Create your own online office with Nextcloud

TL;DR

Nextcloud is the opensource solution that allows you to turn many devices into your own online storage solution (like Dropbox). But not only that because thanks to many apps you can expand functionality and create your own online office solution, such as Microsoft’s Office 365 or Google’s Drive.

In this quick guide I have attempted to describe the steps to obtain a basic instance of Nextcloud and take advantage of ONLYOFFICE to be able to edit documents online. This is all made available via Traefik reverse proxy, so as to ensure a secure connection via https.

Activate HTTP/3 in traefik

Wake-on-LAN from Guacamole in docker

The Guacamole service allows a “Wake on LAN” (WOL) packet to be launched before connecting to the machine with VNC or RDP. Unfortunately, by Docker’s default setting, networks configured as bridge do not allow broadcast packets (even if directed to a specific subnet) to be sent out. This prevents the use of WOL and Guacamole. There remains the option of configuring the guacd container on the host network, but this solution has security issues.

Cloudflare origin certificates in Traefik

Using Cloudflare as a DNS provider for your domains, you can take advantage of its SSL certificates to secure your websites. So you don’t have to struggle with Traefik and Let’s Encrypt to generate your own certificates.

This guide is also useful if you use the free domains described in this post, because Cloudflare blocks the creation of certificates via Let’s Encrypt.

Concept

Cloudflare creates a dedicated certificate that allows the server to communicate only with Cloudflare’s servers. The certificate is not recognized as valid by the various browsers. Cloudflare’s proxies will then provide a certificate that is valid and recognized by all major browsers.

Multiple domains for the same container with Traefik

This example shows how you can configure several domains to access the same docker container by using Traefik. In this example I want to connect the domains whoami.example.com and whoami.traefik-examples.tk to the same docker container.

All necessary files are available on GitHub.

Requirements

1. Two domain names that both point to the Traefik instance (in this example I use example.com and traefik-examples.tk)
2. For both domains the SSL certificate is generated by Let’s Encrypt
3. Traefik is already working (see basic example)

Steps

1. Aggiungere o modificare il docker-compose dei container interessati

  whoami:
    image: containous/whoami
    container_name: whoami
    labels:
      - 'traefik.enable=true'
      - "traefik.http.routers.whoami.rule=Host(`whoami.example.com`) || Host(`whoami.traefik-examples.tk`)"  # <== edit
      - 'traefik.http.routers.whoami.entrypoints=web-secure'
      - 'traefik.http.routers.whoami.tls=true'
      - "traefik.http.routers.whoami.tls.certresolver=certificato"
      - "traefik.http.routers.whoami.tls.domains[0].main=*.example.com"
      - "traefik.http.routers.whoami.tls.domains[1].main=*.traefik-examples.tk" # <== add

2. Recreate the whoami container with the command

sudo docker-compose up -d whoami

3. In the browser try to reach the site using both addresses

If you discover problems in this guide or in the configuration files, you can open an issue on GitHub. Thank you!

Secondary home management experience with Home Assistant

TL;DR

Taking advantage of the unofficial integration I connect two instances of Home Assistant to each other. Thanks to the Wireguard addons I am able to avoid the fact that the 4G modem does not have a public IP address.

Intro

Due to the 2G shutdown in Switzerland, I had to change the heating management system of the second house in the mountains. After some attempts for more than a year a working and resilient solution has been in operation. I had already described some attempts in previous posts, here I collect the experience after more than a year of operation.

Free domain for home projects