In a previous article, I evaluated migrating to YunoHost, and after a year of trying my own solutions for self-hosting I’ve come back to YunoHost and I’ve finally found success! Now I enjoy the benefits of easy maintenance provided by YunoHost and I can spend less time doing sysadmin/devops on my free time.

Kira and I recently tried to join a group that gathers regularly for events after a recommendation from a friend. In their rules on how to join they state that they “take [their] members’ safety, privacy, and freedom […] very seriously!” Yet when I reached out to them we discovered that their practices actually put their members’ identities in danger of being compromised.

I’d like to share with you the practice session we did on Kira for developing her purple fox face. We wanted to deviate from my usual pattern for putting on a fox face, making it more angular and using highlighting and contouring (something I’m currently working on). This was also a good opportunity to play with our new camera, backdrop, and lights.

Update: I later found success migrating to YunoHost.

In my searches on some of the potential services I want to run in my personal cloud, I found out about YunoHost; an open source solution to make self-hosting accessible. The project provides some base services such as LDAP, SSO, email, and XMPP chat; but it also allows you to install applications easily with minimal configuration. In their list of officially supported applicatione are Matrix Synapse and NextCloud, which I use both so it looked like a potential candidate to migrate to.

Here are examples of my new work with some still in progress. These next 2 are still in progress as they need clasps I have on order. Enjoying getting back into crafting. Looking to hopefully get some space at conventions in the next few months to sell my work. Also looking to add in some leather accessories to my arsenal of crafts and maybe sell those too. Fingers crossed!

I have a Netgate SG-1000 that serves as my firewall and router for my home network. I use it to protect my home network with my private VPN service and connect my work computer to my work VPN. PfSense makes it easy for me to write rules around what machines and services are allowed to go through which VPN. However, sometimes an OpenVPN will be in a state that it can’t recover from and require me to manually restart the client.

My wife and I enjoy chatting with my friends on Matrix, but it’s nice to talk to and see friends who we can’t see in person often due to distance. Fortunately Matrix supports voice and video chat. If you’re on the same network this will work without having to setup a relay, but most of the time you will be behind a firewall NAT. In this case you need a TURN server to relay your voice and video chat.

Matrix is an open standard that enables modern chat and voice and video. It is federated (like email) so you can run your own server and still communicate with others running their own servers or who have registered accounts with other servers. If you’d like to try it, check out Riot; a graphical client that can run in the browser, desktop, or on a mobile device.

I’m currently in the process of migrating my personal cloud services over to Scaleway and I’m also switching to NixOS. Scaleway is a service that offers a variety of hosting options, including ARM servers and x86 servers in either virtual or dedicated form. The appeal to us is that the company is based in the European Union (EU) and regulated by the EU instead of the United States (US). Since the recent repeal of net neutrality in the US, we wanted to have our data hosted in a place that has policies that are more in line with ours.