Best Notification System for Home Servers with Apprise Push Alerts

do you hate SMTP notifications to get notifications outside of your home lab as much as I do most likely you do I'm going to introduce you guys to two free and open source notification solutions that will totally change the Paradigm of how you can send and receive notifications from your home lab environment so stick around we're going to see how you can totally get rid of a public SMTP server and pivot to using a modern notification service to both send and receive notifications and alerts from your home lab let's Dive Right In [Music] like most of you I run many services and applications in my home lab environment so I monitor those regularly many of the notification Solutions built into existing applications only give you the option for SMTP monitoring or AKA sending you an email if something is not right well the problem with email is most public email providers that we can freely use to bounce SMTP off of like our Gmail address a Microsoft address so on and so forth rightly so they have introduced more and more security restrictions on email services and what I have seen when I have had situations where I've blast out a lot of notifications and alerts is the public Gmail SMTP server will start denying those emails at least for a few hours so you have a situation that is kind of a perfect storm service is down and you're not able to get your notifications three that led me on a search to see how I could re-architect notifications and that led me to discover two free and open source solutions that have allowed me to totally change how I architect notifications coming from the home lab and those Solutions are a prize or apprise not sure the pronunciation there and another solution called mailrise that is a piggyback solution off of the a prize notification framework it allows you to take normal SMTP messaging and translate those normal emails to a prize messaging a prize supports dozens of public modern messaging services that allow you to instantaneously receive notifications without the use of a public SMTP AKA email server using a prize developers and devops Engineers have the ability to speak to a single API layer to send notifications instead of having to code and configure their solutions to speak to multiple notification services with their own individual and unique API requirements instead a prize does the heavy lifting for you and the developer sends a notification to a prize a prize then translates that and sends it to the configured notification service now I'm going to scroll down and I want to just buzz through and show you guys the number of notification services that a prize allows you to effectively send notifications and alerting to this list is intimidating in its link quite frankly you will most likely find any notification service that you want to use all of the popular most prevalent notification Services out there are on this list from what I see as you can see a prize allows you to with one Library control all of the notifications sent out to multiple services so you're not having to code or find config files or other translations to allow you to specifically communicate with that modern notification alerting and messaging system instead you've got that abstraction layer with a prize that performs those translations for you if you can speak with a prize then a prize communicates those messages to those notification Services as we mentioned at the outset what if you have Legacy applications even modern applications Modern Hardware Legacy Hardware many times often only supports SMTP based notifications are you stuck in the dark ages of 2005 with just SMTP messaging that's where the next free and open source project that I want to introduce you guys to today comes into play that solution is mail rise you may be wondering I'm not a developer I just simply want to be be able to send notifications using a prize but how do I do that I want to introduce you to a solution that brings this full circle the solution is mail rise essentially allows us to replace an internal SMTP relay server that you may be running in your home lab as I was in the mail rise solution acts as an SMTP Gateway that listens for normal email messages sent via SMTP and then it translates those to a prize messages that allow you to send those out to very popular notification Services as shown here 60 plus notification services that are supported by a prize going back to the problem we mentioned at the outset what if you have Legacy devices that know nothing about these modern Services all they can do is SMTP that's where mail rise comes into the picture in that it essentially enables all of these modern notification services to send those notifications out and the Legacy device or solution or application it knows no different all it knows is hey I'm sending an SMTP message to the SMTP relay little does it know we're using mail rise mail rise receives that message it then translates it to these modern push notifications and messaging Solutions and one of the things that I think is just fantastic about mail rise and the config for this is extremely simple literally in one two three four lines of config you can have a working configuration to send your SMTP messages to something like pushover there is an example file at the bottom of the GitHub page that gives you many examples of how you would Implement notifications and alerting to very common services that you want to interact with now this gets even more exciting for us in our home labs in that we can now use modern notifications regardless of whether the application the hardware the service or the solution supports those application notification Frameworks we can still with mail rise take advantage of their SMTP notification capabilities translate that SMTP message on-prem and then use a prize to communicate those notifications out to the modern messaging services that we want to take advantage of let's see how we can easily stand up a mail rise deployment in our lab environment to receive these SMTP notification requests from the devices internally in our home lab Network and how we can easily set up a quick and easy config file to push out to a notification service to install mailrise on the official GitHub page we're just going to scroll down to the installation section here we can install this as a Docker container however today I'm going to just show you guys how to Simply install this on a Linux host you'll note under the the Pi Pi section you can find mail rise on Pi Pi so we can click that link and it's going to show us how to install Mel rise 1.3.0 which is the latest as of the making of this video so I'm going to copy the command we're going to go back out to