Selfhosting update day!

For some reason, and because it is something that needs to be done from time to time when you selfhost, today turned out to be update day! It all started because I decided today was the day for updating my 2 proxmox hosts to debian bookworm and proxmox v8… But it went so smoothly (I expected stuff to broke, so that was an awesome surprise!) that I also took a bit of time to update many other things.

Proxmox hosts

As said, it was almost too easy (exactly like I love my updates to go) and in a nutshell can be resumed to running the following commands on both hosts:

apt update
apt dist-upgrade
sed -i 's/bullseye/bookworm/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
sed -i -e 's/bullseye/bookworm/g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-enterprise.list
apt update
apt dist-upgrade
pve7to8
reboot

Except one change in sshd_config that I ported manually after the update, everything was done via the commands above. Thanks again to the full proxmox team doing incredible work!

VM / CT

While at it, I also:

• Upgrade the last 3 VMs still on debian bullseye to bookworm (as easy and fast as just running the 1st sed command above and updating)
• Made sure all others were fully up to date

Services

As I wrote before, I use willow to stay up to date with services than requires update. It still have some issues and lack some feature, but I haven’t find the time to start contributing to fix what I think is missing. But even in its current state, it is very useful to ensure all my services are up to date. Some (mostly non public non critical) services were not up to date, so I updated them:

• Dendrite to 0.13.8
• Change Detection to 0.46.04
• Draw.io to 24.7.8
• Stirling PDF to 0.29.0
• Forgejo to v0.8.3
• Phanpy to 2024.08.31
• Linkding to 1.33.0
• Picoshare to 1.4.4
• Ntfy to 1.22.0
• Syncthing 1.27.12
• Readeck to 0.15.3

Unfortunately, it seems I broke willow while updating it last. Ironic heh?!? So I reverted back to previous version, at least it works again :). I’ll look into it later.

I also stopped a CT that was running sengil (a fediverse client) (and used to run rss bridge) as I moved from sengil to phanpy (which is just awesome!).

I haven’t updated watchyourlan as the v2 is not backward compatible with the 1.x version, meaning I’ll have to reconfigure everything. That will be for another day :).

Conclusion

Selfhosting can be time consuming, but having the right scripts and tools made it very fast for most things. Didn’t took more than a couple of hours for everything. It doesn’t bother me but you have to keep in mind that selfhosting isn’t a magic things. Even if you can automate a lot, it still needs some time and attention.

I know I could automate more to automatically update services, but I prefer to decide when I do it so I know I can debug it if needed and not just have the bad surprise of suddently haven’t a service failing… But that’s just me :).