A popular problem privacy-minded self-hosters are trying to solve is photo management and automatic backup from mobile devices. The big players, specifically Google and Apple dominate this field, with their main advantage being full control over the respective mobile operating systems. I haven’t used Apple devices after iPhone 5s, but on Android you just sign in to you Google account to be able to use the Play store, and Google Photos is already there, with all your old photos available.

The previous posts laid the basis, now it’s time for the first real example.

There’s one thing I’ve been missing while running GrapheneOS , passkey support. There was a period shortly after the release of Android 14 when I went back to stock Pixel OS. Before this, Vanadium, the default browser of GrapheneOS did not support passkeys at all. To be honest, I’m not 100% sure if there was some level of support, but since I don’t use Google Passwords, and Bitwarden didn’t have any support for passkeys at the time on mobile, I didn’t really look very hard. Nowadays I’m back on GrapheneOS, and trying hard to steer clear of Google Services.

The layout

I like to keep all the relevant files for each respective service under a single filesystem tree. The first obvious reason is keeping things organized, but since the underlying file system is ZFS, it allows to snapshot the whole tree in one go, as the directory is a ZFS dataset.

I self-host some stuff, using Podman. There are a whole bunch of guides online, and it feels like most of them have consolidated on docker-compose. This is understandable, considering how Docker was the first in the field, and docker compose provides a nice way to do multi-container infrastructure as code-type deployments with just a single file.

After a couple years of keeping this site in cold storage, I decided it’s time to bite the bullet and put it back online.

A word about backups

I used to run my homeserver with EL8 on bare metal, but switched to Proxmox VE to widen the possibilities I can do with only a single box. I have utilized ZFS as the underlying file system for data for some time, and the robustness and simplicity of ZFS tooling is really nice.

The idea

I have been eyeing on Silverblue for a long time. Regular Fedora has served me well, but I’ve always felt that the idea of keeping the base OS as clean as possible would be a good idea.

A few people have found my guide for setting up VNC access on a headless box useful on GitHub, so I thought I’ll aim low and publish that same guide as one of my first posts here. It should be noted that I think Wayland makes the same setup possible with less hassle, but GNOME being the only truly usable DE on Wayland at the time of writing, it is a bit heavy for remote access. At least in my experience even on a gigabit LAN connection, the animations need to be turned off to escape the feeling of running out of bandwith.

While I don’t like the word blog, I think that it is the most accurate description for this site. I’ve been thinking of setting something like this up for a few years, but never got around to it. It still might be that there won’t be enough to say to give the impression of an active site, but that’s all right, the web is full of brief blogs with only a couple of entries.