Brian McGonagill

Subsonic / Airsonic music streaming servers are an incredible way to self host your own Google Music, iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora, and any other streaming service out there, by using your own music, and keeping it all local and under your control. The best

Self hosting amazing open source software is the best feeling in the world. Knowing you're not tied to someone else's servers, whims, or quirks.  The ability to control how you use your own apps, and how and when you add more is what open

As we've moved away from the office over the past 2 years now, it's become even more important to have a good means of interaction with our co-workers.  Many of us have started late week meetings in the afternoon to just chit-chat, or talk

Backups are important for so many reasons.  I have had backups save my bacon more than once, and I have also learned the hard way how important backups really are.  Data loss is no joke, and in this day and age there is truly

I've been asked several times to install InvoiceNinja, and no matter how I tried, it never seemed to work, but gave errors in the log every single time.  So, I started looking for other open source invoicing solutions.  I tried a bunch of them.

Whoogle Search is an open source, self hosted Google search with teh ads, and a bunch of other junk-ware, stripped out of it.  It really brings you back to a top notch search experience with more privacy in mind. I found this little gem

Dolibarr is a free, open source, self hosted ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and CRM (Client Relationship Management) system.  I have covered ERPNext in the past, and people seem to be interested in it, so I wanted to provide information on how to install another

I'm making this as an update to my Portainer video that is now easily more than a year and a half old.  The good news is that the old video for Portainer install is really the same as this one will be, except that

I wanted to clear up the steps a bit, as my original set is a bit convoluted. I made it more complicated (slightly) than it has to be, and figure there is an easier way. The following is based on using Portaianer-CE as a

Pi-hole is an amazing tool with tons of functionality beyond it's main purpose of filtering out ads from your devices.  Now, imagine you went to all that trouble to get rid of those ads and tracking, but you still send all your requests right

I've done several videos on NVR software, MotionEyeOS, Shinobi, etc.  But what I've been really looking for is an NVR that could put the use of my cameras to work for me.   Frigate NVR does just that. I allows me to feed it an

IntroductionRemotely is an amazing tool. It's open source, self hosted, and free to use.  The developer puts in a ton of time and effort to make this a really nice remote support tool, so if you have a few bucks, and you are saving

The option to have Home Assistant send notification is absolutely amazing all on it's own, but being able to send actionable notifications is just mind blowing to me.  I use these notifications now to remind me when my Office Air Conditioning unit is still

I've shown you some really cool streaming audio servers you can run in Docker in the past, and while I didn't call it out specifically, Jellyfin can also act as an audio server.  I recently decided to put my music library on my Jellyfin

I'll be having a Contest / Give-away ion July 10, 2021 at 10 AM Central Time US.   The Give-away is just something I want to do to say thank you to all of you for subscribing, being my Patrons on Patreon, and for sticking with

What is DuckDNS?Duck DNs is a dynamic DNS service.  If you have a home IP address that chnages occasionally, or often, and you're wanting to run any kind of homelab or servers that you may want to reach from ourside your home network,

I was fortunate enough to have my good from from the IBRACORP YouTube channel join me, and walk me through setting up these super useful tools.   The channel is superb, and really fits well with the Awesome Open Source channel.  He focuses on Open

As i get more self-hosted sites running on my home lab, or in a VPS somewhere, I find myself having to refer more an mroe often to notes about what I named the site (either in NGinX Proxy Manager), or looking in Portainer or

Watchtower has been on my list for a long time. I’ve avoided it because I was initially told it would just update all of my Docker containers automatically. I’m not one to do auto-update things. I like to read about it, understand

If you've never heard of Home Assistant, but you want to automate your home, or anything else, then you've been missing one of the most incredible and active Open Source projects out there.  Don't misunderstand, there are multiple home automation pojects, but Home Assistatn,

I recently did a video on some really great tools for monitoring your machine's bandwidth usage on Linux / Unix.  If you haven't checked it out, I highly recommend it, as these are some top notch tools for determining how much bandwidth you are using,

Last year I started thinking about making this little gadget to let me know when the postal worker drops my mail in the box.  My mailbox is about 40 ft (~13 m) from my front door, and down a hill, so my Ring doorbell

If you have been looking for a self-hosted, open source, free way to do remote support for yourself, your family, your friends, your business, or anything else, this is an excellent tool for doing exactly that.   The best part is we can now install

OpenMediaVault is a really great Network Attached Storage system (NAS)  that's open source and self hosted.  You can use your own hardware, setup your own system, and run it completely free. You can run OpenMediaVault as a standalone physical server, on a Virtual Machine

Proxmox is an excellent, powerful, and sophisticated Virtualization Operating System built on Linux.  It's Open Source, and, of course, self hosted.   I know I usually cover Docker based apps for virtualization, but there are benefits to being able to install an entire OS as