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Ask HN: What do you self-host?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you self-host?

#291

Post by cyphar »

big_chungus wrote: post #256
cyphar wrote: post #171

I self-host the following at home. Everything is running under LXD (and I have all of the scripts to set it up here[1]): * nginx to reverse-proxy each of the services. * NextCloud. * Matrix Homeserver (synapse). * My website (dumb Flask webapp). * Tor (non-exit) relay. * Tor onion service for my website. * Wireguard VPN (not running in a container, obviously). All running on an openSUSE Leap box, with ZFS as the file…

Why SUSE over another OS? I've used it and like it, though I see more ubuntu, debian, centos among servers. Any particular distinguishing factor/advantage, or just preference?

I've worked for SUSE for quite a few years now, and so I've gotten fairly used to running openSUSE on all my machines (and I do quite like things like the Open Build Service and other openSUSE projects). I'm am a package maintainer for a bunch of openSUSE packages (most of the container-related ones and a few others) -- so I might as well use them myself to make sure they work properly.

Re: Ask HN: What do you self-host?

#292

Post by cyphar »

mwcampbell wrote: post #216
cyphar wrote: post #171

I self-host the following at home. Everything is running under LXD (and I have all of the scripts to set it up here[1]): * nginx to reverse-proxy each of the services. * NextCloud. * Matrix Homeserver (synapse). * My website (dumb Flask webapp). * Tor (non-exit) relay. * Tor onion service for my website. * Wireguard VPN (not running in a container, obviously). All running on an openSUSE Leap box, with ZFS as the file…

I'm curious about why you're using lxd. Is it just that you wanted to try something different from Docker and its rivals? Or is there a reason you think lxd is better for your setup? For a service per container, I figured minimal, immutable containers, rather than containers running full distros, would be better.

The primary reason is that LXD has an indisputably better overall security policy than Docker. They support isolated user namespaces (containers running with different userns mappings), user namespaces are the default, they make use of far more new kernel hardening features than Docker, and so on. If I'm going to self-host something at home and expose it to the internet, I'm simply not going to use Docker.

I used to run Docker containers several years ago, but I found them far more frustrating to manage. --restart policies were fairly hairy to make sure they actually worked properly, the whole "link" system in Docker is pretty frustrating to use, docker-compose has a laundry-list of problems, and so on. With LXD I have a fairly resilient setup that just requires a few proxy devices to link services together, and boot.autostart always works.

Personally, I also find it much simpler to manage a couple of services as full-distro containers. Having to maintain your own Dockerfiles to work around bugs (and missteps) in the "official library" Docker images also added a bunch of senseless headaches. I just have a few scripts that will auto-set up a new LXD container using my configuration -- so I can throw away and recreate any one of my LXD containers.

[Note: I do actually maintain runc -- which is the runtime underneath Docker -- and I've contributed to Docker a fair bit in the past. So all of the above is a bit more than just uneducated conjecture.]

Re: Ask HN: What do you self-host?

#293

Post by ptman »

input_sh wrote: post #124
whalesalad wrote: post #22

Bums me out when I see people putting so many resources into running/building elaborate piracy machines. Plex, radarr, sonarr, etc... (you note some of these services but /r/homelab is notorious for this) Here’s my home lab: https://imgur.com/a/aOAmGq8 I don’t self host anything of value. It’s not cost effective and network performance isn’t the best. Google handles my mail. GitHub can’t be beat. I use Trello and Not…

As soon as I find a DRM-free way to purchase my shows/movies/books, I'll be glad to do so. Until then, yarr.

There are DRM-free ebooks available. https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide/ebooks (and there seems to be other stuff as well: https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide/audio ). But I mostly agree with you. I hope watermarks would be used instead of DRM.

Re: Ask HN: What do you self-host?

