In my last post, I talked about having issues with my homelab setup after returning from vacation. The main culprit being authentication on Vaultwarden and Joplin.

My homelab is a local only setup, and I am just now understanding the role caddy plays in the homelab acting as a reverse proxy. But for some reason, in my arrogance, I thought just buying a domain name and routing everything through a VPN would be fairly simple. Wrong.

This took me down a rabbit hole of DNS, Cloudflare Tunneling, Twin something-or-other, and more. Wayyyyy too much for me at this point in time.

I gave up with Vaultwarden and went with hosting my passwords back on Nord. For one, I hosted my passwords there before with no issues. Second, when my homelab went down and I had no access to passwords, it was incredibly inconvenient and not worth the hassle at this time.

Not to say I wouldn’t try hosting Vaultwarden again once I understand how to give it a legit SSL cert. This was a decision for my mental health haha.

Joplin on the other hand, I found a fix that I was a little proud of. Since the Joplin server was giving me so much fuss over authentication, I used a simpler method. Syncthing.

Syncthing’s easy, no-nonsense setup paired with Joplin’s File System synchronization option made a perfect match to get my notes from my PC to my phone.

The catch is that I have to run Syncthing also on any device I need my Joplin notes synced on.

Throughout all this I found Portainer to be a much more useful application. Up until now I was doing everything via terminal. I’m grateful to have learned it that way, but Portainer became necessary for managing the Docker containers.

Finally, just to have a little growth in the homelab after all these issues, I added LinkAce and SearXNG which I’m already in love with.