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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

#271

Post by Chris2048 »

shaan7 wrote: post #215
Chris2048 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Far fewer people cook their own food for fun versus preparation time not being the only constraint: cost, availability, health, transparency (of prep & ingredients), dependency etc It's common for people to delude themselves into thinking they haven't wasted their time by convincing themselves they did it for fun (or the lols, or whatever) - I'd say the difference is whether they knew )or stated) this upfront, or onl…

Fair enough, by "far fewer" you basically mean the same thing I meant by "some". The point was not to have an exhaustive list of the exact reasons behind people cooking. > It's common for people to delude themselves into thinking they haven't wasted their time by convincing themselves they did it for fun I am probably missing some context here because this does not make sense to me. Something is fun because its fun,…

I mean the minority, which I'm not sure "some" implies. The factors you describe: cheaper, control, health can be seen as the same as cost. More expensive places might taste better, be healthier etc. While I'm sure a lot of people enjoy cooking, I'm not sure many would recreationally cook as often as they need food.

> context

You can have fun imagining the payoffs, only to find they do not appear. Have you ever seen a movie and been disappointed, or played a game and found it lacking. "fun" is not an absolute measure, and review doesn't necessarily capture how fun something is versus how fun you think it ought to be - plenty people give things higher value than their "fun" value, despite claiming to only have done it for fun - the missing value is ideological.

> there is little value in assigning a dollar-value for time that I am going to spend doing something that _I want to do_

Only if there is, some some reason, literally only one thing you want to do. But if there are competing things you might like to do then comparing them makes sense. One way or another, if you choose to watch a movie, or build a sandcastle, you are comparing the two to decide which. Using monetary values is just a more formal way of doing that for larger, less impulsive, projects.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#272

Post by ocdtrekkie »

coldtea wrote: post #266
papaf wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These systems cruise along for years, and when something finally does go belly-up, I can't remember how I set it up in the first place. This happened a few times to me over the years and then I was lucky enough to go on a packer/terraform course. Now everything is scripted and stored in git. A Gitlab job rebuilds the VMs from scratch every two weeks to include the latest bugfixes and updates. It was a lot of work at…

Now you have N problems... What happens when those images are not available, terraform/packer change APIs, etc?

Yep. This will cruise along longer than the parent's solution, but when it breaks, you'll be starting over all of the original services from scratch plus the management system you had built once to manage them.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#273

Post by Siira »

SamPatt wrote: post #258
bentcorner wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree that documentation is key here. Anything you do that is beyond the vanilla "pave the install and plug it in" should be written down. It doesn't need to be perfect - I have a onenote notebook that has the customizations that I've done to my router (static IP leases and edits to /etc/config/network), and some helper docs for a local Zabbix install in docker that I have. I recently how to migrate a database from o…

I set up a folder for notes that shares across my network using SyncThing and is backed up with a FreeNAS box. That folder is just a collection of markdown files for each program / system and when I save on one device it updates the documentation on them all. I use Atom to view and edit them on my Linux machines and a markdown editor app on my phone. This allows me to search across the notes too. I've had this fairly…

I also started doing something similar via org-files, git, emacs, and Working Copy. It has worked pretty well, though Working Copy (the iOS git client) was buggier than I expected (but they have a great developer and support). My network isn't very good, or I'd just use emacs on iOS via SSH via Blink.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#274

Post by aidenn0 »

yakubin wrote: post #263
eptcyka wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nix helps with this. Or at least it intends to. I still need to track down what's vulnerable and what isn't, but most of my setup is reproducible thanks to Nix.

I've read people admitting that Nix can give you a lot of work from time to time, when something isn't already available for Nix (which happens more often than, say, for Debian), and you want to add it to your system. Is that true in your experience? I may be phrasing it wrong. What is the learning curve of Nix?

I found that the nix learning curve to be steep but short. The first time you need to make something available for nix (particularly a service), you'll probably copy something someone else wrote, make a few changes and then (if it didn't work) stare at your screen for a while wondering why it didn't work[1].

It is very different which can be very off-putting, but is not usually gratuitously different, and once you get used to it, it's pretty straightforward.

After having done it a few times, I find that I can adapt a random project not already in Nixpkgs for nix in under an hour, and it's something I do maybe twice a year or so.

One counterintuitive advantage I found switching to nix from other systems is that since the 4 step "download, configure, make, make install" usually doesn't work, I take the time to make a nix expression. On Gentoo and Arch, I would often just install to /usr/local from source and then forget what I had installed and not know how to upgrade it. If you have more discipline than I do, then it's a bug not a feature, but for me it's super helpful.

