Been running one for many years, mostly issue-free. Had to request whitelists way in the beginning, but things turned out ok.

Check out this super great guide. https://workaround.org/ispmail-trixie

I go the easy route with munin and wazuh. It comes with a ton of stuff preconfigured

Backups? In this economy?

But I need to get something working. I am about to move to VaultWarden and that makes me very nervous.

Wasn't there an RCE recently discovered with AI?

My kernel is chill.

I never said anything about it responding.

Monit, simple to setup, gets the job done, runs on my router too.

Yeah, email is one of the more annoying things to self host. Google rejects mine because my ISP has all their non static IPs on block lists (even though my IP hasn't changed once since I've been with them it's still not "static", can't change the reverse DNS) and I'm not paying 150% more a month for a business account to get a static IP. I ended up just using a free email relay. Still had to setup SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and all that jazz still.

I just look at the console.

Uptime Kuma for monitoring web service status (just like if the jellyfin, etc. website is up), and Zabbix for monitoring system metrics like CPU/Memory/Disk I/O, etc. Zabbix can do a whole lot, but can also get a little complicated. There are plenty of guides out there for configuring it though.

My 3-node Proxmox cluster has a dashboard, my NAS has a dashboard, and Home Assistant has a dashboard. Hell, my gaming PC has a dashboard, too (Webmin and Cockpit).

Sure! In Uptime Kuma, add a monitor with type Push. It gives you a URL with a unique token, and the monitor goes into “down” state if nothing calls that URL within the heartbeat interval. Then have a cron (or a systemd timer or whatever) run this on the machine with the drive every 5 or 10 minutes:

use=$(df --output=pcent /mnt/yourdrive | tail -1 | tr -dc ‘0-9’)
curl -fsS -G “http://your-kuma:3001/api/push/TOKEN --data-urlencode “status=up” --data-urlencode “msg=${use}% used” --data-urlencode “ping=${use}”

Ping is of course meant to be response time, but Kuma will graph any number you toss in, so you get a “filled” chart for the drive. I also send status=down once usage passes a threshold. And if the box itself should fall over for some reason, the missing check-ins trigger the alert too.

(I typed this quick on my phone, so please double-check and probably don’t blindly copy-paste)

I've got a few of those services running.

I run a vaultwarden container since forever and it's really smooth. All updates went through just fine, never had an issue with it.

I am using prometheus-nodeexporter which is scraped by Prometheus and then visualized in Grafana

Ultime Kuma, Beszel and Ntfy

Thank you! This is dope!

Same. And I was also nervous in the beginning, but in the end if you are the only user, you'll have your vault replicated everywhere you have the app.

I've been checking several other solutions before and Beszel just hits the spot.

I self-host my own email, have done so for years. I've not gotten pwned. Use an SSH key and a firewall, only expose the ports that should be public, have reasonable access controls, etc, just practise general cybersecurity—it applies to servers too.

I know everyone complains about hosting email. But I've not run into major problems. My emails get through spam filters and I have good uptime. It's also a fun learning experience.

I'll fix it when I get home

Icinga and Phare Uptime

I think that you have to do quite a bit more setup on email than most other services. There's SPF and DKIM and DMARC and so on. Plus spam filtering, setting up accounts and authentication, ...

Plus email is arguably more important than anything else, since it's kind of the lowest common denominator of the Internet; your dentist will probably send you an email to remind you of appointments, job offers will arrive via email, password resets arrive via email, and so on.

So it is a bit scary.

Having said that, as long as you're not hosting from a residential IP addresses it is definitely achievable. You can start with one domain and use it for low-value purposes (or for accounts that allow multiple email addresses, like GitHub).

I have this on my NAS, works well

Yup. It’s so damn annoying hosting email. Do it once to learn, but don’t do it as a permanent solution. It takes so much maintenance to keep it going, if you even do get it working.

Backups are pretty much the only thing I get notifications for. Otherwise, one app or another on my phone will complain if it loses connection to my server.

Use service, wait for 404 or data loss...

If you run Proxmox and Proxmox Backup Server, I actually JUST found a better product for my needs, Pulse

My only problem with Beszel is that it doesn’t know about LXCs within Proxmox, so I can’t see if there are CPU/memory issues happening within them. Pulse integrates directly and can see all of it!

If you don’t run LXCs within Proxmox, I’d say stick with Beszel.

Beszel & Pangolin.

Gatus. Works and easy incremental set up.

I use Signoz and OTel collectors to bring in everything from Kubernetes (and also SNMP-to-OTel for the network and NAS stats.)

That covers dashboards and basic alerting. Then on top of that I have an n8n workflow that runs every morning - it pulls all the main stats out of Signoz, as well as issues and their status from my infrastructure repo in Gitlab, and feeds it all into a local LLM (Qwen-3.8-Flash-Next at the moment), which emails me a report on overall cluster health. It also automatically opens a ticket in Gitlab for anything that might need fixing.

It works really nicely, gotta say.

What maintenance do you mean? run OS updates and pay the vps bill. that's true for any self hosted application. which specific maintenance are you referring to?

Setting up the newfangled security thing. TLS, DKIM, DMARC, SPF are the big ones over the years. Finding out you've been silently blackisted by a provider and hoping and praying they'll answer your request to unblock. Managing your own spam filter.

Don't take this as a reason to not do backups, but vaultwarden is essentially its own back up as it replicates the vault everywhere you use the app. I've recovered my vault several times from my phone.

That and degraded RAID!

You'd need to be running kerberised NFS in the kernel, give the attacker access to your NFS server, and have a valid kerberos login

I don't know anyone sharing NFS access let alone opening it up on the open internet

Yes, it can be a bit involved. I'd say I can spin up a mail server in 1–2 days though provided the OS is already installed and I have a domain name and port 25 isn't blocked (that's the main one that tends to be blocked). It may take longer for people who aren't familiar with mail servers but it's not some huge operation.

You can just try spinning up a mail server for fun. If it goes badly then just don't move over your dentist appointments to it. It's only critical infra if you use it for critical things, which you probably shouldn't till it's stable.

I’m just using Dropbox now and replicating my 1Password everywhere and for some reason it makes me nervous to self host.

I think I’m just going to back up everyone’s vault to a USB and bring it to a second location twice a year. If storage ever gets affordable, I’ll send replication snapshots instead.

Seriously. I just kinda check it out once in a while.

They're in my attached garage. In the living room when it's quiet I can hear them humming. Does that count?

Prometheus & Grafana

"Oh the fans ramped up, something must be going down"

I have a basic dashboard set up in my home assistant that I never check. Don't even know how it works, I forgot. That's why I really want to just put my whole setup in code. That's why nothing is happening, the chore just seems so daunting.

So I listen for complains ringing through the house and react accordingly.

I have the best detector for issues with my self hosted services: my wife!

I run UptimeKuma for monitoring a couple of things, but honestly, I’m pretty much my only user and my homelab is independent of the regular home network, so I don’t really care too much. I’ve been considering some simple log monitoring… when I get around to it :-)

Beszel, uptime kuma, wazuh

Thats cool! My wife thinks i'm crazy just because i homeserve ...

Ah cool! How do you get notifications sent to signal. I've always avoided because i didnt like emails of my home setup leaving home in clear

Edit: ah, i see! It's kuma that allows you to i guess by adding new device on phone Signal

https://github.com/bbernhard/signal-cli-rest-api

Its very finicky to setup, but once you get it working its pretty good. Sometimes needs to be reauthenticated though.

Kuma notification settings: