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FreedomBox: Run your digital services from your home

freedombox.org

61–70 of 77 posts

Re: FreedomBox: Run your digital services from your home

#61
post #48
post #3

Interesting that they now sell prebuilt kits on new hardware, after years targeting the now-defunct Globalscale Dreamplug. https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/Home-Server/Pionee...

"New" A lot has happened in the SBC market since - with (for example) Odroid C4 you'll get significantly more bang for not much more buck. Just an idea if anyoine feels inspired: Organize with Pine64 to make an upgraded version based on their new architecture slated for release this year. With their strong focus on openness it seems like a perfect match to me.

Man I would love to see pine get into the home NAS space.

Re: FreedomBox: Run your digital services from your home

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the parent, but I use a debian VM inside of a proxmox cluster to run docker services. The config and data services for the various docker images are mounted via NFS, and live in a ZFS pool configured in RAID10. For non-technical users I could see freedombox (or sandstorm.io) being useful, but if you have enough knowledge to manage a vm + use docker-compose, the flexibility is much better.

can you please explain how is this flexibility better? Wont more apps be supported in freedombox? maybe it does not allow plugins?

There are 2 types of self-hosters: Those that want to host useful apps, and those that enjoy tinkering with the hosting setup as an end in itself. There is some debate as to whether there's actually any overlap between these groups.

Re: FreedomBox: Run your digital services from your home

#63

I have a feeling that tunneling might just be a better option that creating VPN in enterprise setting. For instance, if you have confluence, jira etc running in your enterprise private network, instead of creating a VPN and asking endusers to connect to that VPN. They could expose each app with a authenticated tunnel. In this way the threat matrix reduces down to the application that is exposed and not whole private…

Perhaps, you're looking for BeyondCorp style networks? https://research.google.com/pubs/pub45728.html https://tailscale.com and https://cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one come to mind, though there are likely to be several implementations at this point.

I think tunneling is a good way for individuals and small companies to implement BeyondCorps-type systems. That's what I personally do rather than using WireGuard, ZeroTier, etc. Obviously there are tradeoffs either way.

Re: FreedomBox: Run your digital services from your home

#64
post #26

Cloudron.io is by far the most developed homelab in a box kit. Worth a look!

So $15 or $30/month to self-host? What are the benefits?

I thought Cloudron was open source. Has this changed over time, and what exactly is the status?

Re: FreedomBox: Run your digital services from your home

#65
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudron also has a full email stack ready to go, however you are totally right about the residential IPs. They are basically all blacklisted by default, which is also why we had to add easy relay-provider support.

> They are basically all blacklisted by default, which is also why we had to add easy relay-provider support. While I understand why people are doing this, I believe it's not the right way to deal with the problem - basically we're handing over e-mail (as a service) to a few big corps. Each time I have this problem I go through the long and painstaking process of whitelisting the IP and fight to make it work. Usually…

While in principle I agree, the reality is that spam is a real problem.

At least we have a decent amount of competition and choice in the email provider space.

Re: FreedomBox: Run your digital services from your home

#66

I read my ISPs terms of service (the biggest ISP in Australia), and it specifically says you can't host servers on your residential connection. They expect you to buy an extremely expensive small business service to do that. I would assume this is the same for many ISPs, and I think it is terrible.

IMO that should be illegal, assuming there aren't any competitor ISPs available.

Re: FreedomBox: Run your digital services from your home

#67
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my (limited) experience, it all boils down to how well the services actually run in such solutions. Yunohost had many services that were completely broken and not well integrated (to be fair it's really complex to do it well) so the user experience at the end of the day will vary from one to another.

I’ve tried it, and it works surprisingly well. They even have pagekite integration if you’re stuck behind a crappy residential internet provider, like any of the main US providers.

> They even have pagekite integration

Nice, I was wondering if/how they handle tunneling.

Re: FreedomBox: Run your digital services from your home

#68
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So $15 or $30/month to self-host? What are the benefits?

I thought Cloudron was open source. Has this changed over time, and what exactly is the status?

The Cloudron platform as such is source-available: https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/box

All tools around it and more importantly app packages are open source (MIT mostly)

Re: FreedomBox: Run your digital services from your home

#69
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your preferred setup?

Also not the parent. Unraid. https://www.unraid.net Edit: link

+1 for Unraid. If I had a small installation where I didn't need easy-to-expand software raid, I'd probably go with something like Portainer just for the easy docker config.

Re: FreedomBox: Run your digital services from your home

#70
post #16
post #4

Not my preferred setup but I hope products like this help people get into "homelabbing" and self-hosting more of their stuff.

I would build a homelab if I knew exactly what I should be self hosting? Photos? A blog?

Streaming your own media (Plex, Kodi, etc.), hosting your own password manager (BitWarden), home automation (Home Assistant, Node-RED), torrent seed box, a VPN so you can remote into your own network (OpenVPN), security NVR (Unifi Protect, Shinobi), a general file backup server (which can mirror to Google Drive, DropBox, etc. automatically with RClone), etc.

Really just depends on how much work you want to put into it. Pretty much any service you use online you can self-host a version of it.

That's not to say I don't pay for any online services. I still use Google Drive, Netflix, and Spotify, but self-hosting is getting me closer to "cutting the cord" with some of these.

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