pimeys

I'm looking for a service I could install to archive a huge pile of letters, preferably in PDF form, to a database. I'm living in a country where paper is still king, and digital services are either non-existent, or loathed (Germany). My current situation is that I have a mailbox with lots of PDFs all over the place, but also many folders of paper sent in 2007 etc. that I have to keep, but I also have to find them every five years or so.

So what I'd like to have is a service to my homelab, where I could scan these and copy these, that would index them, clean them, OCR them and all that good stuff. It should have really good metadata abilities, because my files are usually named in a very random way, so if I could copy these, and quickly categorize them, that would be really awesome.

There is one service called Papermerge, that kind of fits to my use-case. I spent one afternoon with it, and there were a few issues:

• crashes quite often
• when sending a large folder of PDFs, uses all the CPU and crashes again
• categorizing functions are not very good, it takes time to get everything together and clean when organizing files

This might not be very interesting if your country has digital services for everything, but for us needing to suffer this paper madness, a service to do so would be great.

I'm running a small Lemmy server using the Ansible setup modified to our needs. Now, we do not post that many (if any) images, but I'm also running an Akkoma server with Cloudflare R2 setup for images, and I was wondering is there an easy way to just set the Lemmy server to use this bucket? Would be better than to just keep them lying around in the server disk for sure.

If somebody else did this, is there any written documentation on the best practices? I might need to (again) modify the Ansible scripts, but I'd love to not waste time making mistakes if there's a good way to do this.

How would a man wear pants?

This weekend I installed my own Lemmy instance, so I want to share the instructions to help others, who want to do the same.

I used the Ansible script and it was pretty easy. First I wanted to use my existing PosgreSQL server, what I already use for my Akkoma server. It didn't really work out that well, the migrations failed and I couldn't figure out what didn't work. Eventually I just went back using PostgreSQL on Docker. If you don't start modifying the script, and just use the dockerized PostgreSQL, you will have no problems with the installation.

What you need first is a cheap (or expensive, if you decide to invite million friends to your instance) VPS: I use Hetzner Cloud, which has been working for me super well for many years and I'm very happy with the service. I got the second cheapest AMD instance, with two cores and two gigabytes of RAM. Before buying the instance, you need to upload an SSH key to Hetzner. If you don't have one, creating is easy from the command line: ssh-keygen -t ecdsa. What you need to give to Hetzner is your public key; the one with the .pub extension in your $HOME/.ssh directory. Do not give the private key to anyone. Go with Ubuntu, might work the best with the Ansible script.

You can now SSH to the instance: ssh root@<ip-address from the Hetzner control panel>.

Next what you need is a domain name for the server. Lemmy wants an A record, and being a good internet citizen, you also get an AAAA record for the IPv6 users. I use Cloudflare for my DNS records. It's very easy to set them from their control panel. Do not set the proxy on just yet, we'll come back to that later. You can get the IP addresses from the Hetzner panel. The IPv4 you just copy, for the IPv6 you have to replace the ::/64 with ::1.

Now you should be able to ssh to your instance with the new domain name. It's time to follow the Ansible instructions for Lemmy, just run the script and see it's done correctly with no errors. When you can login to your Lemmy instance as an admin, go back to Cloudflare and turn on proxying to your A and AAAA records to hide your server IP and prevent DDOS attacks.

The first time federation is a bit slow in the beginning. Go to search in your instance, and search for [email protected]. It takes a while for the result to arrive. You can SSH to your instance, and look for the logs of your Lemmy image:

root@lemmy:~# docker ps
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                        COMMAND                  CREATED        STATUS        PORTS                                NAMES
9e940b84cc45   dessalines/lemmy-ui:0.17.3   "docker-entrypoint.s…"   22 hours ago   Up 22 hours   127.0.0.1:6719->1234/tcp             lemmynaukio_lemmy-ui_1
6442d9d93554   dessalines/lemmy:0.17.3      "/app/lemmy"             22 hours ago   Up 22 hours   127.0.0.1:20926->8536/tcp            lemmynaukio_lemmy_1
36a030f7bf27   asonix/pictrs:0.3.1          "/sbin/tini -- /usr/…"   22 hours ago   Up 22 hours   6669/tcp, 127.0.0.1:8934->8080/tcp   lemmynaukio_pictrs_1
979be89076b2   postgres:15-alpine           "docker-entrypoint.s…"   22 hours ago   Up 22 hours   5432/tcp                             lemmynaukio_postgres_1
774112d48c87   mwader/postfix-relay         "/root/run"              23 hours ago   Up 23 hours   25/tcp                               lemmynaukio_postfix_1

> docker logs -f 6442d9d93554

This should start showing you the federated posts in real time. Eventually your search will show up, you can click the community open and subscribe to it. Do the same for other communities what you want to follow, federate other instances and eventually you are part of the federation. It gets faster and easier for the other users, but the beginning is a bit slow.

Congratulations, you're now a Lemmy admin and part of the bigger federation.