Self-Hosted Main

I wrote my own SMS gateway API with authentication tokens, quotas, rate-limits. This is because I wanted to send SMS without relying on an external API, so I got a 2€/month SIM card and plugged a USB modem (Huawei E169) into my RPi to use with Gammu. I'm using Gotify to log sent and received SMS, and send an SMS whenever my home internet is down or the IP address changes for example. It's plugged into my systems monitoring for critical alerts, and while I offered API keys to my friends, none of them wanted any so I'm the sole user.

Newsweek Poland has pdf version and I am a subscriber. Unfortunately there is no mechanism on their page to schedule sending newest magazine to subscriber email. There is only a button in subscriber section to send selected pdf (link) to email. I wrote client which is logging in, bypassing captcha, gets listing of current issues, looks into history of downloaded issues and downloads newest issue for me. They offer in the same subscription other magazines too, so I extended this tool to also download others too.

Second one. I use IPTV service which has time shift functionality. I wrote app which allows me to download any tv program within this 3-4 day window of past tv show. It is using ffmpeg and some logic.

Got a server and wanted to know what the temperature was in my room where it runs Installed VMware on it and a SIEM as a virtual appliance on top, poll the VMware API every minute to get the reading from the temperature sensor so that I can look at it from my phone's web browser. Overkill: Quite certainly Useful: Definitely

I do work for multiple organizations and got tired of having to disconnect/reconnect VPN tunnels each time.

Solution: Raspberry Pi. It's got a single Ethernet port on it which makes it perfect. I used Openconnect since it was compatible with Cisco and PulseSecure (at the time). When you establish a tunnel, the routes come in as "kernel routes" assuming you have a split tunnel. I configured IPTables to NAT masquerade out each interface and I set up Quagga, a routing daemon to talk to my main gateway and redistributed my kernel routes into OSPF. That way, any of my devices can now access any networks they need. I did also have to configure my own DNS server since I needed to resolve the different private networks.

In 2018 after deciding that I hated ProxMox, that Ganeti was dead (and it was at the time), that Harvester didn't exist yet, that OpenStack was way too complex, and that I was interested in going the Kubernetes/container route (sorry I'm still a VM guy), I decided to write my own self-hosted hyperconverged infrastructure manager. I based it on what little I knew of how Nutanix worked, with a lot of ideas from Ganeti too.

And I named it after drain pipe on a whim at Home Depot.

https://github.com/parallelvirtualcluster

5 years later I have 16 production clusters, including my own homeproduction (but not including my testing cluster), mostly through finding a niche for it with my employer, and I spend a solid 25% of my free time working on it. It's not quite at a "1.0" release I'd be comfortable with random people using yet, but it's getting close enough for me to start talking about it on social media!

Ugh, I think the craziest thing I do selfhosting-wise is use a full fledged project management tool as a todo list.

I need to up my game!!

The only thing slightly different that I self host is WebODM. It's open drone mapping software. You can upload 10s or 100s of photos of an area and it can generate an orthomosaic, kind of like Google maps. It has a lot of other features too.

I don't really use it, I just play with it from time to time.