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Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

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Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

#81

Post by Georgelemental »

jve wrote: post #38
fallenhitokiri wrote: post #7

I do not know of an opinionated beginners guide, but would recommend browsing r/selfhosted and r/homelab a bit. Lots of these and similar questions are answered on a regular basis. Some starting points - photos: NextCloud - git: Gitea - BitWarden: Vaultwarden (even if you deploy this locally you want a SSL certificate as clients will refuse to connect otherwise) I'd suggest using official docker images to get started…

> - photos: NextCloud If you don't mind horrible experience viewing photos/videos via nextcloud, go on. In my case this was unusable. Thumbnails not pregenerated even after trying (Yeah, didn't spend whole day on that issue) and generates on the fly. So viewing larger directory is... rubbish. Videos don't play as nice not to say they don't even have thumbnails. Feels like "guest book" from 2000 - no features that aut…

Nextcloud released a new version of their photos app a few days ago (https://nextcloud.com/blog/announcing-nextcloud-hub-3-brand-...). Haven't had the chance to try it yet though

Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

#82

Post by a-t-0 »

A bit of self-promotion regarding your:"host my own bare git repos and not rely on GitHub." objective: Here is a work-in-progress code for 1-command deployment of a self-hosted GitLab server over tor, with free, limitless self-hosted CI (that can still report build status results to GitHub if you want): https://github.com/TruCol/Self-host-GitLab-CI-for-GitHub

Tor because that way your self-hosting works from wherever you are, even if you're in a flat behind a gateway/router you do not have access to. 1-click because I like the user experience to be as simple as possible.

Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

#83

Post by kickaha »

leejoramo wrote: post #65

> In short it’s all about control, privacy, and security, in that order. I am going to strongly urge you to consider changing that order and move *security* to the first priority. I have long run my own servers, it is much easier to setup a server with strong security foundation, than to clean up afterwards. As a beginner, you should stick to a well known and documented Linux server distribution such as Ubuntu Server…

Wow, thank you for all the concrete pointers!

>> In short it’s all about control, privacy, and security, in that order.

> I am going to strongly urge you to consider changing that order and move security to the first priority.

I made myself easily misunderstood. On the desktop, I moved away from proprietary platforms because of good old-fashioned paranoia ("security and privacy"), but first for control.

Needless to say, for anything exposed to the net all considerations come after security. That's why I need to "understand."

Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

#85

Post by kickaha »

z3t4 wrote: post #55

I suggest installing Debian or Ubuntu on the NAS so that you will be familiar. Then install all the services on that NAS box. Next step is to learn iptables and make your own router. Could make the NAS into a router if it has two or more network ports. A router is just some iptables commands.

Thank god my wife will never know I read those words. :-)

Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

#86

Post by kickaha »

dml2135 wrote: post #20

I build my own server for the first time last year running Unraid OS. It's been great. Super easy to set up, all apps are installed as docker containers. SpaceInvaderOne and Ibracorp are great youtube resources, and their forum community is super active and helpful. Definitely still an amateur in my networking knowledge but I've learned a ton over the past year.

Thanks for those pointers!

Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

#88

Post by kickaha »

smachiz wrote: post #39
jzymbaluk wrote: post #31

One thing that has kept me from starting to self-host is that I'm terrified of the thought of opening ports on my network to the open internet. For people who have self-hosted, how do you secure or set up your network?

nginx or other reverse proxy running SSL - don't open ports directly to any of the apps. You should also run fail2ban on everything.

jzymbaluk's fear is mine too. I should have made it explicit!

I'll follow these pointers for sure.

Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

#90

Post by mindslight »

breakds wrote: post #77

I have been there. The progress was rather slow until I started to use NixOS. The learning curve is a bit steep but is very rewarding. It is not specific to self-hosting stuff, but as a side effect it makes self hosting super easy (declarative, readable, etc). For most of the services that you would like, you just write a simple configuration and deploy it. For example, to run the service shiori ( https://github.com/…

I'll second the NixOS recommendation, but cautiously as it is learning more (different) sysadmin rather than networking. The downside is your "get myself out of trouble when I mess up or an update breaks" is mostly changed. The upside is the NixOS solution is to reboot and choose the previous GRUB entry. Also you get a focused community where the documentation is nice and dense, and a natural reason to avoid curl|sh, docker bundles, and other disempowering nonsense.

If your goal is to self-host, you don't need to learn too much networking. Focus on the Linode, which has a nice public IP, and try out the various suggestions people have made for services.

To learn networking specifically, do projects with networking. Set up wireguard directly rather than tailscale. Multi home a server with ipv6 tunnels (he.net, 6to4, etc). Set up your own router for your house. Host a service at home, either on your home IP or with a port forwarded from the VPS. Learn nftables and how packets flow through the kernel rather than limping along with copypasta iptables commands.

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