So I decided to invest a bit of time to explore if it would be possible to deploy a self-hosted Jitsi video-conference server on a Hetzner cloud server on demand, without much configuration needed. And this is what I came up with.
I really do enjoy the service of snipboard.io. It is straight forward, very easy and convenient to use and independent from operating system. Unfortunately it is closed source and I really wanted to have something similar as a self-hosted service.
The closest I could come up with to get something like or even more convenient was a combination of xbackbone on server-side and Shutter as client tool.
tl;dr: Was bored and setup a Nextcloud instance behind a NGINX proxy and since I had some trouble to get it running properly I simply share my configs here. Maybe this helps somebody else.
My two main goals were forwarding client real IP addresses to Nextcloud and getting rid of NC’s warnings about running behind reverse proxy.
Nextcloud itself runs on a LAMP stack inside Ubuntu 22.04 LXC container. The reverse proxy is provided by NGINX running on the host machine which is also powered by Ubuntu 22.04.
While I was bored and had a spare NanoPi Neo3 laying around I though to myself why not make good use of it? With its small size, gigabit ethernet and a USB3 port it is the perfect board for creating servers or in this case a crude network storage. Some of you already read about it on Twitter.
Intentionally I did not plan to write an article about this project since I believe it is poorly hacked together and it also suffers from performance issues which I could solve partially at least. However to anticipate the excitement for all the Neo3 owners: I did not finish this project on this board and had to switch to a more expensive model to accomplish full speed. If you are fine with slower speeds it is still perfectly fine though.
Since my cloud backend would be Google I realized that this way I can access all the data on my phone as well simply by using the Drive app. This is comfortable but also concerning since I do not want to blindly send all my data plain to the cloud and simply trust a hugh company in the US. So I split it up into two shares: an unencrypted one for mobile access and an encrypted one for local access only.
With its lack of HDMI and other screen connectors this board is clearly designed for headless application like acting as a router, home server, network-attached storage (NAS), media station or everything together the same time. Paying 60$ plus shipping and tax might sound a bit much for a headless board but depending on the usage it can be well worth the money.
I have to admit I do not really know why I bought a board with dual gigabit NIC. I just knew I need to have it. Maybe I have a weakness for (powerful) headless SBCs 😄
As you might have already got through Twitter I recently received a Pinebook Pro. While it looks like a normal well made laptop from the outside its internals are way different than you are used to. There is no such thing like a BIOS/UEFI that greets you and it is quite likely that you are stuck with a blank screen if you do not know what you are doing.
Also I will explain why this laptop does not come with a charging adapter by default.Update: It DOES come with a PSU. Check below.
Station P1 wedged between another box and a monitor
I have been using the Station P1 mini-computer for a while now and as already stated occasionally I am pretty happy with it. For the last couple of weeks it’s been used on daily basis. Fun fact: I am writing this article on it right now. The main reason for that is its electric efficiency. While my main workstation wastes lots of power for mostly being idle all the time the Station P1 barely exceeds 20 watts of consumed power while being very busy. For comparison the graphics card in my desktop computer consumes twice the amount while being idle(!).
Each time I think about this NicoD comes to my mind for his description for desktop PCs as “giant space heaters”. There is a bit of truth in these words.
