Decentralised Image Storage hosted within Secured LAN
In this report/tutorial, An Open-source decentralised image storage service will be configured, using a reverse proxy, free tier cloud servers and a ultra-low power storage device (RPi 2B). This setup splits the workload of the compute across the different hardware avaliable and allows for acceptable application performance while FAR below the recommended minimum hardware specfication for the hosting application, Immich.
Reverse Proxy Setup
On Remote Oracle Free tier server
Download and extract latest frp version for your cpu architecture from
https://github.com/fatedier/frp
Navigate to the directory you extracted the tar file to,
Open the frp server config file:
nano frps.toml
Choose a port for the reverse proxy to be opened on:
For example (default is port 7000):
On your Oracle cloud instance dashboard
To create a firewall exception for this port, click on your subnet name:
Next navigate to the default security list setup automatically when the compute instance was created, the list will look like this:
Next add a new stateless ingress rule as follows:
Back on the Remote Server
Run the server using ./frps -c ./frps.toml
To run in the background and keep using the same shell use:
nohup ./frps \-c ./frps.toml &
On local storage server
Attach Storage to local linux machine
Use lsblk to show storage devices and partitions, note the name of the partition that you would like to share with cloud server
Next create a mount point for the partition, if there is not one already
For example:
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/sandisk
Next install frp
Open the frp client config file
nano frpc.toml
Take note of the client port (default port 7000)
Next, run the client using the command:
./frpc \-c ./frpc.toml
Again, to run in the background and reclaim the shell, use nohangup:
nohup ./frpc -c ./frpc.toml &
The remote server will show the following message when the client connects successfully
Secure file system setup
Next install sshfs
sudo apt install sshfs
On remote server
Also Install sshfs
sudo apt install sshfs
Set up a mount point for the remote folder to be mounted to:
For example:
mkdir /mnt/data2
next connect to the local storage server with the following command:
sshfs \-oport=\[frp remoteport\] pi@127.0.0.1:\[local disk mount point\] \[remote server mount point\]
For example:
sshfs \-oport=6000 pi@127.0.0.1:/media/sandisk /mnt/data2
NOTE: don’t run as su or mount point will be inaccessible by non su
If you are having trouble using sshfs, you can show debug output using environment variables like so:
sshfs \-odebug,sshfs\_debug,loglevel=debug \[^^ rest of command\]
Install Docker
Next install docker
Remove all previous installed docker versions (clean start optional)
for pkg in docker.io docker-doc docker-compose docker-compose-v2 podman-docker containerd runc; do sudo apt-get remove $pkg; done
To install docker and its plugins use
sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin
If apt is not able to find docker you may have to add docker to your repository, to do so, read the official docker page here:
Install Immich
Next install immich
Create and enter a directory for immich to use
mkdir ./immich-app
cd ./immich-app
Next pull the required files docker will use to build the immich instance
wget \-O docker-compose.yml https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/latest/download/docker-compose.yml
wget \-O .env https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/latest/download/example.env
Make sure this file is saved with the name “.env”
Open the .env file with a text editor
Make sure to change the upload location to the remote server mount point you created earlier and set your database password to something private.
Next open the docker-compose.yml in a text editor
Low Hardware Accommodations
To minimise memory usage if needed we can prevent machine learning process from running at the expense of some features by commenting out it’s declaration like so:
Next limit the memory each process can use and allowing limited swap file usage
Under the “immich-server” process add memory limits like so:
Again under the “database” process add the limit parameters as required
If you are running Immich with 1GB of ram or less (far below minimum recommended) swap file usage is required for stable operation. To create a swap file
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1MB count=1024
Next protect the file by setting the file permissions to read and write access for root only
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
Then format the new swap file using the following command:
sudo mkswap /swapfile
Enable the use of a swap file using command:
sudo swapon /swapfile
Next download the latest immich version using
sudo docker compose pull
And start the server using
sudo docker compose up
References
Tunnel https://github.com/fatedier/frp
SSHFS https://phoenixnap.com/kb/sshfs
https://phoenixnap.com/kb/linux-swap-file
https://www.reddit.com/r/immich/comments/1ccxm2c/guide_how_to_setup_immich_from_scratch_in_10/