As we march toward fall, it’s time to start thinking about tidying up the homelab and making it a bit safer and more secure. Today’s projects include two programs that help keep an eye on your homelab for you, and one that makes your information way more accessible.
Get alerted when automated jobs stop working with Healthchecks
The worst kind of failure is one that happens silently
In any homelab, there are likely lots of automated jobs happening for various reasons. Whether that’s a backup, a file sync, a scheduled update, or something else entirely, it’s very possible that your homelab relies on that scheduled task to run.
So, what happens when it stops? If you don’t have notifications set up, it might stop silently for weeks or months before you notice. I have multiple Duplicati backup tasks running in my homelab, and if they stopped (right now), I’d have no way of knowing without manually checking. It’s conceivable that months could go by without my backups running, and I wouldn’t know until I went to access them.
So, this weekend I plan to deploy Healthchecks in my homelab. Healthchecks utilizes unique URLs for every script or job that’s running in your homelab. Whenever that thing completes, it pings Healthchecks, which is programmed to listen for it to happen at a certain time.
If your automation doesn’t fire off within the expected window, then Healthchecks can alert you that something might be wrong. This allows you to find out why that job didn’t run and fix it.
You can deploy Healthchecks in Docker, and it’s easy to set up. If you want to run it outside of your network, you’ll need a reverse proxy, but I’d recommend keeping it local-only and also running instances of Healthchecks on every individual machine in your homelab, instead of running it from one central place.
Keep an eye on your hard drive’s health with Scrutiny
Know what your drives are doing and when it’s time to replace one
Credit: Scrutiny
How old are your hard drives? How many power-on hours do they have? Any reallocated sectors? These are things that are crucial to know in any homelab situation, as they’re indicators of how much life your drives have left in them.
While you can manually check each drive’s SMART data (or just wait for your system to alert you to a failing drive), automating it is so much better. With Scrutiny, you can have your homelab automatically chart a readable dashboard that shows drive health, temperatures, and changes over time. It pulls drive-reported SMART data to build its database, allowing you to spot deterioration in real-time.
This does mean that your drives will have to properly report to SMART. If they’re in a DAS that RAIDs them before they get to your system, for example, it’s possible that it won’t work. Scrutiny needs to be able to see the drives individually for smartctl to access them.
However, once you deploy Scrutiny in your homelab, it’ll start gathering all the information it can and collecting it into an InfluxDB storage system, which can then send out that information to something like Grafana to build graphs of your drive’s stats over time.
So, deploy Scrutiny in your homelab this weekend and make sure you keep an eye on your drives so you have a heads-up before they start to fail.
Build a searchable bookmark collection you can access from anywhere with Linkding
No more logging into a Chrome profile to access your bookmarks
Credit: Linkding
I have bookmarks that I really don’t need in my bookmarks bar in Chrome, but I have them there anyway because it’s the most convenient place for them. However, with a tool like Linkding, you can move the bookmarks from your bookmarks bar to their own personal website.
Linkding is more than just a glorified bookmark manager. It supports tags, Markdown notes, a way to know if a bookmark is unread, automatic title/description retrieval, and so much more.
You can actually import bookmarks from an existing browser into Linkding, which makes it really easy to get out of Chrome or Firefox and into self-hosted bookmark management. One of my favorite parts of having a locally-hosted bookmarks manager is being able to access those bookmarks remotely without having to log into a Google account.
Just keep in mind that Chrome, Firefox, and even Safari keep your bookmarks backed up automatically for you. If you decide to migrate all of your bookmarks to Linkding, ensure you have a proper backup strategy; otherwise, you could lose everything if something in your homelab goes awry.
Let your homelab power your life — just do it safely
My homelab absolutely runs my life. Almost everything I do in my house touches my homelab in some way, shape, or form. But it has to be accomplished safely.
Today, I showed you two ways to keep your homelab safe with both Healthchecks and Scrutiny. If you’re not running one (or both) of them, you should be by the week’s end.