What is this?

This is a handbook for our (Maggie and James) house and, to some extent, parts of our life.

I (James) primarily wrote this as a reference for myself.

Our family values control over our data and I like side projects so as a result our home, computers, WiFi and other parts of our digital lives have a lot more going on behind the scenes that we (primarly me, James) are responsible for.

For the most part this stuff works fairly well, and that's good and bad.

It's good because, well, it means things are reliable and rarely need to be tinkered with. There's a bit of survivorship bias here, but I'd also like to think that I have decent instincts for choosing reliable software to run the services we decide to host ourselves.

It's bad because touching services and parts of our house less often means that I forget the details of maintaining, operating, whatever the service in question. That's part of what this document is attempting to address.

TLDR

This handbook exists to make supporting our vast and complicated digital lives easier.

Changelog

Normal Stuff

This section of the handbook covers the maintenance details of "normal" things that every house has.

I'm sure I'm forgetting some things because this is the least interesting to me but it's probably the most useful to a normal person so it's important to have.

Breaker box

Upstairs

Our upstairs wiring is too complicated to be fully documented by the paper labels inside it.

This covers more detail about what each of the breakers manage.

Water shutoff

Air Filters

Our home has four (4) devices that require air filters.

Home Network

WiFi

Physical Network

Hosts

Network Infrastructure

Other machines

Audio

Piracy

Plex

Download clients

Media managers

VPN

Disaster Recovery

Changelog

• 2025-06-03: Initial version (incomplete)

Complete self-hosted disaster plan

Lots left. Here's the rough order

• Finish disaster recovery section. It's the "failsafe" and needs the least details because it's largely "here are the keys, and get help from someone else"
• Finish the photos section
• Add a "domains" section
• Finish "things you probably don't want to maintain" section
• Finish documenting all the computers (I think all that's left is Snapcast machines)
• Add some warnings about disposing of hardware (the Pis all have the wifi password on them)
• Write some notes about helping get onto our server using my SSH keys
• Put this somewhere accessible (git gist?)

Overview

This document is intended to help you, Maggie, recover our important media in the event I die.

As you know, we "self-host" a lot of stuff on our own servers. If I pass then most of that stuff is not important anymore.

The things, I think, you want to make sure you have consistent access to are:

• Photos - https://photos.roo.lol
• Passwords (including mine) - https://passwords.roo.lol
• Recipes - https://kitchen.roo.lol
• Digital documents - https://paperless.roo.lol
• Network file share
• Maybe TV/Movies (unlikely) - https://plex.roo.lol / https://jellyfin.roo.lol
• Your laptop backups

Each of these has a section below on how to recover their data.

In general, my suggestion is to just go back to hosted services for each of these once you've recovered the data.

Email

We do not host our own email. As you know we use Fastmail. Your account is already an admin so you should be able to access my mailbox as needed.

Log in, click Mail in the top left, click Settings, click Users & Sharing, then you should see our accounts in the main section with an "Open Inbox" section by me.

I have mail rules to send anything not directly addressed to me to the "Services" folder (under Inbox) Finance stuff goes to the Finance folder (near the bottom of the list, NOT under Inbox)

Accessing accounts and computers

You should have access to everything you need from Bitwarden. Even if the servers are off then you should be able to use Bitwarden from your phone and laptop.

If someone is helping you with the servers then the easiest thing will be for them to extract my SSH key from my desktop, zendo and use SSH if they need to remote into any of them.

The hard drive of my laptop is encrypted - it will not be usable (NOTE: I should come back and put the password on a Yubikey in the house)

The SSH key to use is in /home/jbrechtel/.ssh/id_ed25519

My username on each machine is jbrechtel

Bitwarden Emergency

Computers

We have a lot of computers in the house. Here is a description of each of them, including the WiFi access points. I also put labels on them so you can be sure which is which.

• AT&T Modem (this can also act like a router, see the WiFi Suggestion section below)
• Biscuit (this is in the closet with the dog food) - it's just a wireless access point
• Nutmeg (this

WiFi suggestion

It might not make sense to do this right away if everything is still working, but eventually you'll want to simplfiy the WiFi setup.

Here's my suggestion:

The simplest thing to do is to get rid of almost all of our own stuff - except for one WiFi access point - "Biscuit"

I suggest you do the following

• Turn on the WiFi on the AT&T Modem/Router and set that up to be the main router - it needs to stay upstairs since that's where the fiber is at.
• Put what is currently "Biscuit" in the basement
• Connect "ATTRouter" to "switch-01" (any port on either, doesn't matter)
• Connect "switch-01" to "Biscuit" (use one of ports 1-4 on "switch-01" and the port that has a lightning icon on "Biscuit")

Note that "Biscuit" does not need a separate power cable when connected to "switch-01" if you used the ports I mention above.

As for setting up "ATTRouter" to be the main router - the easiest thing to do is just reset it to the factory defaults. An AT&T tech can help with this. Once it's back to defaults you will probably want to set the WiFi network name and password to something easier to remember and that will be your upstairs network. "Biscuit" will be the downstairs one.

