• ansible playbook for automated/self-documenting setup
• for one-off bugs or ongoing/long-term problems, open an issue on my gitea instnce and track the investigations and solutions there.

allows my mail clients to connect via IMAP to view and search emails

dovecot will be able to handle this part. This is what I use as a mail archive (once a year, archive all mail from the previous year from various mailboxes to my self-hosted dovecot instance). I wrote this ansible role for it.

downloads new emails via IMAP

As others recommended, imapsync should be able to handle that part.

docker solution

These tools are simple enough to install and manage (one package, one config file), Docker is not needed. If you really need it to fit into your docker-based setup, build and maintain your own images.

What’s your existing setup? For such a simple task, check if any of the tools you use currently can be adapted (simple text files on a web server? File sharing like Nextcloud and text files? Pastebin-like? Wiki? …). Otherwise a simple Shaarli instance could do the trick (just post “notes” aka. bookmarks without an URL). I use this theme to make it nicer. Or maybe a static site generator/blog.

I would never recommend Odoo anymore, given how painful it is to upgrade from a major version to another. Their answer to it is basically “yeah, some complex migrations need to be done, just send us a copy of your database with highly sensitive company data, pay us to do the migration and we’ll send it back to you”. Yeah, lol, no.

• monitoring: https://github.com/awesome-foss/awesome-sysadmin?tab=readme-ov-file#monitoring
• sending commands: https://github.com/OliveTin/OliveTin

example preseed file which I use to provision new servers (VMs)

Shaarli + stack theme

Windows Servers

No

setup automatic responses to the alerts

It should be possible using script to execute on alarm = /your/custom/remediation-script https://learn.netdata.cloud/docs/alerts-&-notifications/notifications/agent-dispatched-notifications/agent-notifications-reference. I have not experimented with this yet, but soon will (implementing a custom notification channel for specific alarms)

restarting a service if it isn’t answering requests

I’d rather find the root cause of the downtime/malfunction instead of blindly restarting the service, just my 2 cents.

I use netdata (the FOSS agent only, not the cloud offering) on all my servers (physical, VMs…) and stream all metrics to a parent netdata instance. It works extremely well for me.

Other solutions are too cumbersome and heavy on maintenance for me. You can query netdata from prometheus/grafana [1] if you really need custom dashboards.

I guess you wouldn’t be able to install it on the router/switch but there is a SNMP collector which should be able to query bandwidth info from the network appliances.

• rsync + basic scripting for periodic sync, or
• distributed/replicated filesystems for real-time sync (I would start with Ceph)

10000RPM SAS drives are noisy (and expensive), something to keep in mind. If I needed this kind of performance I would probably go full SSD.

I agree that desktop/ATX tower PCs are the most useful form factor, you can stuff all your old junk hardware in there and offer it a second life without much investment.

However with current electricity prices buying more power efficient hardware can be a better medium-term investment. 1kWh bills at 0.2516€ currently where I’m at (~EU average price), assuming an average power consumption of 50W this gives you (50×24×365)/1000×0.2516=110€/year. At this rate a 200€ investment in hardware would pay for itself in 2-3 years.

Buying a <100€ setup is not worth it for general purpose servers in my opinion, it will either be underpowered or power hungry.

My current solution is to to run all my services in KVM (libvirt) VMs on my beefy desktop computer which is already on most of the time anyway. Best of both worlds.

If I had to redo everything I would probably buy a NUC/mini-PC with a good CPU, 64GB RAM and low power consumption, stash a single huge SSD in there, migrate my VMs there and call it a day. But this is not a cheap setup.

Netdata can also expose metrics to prometheus which you can then use in Grafana for more advanced/customizable dashboards https://learn.netdata.cloud/docs/exporting-metrics/prometheus

I just don’t have that much time to spend on initial implementation and upkeep

Well k8s is a poor choice of platform for you :D

lsblk also show block devices and is prettier than looking directly at /sys/class/block

Don’t mind him. He’s always there ranting about who knows what whenever software he dislikes is mentioned. Lookup his comment history for more of the same.

Easiest method to summon him is to mention Nextcloud and Proxmox in the same sentence.

msmtp never failed me

See you back on Debian in a few months

i was just worried that the libraries in the container image are outdated

They actually are: trivy scan on authelia/authelia:latest https://pastebin.com/raw/czCYq9BF

awesome-selhosted maintainer here. This critique comes up often (and I sometimes agree…) but it’s hard to properly “fix”:

Any rule that enforces some kind of “quality” guideline has to be explicitly written to the contribution guidelines to not waste submitters’ (and maintainers) time.

As you can see there are already minimal rules in place (software has to be actively maintained, properly documented, first release must be older than 4 months, must of course be fully Free and Open-source…). Anything more is very hard to word objectively or is plain unfair - in the last 7 years (!) maintaining the list I’ve spent countless hours thinking about it.

For example, rejecting new projects because an existing/already listed one effectively does the same thing would give an unfair advantage to older projects, effectively “locking out” newer ones. Moreover, you will rarely find two projects that have the exact same feature set, workflow, release frequency, technical requirements… and every user has different needs and requirements, so yeah, users of the list are expected to do some research to find the best solution to their particular needs.

This is of course, less true for some categories (why are there so many pastebins??). But again, it’s hard to find clear and objective criteria to determine what deserves to be listed and what does not.

If we started rejecting projects because “I don’t have a need for it” or “I already use a somewhat equivalent solution and am not going to switch”, that would discard 90% of entries in the list (and not necessarily the worst ones). I do check that projects being added are in a “production-ready” state and ask more questions during reviews if needed. But it’s hard to be more selective than we already are, without falling in subjective “I like/I don’t like” reasoning (let’s ban all Nodejs-based projects, npm is horrible and a security liability. Let’s also ban all projects that are so convoluted and impossible to build and install properly that Docker is the only installation option. Follow my thoughts?)

Also, Free Software has always been very fragmented, which is both a strength and a weakness. The list simply reflects that.

Another idea I contemplated is linking each project to a “review” thread for the software in question. But I will not host or moderate such a forum/review board, and it will be heavily brigaded by PR departments looking to promote their companies software.

A HTML version is coming out soon (based on the same data) that will hopefully make the list easier to browse.

I am open to other suggestions, keeping in mind the points above…

250+ self hostable apps

1268 exactly.

You can help cleaning up the list of unmaintained projects by working on this issue