I am very much a newbie setting up my home server and have got quite far by watching YouTube videos, but am now stuck. Can anybody help me with the following tasks:
Setting up remote access to and from all my devices.
Setting up my wife as a separate user with her own private folders, and shared folders and apps.
Running some kind of VPN to mask my downloads from my ISP (Starlink).
Advising me wether I should be doing the VPN and remote connecting via Tailscale/Netbird or not?
Helping me and my wife remotely access Jellyfin outside my local network (Iāve set up the arrs already which connect to Jellyfin).
Advising me the best way to back up my my photo library. Immich?
My NAS is a Beelink Me Mini with 4x 4tb NVMe m.2 drives in a RAID 5 configuration (12tb). It is running ZimaOS in its 64gb internal eMMC drive.
My router is a Unifi Dream Machine SE and my ISP is Starlink, which apparently uses CGNAT and does not have a public IPv4 address.
Please contact me if you can help with all the above.
I can definitely help you get all of this sorted out. Been working with ZimaOS setups and Unifi gear for a while now, and dealing with CGNAT is pretty standard these days.
For your setup, Tailscale would be perfect for remote access since it handles CGNAT beautifully, and you can run your VPN through it too. Immich is solid for photos, though there are a couple other options worth considering based on your needs.
Would be happy to walk through everything and get your wife set up with proper permissions too.
Iām happy to see everyone helping each other, and I encourage you to try using an open forum for discussions. This benefits everyone who sees the post. Your help will have a wider impact.
If you communicate via email, please be careful about sharing your personal information. Discuss any issue with strangers as you would in a public setting.
Also, do not give any administrator privileges and remote desktop permissions to default users. If necessary, do so under the supervision of a highly skilled technical pal.
I am still getting my head wrapped around this as I set this up in my home lab. Itās pretty frickin slick. I am currently running a ZimaOS server and a CasaOS test bed as well.
Hey - do you guys need a knowledge manager? The docs are good thus far but need to stay in sync with updates to the releases. Release notes are great but do they get brought down to the user/customer docs?
With regards to the ZimaOS, your change/release management looks very well managed, with bugs/fixes feeding back into the analysis>dev>testing process along with new solution enhancements. The release notes reflect this process being well bedded down. Based on the release cycle it looks like you are going through 2 week sprints on the ZimaOS software.
Your users docs, very good on their own, at a point in time. And well presented too. They seem to perhaps be missing some of the more recent information that has been affected by change/release. Very typical in most IT organizations as documentation tends to be an afterthought.
I worked very closely in this space in my career as an ITIL specialist, my favorite processes being change/release management > knowledge management. The business realized that as a system change, the training/user documentation had to change with it. It benefited existing and new users of the system. Especially true for critical business applications.
My solution always involved a categorization and tagging methodology for the software āmodulesā so that when the technical folks were working on in a certain area of the solution, people documenting technical and customer docs were aware and could keep this in sync with releases. The documentation was tagged similarly so that it could easily be identified for a review.
It always took a while to realize a change in mindset for the humans involved, but when the benefits started to appear, it became a lot easier to justify additional work and attention.
Thanks for the information. I will forward your information to the team, and we will discuss this suggestion together. If it is convenient, you can also join the zimaos-open-test-partner-team channel on our Discord server, where we discuss the latest roadmap and direction more promptly with our pioneer users.
Just a suggestion, since it is sometimes difficult to get good advice from the right person at the right time (i.e. now), is try communicating your problem to an AI in a browser on your desktop alongside the problem you are working on. Itās a lot of cutting and pasting, but often boils down the problem to getting is solved.
Hello! Good people of ZimaOS. I have spent several hours myself (at least three full days), even got my cery tech savy wife in on it, and just cant figure this out.
This is the error I am coming up with when I run Duck DNS
Service Unavailable
The application is not running properly. We recommend checking:
All configuration items (e.g., port, path).
The access permissions of the storage directories.
The connection settings for dependent services like the database.
Please check the detailed startup logs in the āConfigurationā menu to identify the specific issue.
I have used the zima client and yes that works, So I have an account with duckdns, I have an account with NginX Proxy Manager, and a SSL through them. I think I can get two factor and Jellyfin to work properly once the DNS is working. I can follow documentation, and configure routers, and all that. I have an older associates degree in Net Admin. So I am not a dumb, dumb, but this is sure making me feel like one. Can someone help me get over this hurdle, then I think I will be good.
From a local standpointā¦ is ZimaOS running on a standalone hardware server via a connected network cable? If so have you checked the terminal in ZimaOS to make sure all is OK?
Next, based on the IP addr listed in the ZimaOS terminal, have you tried to access this locally via another device in your local LAN/WAN? Have you been able to access ZimaOS SSH terminal via the web interface?
Just a good place to start to discount potential issues.
Youāre not doing anything wrong, and youāre definitely not missing something obvious. This error almost always means the DuckDNS container itself isnāt running correctly, not that your DNS or router setup is broken.
On ZimaOS, that āService Unavailableā page is just a generic proxy message. It shows up whenever the backend container fails to start or exits on launch.
One key thing to clarify: DuckDNS does not handle SSL. It only updates your public IP. SSL is handled by Nginx Proxy Manager. So if DuckDNS isnāt running properly, everything upstream looks broken even though NPM itself may load.
At this point, the only thing that matters is the container logs ā not reinstalling or reconfiguring everything.
Have a look via SSH:
docker ps -a | grep duck
docker logs <duckdns_container_name>
That output will immediately tell us if itās a token issue, subdomain typo, permission problem, or a startup failure. Once DuckDNS shows itās updating your IP successfully, the rest (NPM, SSL, Jellyfin, 2FA) will fall into place.
Thank you so darn much for all the help. I appreciate it so much. I have edited the log without a lot of the cloudflare v4 unchanged ip message. So, they wont let me upload a txt document, and only two link addresses.
Looks like you are in good hands with gelbuilding, but one thing I always do is get onto the host after installing and confirm the IP address it is running on.
Then, while I am still on the host, I log in and set the root password. From then you can remove keyboard and monitor and SSH into the box.
The ip address it is on is a set up address that is fwd through the router, and wonāt change. I do not have a static ip coming in from isp, but thatās why theirs tools to automatically refresh and change it if necessary. (Thankfully, cause spending $100 a month for 400 down and 12 up is a ripoff). But there the only choice in the area. Trust me I have looked. Thank you for your help. Waiting on a reply to see where to go next.
Thank you! That seems to have fixed that issue. Both say online, and did exactly what you have said. Now when going to my domain, it is going to
502 bad gateway. Open resty. Below that. Now due to the advice of a previous YouTube video I watched to set this up originally, he said to set the website port to 86. I wonder now if thatās my issue.