The password for the ATT Router is shared in Bitwarden under "ATT Router"

http://192.168.1.254

Recovery

TODO Photos

Passwords

This should be relatively easy. Just a handful of straight forward steps below.

You should be able to access all the passwords from your phone or your laptop even if everything at home is off.

• Open Bitwarden and go to Settings -> Vault Items -> Export vault
• Leave "Export from" set to "My vault" and the format as JSON
• Export vault again and select "Leonard-Brechtel Shared" and leave the format as JSON
• Create a new account on the hosted version of Bitwarden at https://bitwarden.com (you should probably get a paid account, I don't know how they tier the features)
• Sign in to your new Bitwarden.com account go to Settings -> Vault Options -> Import
• Import each of the two files you just exported
• Confirm both your personal and our shared passwords are in the new Bitwarden.com account
• Delete the JSON files and empty your trash so you don't accidentally leave them on your computer unprotected.

TODO Digital documents

This covers all the files at https://paperless.roo.lol

TODO Network file share

Recipes

The software we use, Recipya, lets you download all of the recipes as separate PDF files in a single zip file - but it obviously needs to be running to do that.

If the server is up

• Go to https://kitchen.roo.lol
• Click the "J" in the top right (it does not require you to log in)
• Click Settings
• Click Data
• Change "JSON" to "PDF" in the Export section
• Click the download icon to the right of the now selected "PDF"

If the server is down

You'll need help from someone to start the site and then follow the instructions above.

The site is on the server labeled "pandemic.brechtel" - it's the big black box in the basement.

TV/Movies

Where to put them

Obviously you can just let these go because you won't be uploading them to some online service.

However, if you want to keep them then you'll want to buy a pretty beefy external hard drive to store them on.

At the time of this writing they take up about 11TB of space. 8TB of TV and 3TB of movies.

How to get them

If the servers are still running then you should be able to access them from the network share from your laptop

• Hook up an external hard drive to your computer - you may need to format it
• Open Finder
• Hit CMD+K
• Select or enter the pandemic.brechtel server
• Select select the TV folder
• Copy the files to the external hard drive
• Repeat for movies

These are the raw video files - you can play them by double clicking them and they should open in VLC.

The other things on our servers include (but probably aren't limited to)

• Multi-room audio setup
• Smart home / HomeAssistant (see notes on this below)

TODO Your laptop backups

Things you probably don't want to maintain

Smart home / HomeAssistant

As you know the whole system basically works fine even if the server is off. There are a few exceptions / annoyances but nothing major.

The locks will still work, the camera in Heidi's room will still work, all of the "smart switches" and bulbs and lamps will still work like normal.

I suggest you just turn it off - it will be a pain to maintain it. If you really want to maintain it then check out the r/homeassistant subreddit and ask for help. The community there is generally very helpful in these situations from what I've seen.

Phillip Campbell is also into home automation so he might be able to help.

The things that will stop working if the server is turned off

• Dimming lights with sunset
• Ikea buttons
• Nursery buttons for lights
• The dance party lights will not work anymore

Disaster Recovery (if all the hardware at home is gone)

If something happened to the house and the computer are all fried then you still have two offsite backups. Restoring things becomes a bit trickier but not impossible.

You'll need help from a techy friend.

Backups are stored using the backup software "Kopia" (https://kopia.io/) There are stored in two locations

• Backblaze https://www.backblaze.com/ - the password for this is in Bitwarden and shared with you.
• Hive (at the time of writing, this is at home but I plan on giving it to either Trevis or leave it at your parents)

I use Kopia for storing offsite backups. https://kopia.io/

The information needed to access this repository is in Bitwarden under "Kopia Disaster Recovery Password"

The backup here should have a regular snapshot of everything important at home (NOT movies and TV shows)

Using Kopia, you may need to click "Disconnect" on your existing laptop backup repository. Then you should see "Select Storage Type" and click "Use Repository Token" and enter the token from Bitwarden.

Once that connects (it will take a few minutes before you can view the Snapshots in my experience)

1. Select "Snapshots" in Kopia

2. Change "Local Snapshots" to "All Snapshots"

3. Access the files needed as described below

4. all our photos are in /nas1/photos.roo.lol in the library folder. The albums don't exist anymore but hopefully you can recreate them by date and with facial recognition. You could get someone to help you run Immich again from this backup.

5. digital docs are in /services/paperless.roo.lol in media/documents/originals

6. The files on our "network fileshare" are in /nas/files

7. Recipes are there but you'll need to start the site (in /services/kitchen.roo.lol) and follow the instructions for it above to get them.

Backups

Offsite backups are stored on Backblaze B2 (https://www.backblaze.com/)

Onsite backups are kept using ZFS snapshots for the Linux machines and Kopia for Maggie's personal laptop.

Maggie's laptop

Family photos

Onsite backup details

ZFS snapshots are made on each machine using Sanoid ( https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid )

Those snapshots are pulled onto the backup server (azul) using syncoid via the "backup" script of the "backups" user

If something happens to James