Why would one market a device to non-experts as a Dropbox alternative, a NAS to backup for all your computers, and a Bittorrent client, when it ships with a 32GB SD card?
FreedomBox: Run your digital services from your home
71–77 of 77 posts
Re: FreedomBox: Run your digital services from your home
#72As a newbie to this, I got one of the olimex units with ready-to-go SD Card. I've had it for a couple of years, I think. I've tried various of the apps and have settled on using it as an always-on syncthing node and to run Privoxy on my home network.
To access away from home, it is running a Tor hidden service. Wireguard is also provided, so I'm thinking of trying that out as well. It snapshots, so if I get into trouble with a new app... I roll back. I keep all my syncthing data on an attached usb drive. I realize the SD card won't last indefinitely.
What makes it feasible for me is that installation, configuration, and backup is handled by its web interface. I haven't needed to edit config files.
Re: FreedomBox: Run your digital services from your home
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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https://github.com/andrewzah/lilac-docker/tree/master/servic...
None of these services are useful apparently, because I manage them myself instead of relying on something like sandstorm/freedombox.
Re: FreedomBox: Run your digital services from your home
#74I 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.
Telstra? Yeah, they're about as consumer unfriendly as it's possible to be. I went out of my way to avoid paying them any money a few years ago, including moving my workplace (>10 branches around Australia) off Telstra comms infrastructure and onto a competitors whilst also saving about 30% per year.
> I went out of my way to avoid paying them any money [...] whilst also saving about 30% per year.
Just curious, how did you go out of your way by saving money?
"going out of your way" is usually associated with being inconvenienced. but saving money is hardly an inconvenience.
Re: FreedomBox: Run your digital services from your home
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
By far the best solution I've seen is wireguard. Easy to set up, super fast and secure. My little swarm of VMs, containers, and raspberry Pis is all meshed together by wireguard. The only "hard" thing is that wireguard doesn't port forward automatically, you have to add an iptables rule. Took me 10 minutes to figure out how and now whenever I add a service I simply copypaste previous rules and add relevant ports... E…
Several of the tools on the list are based on WireGuard, and I think we'll continue to see other useful abstractions over it in the future. It's an excellent technology. The main reason to use something other than WireGuard today is that it requires root to run, in order to change the network configuration, so you can't use it to tunnel out on machines where you don't have elevated privileges.
My workplace always had web-proxies and openvpn used to allow me to login at home to admin stuff if needed.
Now I imagined wireguard would be perfect for this, but alas its only UDP which will never work on this network, sadly.
Also my cell proider somehow makes wireguard impossible, not sure if they block UDP too.
I was also sad when zerotier wouldn't work through the proxies.
I know, I know, busting proxies is wrong. But for me using it between linux boxes on permanent connections works fine, but its a very small portion of what I want from my VPN.
In the end it turns out Home Assistant on a dyndns HTTPs site solves most of my access problems. Even ssh can be solved using it!
Re: FreedomBox: Run your digital services from your home
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Telstra? Yeah, they're about as consumer unfriendly as it's possible to be. I went out of my way to avoid paying them any money a few years ago, including moving my workplace (>10 branches around Australia) off Telstra comms infrastructure and onto a competitors whilst also saving about 30% per year.
> I went out of my way to avoid paying them any money [...] whilst also saving about 30% per year. Just curious, how did you go out of your way by saving money? "going out of your way" is usually associated with being inconvenienced. but saving money is hardly an inconvenience.
Having to convince older, management types to roll the incumbent provider. 30% savings helped, but they were still quite nervous for the integrity of the new network. Had to do a fair bit of convincing and putting my neck on the line.
Just thinking about it (it was 10+ years ago), it would have been much easier to just sign contract extension with Telstra, no management involvement, no additional research, no putting my reputation in danger.
That's what Telstra relies on.
Re: FreedomBox: Run your digital services from your home
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
So $15 or $30/month to self-host? What are the benefits?
For me paying $15/$30 a month for the ability to self-host is ridiculous (I'd consider it if it was 10 times less, just for the conenience of 1-click installs). However, when you need to install a more complex app like Taiga, it's often simpler to use the free Cloudron account to do it rather than install it by hand.
“ridiculous” is a strong word.
Sure if you’re addicted to free, and being used as a product, $15 sounds crazy.
If you want to take control of your data and don’t have the time or inclination to do it all yourself, $15 isn’t so bad.