Brian McGonagill

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

I've been promising, for a while now, to do a video on installing and setting up a VOIP / PBX system you self host.  Understand there are multiple options out there, and many of them are open source.  The two most common I hear of,

This week I wanted to give you some really simple tools for monitoring your machine's bandwidth usage.  I'll be including a few really great tools you can run directly from the terminal (CLI) and this means you can run them remotely via SSH without

Rockstor is a Linux based NAS (Network Attached Storage) system.  It's, of course, free and open source, and is akin to systems like TrueNAS, Open Media Vautl, etc.  Rockstor is based on CentOS Linux, so the underlying system is extremely stable. Much like TrueNAS

OpenSnitch is a free, open source, self-hosted outbound application firewall.  All Operating Systems these days have a built in firewall, but these are generally only effective against incoming threats.  This the firewall where you'll hear me or others talk about opening ports to allow

We'll be taking a small series adventure into the world of TrueNAS.  I'll be starting with TrueNAS core (formerly FreeNAS).  If you've never heard of TrueNAS(or FreeNAS), then let me explain a bit. Truenas is a self hosted Network Attached Storage solution.  It

Following up on my previous video showing some very simple dashboards for machine statistics and analytical information, I wanted to provide some options that are made with the power users in mind.  Both of these tools have configuration options that you can use to

I've recently been enjoying the ability to quickly open a shortcut and see the status of various bits of information about my servers.  Now, I have an upcoming video where I'm going to cover NetData (an amazing dashboard for your server or servers), as

I've been asked a few times to setup a Matrix server as a potential means of communication with me vs Email or Telegram.   I finally had time to sit down, read through the docs and actually give it a run a couple of times.