Self-Hosted Main

I live with a couple roommates in an apartment. For convenience we create a simple webpage where we could quickly see who's home. It works by querying the router (running OpenWrt) every few minutes for known phones connected to the Wi-Fi. We pretty soon realized that we could actually see which room someone was in pretty consistently based on the signal strength alone.

After that it didn't take long before we exploited it as much as we could, everything from automatically turning on the coffeemaker the first time someone left their room between 7-10am to blasting an alarm if someone left/didn't leave their room at certain times.

For years, I hosted a PHP script on a personal website that would connect to a weather API, retrieve the weather at my home location, and, depending on it, generate a cute display with HTML/CSS and SVGs. The display looked like a 1500x500 image (though it was a website), where the sun (or moon), clouds (or rain or snow, etc.), were positioned differently based on the weather and time of the day. Additionally, the temperature and other details were displayed.

Then, the script would call an HTML to PDF tool to generate an image from it. This image was, at that time, uploaded to Twitter as my profile banner image. A server cron job would run the script every hour, so my banner would be updated every hour to reflect the weather at my home position.

Why did I do this? I have no idea. Not even sure if anyone noticed, but I could, so I did! Eventually, I ended up turning the script off at some point because it felt childish.

Ugh, I think the craziest thing I do selfhosting-wise is use a full fledged project management tool as a todo list.

I need to up my game!!

The only thing slightly different that I self host is WebODM. It's open drone mapping software. You can upload 10s or 100s of photos of an area and it can generate an orthomosaic, kind of like Google maps. It has a lot of other features too.

I don't really use it, I just play with it from time to time.

In 2018 after deciding that I hated ProxMox, that Ganeti was dead (and it was at the time), that Harvester didn't exist yet, that OpenStack was way too complex, and that I was interested in going the Kubernetes/container route (sorry I'm still a VM guy), I decided to write my own self-hosted hyperconverged infrastructure manager. I based it on what little I knew of how Nutanix worked, with a lot of ideas from Ganeti too.

And I named it after drain pipe on a whim at Home Depot.

https://github.com/parallelvirtualcluster

5 years later I have 16 production clusters, including my own homeproduction (but not including my testing cluster), mostly through finding a niche for it with my employer, and I spend a solid 25% of my free time working on it. It's not quite at a "1.0" release I'd be comfortable with random people using yet, but it's getting close enough for me to start talking about it on social media!