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Screw it, I’ll host it myself

markozivanovic.com

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Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#151

Post by bachmeier »

planb wrote: post #9

Funny headline, because every time I try to self-host anything important like mail, I learn how deep that field is and how little I know and that I'll probably need many many hours to do everything right and in a secure way (and my mails would still have a higher probability to be classified as spam). Then I think: "Screw it, I'll just use GMail"

> self-host anything important like mail

Email is basically pointless to host yourself from a privacy perspective. Every email has one or more people on the other end that also get a copy. Privacy and email are mutually exclusive. That said, the alternative doesn't have to be something like gmail, where they can do whatever they want with your data. I use Fastmail and that's "sufficiently private" for my needs.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#152

Post by sandreas »

One thing that would interest me: What about Ransomware? If everything is connected and synced, how to prevent getting everything encrypted before it is too late?

For me encrypted FreeNAS with readonly ZFS-Snapshots have been a good solution for this.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#153

Post by regularfry »

akho wrote: post #150

Vultr seems entirely unnecessary in this picture (but the referral dollars probably help). They are just hosting stuff for themselves, right? The Synology can do all that (through VPN for the on-the-go devices). Separate VPSes for things like a 1-user Monica instance are insane.

Depends how reliable the home internet connection is. Pushing it out to a VPS means you can carry on regardless over 4G if the broadband flakes out.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#154

Post by clairity »

mikepurvis wrote: post #101
clairity wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are actually tons of companies in this space already making money (e.g., wyze), but it’s highly fragmented and none have a unified vision or product strategy yet. so yes, they’re vulnerable to the behemoths right now, but those dynamics aren’t locked in yet. it’s mostly tough because of the high upfront capital costs (manufacturing, r&d, and marketing). people still talk fondly about discontinued apple routers…

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the pitch from the GP, but Wyze seems like it's pretty clearly a hardware + cloud services play, similar to most other IOT ecosystems except maybe Hue. The (optional) monthly cost paid there is for loosened restrictions on an already existing works-anywhere setup— it's an upsell for power users, not a cost of entry. This seems a lot easier to me than on-prem cloud services, either in BYOH f…

the primary value-add is one layer higher than a NAS, a standalone router, or homeassistant but would likely be built on those kinds of things. it's providing a range of hardware devices that can work seemlessly together in a way that you don't have to muck around with config files or programming and yet have it all be secure and private by default. the value is in an ecosystem of safe appliances that require little technical knowledge.

home audio/theater from prior to the internet revolution might be a good analogy: a bunch of separate boxes that each provide tailored functionality but all work together seemlessly without a lot of technical knowledge. that, but for all sorts of computing devices.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#155

Post by ballerburg9006 »

Definitively the wrong approach. I wrote this on another board:

> Everyone has 100Mbit lines now, a lot of people have gigabit fiber internet at home.

> You can get a Cortex-A55 TV Box for $30, plug in your old SSD drive via USB 3.0 with

> a $3 adapter, install Linux and you are ready to go. It consumes virtually no power.

> The processing speed and disk speed is incredible. Often the ping is lower than in a

> datacenter. This is not even the future of hosting. It has been around for quite some

> time. It is totally superior to any mid-range server. There literally are only advantages.

Pair this with Yunohost (via Docker). Yunohost is like an appstore for Linux servers. Easy 1-click setups for Nginx, Xampp, Postfix, Dovecot etc. that average people can do and understand.

You can still use the TVbox as a media center, even run Libreoffice on it and Blender like a small mini PC that has "poor but good enough" performance for most everyday tasks. Also games via Retroarch.

Sounds too awesome to be true? Yes, it is not quite true yet. You can do all this, but you still need to be tech savvy to step through it. And the media-center part is still questionable, because video drivers (the ones that work with hardware video acceleration) are bugged on most SOCs. Games work though, just not HD videos.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#157

Post by theandrewbailey »

sandreas wrote: post #152

One thing that would interest me: What about Ransomware? If everything is connected and synced, how to prevent getting everything encrypted before it is too late? For me encrypted FreeNAS with readonly ZFS-Snapshots have been a good solution for this.

Delete everything on synced devices and restore from offline backups.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#158

Post by trbfred »

Tried the same some time ago. While setup is fun, maintenance etc. is mostly underestimated. Following Murphy's law, things mostly break in uncomfortable times (deadlines, etc.).

My (current) strategy: Do without the "last functionality" and stick with boring, local software/approaches. Not everything needs to be synced to / accessible from any device -- at least for me... One well backed-up machine, a few online services (e-mail, github for collaboration, ...) and long-proven applications like Photos.app. Something close to the situation 15 yrs before?

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#159

Post by clairity »

mikepurvis wrote: post #148
clairity wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think you need to go up a level of abstraction from this perspective to see the utility for the average consumer. we each have computers all around us, phones, tablets, tv's, and increasingly everything else. it's so hopeless to manage, much less understand, these mysterious machines for more and more people. what you want is a company you can trust to manage these things for you but gives you the ultimate, yet cog…

"a company you can trust to manage these things for you" "automatically segregated into its own vlan" Aren't these goals fundamentally at odds? I would imagine that Joe consumer (if they care at all about any of this) would be rather more inclined to entrust the role of orchestrating/segregating their home network devices to an entity like Google than to some random startup.

the average person doesn't even know what these things are, which is partially why there is a market opportunity here. what they know is that companies like google and facebook are not entirely trustworthy but they have no alternative. it's hopelss, until an entity comes along and gives them some hope in the form of an alternative. basically all of the things we talk about around preserving privacy and security on the internet need to be built into our devices, and companies like google actively oppose such limitations of their reach into our lives.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#160

Post by megous »

grep_name wrote: post #129

I tried to have a setup similar to this during covid but ended up with a bit of a mess. What I wanted was a home server that used X forwarding to forward services to my VPS, which also had some images running in a docker-compose stack that I wanted to have more robust uptime than my home server. I ended up being unable to get traefik to pick up on the x-forwarded ports, and ran into SSL certification issues that seem…

Yes, I use wireguard to link VPS with an array of computers in my home via point to point tunnels. This solves the "my home IP not being completely static" problem, because wg handles roaming quite gracefully.

And then I just use either DNAT or nginx reverse proxy to proxy https to some http ports at home, depending on the service.

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