I have a lot of old TV boxes around, most being RK3229/variants that spawn in Japan just like rabbits in a rabbit farm. You can buy them for just around $8 depending on where you live. This is my tutorial on how to get a functioning (decent!) desktop on RK322x boxes by converting them to Armbian.

These boxes operate on 5V/2A peak, though they can comfortably run on the power of a simple iPhone power brick at 5V/1A, you can even strip the cable that comes with it and hook it to a USB port and it will work just fine. With this in mind, they are extremely power efficient, with video output.

First up, you must follow this amazing tutorial provided by jock at https://forum.armbian.com/topic/34923-csc-armbian-for-rk322x-tv-box-boards/ in order to patch your old most-likely-chineseware-infected RK322x box with a nice fresh installation of Armbian!

After following the tutorial, you will be greeted with:

    _             _    _                                         _ _        
   /_\  _ _ _ __ | |__(_)__ _ _ _    __ ___ _ __  _ __ _  _ _ _ (_) |_ _  _ 
  / _ \| '_| '  \| '_ \ / _` | ' \  / _/ _ \ '  \| '  \ || | ' \| |  _| || |
 /_/ \_\_| |_|_|_|_.__/_\__,_|_||_|_\__\___/_|_|_|_|_|_\_,_|_||_|_|\__|\_, |
                                 |___|                                 |__/ 
 v26.8 rolling for rk322x-box running Armbian Linux 6.18.16-current-rockchip

 Packages:     Debian stable (trixie)
 Support:      for advanced users (rolling release)
 IPv4:        (LAN) 10.0.0.141 (WAN) xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
 IPv6:        (LAN) 2400:2651:2a21:fc00:: (WAN) 2400:2651:2a21:fc00::

 Performance:  

 Load:         60%               Uptime:         2m  Local users:  1            
 Memory usage: 27% of 970M      
 CPU temp:     67°C              Usage of /:   39% of 7.0G      

 Commands: 

 Configuration: armbian-config
 Upgrade      : armbian-upgrade
 Monitoring   : htop

With 1GB of RAM (gladly zswapped by default thanks to the optimized armbian config) and the Mali-400MP2 GPU, full DEs like XFCE or KDE will make this cry and die. To get a somewhat responsive desktop, we need to go far away from simple one-liner DEs and find their lighter relatives instead.

With this in mind, my most optimized shot at this, while keeping usefulness, was a X server with OpenBox, picom (for screen tearing) and tint2:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install xserver-xorg xinit openbox lxterminal picom tint2 -y

After that, we need to make it useful

I initially intended to only use Dillo, but as testing went, it turns out a LOT of websites (including Google) completely killed their non-Javascript browser support, and yeah, you could use DuckDuckGo Lite, but that defeats the practicality of this box on anything else other than web browsing. So, relying on zswap, we'll use Firefox for modern web browsing, Dillo for ultra-lightweight work, and VLC for local media playback. Just for the ones that need it, I have also included LibreOffice, but I am not part of that group:

sudo apt install firefox-esr dillo vlc libreoffice -y

After installing all of these, you must tell your system you're intending to use Openbox, so:
Create or edit your .xinitrc file:

echo "exec openbox-session" > ~/.xinitrc

Next, copy up the Openbox autostart script. This is where we launch our compositor and define how the desktop is meant to be, you can go crazy on this file after the next step:

mkdir -p ~/.config/openbox
cp /etc/xdg/openbox/autostart ~/.config/openbox/

Lastly, but very importantly:

As previously mentioned, this device has an awfully weak Mali-400MP2 GPU, where, depending on the compositor action (such as glx), it will terribly choke and the screen will tear.. For this, and with a lot of testing, xrender offered me the best performance-cost ratio, so for that:

Edit ~/.config/openbox/autostart and add this to the very bottom:

picom --backend xrender &

And then, embrace it:

startx

Enjoy your desk I can run this comfortably with 2-3 browser tabs on Firefox (or just 1, if you're using an Electron-based horribly optimized website)

Hi everyone,

Some of you might remember me mentioning this project here over the past months while it was still being built.

Today, we finally launched WHMDC (WHMDeskCloud).

It’s a self-hosted hosting automation and billing platform built for hosting providers.

The project originally started after repeatedly running into limitations with existing hosting automation platforms and wanting to experiment with a system where most functionality is included in the core instead of relying on endless paid modules.

