Jekyll2026-04-21T06:19:46+00:00https://hemanthk-12.github.io/feed.xmlHemanth Karthikeya GComputer science final year student, in BITS Pilani Hyderabad Campus. Currently interning at Hevo Data as Data Scientist Intern.the story of the homeserver2026-04-21T00:00:00+00:002026-04-21T00:00:00+00:00https://hemanthk-12.github.io/posts/server-storyMaking a server is very straightforward and requires no highend hardware and is completely free(excluding negligible electricty costs). For example, the initial draft of my server worked on an i3-2nd gen cpu with 4GB ram (ddr3, ouch), and it still worked great. only with some small storage and ram modifications, I am still maining the same system.

alt text
my present cpu and ram through my monitoring tool (the uptime is in DD:HH:MM)

How this journey started

My first exposure to diving into tech came from me learning about ubuntu and linux in the 1st year of my undergrad through the labs and also the robotics club I was a part of. As time went on, I tried various distributions, viz. ubuntu->zorin->endeavour->kali->omarchy->debian and finally on bazzite for the last 3 months. I think it was this which made me dive deeper into the privacy rabbit hole: looking at VPNs, learnign about nmap, dabbling with Kali linux, RSS feeds, open source alternatives to services i use, reading privacy policies, monitoring data breaches, encrypting passwords, finding out about Yubikey, and many more. Hands down, the best outcome which came from this slowly rising paranoia in me was getting introduced to the world of self hosting.

Self hosting became the perfect middle ground for me. I was concerned enough to realise the extent of survelliance and control companies like the big G, zuckerbook and microslop (and even govts with the new age verification bs) have on our personal machines. But, I wanted it without causing a major hit to speed or convenience as does anyone. Naturally, Tor, dark web, hosting my mail server, multiple VPN tunnels wasn’t practical for me. Self hosting made me aware of the fact that if the data being transmitted is sent to my own machine, inacessible to the outside world without my explicit permission, I’m fine with it.

My Services

As of now, these are the service I host in my server :

Affine Notion Equivalent
VaultWarden Password Manager[Self hosted rust reimplementation of open-source Bitwarden]
Dozzle Docker containers monitoring tool
Glances Homepage to monitor all metrics of my server
Karakeep Bookmarking + Temporary note-taking app
SearXNG Metasearch engine, replacing google with fallback on brave search
Forgejo self hosted git instance
Navidrome spotify equivalent’s backend + symfonium as frontend client
Immich Google photos alternative
Filebrowser quantum google drive alternative
Media Server Netflix alternative
- Prowlarr Torrents and Indexers finder
- Radarr Movie management
- Sonarr TV Shows management
- Bazarr Subtitles management
- Qbittorrent Downloading client
- Jellyfin Streaming client
- Fladder Material You based frontend client, crossplatform, supporting windows, mac, linux, android, ios

If it’s your first time, I recommend starting with a password manager and a google drive equivalent as you’ll face all the common problems in self hosting. But first, you need a machine.

The Server

My father had an old office cpu, i3-2120 4GB ddr3 ram and that was enough for me to run everything except media streaming(for this, I upgraded ram by adding another 89gb ddr3 stick totalling to 12 gigs, costed ~Rs.2000). Any old laptop/cpu would be perfect, just make sure it gets plenty of ventilation.

]]>Interesting Things/Updates I found out2024-12-26T00:00:00+00:002024-12-26T00:00:00+00:00https://hemanthk-12.github.io/posts/update-and-things-i-found-outSome interesting developments on things I’m interested in :

Found out Nginx and Caddy are the same

I have used caddy to help me in hosting vaultwarden password manager in my home server(you can check out the blog here) because vaultwarden apparently accepts https only. Meanwhile, I was also seeing posts about https and cert generation mentioning nginx, and then found out Caddy and nginx are the same, just in diff setups, viz. one in small homelabs/monolithic sstems and the latter being used in production env and enterprises. The more you know.

Tailscale finally adding subdomain cert generation

Tailscale has rolled out a beta which introduced a new feature called Tailscale Services, which FINALLY allows us to generate certificates for subdomains of our self hosted services and also need https for them. Generally we need to use a third party service like nginx or caddy to generate certificates using Let’s Encrypt for https compatibility for our services and it was COMPULSORY for us own a domain to direct these certs. But Tailscale has the feature of generating cert for the tailnet <name>.ts.net BUT FRUSTRATINGLY, only 1 service can use it. Now, we can generate multiple certs, one for each subdomain of our tailnet, eg. immich.<name>.ts.net. Good to hear :D

Using a Data Structure in the Wild..!

I had the opportunity of using a data structure I’ve known since a long time, the HASHMAP, for an actually useful work instead of just in leetcode/interviews.

I had a project in mind to sort through all the contacts in my phone, which include the union of contacts in my google accounts(yes, multiple), my sim and my device. For context I have an android phone running Android 16 and in the default contacts app, there is NO way to show duplicates of contacts, atleast not reliably. I don’t know what the reason is, but my bet is on the difference that numbers stored in google, in my sim and on device store numbers in different formats, namely xxx-xxx-xxxx, xxx xxx xxxx and xxxxxxxxxx. Contacts app was only showing me duplicates in the first format, but not the others and I needed to clean around 2000 contacts.

So, I exported the contacts in .vcf format, sent it to my laptop and opened it in vscode to see the contents. I noticed that it was just a text file with this format for each contact :

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:2.1
N:;Lorem Ipsum;;;
FN:Lorem Ipsum
TEL;CELL:+91[redacted]
PHOTO;ENCODING=BASE64;JPEG:/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQAAAQABAAD/4gHYSUNDX1BST0ZJTEU
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 AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAQAA9tYAAQAAAADTLQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
 AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAlkZXNjAAAA8AAAACRyWFlaAAABFAAAABRnWFlaAA
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 iVFJDAAABZAAAAChjcHJ0AAABjAAAADxtbHVjAAAAAAAAAAEAAAAMZW5VUwAAAAgAAAAcAHMA
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 goKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgr/wAARCA
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END:VCARD

So I wrote a c++ script which extracts the name and the phone number with regex and normalises the phone number to only 10 digits. Then, to find duplicates I made a hashmap with the phone number as the key and the name as the value(made it a vector), and printed all phone numbers with >1 name. Worked like a charm ! You can find my (very sloppy) c++ script here.

Catch you guys in the next one.

]]>My Server and how it came to be2024-12-15T00:00:00+00:002024-12-15T00:00:00+00:00https://hemanthk-12.github.io/posts/immich-tailscale-serverI’ve always hated the cloud. Maybe because I couldn’t afford it (mostly) or that I couldn’t control it, or that it doesn’t have the niche features which I needed and there was no way to get around them. But I didn’t know any better and was not aware of selfhosting at that time.

]]>Vaultwarden and my struggle with HTTPS2024-12-15T00:00:00+00:002024-12-15T00:00:00+00:00https://hemanthk-12.github.io/posts/vaultwarden-setup-selfhostingI presently have immich and filebrowser running on my server. I wanted to have a password manager for a lon time and was searching for something which is reliable and has a self hosted solution. I found Bitwarden and subsequently found Vaultwarden. I copied the compose.yml, ran docker and gave it a random port. I went to the URL and was greeted with this : Vaultwarden Loading screen loop

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