Matei's Homelab

Problem

The dashboard is a single HTML file served by an nginx:alpine container in Dockge, reading from /mnt/Pool/dashboard. Every so often, after editing the file and saving it back into that folder, nginx starts throwing:

403 Forbidden
nginx/1.29.8

Why

Saving the file from another machine resets its owner and permissions, and nginx can no longer read it.

Fix

Folder needs 755 (nginx has to be able to enter it), the files inside need 644:

chown -R root:root /mnt/Pool/dashboard
chmod 755 /mnt/Pool/dashboard
chmod 644 /mnt/Pool/dashboard/*

Problem

I first pulled the camera streams into the dashboard through Home Assistant. It meant fighting HA's CORS settings, and even when it worked it was flaky.

Fix

Skip HA for video entirely. The dashboard now talks straight to Frigate: live view uses go2rtc's MSE stream in a plain <video> element, and recordings and clips come from the Frigate API. HA is only used for the things HA is good at — lights, AC, the air purifier, scenes.

Problem

Frigate runs in Docker on TrueNAS, Home Assistant runs in a VM on the same box. HA could not talk to Frigate on its normal LAN address.

Why

Hairpin NAT. TrueNAS's Docker port forwarding (DNAT) doesn't handle traffic that leaves the host and comes straight back in, so the VM's requests to the host's own IP went nowhere.

Fix

Point the HA ↔ Frigate integration at the Tailscale IPs instead of the LAN ones. Tailscale routes around the NAT problem completely.

Problem

Turning on audio for the TP-Link VIGI cameras broke recording.

Why

The cameras send audio as PCM A-law, and that codec isn't allowed inside an MP4 file, which is what Frigate records to.

Fix

Tell ffmpeg to transcode the audio to AAC when recording:

ffmpeg:
  output_args:
    record: preset-record-generic-audio-aac

Problem

After moving to Frigate 0.17.0, my old retention config stopped doing what I wanted.

Why

0.17 replaced the old retain / events layout with separate settings for continuous recording, alerts and detections. Most guides online still show the old format.

Fix

Rewrite it in the new structure. Mine keeps about a week:

record:
  enabled: true
  continuous:
    days: 7
  alerts:
    retain:
      days: 7
  detections:
    retain:
      days: 7

Problem

I wanted to cap the Frigate dataset at around 120–130 GiB so recordings can't eat the whole pool. Setting the quota just failed.

Why

ZFS won't let you set a quota smaller than what the dataset is already using.

Fix

Delete old recordings first (or shorten retention and let Frigate clean up), check usage, then set the quota:

zfs get used Pool/frigate
zfs set quota=130G Pool/frigate

Problem

I tried installing Hermes Agent straight onto the TrueNAS host with its normal installer. It "installed", but nothing would run.

Why

TrueNAS SCALE locks the host down on purpose: / is mounted read-only and /home is noexec. The installer drops its binaries somewhere they're not allowed to execute.

Fix

Don't fight it. Use the app from the TrueNAS catalog (Community train) and keep its data on the pool at /mnt/Pool/hermes. Rule of thumb: on SCALE, everything goes in an app or a container, never on the host.

Problem

Deployed the Odysseus app through Dockge. It started fine, but I couldn't open it from any other device on the network.

Why

Two things. It was only listening on localhost (127.0.0.1), so it ignored everything that wasn't the server itself. And Dockge only manages stacks that live inside its own stacks folder.

Fix

Clone the project into Dockge's stacks path, and change the listen address to 0.0.0.0 so it accepts connections from the network.

Problem

After moving Home Assistant into a VM on the TrueNAS box, the AirCast integration stopped working. It couldn't see any of the Cast devices on the network, even though the VM itself was online and everything else in HA was fine.

Why

AirCast finds devices with multicast discovery (mDNS). By default the VM's network card ignores the guest's requests to receive that multicast traffic, so the discovery packets never reach Home Assistant.

Fix

In TrueNAS go to Virtualization → the HA VM → Devices → NIC → Edit, tick Trust Guest Rx Filters, save and restart the VM, and AirCast can see the speakers again.

Problem

qBittorrent completes the download, Sonarr just sits there and never moves the file into the library.

Why

Path mismatch. qBittorrent reports where it saved the file using its container's path. If Sonarr has the same dataset mounted at a different path, it goes looking in a folder that doesn't exist for it.

Fix

Make the qBittorrent category save path match the in-container mount path exactly, and mount the dataset at the same path in both containers.

Problem

Films I'd deleted long ago were still in the Jellyfin library, and on top of that no movie had the right title or poster.

Fix

Normal rescans didn't clear the ghosts. What worked was wiping the library and letting Jellyfin discover everything again from scratch.

Problem

I use Plex at home and Jellyfin for remote family streaming over Tailscale. I wanted one request page for both.

Why

A single Seerr instance can only be connected to one media server at a time.

Fix

Run two Seerr instances — one for Plex, one for Jellyfin.

Problem

Managing quality profiles through Recyclarr meant editing YAML, and the usual advice is to run separate Radarr/Sonarr instances for 4K and anime, which doubles everything.

Fix

Swapped Recyclarr for Profilarr (it has a proper UI), linked it to the Dictionarry database, and kept one instance per app with multiple profiles inside: Radarr has 2160p Remux + 1080p Remux, Sonarr has 2160p Quality + 1080p Efficient.

Problem

I moved Home Assistant into a VM on the TrueNAS box, but out of the box the board had virtualisation switched off.

Fix

In the BIOS of the ASUS PRIME A320M-K, turn on SVM (AMD's virtualisation) and IOMMU. After that TrueNAS can run VMs.

Problem

Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 sticks gave me compatibility trouble on the A320M-K.

Why

They're not on the board's QVL (the list of RAM the manufacturer actually tested).

Lesson

Check the motherboard's QVL before buying RAM, especially on budget boards.