Some of the things included:

• unlimited client and service management
• automated billing and invoicing
• built-in support ticket system
• infrastructure integrations
• operational intelligence (revenue visibility, support performance, infrastructure awareness)

We’re a small team based in England, and today is launch day, so feedback from the community would genuinely mean a lot.

Website:
https://whmdc.com

A question for hosting providers here:

If you were switching to a new automation platform today, what would be the one feature you would absolutely need it to have?

Happy to answer questions and hear what people think.

Does anyone have any recommendations for decently priced VPS providers? Porto Alegre would be preferred but other areas work as well.

Specs aren't a big deal they just depend on the price but just an example of Min Specs:

4GB of ram
~100+ GB of Space

Looking forward to y'alls recommendations.

Thanks!

Anyone tried it? Thoughts? Enhance.com - obviously it's in beta so I wouldn't use in production environment, but I do like a play around

Servyrun is a self-hosted web application built with React JS + Tailwind CSS for the frontend and a backend of PHP Laravel.

Servyrun should not be used as your main connection to your servers but rather an easy method to monitor, be informed and do small tasks all through the web panel rather than an SSH client.

Servyrun comes with a comprehensive API and a dark and light mode.

Demo link in a read-only state for obvious reasons.

Why?

This was a personal project of mine to further learn and get experience with React whilst creating something that can be useful.

How is Servyrun different to Myidlers?

Servyrun involves interacting with your servers through SSH and SFTP, you can run commands, edit and download files. Myidlers is about organization and information.

Found a bug?

Please open an issue and provide as much information as possible.

Screenshots

https://cdn.write.corbpie.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/surcuri-command-example-1.mp4

https://cdn.write.corbpie.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/surcuri-dark-light-mode-example-1.mp4

I was using a custom script to monitor my server's uptime. It would monitor the ports listed and send me a message on Telegram (using bot API) if any of those goes down or comes back online.

Up until recently, it was mostly working fine until I updated the script, upon which the script stopped working partially. It will monitor uptime but no longer send me notifications if something goes offline or comes back online. It still sends notifications regarding the health status.

Ah, did I mention that I deleted the original backup (that I made before the modification) from the server during a previous cleanup? Anyway, I do not have enough time to fix the script and was looking for a simple opensource script/project that can do the same.

Requirements:

1. Monitor uptime for ports and websites
2. Send message via telegram if something goes down or comes back up
3. Send a daily telegram message with the uptime status + monitor duration
4. (optional) Monitor latency
5. (optional) Does not require docker or nodejs
6. (optional) PHP or python based script

If you guys know of such a project/script, do let me know.

PS. I am NOT looking for a public service that does the same, unless I can self host it. Many of the servers that require monitoring are on local network without publicly open ports and I would like to keep it the same.

For those who do not have time to read the full thread, here are the scripts being discussed here:

@msatt recommended: https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma/wiki

@Asim recommended: https://hub.docker.com/r/jasonrivers/nagios

@Mason recommended: https://www.librenms.org/ | https://github.com/librenms/librenms

@AuroraZero recommended: https://github.com/bderenzo/tinystatus

@iandk's custom solution: https://github.com/iandk/pymon

In a gist: criteria like notify me if 3 locations see the target as offline.

I am aware of smokeping, and to be fair it handles the primary/secondary nodes pretty well but, to my knowledge, you get an e-mail every time a location sees the target as down.

So here is a docker setup guide for anyone wanting to quickly run their own federated messaging server

https://cyberhost.uk/element-matrix-setup

Best Wishes,
CyberHost

This week I’ve written an article on setting up Duplicati backups, hopefully it will help some of you guys

https://cyberhost.uk/duplicati-backup

If you haven’t got backups running, you should definitely get some sorted unless you like a bit of data loss!

Best Wishes,
CyberHost

I have written up a cheeky guide https://cyberhost.uk/selfhost-plausible-analytics/ on how to set this up.

Could be another option to replace Google Analytics with @AnthonySmith

Please let me know if you have any issues with the setup or want to suggest a change to the article.

Best Wishes,
CyberHost

I am curious:
Which services/apps/solutions do you host yourself, instead of using external service providers?

I guess most of us know this list:
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
Which of the solutions on the list can you recommend or do you have something to add that the list is not carrying?

Looking forward to your inspirational posts and self-hosted solutions!

Free/ paid
Hosted / selfhosted
Do you do it on your own or outsource the management?

Anything interesting to look out for during black Friday?

Thanks