A Geek's Life

It is coming up to a year since I ditched my Microsoft Enterprise Basic subscription, slapped TrueNAS on an old Lenovo ThinkCentre, and started the self-hosting journey. Since then I have replaced OneDrive with Nextcloud (without all the bells and whistles of talk, photos etc), and Google Photos with Immich. Both pieces of software are fantastic in their own right.

My first attempt resulted in the machine and associated services being publicly available on the public internet. I don’t believe I was ever hacked, but given the number of logon attempts from Russia (according to Cloudflare), someone (or someones) must have felt intrigued enough to try. I have since put it all behind Tailscale , which only allows connections from devices on my tailnet. An old domain name, alongside Cloudflare and NGINX, has removed the pain of remembering wonky IP addresses.

Today, I installed Navidrome which I expect to replace Spotify in conjunction with Symfonium. AI artists, and wanting to own my music again (as opposed to being granted a license to listen to it) were part of the reason for exploring self-hosted music streaming options.

Early days, I suspect, but on the evidence of the past six or so hours, I may not be renewing my Spotify sub come year end.