I am sick and slightly out of my mind anyway so I’m not going to be very helpful. One thing that stands out though, if you can SSH the machine and you can curl local host to Port 8,000 or whatever. This should help you troubleshooting the container while it lives on the VPS I think

Idk, I had not heard of gitea or forgejo before. Personally I really want strong & flexible CI/CD, and Don’t know what the alternatives have to offer there, but it would be worth looking into. GitLab is pretty resource-heavy even for low user count.

Self-hosting gitlab?

I’ve used Ghost Commander for this; I’ve tried several and disliked it the least. That said, really wind up doing SCP over command line with termux.

I don’t consider an app deployable until I can run a single script and watch it run. For instance I do not run docker/podman containers raw, always with a compose and/or other orchestration. Not consciously but I probably kill and restart it several times just to be sure it’s reproducible.

My entire music library must pass through beets first. If it’s not automatically tagged I will manually search, and finally (esp for locals’ or friends’ music) I will manually tag it using eyeD3 and import through beets as l-is.

I think most home lab/shelf hosters start off because they want to learn something. I think (generally, philosophically) many people never start something new even if it interests them because they are afraid. To this point, it sounds like you can either let the fear prevent you from doing what you want, or you can use the fear as a learning tool.

Start simple. Build something very easy and isolated, air gap it if you need to. Figure out how logs and monitoring work, maybe even try attacking it yourself, so you have confidence that even if it’s compromised you will see how and why. Then you can connect it to the internet, isolated from the rest of your network, and then you will learn how well- or un-founded those fears are. Learn even more about monitoring and defending, then start looking for a job as a cybersecurity professional because you are already well underway.

They don’t have to succeed once.

Use antivirus and other endpoint security measures. Rotate your passwords and keys. Use Everything as Code, and for goodness sake make backups.

If you find yourself compromised, rotate and burn the keys, wipe and redeploy.

I have a much older NAS with not a lot of compute power, but it’s only purpose is to share data. I have a a proxmox server that connects to the NAS through NFS and does the actual transcoding, etc.

I have heard good things about LM Studio from several professional coders and tinkers alike. Not tried it myself yet though, but I might have to bite the bullet because I can’t seem to get ollama to perform how I want.

TabbyML is another thing to try.

Looks like on Reddit, the creator is blocking people from reporting things like sending data to foreign servers.

I tried using https://kerberos.io/ a while back, I did not have success but I think that’s because my setup was wonky. We’re looking into, at least.

Also, HandsOnKatie has done a couple videos on home surveillance, I know she likes ReoLink and Home Assistant But I don’t remember what her full software stack set up as like.

I’m imagining compilers evolving from digital primordial goo.

Not outside the US, specifically I think in Canada they are basically M&Ms

What happened to grafana and Prometheus?

I have been putting off rebuilding my home cluster since moving but that used to be the default for much of this and I’m not hearing that in these responses.

I use podman instead, though I’m honestly not certain this “fixes” the problem you described. I assume it does purely on the no-root point.

Agreeing with the other poster, network tools and not relying on the server itself is the professional fix

Non-stick chemicals have been historically poisonous, don’t know about the modern stuff though.

Also, cooking with cast iron increases iron intake.

You can configure Dropbear to allow SSH unlocking. I have also heard of some key management software over network that can perform this role for you as well.

Can you just point the second to the first?

I want to say iGPU makes things easier, not because of experience but only because I tried passing through an Nvidia card and the instructions all insinuated this was more difficult than any other option