#294

Post by dmos62 »

zelly wrote: post #271
dmos62 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sympathize. My meditations about this lead me to thinking about waste as well. Why computer at home though? For someone who moves around a lot and doesn't invest into "a home", this would be bothersome. Not to mention it's more expensive, in terms of energy and money. I think third-party data centers are fine for self-hosting.

There's really no difference. Mainly I use a machine at home instead of a data center VM because that's just one less bill to pay. I have two GPUs in there which would be very expensive on public cloud. I guess one reason people might gravitate to home hosting is owning your own disks, the tinfoil hat perspective. You can encrypt volumes on public cloud as well, but it's still on someone else's machine. They could ta…

I speculate that in the future the trust aspect of using third-party hardware might be solved technologically. And I agree that today the tinfoil sentiment is not baseless.

Re: Ask HN: What do you self-host?

#295

Post by bluegreyred »

ricardbejarano wrote: post #245
bluegreyred wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nice to see somebody using a thinkpad as a homeserver. I remember comparing low power homeservers, consumer NAS and a refurb Thinkpad and the latter won when considering the price/performance and idle power consumption (<5W). You also get a built screen & keyboard for debugging and a efficient DC-UPS if you're brave enough to leave the batteries in. That's of course assuming you don't need multiple terabytes of stora…

I don't overload the CPU and my storage requirements are low. 95% of my used storage is stuff I wouldn't care if it got lost, but just nice to have around. I only have around 2GB of data I don't want to lose. I do leave the batteries in. Is it dangerous? I read some time ago that it is not dangerous, but the capacity of the battery drops significantly, I don't care about capacity, and safe shutdowns are important to…

>I do leave the batteries in. Is it dangerous? I read some time ago that it is not dangerous, but the capacity of the battery drops significantly, I don't care about capacity, and safe shutdowns are important to me.

It's not necessarily dangerous but lithium batteries have a chance to fail and in very rare cases even explode, making them a potential fire hazard. I'm not an expert, maybe someone else can expand on this. If I were to run an old laptop of unknown provenance with a LiIon battery 24/7 completely unattended I'd at least want to make sure that it is on a non-flammable surface without any flammable items nearby.

>In the past I used an HP DL380 Gen. 7 (which I still own, and wouldn't mind selling as I don't use it), but I had to find a solution for the noise. And power consumption was at around 18EUR for my EUR/kWh.

Yes, I am surprised how many people leave power consumption out of the equation. These days you can rent a decent VPS for the power cost of an old refurb server alone.

Re: Ask HN: What do you self-host?

#296

Post by input_sh »

ptman wrote: post #293
input_sh wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as I find a DRM-free way to purchase my shows/movies/books, I'll be glad to do so. Until then, yarr.

There are DRM-free ebooks available. https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide/ebooks (and there seems to be other stuff as well: https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide/audio ). But I mostly agree with you. I hope watermarks would be used instead of DRM.

Ebooks are the easiest of the bunch, but I don't purchase a book simply because it's DRM-free. I find the book I want to read, I look for a DRM-free version of it (I'm fine with watermarks as well), and, if I can't find it, I either strip away the DRM or pirate it.

I specifically didn't mention music because it's easy to get it DRM-free. Pretty much every online music store is DRM-free.

Re: Ask HN: What do you self-host?

#297

Post by lma21 »

sdan wrote: post #278
AdamGibbins wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reduces surface area of attack, you never know when a 0day is going to be found. Exposing monitoring/metrics is particularly interesting as it exposes a lot of information to an attacker, if they're trying to starve your machine of a resource or whatever.

Exactly. They have direct access to your vitals and can push certain buttons to figure out how your system is running to brute-force that attack, ultimately ruining whatever they intended to do. I'm probably going to change how publicly accessible my monitoring view is soon, but for now, it seems pretty cool for everyone to see.

Indeed it was cool.

Would love to get a link to a screenshot of your system's resource monitoring. The description of each panel & eache metric was quite useful!

Re: Ask HN: What do you self-host?

