Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What do you self-host?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 347 posts

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

#311

Post by vaxman »

mavidser wrote: post #133
tnsittpsif wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much do you spend on the remote server on a monthly basis? Also, what's the hardware you use for the home server?

Remote server's a 20USD/month DigitalOcean droplet with 4GB memory. Though even half of that would also have specified for these services. Home server's a Raspberry Pi 4.

Prefab system images From Russia With Love, including password managers and surfing proxies, spun up on a VPS operated by totally unknown people (probably remoted to the actual DC from some place with bad water)...security nightmare. When I see Statue of Liberty sticking up out of the water on the shoreline, imma scream like Charles Heston! Need Congress/FTC to set guidelines. In mean time, know that you don't get all the benefits of that stack for "free", you're burning down future hours that will be in disaster recovery mode.

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

#312

Post by vaxman »

mavidser wrote: post #159
mavidser wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote server's a 20USD/month DigitalOcean droplet with 4GB memory. Though even half of that would also have specified for these services. Home server's a Raspberry Pi 4.

s/specified/sufficed

..and note rPis don't have error checking memory and have disk errors all the time

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

#313

Post by slavox »

dcchambers wrote: post #306

A household wiki. Contains all kinds of information about our house and lives. We used to track stuff like this in a google doc but it was getting unwieldy. I wasn't happy with any of the free wiki hosting solutions available so I ended up self-hosting a mediawiki site. It's been...challenging...to convince my wife and family to adapt and use wiki markup. I've been considering switching to something that uses standar…

I also had issues with the mediawiki/wiki editors and their clumsy nature.

For me I'm just after a simple pure text knowledge-base.

Currently I use vuepress https://vuepress.vuejs.org/

The positives with vuepress for me were:

* Plain Markdown (With a little bit of metadata)

* Auto generated search (Just titles by default)

* Auto Generated sidebar menus

The negatives:

* No automatic site contents, I mostly use the search to move around docs

* Search is exact not fuzzy

* The menu settings are in a hidden folder

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

#314

Post by mmcnl »

Besides some self-hosted applications, this is some stuff that is very useful to me:

* Nextcloud - your own Dropbox! Amazing stuff.

* VPN - simple Docker service that is super reliable and easy to set up (docker-ipsec-vpn-server)

* Ghost - a very nice lean and mean blogging CMS

* MQTT broker for temperature sensors

* Samba server

* Deluge - Torrent client for local use

* Sabnzbd - NZB client

* Gitea - my own Git server

* Mail forwarder - very handy if you just want to be able to receive email on certain addresses without setting up a mailbox

* Pihole - DNS ad-blocking

* Jellyfin - self-hosted Netflix

It's become sort of my hobby to self-host these kind of things. I use all of these services almost daily and it's very rewarding to be able to fully self-host it. I also really love Docker, self-hosting truly entered a new era thanks to readily avaibable Docker images that make it very easy to experiment and run things in production without having to worry about breaking stuff.

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

#315

Post by avl999 »

maxerickson wrote: post #218
teddyh wrote: post #196

“Self-host” is such a weird word. Having your own stuff yourself should be the default , should it not? I mean, you don’t “self-drive” your car, nor “self-work” your job. The corresponding words instead exists for the opposites: You can have a chauffeur and you can outsource your job. I think the problem is entirely caused by the US having absolutely abysmal private internet speeds and capacity. Since you can’t then…

If you take a broader lens, having a private vehicle is an expensive hobby for the rich. And most people actually do outsource their jobs. They are employees rather than working for themselves…

> If you take a broader lens, having a private vehicle is an expensive hobby for the rich.

That might be true if you are in SF, NY, Toronto, London or some other major metropolitan with a good public transportation network. However for a large number of places in North America including metropolitans like LA, San Diego, Minneapolis, Dallas, having a car is almost as necessary as anything as that is the only way to get around the city without spending half a day in public transit.

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

#316

Post by 0x0aff374668 »

AYBABTME wrote: post #138
0x0aff374668 wrote: post #116

Why are so many folks here running media servers? Are you really streaming your own video / audio libraries, or is there something else it is useful for? I'd be rather shocked to learn people still store digitally media locally.

I use it for my boat (offgrid) & for travels, so we're not stuck behind regional content filters, like mid-way a series and we arrive in a new country and it's not on Netflix here.

This is the coolest response. :)

(You didn't by any chance sail around Cape horn in 2016? I met this really cool older couple in Central America who had been living at sea for 17 years.)

Reading all of the replies I realize that sometime between 2007 and 2012 I just gave up entirely on storing media locally. I don't watch movies (e.g. no cable or netflix), but I've been using spotify for a decade maybe? One response makes a good point: it is a waste of overall bandwidth to stream content.

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

#317

Post by gnfurlong »

cyphar wrote: post #292
mwcampbell wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you taken a look at podman / buildah? My understanding is that podman resolves all of the security concerns you highlight above while mostly maintaining compatability with the docker cli and existing docker images. It gets rid of the docker daemon so your containers (and restart policy) can just be managed by your existing service manager.

I only just recently discovered podman and I've been pretty excited. Having never used LXD and only understanding the high level differences between the two, I'm curious how it compares with regards to security and usability.

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

#318

Post by johntash »

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.

You might like Pass [0] or GoPass [1] which had more features the last I looked at it.

They both store passwords/data in gpg-encrypted files in a git repo. I'm not sure what the state of GUIs/browser plugins are for it, but I'm pretty sure there are some out there.

You can also set up your git config to be able to diff encrypted .gpg files so that the files are diff-able even though they're encrypted.

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

[1]: https://github.com/gopasspw/gopass

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

#319

Post by cyphar »

gnfurlong wrote: post #317
cyphar wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you taken a look at podman / buildah? My understanding is that podman resolves all of the security concerns you highlight above while mostly maintaining compatability with the docker cli and existing docker images. It gets rid of the docker daemon so your containers (and restart policy) can just be managed by your existing service manager. I only just recently discovered podman and I've been pretty excited. Havi…

I'm a little bit too familiar with podman. LXD is more mature and actually implements all of the hardening features I mentioned. podman could implement them in theory, but doesn't. Its default security posture is very similar (though not the same as) Docker. Don't get me wrong, I do want to see podman succeed -- but I don't like the amount of unneeded hype around it. It's effectively a Docker rewrite by Red Hat (and other folks) that has some fairly important improvements, but it's not a revolutionary new concept. As for buildah, I am too biased to respond to that question.

Oh, and most of the Docker CVEs found in recent years -- including those I've found -- have also impacted podman. The most brazen example is that podman was vulnerable to a trivial symlink attack that I fixed in Docker 5 years ago[1,2]. It turns out that both Docker and podman were vulnerable to a more complicated attack, but the fact that podman didn't do any special handling of symlinks is just odd.

[Disclaimer: The above is my personal opinion.]

[1]: https://github.com/containers/libpod/pull/3214 [2]: https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/5720

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

#320

Post by CaptainJustin »

Running a few different containers in Docker at home.

- Hand-rolled Go reverse proxy with TLS from LE.

- Several Pg DBs for development.

- VPN server.

- Chisel for hosting things "from home" while running on my laptop remotely.

- Etcd

- Jenkins

- Gitea

- Pi-hole

- A few different development projects

Post reply on HN