May 2023 Bits

This page contains small entries about random technical stuff I have done throughout May 2023.

Stuff I did on May 28, 2023

Just because I could, I wanted to get a few more services running because I had them on my list to try out. I got Stirling PDF up and running. It should allow me to mess with PDF files more easily now. I got Trashcan up and running. It’s a nice way to store PDF files that have a DOI associated with them. I plan to use this the next time I need to manage a bunch of sources for a paper I’m writing. I also got Folding At Home up and running using its docker image. Getting it to use my GPU was fairly simple. It seemed to detect it right away. It definitely helped that I had already setup the nvidia runtime for Plex. When I let Folding At Home use my GPU, my GPU power usage sits around 100W and its temperature is 70C-80C. This won’t be something I run forever, but it’s fun for the time being. Maybe I’ll see how it affects a Plex transcode. Also, link to my folding at home stats.

AdGuard Home on Proxmox (May 30, 2023)

Since I recently got Proxmox VE up and running, I wanted to move my adblocker off my Raspberry Pi Zero. I hadn’t moved it to Docker on my previous server (parker) because I knew if I did that I would need port 53 on my server working. With Proxmox, I can put Pihole or AdGuard Home. I was going to setup Pihole again, but after looking at the feature comparison between Pihole and AdGuard Home, I decided AdGuard Home would be a better fit. The feature that really decided this for me was built in DNS over HTTPS/TLS support. If you want to do that in Pihole, you need to install cloudflared and manually create a service to get it running. I really don’t like the idea of doing that, and AdGuard Home just seems to be more polished in that sense.

I would create the LXC myself and start to either set up Docker or install AdGuard Home through another means, but I came across Proxmox helper scripts. That page has a section about “AdGuard Home LXC”. To get this working all I have to do is copy-paste the command into my Proxmox VE root shell. That’s a big security concern, but whatever. It seems trustworthy. A bunch of people use these scripts (4.5k stars on GitHub). The installation tells me that I should not use SSH because something about incorrect variables, so I’ll go and do this in the browser. The installation is actually really slick. I’m seriously impressed by how polished it is. After going through the setup I’m renaming the hostname to “betta” (pronounced beh-tuh), which ChatGPT seems to think is a fish that could guard a small area. (I need to stay consistent and name my Proxmox stuff after marine life since I’m doing that for some reason).

After giving betta a static IP in my router and setting it as my DNS server, it started getting requests. I wanted to make sure that its settings were configured so that its upstream DNS server was using DNS over HTTPS (DoH). It turns out it’s configured by default to do that. Awesome! I looked at the Known providers and saw that https://dns10.quad9.net/dns-query does not do any censoring, which is good because I wanted to configure adblocking myself. I’ll also go ahead and add Cloudflare’s provider: https://dns.cloudflare.com/dns-query.

I did a test using what is my dns server on my computer and see that my computer may not be using Adguard Home as its DNS server. nmcli device show wlo1 | grep IP4.DNS seems to correctly point at betta and my router’s IP. After a bit I tried again and it tells me my DNS server is Cloudflare, which is good.

Thinking about a Grafana Dashboard

Eventually I want to create a Grafana dashboard with statistics from as much of my services as possible. It looks like there is adguard-exporter for getting data from AdGuard. Downside to that is that it looks like you will have to put your AdGuard Home password inside an environment variable. Luckily I can create a docker secret when it comes to that and use the env configuration of password_from_file=true.

Authelia Alongside Caddy (May 30)

Earlier today I was messing with Authentik because I wanted to set it up to require authentication for some of my services that needed to be password protected. I had been using Caddy’s basic auth feature up until this point, but it was annoying to have to type in my basic auth credentials for each service I wanted to access. I got Authentik to run and I got its page to come up, but there were a bunch of errors in my browser’s console window. I probably hadn’t set it up correctly with Caddy and I probably needed to set an environment variable to allow it to be accessed over HTTPS through Caddy, but I did not feel like figuring it out. It seemed too complicated for what I was trying to do.

During my research I found Authelia to be a much simpler alternative to Authentik. Plus, it has support for many proxies including Caddy. The only downside is that it isn’t really a SSO solution, but a layer of protection over services that don’t have protection.