I recently had the pleasure of going outside and touching some grass, which means I haven’t worked on my homelab for about a month, and now I’m catching up.

I didn’t need to use it

I’m not running that many apps or services right now but it was still interesting to realise I didn’t need to use it whilst I was away. I went hiking and camping for 9 days and didn’t even think about computers, which was nice, and when I got back I was recovering and still didn’t use it.

It turns out my homelab is an indoors-only sort of thing.

It all worked fine

The one app I did use was FreshRSS, which syncs my RSS feeds with NetNewsWire on my phone and my laptop. The few times I used it I had new content to read, although I have that many unread articles I would have been fine if it had stopped working.

To use FreshRSS I had to be connected to my Wireguard VPN, so that also worked.

My monitoring failed

One thing that didn’t work was my monitoring setup.

Whilst I was away there was a brief power-cut to my homelab and all of my machines turned off. When the power came back they all turned on and resumed normal functions, except my Raspberry Pi.

This Raspberry Pi runs Uptime Kuma, for monitoring apps and services, as well as Beszel, for monitoring servers. I’m using an Argon One NVME case and I hadn’t set it to turn on when it receives power, so the Pi stayed off, and even though all of my services started working again I wasn’t told about it.

The immediate fix was to set the Argon One NVME case to turn on the Raspberry Pi 4 when it receives power, but in the long-term I might need to rethink my monitoring setup.

There’s been lots of updates

Before I went away I set up Renovate to track the dependencies in my homelab repo and send me pull requests when there are updates available. Now I’m back I can see it has maxed out at (the default) 10 updates and is waiting for me to review them before continuing.

I like this way of doing updates, it’s much easier than manually checking everything every time.

“Is it ready yet?”

My Pangolin on a Pi project stalled whilst I was away. This was meant to give friends and family easier access to the apps and services I’m running.

Mealie is the main app being used, but a close second now is Homebox, which is for inventory management.

I guess now I’ve recovered and my brain power’s been restored I’ll have to finish this.