our SSH session that we have to our Linux host one of the things as a prerequisite that you're going to want to have is you're going to want to and make sure that you have installed Python 3 pip which I've already done well I'm going to paste out the command hip install mail rise and we're just going to execute that command and in just a few seconds you can see how quick and easy it is to install the Mel rise package now that we have mail rise installed the next step that we need to take is create a service file for our mail rise installation repeat the service file we're going to navigate out to systemd and system we want to change our directory there then we're going going to create a file called mailrise dot service and we're going to edit that file now that we have the file created we're going to paste in some configuration so basically the service file is very simple we're telling it where to get the executable for the mail rise installation then we're also telling it where the mail rise dot config file is and in this config file is where we actually tell mail rise which notification services that we want it to translate to now that we have the file created we're going to save the mail rise service configuration now as we saw in the service configuration we need to create the mailrise.config file I've navigated back out to the Etsy folder and we're simply going to create a file called mailrise.com and we're going to edit that file at this point our mailrise.com file will contain the configuration that we see in the documentation we're going to actually use the documentation for our configuration found on the apprise GitHub site so I'm going to scroll all way down to push over and show you the examples that they give for the pushover notifications so for pushover you can use a combination of any of these notifications I want all my devices for all of the configured devices to receive notifications so that literally looks like this without the extra pushover configuration in there so we just simply have the user at token this is not literal so I need to change this just to be clear I'm simply pasting this in to show you guys what actually needs to go here because I was a bit confused when I first set this up as to what actually goes here based on the example that they showed here when I started looking at the a prize GitHub documentation this was a bit more intuitive that this is what it actually needs when we go out to pushover and configure our pushover configuration sign up for the service you're going to get a string that represents your user then we need in pushover to create what they refer to as an application and once you create that application you can then generate a token for your application so you're going to have a string here and then a a very long token string here as well to represent the application that you want to push those notifications out to then you have of course your mobile devices and the devices you have there are tied to your application so that's how everything works with the pushover configuration at this point we would simply start the mail rise service using the systemctl start melrise dot service configuration file and it will read from the mail rise configuration to know which notification Services we want to use now let's take a look at actually testing our notifications that we have configured by putting these pieces to the notification puzzle together as you can see so far it's not anything too difficult as we get the pieces together it fits together nicely and the solution is not complicated now we want to actually test our mail rise configuration and our mailrise installation to make sure that our notifications are received as expected I'm going to use a very common Powershell commandlet the send Dash mail message commandlet I have long used to test email servers or to even generate legitimate emails from various scripts and so on and so forth my mailrise IP is here by default mailrise listens on Port 8025 so I've got both of those in there the SMTP server the port one of the really cool features I like about mailrise is it determines which notification service that you want to notify based on a fictitious email address that you can enter into your notifications with the mail rise configuration it uses a fictitious domain of mailrise dot XYZ then the front part of the email address actually triggers the particular notification service that you want to use here I have pushover at mailrise.xyz when male rise receives the email from this notification it will see that we're wanting to trigger pushover for the notification service also the from address with mail rise can be fictitious as well you can literally put in anything for your from address and then of course we've got our subject and our body of testing what I have went ahead and done as well with my pushover configuration is I've added my workstation to the desktop notifications to allow this particular workstation to receive those desktop notifications so I want to send this and I want to show you guys just how quick that we received the notification using our mail rise configuration okay and as you see we've got a test admin at local testing and we see we've got our toaster notification that popped up on this Windows 11 workstation that quick and we can trigger as many as we want and we will see the notifications come in and it's that quick and that easy now with our notification service tested we know we have connectivity between mail rise a price messaging framework and pushover so now we can point any and all monitoring to our internal mailrise SMTP listener and it will translate those notifications to our notification service that is awesome what do you guys think about this modern approach to notification Services SMTP services are great when they work however with the additional security restriction public SMTP providers like Google and Microsoft and others are having to place on public listeners the ability to Simply send SMTP notifications from a public IP address on a consumer internet connection with no dkim or proper SPF records is becoming more challenging so for me looking at a more modern approach has been extremely beneficial and I'm happy with the outcome of re-architecting notifications from the home lab let me know what you guys are using is there another solution similar to mail rise and a prize messaging framework and other public services that you're using for your home lab notifications well I'm Brandon Lee please do like the video subscribe to the channel and I hope to see you guys soon [Music]

Channel: VirtualizationHowto

Views: 33,660

Keywords:

Id: Cj7A46NuACA

Length: 15min 55sec (955 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 03 2023