Homeserver: Glances and Home Assistant for Monitoring

Now that I have a minimal home server running, I thought it would be good idea to monitor temperature, disk usage and such. The simplest solution that I found was to use Glances and use Home Assistant to store and display the data. ...

April 30, 2025 · 2 min · 242 words · Andreas Happe

Homeserver: Creating local Proton Drive/Mail Backups

By now, I am using Proton Drive for cloud data storage and Proton Mail as my primary mail service. While I trust Proton with my data, I do not want to rely on them completely. As I have a small server standing around at home, it’s kinda obvious to use it for automatically performing backups of my cloud data. I try to use systemd services and timers for this, as this makes monitoring and logging quite easy. This blog post mostly serves as a reminder for me, but maybe it helps someone else as well. ...

April 27, 2025 · 8 min · 1616 words · Andreas Happe

Homeserver: Services Pt. 1

I am running a home server for a while now. I have been using it to host some services that I use regularly. In this post, I will share my experience with some of the services I have set up on my home server. This initial post will go over local git hosting using gitea, audiobook streaming using audiobookshelf and a self-hosted RSS reader using tt-rss. ...

April 9, 2025 · 6 min · 1239 words · Andreas Happe

Using tailscale on Fedora Silverblue

I am using Fedora Silverblue as one of my main desktops. Recently, I’ve been moving some services to a server behind tailscale but was still using its local IP address when at home at my Silverblue desktop. While doable, using an IP-address with an invalid HTTPS certificate wasn’t that pretty — so why not just access it through tailscale even within the same network, it’s an overlay network overall (so it should do a direct connection between my desktop and the home-server). ...

April 7, 2025 · 1 min · 175 words · Andreas Happe

Building a little home-server with Linux, TailScale, ProtonVPN, Docker Compose and VM support

I’ve been using a mini-computer as home-server for the last couple of years. Originally, I used it to share files between my computers, but over time more and more services (like RSS-readers, media-libraries, home automation, etc.) were moved on that surprisingly capable mini-server. I’ve grown up using Linux (well, I was already 16 when Linux became available around here, but you get the gist) so it always felt natural to me to just just use a minimal Linux installation (debian) instead of using some NAS that supports add-on third-party software. ...

April 5, 2025 · 13 min · 2615 words · Andreas Happe

Building a 4G/LTE router+accesspoint using hostapd, network-manager and modemmanager

So I’ve been using a Raspberry Pi 4b+ together with a WaveShare LTE Modem as 4G router/access-point for my home network setup. I do like my hardware to be quiet and thus fan-less, alas the Raspberry Pi 4b+ gets a tad on the warm side. So this was a perfect opportunitiy to play around with an older Raspberry Pi 3b+ which should use approx. 20-25% less power (both, during idle and load) and with “new” software. ...

February 11, 2022 · 6 min · 1224 words · Andreas Happe

Running OWASP Juice Shop with Root-the-Box on Google Cloud Platform

So I am back at teaching web application security. This time I wanted to setup a CTF challenge for my students. To not reinvent the wheel, or rather, to stand on the shoulders of giants I am reusing the OWASP Juice Shop vulnerable web app in its CTF mode. Normally I would teach at a (physical) lab which would make the setup easy: all students are situated in the same physical room, I can setup the game server on my laptop and distribute virtual machines containing the vulnerable web app over the local network. Well, that thing called COVID-19 happened so this is not an option right now. ...

December 2, 2020 · 7 min · 1464 words · Andreas Happe

Create a new Ubuntu 20.10 Desktop without too much Ubuntiness.

After I’ve bought a new and fast 1TB SSD, it’s time to setup my aging Desktop again. Last time I went with Fedora Core, this time I will try to reduce some of the ubuntu-iness of a Ubuntu 20.10 Desktop for that. After preliminary tests Ubuntu seems to be more resource efficient than Fedora Silverblue and I should be able to remove most of Ubuntu’s problematic packages. Given that my Notebook still runs Fedora Core, I’m also keeping in touch with both the Ubuntu/Debian as well as with the Redhat/Fedora world through that. ...

October 13, 2020 · 5 min · 986 words · Andreas Happe

Building a simple VPN with WireGuard with a Raspberry Pi as Server

Now that wireguard will be part of the upcoming Linux 5.6 Kernel it’s time to see how to best integrate it with my Raspberry Pi based LTE-Router/Access Point Setup. What is my scenario? Raspberry Pi 3 with a LTE hat, using a public IP address. This will be the VPN server (called edgewalker in this post) An Android Phone that should use the VPN for all communication when connected An Linux Laptop that should use the VPN only accessing network services that are exposed to the VPN Each device connected to the VPN should be able to connect to all other devices, e.g., my phone should be able to connect to a webserver running on the laptop as long as both are part of the VPN network. If setup is easy enough I’m actually thinking about adding my (Ethernet-connected) Desktop to the VPN too. ...

January 29, 2020 · 5 min · 1001 words · Andreas Happe

Adding advertisement-filtering and spotify support to a Linux-based Access Point/Router

The last weeks I’ve tried to improve upon my Raspberry Pi based LTE-Router/Access Point. Normally I would heave tons of software on it, try it out and let it simmer on. I did that this time too: the ELK-Stack (too little memory) and HomeAssistant (too little SmartHome-devices in my flat) only had a short intermezzo on this hardware. What stuck? Before that a small note: originally I was using a IKEA USB charger; its spec should be sufficient but I kept getting “Undervoltage detected” error messages in dmesg/syslog. I switched it out my Xiaomi Phone’s USB charger: the warnings disappeared. ...

December 8, 2019 · 2 min · 410 words · Andreas Happe