jobbies

I'm wondering what folks do to optimise the power efficiency of their Linux servers. I've never really got to the bottom of what is the best way to do this and with the current energy crisis its a pertinent topic.

I'm talking about home servers, so the availability requirements are not the same as in a corporate environment. There might be vast chunks of time during the day or night when they sit idle, and home users are more tolerant of a lag when accessing resources if it means lower energy bills.

Specifically I've been thinking about:

• allowing lower power states when idle
• spinning-down hdd's when they're not in use
• MAYBE letting machines sleep/hibernate
• setting schedules of times where you know demand will be low/zero and efficiency can be managed aggressively
• any other quick wins I've missed

It would be amazing if there was one tool or one guide that helps with all of that but thats never the case, is it 😅

Thoughts?

What's everyone using to auto-transcode their media library?

Tdarr and unmanic are both freemium/proprietary. I dont mind paying for software but I prefer to support open source projects.

Is there anything similar worth looking at?

I have a tailscale exit node set up in a Linux VPS. On that VPS I've also installed pihole to act as DNS for the tailnet.

When I run a DNS leak test from a machine on the tailnet I get confusing results. I appear to be using servers in my home country (also my current location).

The servers don't say they are owned by my ISP but I suspect that's the case. Its the only way the machine could have got their addresses. I've tried on multiple machines to test this.

In Tailscale settings each machine is configured to use Tailscale DNS. Tailscale has been told to use Quad9 in the event pihole is unreachable. Needless to say, Quad9 is not located in my home country.

I'm a noob to both Tailscale and pihole so I'm probably missing something obvious?

You're probably already aware of this, but if you run Docker on linux and use ufw or firewalld - it will bypass all your firewall rules. It doesn't matter what your defaults are or how strict you are about opening ports; Docker has free reign to send and receive from the host as it pleases.

If you are good at manipulating iptables there is a way around this, but it also affects outgoing traffic and could interfere with the bridge. Unless you're a pointy head with a fetish for iptables this will be a world of pain, so isn't really a solution.

There is a tool called ufw-docker that mitigates this by manipulating iptables for you. I was happy with this as a solution and it used to work well on my rig, but for some unknown reason its no-longer working and Docker is back to doing its own thing.

Am I missing an obvious solution here?

It seems odd for a popular tool like Docker - that is also used by enterprise - not to have a pain-free way around this.

Besides "don't use Cloudflare/AWS/etc", how can we make our selfhosted setups resilient to outages like the ones we've seen recently?

Been on GOS on my Pixel 9 Pro XL for about a year and use the default camera app (the GOS one, not the Pixel one).

I'm not a pro photographer and the photos I've taken lately look like they were captured on a low-res laptop webcam. I'm suddenly appreciating how easy it was to take decent photos on iPhone.

What camera app do you use? Or are you using a separate device? Any recommendations would be much appreciated.

Trying (and failing) to setup Timeshift. Hoping to have it do snapshots of an ext4 LUKS-encrypted Arch system partition.

Documentation is thin on the ground and relates heavily to the GUI so problem solving hasn't been easy.

This is what I get when I run it for the first time:

$ sudo timeshift --create --comments "initial snapshot" First run mode (config file not found) Selected default snapshot type: RSYNC Mounted '/dev/dm-0 (nvme0n1pX)' at '/run/timeshift/991/backup' ------------------------------------------------------------------- Estimating system size... Creating new snapshot...(RSYNC) Saving to device: /dev/dm-0, mounted at path: /run/timeshift/991/backup Syncing files with rsync... E: rsync returned an error                                             E: Failed to create new snapshot Failed to create snapshot ------------------------------------------------------------------- Removing snapshots (incomplete): ------------------------------------------------------------------- Removing '2025-11-07_10-30-22'... Removed '2025-11-07_10-30-22'                                          ------------------------------------------------------------------- E: Failed to remove directory Ret=256

I initially left timeshift.json empty except for 'backup_device', but this is how it filled it out:

{  "backup_device_uuid" : "ab13bb9a-e4d6-4884-b8c8-XXXXXXXX",   "parent_device_uuid" : "904be7d0-a38d-4aed-9ee4-XXXXXXXX",   "do_first_run" : "false", "btrfs_mode" : "false",   "include_btrfs_home_for_backup" : "false",   "include_btrfs_home_for_restore" : "false",   "stop_cron_emails" : "true", "schedule_monthly" : "false", "schedule_weekly" : "false", "schedule_daily" : "false", "schedule_hourly" : "false", "schedule_boot" : "false", "count_monthly" : "2", "count_weekly" : "3", "count_daily" : "5", "count_hourly" : "6", "count_boot" : "5", "date_format" : "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", "exclude" : [ "/root/","/home/joe/" ], "exclude-apps" : [] }

I believe that unless you tell it otherwise, it will write snapshots to the same partition, which is what I want. 'parent_device' appears to be the LUKS crypto container that the root sits in.

Anyone spot the problem? Any help would be much appreciated!

Also, if I wanted to exclude a dir (inc. all subdirs & contents) at root called 'blah', would "/blah/**" be the correct exclude pattern?