my journey into Linux and selfhosting.

Welcome to my new, self hosted blog. I’m very excited about this! I have spent many hours making countless google searches, reading documentation, books, listening to podcast after podcast, bothering my sysadmin father, and of course watching the occasional youtube video to learn Linux and about other homelab tools. It is a departure for me, as I have been a photographer for all of my life thus far, and have only recently dove into Linux much like I did with photography when I was younger. Unfortunately I should have studied Linux first, but better late than never I suppose. Hey, at least now I have good content to post along with my text.

The interest started after attaining a number of terabytes of my photography, music, and videos over the years. I had an urge to ressurect old apple hardware and what better way to do that than with a Linux distro. It snowballed from there, my 2012 Macbook Pro is running Arch with a KDE Plasma DE, and truthfully runs better than any other distro I tried before. Plus it taught me quite a lot about the ins and outs of the operating system.

Then I put Proxmox Virtual Environment on a 2012 Mac Mini. This has been my homelab. It contains a number of LXC containers serving a photo database, wireguard VPN, a samba share, plex, filebrowser, and this web blog.

This mediocre blog is the latest thing I got up and running and for some reason it was one of the most difficult for me. I kept running into update/compatibility issues between OS and Hugo and the themes, I found there to be a lack of “extended” documentation and direction for some aspects of setting up Hugo, the themes, and nginx, but that’s mostly because I’m a noob. There are just so many moving parts trying to get everything talking to each other. I was unsure which updates were affecting the changes I was seeing, but eventually I broke it and started over enough to now know every config I touched and what it does. I probably shouldn’t have picked arch to run this container but will be interesting to maintain, and of course, there will be backups.

I intend for this blog to serve as my public documentation for my homelab, in doing so it will help instruct me on how to manage and maintain a webserver. And maybe other happenings in my life. While I started this journey a couple of months ago, I am happy to continue making breakthroughs.

I may add previous blog posts from my photography website just to have things all in one place.

Cheers 🍻 to new beginnings!