Willy's Wiki - gentoo

F) Using Containers on Gentoo

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2025-05-06T05:55:13+00:00

F) Using Containers on Gentoo Containers are a great tool that caters to some specific, and important, needs. But be aware that containers are not the solution to selfhosting-made-easy and, specifically, containers have been created to solve different issues than self-hosting!

A) Gentoo Linux Installation

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-02-25T08:26:15+00:00

A) Gentoo Linux Installation Why Gentoo Linux? In short, because its lightweight, gives you full control on your server and can be much more secure than others bloated Linux distributions. More in detail. These instructions are aimed at supporting you during the installation of your home server, the one on which most, or all, your self-hosted home services will run. This same page can be referred to when installing your

Virtualization with KVM-QEMU

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-24T10:43:10+00:00

Virtualization with KVM-QEMU QEMU is a virtualization solution that is fully open-source and probably the most efficient free option on a Linux kernel. It can use the kernel KVM technology to access the highest possible virtualization level. Reference links

Build LineageOS

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2024-03-01T11:02:58+00:00

Build LineageOS This page is about building LineageOS for your mobile device of choice using a Gentoo PC as build-host. If you want to build Gentoo linux to run on an Android device you can refer to this wiki page. Gentoo forums post are my source: this one There are the official LineageOS instructions. The following notes are the changes you need to do on your Gentoo system to be able to build instead of using Ubuntu.

Z) Custom User Services

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2025-05-06T05:45:52+00:00

Z) Custom User Services Since i am running lots of various shaped and managed services, i needed an efficient and simple way to automatically start and stop them. Gentoo already provides a good approach to starting and stopping services called SysVInit that can easily take care of all the services installed by the system, like the NGINX reverse proxy and similar stuff. In general, it can handle directly anything you have installed via emerge.

D) MariaDB / MySQL

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2025-03-13T13:24:20+00:00

D) MariaDB / MySQL MariaDB is the successor to MySQL after Oracle went a bit crazy on it. MariaDB is more updated, more secure and generally the logical successor to MySQL. And it's 100% compatible. Installing MariaDB is easy: emerge mariadb Configuration

B) Home Server Networking setup

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2025-03-13T14:45:02+00:00

B) Home Server Networking setup I assume you have already figured out how many network connections you need on your home server, and which IP address to assign to them. You will need at least two network connections on your home server. I mean at least two physical network Ethernet card. You could use one WiFi link, but i strongly advise against such choice for stability and bandwith reasons.

I) NFTtables

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2025-03-13T13:26:39+00:00

I) NFTtables Linux has very advanced and powerful low-level networking management capabilities. Historically, it was iptables, but it has evolved to NFTables. The difference is not only in the name, but it's deeply rooted in the substance of the Linux kernel.

H) Using npm on Gentoo

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2025-03-13T13:26:30+00:00

H) Using npm on Gentoo Quite similarly to the issue with pip, direct installation of NodeJS packages via npm poses some issues since you don't really want to mess up your system by installing out of tree packages. Everything should be managed by portage, but hey, there are literally thousand of packages that you might find usefull to install via

G) PIP

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2025-03-13T13:26:14+00:00

G) PIP or pip is the Packager Installer for Python and it's a great tool to quickly install and manage python tools. Since PIP behaves like a package manager and will mess up with your Linux installation, Gentoo folks have devised a cool way to let you use pip for anything that is not already packaged into Portage, Gentoo packaging system.

A.x) Replace Linux with Gentoo

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-04-17T15:55:56+00:00

A.x) Replace Linux with Gentoo Ok, let's assume that you have rented a very cheap VPS, or in general that you want to install Gentoo on a machine where another Linux is already installed, and you cannot access the machine locally, or the machine has no USB or CDROM or network boot available at all. This is actually common on very cheap VPS where you might only have an emergency console access, but limited disk space and no external attachable media.

M) Custom Repositories

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2025-05-06T05:45:41+00:00

M) Custom Repositories Portage (Gentoo's package manager) is based on package repositories. It might happen that you need some software which has not been packaged on official Gentoo repository yet or maybe you want to thinker with a newer release that did not hit the official repo yet.

L) Using independent PHP for different services

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2025-03-13T13:27:09+00:00

L) Using independent PHP for different services Ideally, you want to run each PHP-based service within the boundaries of it's own PHP instance. The advantages of such a solution would be that each PHP instance can run as the service user which guarantee service isolation and more protection in data access.

3] Linux

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2025-03-13T09:40:24+00:00

3] Linux Why Linux When it comes to server operating systems (this is valid also for client or workstation O.S., but let's stick to servers not to be off topic), there are three main pillars: trust, stability and understanding. Trust: my operating system must do what i expect it to do, when i expect it to do. I need to

C) Storage Setup

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2025-03-13T13:23:39+00:00

C) Storage Setup During the Gentoo installation on the home server, you should have configured the operating system disk. This page will show you how to setup the data storage, the arrays where you will be storing your files, media and such. In other words, your storage space.

K) SyncThing

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2025-03-13T13:27:01+00:00

K) SyncThing SyncThing is a continuous file synchronization program. It synchronizes files between two or more computers in real time, safely protected from prying eyes. Your data is your data alone and you deserve to choose where it is stored, whether it is shared with some third party, and how it’s transmitted over the internet.

E) Updates

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2025-03-13T13:24:34+00:00

E) Updates Drop this as /etc/cron.weekly/auto_update.sh: #!/bin/bash echo "Update started on $(date)" >> /var/log/autoupdate.log emerge --sync >> /var/log/autoupdate.log emerge -uv --deep --with-bdeps=y @world >> /var/log/autoupdate.log date >> /var/log/autoupdate.log echo "Update terminated on $(date)" >> /var/log/autoupdate.log

J) WireGuard

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-19T08:21:13+00:00

J) WireGuard WireGuard is a modern VPN tunnel solution which is quickly taking the place of OpenVPN. Some of the strong key points of WireGuard are, beside a supposedly more secure implementation, the ease of setup and how it simply merge with the overall linux network management.