1: If the project uses cmake or autotools and has no strange dependencies, then packaging it for nix is trivial. However a surprising number of packages do things like downloading dependencies from the internet at build time, and it's not always immediately obvious how to adapt that to nix. Projects using npm or pip also probably won't work right away just because the long-tail of dependencies means that there will be at least one dependency that isn't already in nixpkgs (haskell should in theory be just as bad, but the strange proclivity for haskellers to use nix means that someone has probably already done the work for you).

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#276

Post by imwillofficial »

jedberg wrote: post #92
imwillofficial wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a massive jump to make when he is probably being beaten to hell by HN right now. That’s not a reasonable chain of expectation. Reevaluate your logic.

In 2021, HN doesn't make that much traffic. Any decently built website should be able to handle it, if the owner cares about the user experience.

"HN doesn't make that much traffic" Cite your sources, that claim sounds made up. Your inference that if somebody doesn't use a CDN or have acceptable load times for you, that they don't care about user experience, and so their opinion on self hosting is not worth listening to is absurd.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#277

Post by ocdtrekkie »

ryukafalz wrote: post #227
paulryanrogers wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like Sandstorm?

Yup, the sibling comments mention a few alternatives (FreedomBox and Yunohost) but Sandstorm is really the only one I've ever used that makes me confident in the state of the system long-term. Let me elaborate on that. FreedomBox and Yunohost use more traditional software installation mechanisms; they'll install packages, run scripts, etc. They just add (sometimes very nice) UI around it. While that's great for some…

:) Always glad to see Sandstorm fans here.

FWIW, there are places Sandstorm could improve here. Probably the biggest one for me is that Sandstorm backups do not happen automatically in the managed space. (You could automatically back up your Sandstorm server with another utility, and you can manually backup/restore individual grains in the web UI, but there isn't yet a really clean integrated way to restore grains inside Sandstorm.) But if this is the one thing you have to figure out outside of Sandstorm itself, that's not too bad (or unusual for many server applications).

Also, the parent suggests being able to offer a hardware box good-to-go, and I'd like Sandstorm to have that, or at least, a full distro release, where you do not have to worry about the server OS at all. It's something we've talked about quite a bit.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#278

Post by lrem »

wayoutthere wrote: post #196
dr-smooth wrote: post #189

The problem I have always had when building elaborate home server setups is the "set it and forget it" nature of the systems I've installed bites me in the ass. Since it's not my full-time job to manage these systems, I'm really not familiar with them the way I might be with the systems I manage at work. These systems cruise along for years, and when something finally does go belly-up, I can't remember how I set it u…

This right here; but even more so. Eventually, whatever platform / tool you use will need to be upgraded. Security vulnerabilities, new features, etc happen and projects like these can get abandoned within a 5-year timeframe. When you have to migrate to either a new or upgraded platform, you have to figure it all out yourself. When the config is broken by an upstream dependency, you’re on the hook too. Who knows if t…

Today I've heard fellow SREs discussed whether RRDTool is the best solution for monitoring private things. Its only merit: it stopped evolving. Might or might not outweigh the decades of progress.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#279

Post by jjeaff »

Semaphor wrote: post #164
divbzero wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and many popular applications are prepackaged as one-click apps by cloud providers like Vultr [1] or Digital Ocean [2]. [1]: https://www.vultr.com/features/one-click-apps/ [2]: https://marketplace.digitalocean.com You can also enable automatic backups for your servers.

Somewhat OT, but never realized how expensive those cloud instances are. For comparison, I pay $4.95/month (billed annually) for a KVM VPS with 2 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 40gb SSD, 400 GB HDD in the Netherlands. That seems a lot better for selfhosting where you probably want more raw storage than more SSD space.

If that is enough to handle everything you need, then that is definitely a better deal. The electric bill for a similar home server running 24x7 would be more than $6/mo.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#280

Post by yakubin »

aidenn0 wrote: post #274
yakubin wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read people admitting that Nix can give you a lot of work from time to time, when something isn't already available for Nix (which happens more often than, say, for Debian), and you want to add it to your system. Is that true in your experience? I may be phrasing it wrong. What is the learning curve of Nix?

I found that the nix learning curve to be steep but short. The first time you need to make something available for nix (particularly a service), you'll probably copy something someone else wrote, make a few changes and then (if it didn't work) stare at your screen for a while wondering why it didn't work[1]. It is very different which can be very off-putting, but is not usually gratuitously different, and once you ge…

Thank you for the detailed reply. I'll try it out (in a VM first).
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