#298

Post by dkarras »

cannonedhamster wrote: post #219
dkarras wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it is necessary to construct and reinforce so arbitrary an apparatus as copyright to substantially stymie the tremendous potential information exchange of computer networks. It makes sense when you consider that information is generated in the first place for an incentive, and that incentive is only possible when copyright guards it. People are more than free to create public information if they choose to do so (and…

US copyright laws have been proliferated around the world. Copyright was originally intended to be a limited-time monopoly which allowed consumers the ability to trust creators and creators the ability to share without worry that their idea would be stolen by other businesses . It was never intended to limit the rights of consumers, it's been warped into that by Disney which rewrote the laws to protect Mickey. Copyri…

>ability to share without worry that their idea would be stolen by other businesses.

Presumably so because consumers stealing the final products was already prohibited / a crime. The final product was generally physical, and consumers would have to physically break into stores to get their copy of whatever was produced and it was already illegal. And even if the consumers obtained their copy by legitimate means, them sharing with other would mean they would lose their own copy. For consumable-ish items (things you only need to experience once to get the value out of the product) this is still a problem of course but there is no easy way of preventing it - but the idea is still there and the limits can be enforced. With digital information, the barrier for entry for such theft is greatly reduced. You don't lose your copy when you share, and stealing is a lot easier too. Doesn't mean it is right or it is in line with the spirit of what we thought ownership meant back in the day.

>Copyright as it is goes against the very purpose of creation preventing any new works from ever being created.

Again, I don't get this. EVERYONE has the OPTION to create works for public domain. Why is this not enough for you? Everything you want is already there. It's just that there is another option for others that don't want to create works for public domain. Why does that bother you?

My guess is that if you were entirely happy with what people create without a motive for profit, you wouldn't care that other people had a copyright option. But you are not happy with what that economic model (free, copyleft etc.) produces by itself. You are aware that that economic model doesn't work. You want free access to information that people with economic incentives create with a price tag attached to it, because you know information generated with profit in mind tends to be more valuable.

Re: Ask HN: What do you self-host?

#299

Post by 0xAF »

stiray wrote: post #223
dillonmckay wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, that would be interesting to note who here is in the EU self-hosting w/ their symmetric, low-cost, high-speed ISPs, versus the US, paying $600/mo for a 5 year contract for 10/10 Mbit DIA setup (anecdote).

I am paying 76 euros/month for 500/100 (This is max achievable, with latency at around 6ms, after replacing their crappy router (12ms+) with mikrotik, throughput can be lower but mostly it is throttled by source) fiber connection + 1 phone (50gb download, LTE, with 80% of country coverage) + max iptv scheme with HBO + static ipv4 ip and reverse resolve. I would love to hear what the prices are around the world. (edit…

In Bulgaria for businnes, you can get 1Gbps/1Gbps dual-line fiber (in case one gets broken) with 16 IPs for about 200-250 EUR/month. But I guess the price is negotiable and will differ. For home you can get 100Mbps/100Mbps (no reverse DNS) for between 7-15 EUR/month.

Re: Ask HN: What do you self-host?

#300

Post by monotux »

dmos62 wrote: post #252
mavidser wrote: post #60

I reworked my servers a while ago to host literally everything through docker, managed via terraform. All web-services are reverse-proxied through traefik At home: loki + cadvisor + node-exporter + grafana + prometheus syncthing tinc vpn server jackett + radarr + sonarr + transmission jellyfin samba server calibre server On a remote server: loki + cadvisor + node-exporter + grafana + prometheus syncthing tinc vpn ser…

I see you're using Bitwarden. Does anyone have recommendations for password+sensitive-data management? I'm currently using Keepass and git, but I have one big qualm. You cannot choose to not version-control that one big encrypted (un-diff-able) file.

Bitwarden can be self-hosted and it's server is open source (and security audited, for what it's worth). I've used it for a few years or so and I've had no issues this far.

One other alternative to keepass is pass[1].

[1]: https://www.passwordstore.org/

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