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Screw it, I’ll host it myself

markozivanovic.com

301–310 of 495 posts

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But it only breaks when all systems fail together; if your router fails, you can rebuild it from the gitlab job. If the VM host fails, you have time to replace it because the rest of your network still functions. If your git host fails, same thing, but where did you put those backups?

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Long term platform stability seems to be moving from relying on the OS to higher up in the stack with the advent of Docker. It feels like Docker is being used more and more in cases where I would have considered something like CentOS.

Docker feels like the equivalent of the teenager that doesn't want to clean his room so he just pushes all his mess under the bed.

The complexity is still under the bed. We're all going to have to dig under that bed one day. Or we're just going to end up buying new hockey sticks, football pads, etc. Which is to say, we're going to end up with Linux on top of Docker on top of Linux.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#304

Ok, I’m SUPER into self hosting, but this article? No way. 1) Duck out isn’t a thing, just stop it. 2) Half the articles cited as examples of corporate abuse were later revealed to be mistakes by the user or easily avoidable pitfalls. 3) Self hosting still requires trust (software you’re running, DNS, domains, ISP, etc...) The line of who to trust and how far is a tough one to answer, even for the informed. How I sol…

the 'duck it out' thing really made me cringe. we really need to get away from that idea of having a searching verb that is tied to the popular search engines of the day. i use duckduckgo but it might not be around in 10 or 20 years or there might be something better by then so its pointless to expect everyone to keep learning new verbs all the time.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#305
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NAS fails for smartphone integration. Photos should auto upload. Calendar, todos, and contacts need to show up in the usual apps. It needs to be available from remote.

Syncthing may be used to sync remotely the relevant directories. It's multiplatform and has a Android app too (still not iOS though). https://syncthing.net/

FolderSync is another excellent option that might mesh better with your existing setup.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#306
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

RRDTool is great for exactly this reason! I actually still use it to plot time series data on a raspberry pi for various projects. It hasn’t changed in at least a decade and it will run with good performance on any hardware. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#308
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is Helm - check us out at thehelm.com

You clearly have the upsell part, but where is the "and win over the enthusiast crowd by making it possible to host your own alternatives to those services with a little technical know-how." part? I and probably many others would be OK with paying for the upsell part, if it's an optional convenience, but nothing I saw on your site indicates it is, or that "own your data" is in any meaningful way true. How do I own my…

If you store data on a hard drive you purchased from Best Buy, do you own that data? It's a proprietary box also...

Data from Helm is accessible using IMAP, SMTP, CardDAV, CalDAV, WebDAV on the local network (without requiring our service). You own the device, you own the data. There is a standards-based way of accessing that data just as there is with the hard drive from Best Buy.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#309
post #68

The diagram alone is more than enough of an argument to dissuade me from giving this a shot right now - it's simply too complicated and too much to manage for the amount of time I can dedicate to it. BUT - I'm really thankful for people who keep posting and sharing these sorts of projects; they're the ones iterating the process for the rest of us who need something a bit more turn-key. I'm excited to see this eventua…

I think the diagram gives a skewed view of how hard this actually is. I run a very similar setup only my VPS is only a proxy for my home server and it requires very little maintenance. I run everything with docker-compose and I haven't had to work on my setup at all this year and only about 8 hours in 2020 to setup the Wireguard network to replace the ssh tunnels I was using previously for VPS -> server communication…

I went down an almost identical path/plan, but then stopped due to corruption concerns with doing the VPS / home sync the way that I wanted without a NAS in the middle managing the thing. It’s still possible, but it explodes the complexity.

One of the big things I wanted to accomplish was low cost and easy to integrate / recover from for family in case of bus-factor.

I didn’t expect to compete with the major cloud providers on cost, but the architecture I was dreaming of just wasn’t quite feasible even though it’s tantalizingly close...basically, all the benefits of a p2p internal network with all the convenience of NextCloud and all the export-ability of “just copy all these files to a new disk or cloud provider.”

It’s so close, there’s just always some bottleneck: home upload is too slow, cold cloud storage too hard to integrate with / cache, architecture requires too much maintenance, or similar.

I think NextCloud is very close for personal use, if only there was a plug and play p2p backend datastore / cache backed by plug and play immutable cold storage that could pick up new entries from the p2p layer.

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