My Next Update and it is not going well...

Well here I am again, making another update for you all, hoping to provide a little bit of good news, unfortunately that’s not the case…Here’s the deal, I’m a big linux distro hopper, and at some point I wanted to play an old and outdated but still supported MMO on my Windows install, so I resized the partition with my containers, and also installed an Arch distro called CachyOS on my daily driver SSD. These actions have caused the GRUB bootloader on my EndeavorOS install that houses my containers for Cloudflare and Jellyfin, to wipe itself out and I have no idea why that would’ve happened other than Windows essentially destroying the boot loader when I created a gaming partition on that drive to install games on Windows, long story short I won’t be doing that again and have since moved towards setting up a stable daily driver and a stable server install for my PC and will not be touching it in the future.

It’s a bit disappointing, because now my Cloudflare Tunnels throw up a 502 error for a bad gateway and I can’t for the life of me figure out what’s going on. I’ve verified the Jellyfin service is working on the container by accessing the service through my local PC through the Jellyfin port on my host IP address, but it simply won’t go through my CloudFlare Tunnel…I’ve tried recreating the tunnel multiple times, deleting any remnant DNS A records, and creating direct routes to the Jellyfin server, only to be met with the 502 Bad Gateway errors whenever I try to access the site through the hostname provided to my tunnel, it simply doesn’t work. I did find out the tunnel is using IPV6 instead of IPV4, so I’m not sure if that has something to do with the issue or not, but I’m going to look down that route and hopefully figure things out from there and find a solution.

I’m a little scatterbrained at the moment, this website feels like the only successful thing I’ve been able to create, and in essence that’s true. However, this has been a very good lesson in container management through Docker and Docker Compose, it just beats you down when things simply don’t work and you have no frame of reference to troubleshoot. I’m usually pretty good about isolating problems and narrowing down a solution, that really has been my biggest asset in my career within IT, my ability to troubleshoot problems piece by piece and rationalize a solution that works, but in this case, it’s just beating me down and I can’t seem to find a solution! I have a friend that might be able to help me out, we’ll see if getting a second pair of eyes on the situation will help, it helped the first time around, so maybe it will help again.

So the localized LLM’s, it’s not going at all, unfortunately I haven’t really had the time nor the motivation to dive deep into this and every time I do try to dive into it, I’m met with the same problems, half baked frontends that either work half the time or don’t work at all. I know, I’m probably not configuring everything correctly, which is why I’m doing this, but just like with a simple Jellyfin server running through a CloudFlare Tunnel, it beats you down when it doesn’t work how you expect, and it only gets harder to motivate yourself. I’ve put NextCloud and the Discord bot on the back-burner for now, I’ve been fighting a horrible cold and stomach bug that’s put me out of action for a few days, and I’m hoping to dive back into this stuff throughout the week. Even if I can’t get my Jellyfin server to work through the CloudFlare Tunnel, I’m hoping I can, at the very least, start working on other projects on the side like the Localized LLM and Discord bot. I’ve also been looking into cloud containers and possibly setting up my containers through something like Google Cloud Run, that way I only need the docker files as a backup and the containers are running in a persistent environment, and I don’t need to worry about hosting them from my server and managing it full-time.

Well there you have it, my latest update, it hasn’t been going well, but you know, that’s the beauty of trying to learn something new. If you fail, it’s still a learning experience, and if you’ve learned something than you still haven’t failed, so it’s best to just keep getting back up and working hard for a solution.

This is your friendly man without a face, DeFaced signing out!