystem. This served me well for many years but it’s starting to become tedious. I have around 30 applications deployed this way, some are live others are just test stacks.

Current Kubernetes
#

As mentioned above I am using k8s already. I have 4 Ubuntu Server vms running k3s. It works which is nice but I’m just waiting for snap to go wrong and break something. I’m going to look into moving to something else over the next few weeks. I feel really comfortable doing this because once I have argocd installed I can just point it my existing configuration and have everything provision nicely.

Next steps
#

Moving away from k3s and snaps
Moving away from Ubuntu Server (all my new VMs are debian 11/12 now)
Start moving docker-compose apps to k8s via argocd (or flux2 hmmm)

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Homelab on Mike Bell - Blog & Stuff

Homelab Update March 2026

External Backups #

Resound #

ForgeJo Mobile Web UI #

Hetzner Price Increases #

Tailscale #

Rebuilding my digital library

Homelab Update January 2026

Chicken/Egg Docker Woes #

Uptime Kuma and Gotify #

Wireguard on Android #

My Music in 2025/26

Getting Music #

Storing Music #

Organising Music #

Library #

Software Player #

Hardware Player #

Homelab Update July 2025

Migration to Kubernetes #

Hardware #

Software #

Next Steps #

Homelab Update June 2025

Bye bye Ubuntu Server 20.04 #

Migrated ingresses to Traefik in LXC #

NAS Cleanup #

Next steps #

Homelab update October/November/December

New Jellyfin Server #

Migration to Debian #

Opensearch #

Rebuilt ADSB Setup #

Even smarter smart home #

Orange Pi and SBCs #

Homelab Update August/September 2024

Kubernetes #

Parents Homelab #

Commafeed is gone #

Paperless NGX #

Immich #

Homelab Update July 2024

June #

Changelog #

Migration to Debian 12 #

K3S #

New D12 VM and Forgejo #

Docker server HDD space increase #

Homelab Update May 2024

Changelog #

gethomepage.dev #

FreshRSS #

Future #

Other News #

Discuss at #

Homelab Update March 2024

Temporary 2nd homelab #

New router #

Faster broadband #

Changelog #

Kubernetes #

NAS Upgrade #

Discuss at #

Moving Away from Spotify

How do I get my data? #

Where does the music come from? #

Where do I store it? #

How do I sort it? #

How do I listen to it all? #

Symfonium and transcoding #

Conclusion #

Discuss at #

Kubernetes Homelab Journey Pt0

Where are we now? #

Current Kubernetes #

Next steps #

External Backups
#

Resound
#

ForgeJo Mobile Web UI
#

Hetzner Price Increases
#

Tailscale
#

Chicken/Egg Docker Woes
#

Uptime Kuma and Gotify
#

Wireguard on Android
#

Getting Music
#

Storing Music
#

Organising Music
#

Library
#

Software Player
#

Hardware Player
#

Migration to Kubernetes
#

Hardware
#

Software
#

Next Steps
#

Bye bye Ubuntu Server 20.04
#

Migrated ingresses to Traefik in LXC
#

NAS Cleanup
#

Next steps
#

New Jellyfin Server
#

Migration to Debian
#

Opensearch
#

Rebuilt ADSB Setup
#

Even smarter smart home
#

Orange Pi and SBCs
#

Kubernetes
#

Parents Homelab
#

Commafeed is gone
#

Paperless NGX
#

Immich
#

June
#

Changelog
#

Migration to Debian 12
#

K3S
#

New D12 VM and Forgejo
#

Docker server HDD space increase
#

Changelog
#

gethomepage.dev
#

FreshRSS
#

Future
#

Other News
#

Discuss at
#

Temporary 2nd homelab
#

New router
#

Faster broadband
#

Changelog
#

Kubernetes
#

NAS Upgrade
#

Discuss at
#

How do I get my data?
#

Where does the music come from?
#

Where do I store it?
#

How do I sort it?
#

How do I listen to it all?
#

Symfonium and transcoding
#

Conclusion
#

Discuss at
#

Where are we now?
#

Current Kubernetes
#

Next steps
#