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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

#311

Post by _carbyau_ »

ballerburg9006 wrote: post #155

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 > datace…

My HTPC gets parts handed down from my gaming PC. I want to leave it "always on" anyway and so I was thinking of yunohost but you've now confirmed my path. Thanks!

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#312

Post by markozivanovic »

Hi, I'm the author,

Thank you all so much for your comments. I didn't expect this will be this high on HN. I'm aware there are more simple solutions for self-hosting, even partially. I'm also aware that my setup is not perfect - that's why this post was created. I was hoping to get some feedback. Not from that many of you, but some friends. :) Ask me anything you like, I'll try to answer every question.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#313

Post by IggleSniggle »

lnwlebjel wrote: post #298
clairity wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i've actually daydreamed about starting a computing appliance company that would make a variety of services plug and play for consumers and small businesses, from email to storage, to networking, to security, and to smart home. it's actually the direction apple is headed, but they're encumbered by the innovator's dilemma, which leaves an opportunity for an upstart. google and facebook are similarly too focused on adt…

Having spent the past year frustratingly trying to build these types of things in AWS and spending too much money with mistakes I'd say there is a huge opportunity here. SMB or NFS as a service for example.

https://www.rsync.net/ has been selling this solution for years. Price competitive these days. Not affiliated, just looked at it recently and thought it was extremely cool.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#314

Post by nucleardog »

bentcorner wrote: post #233
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…

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…

Just to throw more products at the wall, I've been using Bookstack[0] for the same sort of documentation.

Besides being relatively lightweight and simple to setup, out-of-the-box draw.io integration is nice. Makes diagramming networks and other things dead simple. And I know "dead simple" means I'm infinitely more likely to actually do it.

[0] https://www.bookstackapp.com/

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#315

Post by koyote »

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…

I encounter this every 6-12 months when I go back to an old project that is 'working' and want to add something/update something and it all just looks foreign to me.

The worst thing is that I have often gone through a lot of effort around making it easy to set up and deploy (docker and whatnot) but even that I have forgotten about. (I came across a docker file in an old project and couldn't get it to work properly until I noticed that there was a docker compose file lying around that I had missed)

How do you keep track of documentation? I guess for a project a README in the git's root is a good start, but what about more complex systems stuff that does not live in a git project? For example, I had to manually edit a bunch of config files on my Proxmox setup to get docker and some other things to work properly. Where would I document such manual steps? I am thinking a text file somewhere in cloud storage but then of course I'd need to remember that...

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#316

Post by blabitty »

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…

>back up every single configuration file.

This right here. I recently lost my home server of 10 years courtesy of the Texas power issues during the winter storm. I rebuilt and started with fresh Linux install. Having a recent backup of /etc made it so much easier than it could have been. I had more trouble with the network driver on the new mb then with all my services, customizations and data.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#317

Post by therealx »

eptcyka wrote: post #260
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…

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.

Just firewall off all management interfaces and allow via IP as needed. It's still possible your webserver will get become vulnerable, but you'll prob here about it here if it is.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#318

Post by therealx »

yakubin wrote: post #280
aidenn0 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It's 1000% worth it. The skills bleed over onto Mac, and now Windows. Best skills of my tech life, almost.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#319

Post by therealx »

deckard1 wrote: post #302
mooman219 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Amen. I find generic scripts to be way more mangemaable. You can still use them with docker, but you can also just buy any Linux VM and go.

Also, easy to backup.

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