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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

#361

Post by skynet-9000 »

blabitty wrote: post #350
skynet-9000 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes, did you have it on UPS? How did a power issue kill your server? A big spike? Most filesystems like XFS should be able to fsck even after a power drop, especially with RAID. (I prefer RAID-10 for speed of rebuilds.)

Surge protector but the spikes were huge. My drives we're actually fine what got killed was the PSU and it was a case integrated PSU, in a system I had been meaning to upgrade for a while anyway. So this gave me the kick in the butt to finally do it. I also went to NVMe for the root drive wow what a difference. The system that died was not out of date software wise it had been dutifully upgraded with every major Debi…

Wow. Yes, it seems like everything is a lot more expensive even if you can find it.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#362

Post by hakube »

lisper wrote: post #77
ziml77 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am perpetually confused about why people think that self-hosting on a VPS solves their privacy and security problems. While I'm sure there are controls in place at reputable VPS providers, it wouldn't be too difficult for them to grab absolutely anything they want. Even disk encryption doesn't save you. You're in a VM, they can watch the memory if they need to. Using a VPS can also make you more identifiable. Your…

VPS doesn't solve privacy and security, it solves getting locked out of your account because some algorithm decided you were peddling child porn. If you want privacy and security and you don't trust your provider, then you have to build your own hardware and compile everything you run on it from vetted source, including your kernel. You can do it, but most people decide that on balance its better to trust someone.

well DO decided to lock me out of my account that I had for years because they decided that I'm a fraud and had to deal with their terrible customer service

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#364

Post by nine_k »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #294
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…

The author focuses the entire blog post on remote third party services that are alternatives to popular third party services financed by data collection as a "business model". IMO, the single most important component of a home network is not any piece of the hardware/software outside the home that the third parties may control, it is the internet gateway in the home. Routers were the most important computers at the d…

I wonder how much a gateway router can do here.

Most of the data passing it are encrypted: https, SSH.

Cutting off the phone-home requests is best done on respective devices: you can run firewalls on most desktops and laptops, and even phones. Рhones often go online via GSM or LTE, without passing through the home router.

While a proxy like pihole can be helpful sometimes, cutting off tracking and ads is done best by browser extensions and by using open-source clients, where available.

The best the home router should do is to not be vulnerable to exploits, and otherwise up-to-date, and fully under the owner's control That's why my home router runs openwrt.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#365

Post by FpUser »

20 years ago I've said to myself screw it, quit very well paid but nerve wrecking job in a software development company and never looked back. That's when I also went full remote ( I hire subcontractors but never felt need for an office ) and started hosting my own stuff on rented dedicated servers and in my own office.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#366

Post by candiddevmike »

gsreenivas wrote: post #122
Ajedi32 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardware sales. People will pay for the convenience of a device that works out of the box with minimal setup. On the software side, integrate tightly with your own subscription services (offsite backups, VPS, etc) to upsell to those who want that, and win over the enthusiast crowd by making it possible to host your own alternatives to those services with a little technical know-how. Open source most components to app…

this is Helm - check us out at thehelm.com

Just sent you a message on your website--I think our companies could produce something exciting together.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#367

Post by randomdude402 »

koyote wrote: post #315
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 un…

I use a single git repo for all my personal project docs.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#369

Post by hpcjoe »

jrm4 wrote: post #343
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author focuses the entire blog post on remote third party services that are alternatives to popular third party services financed by data collection as a "business model". IMO, the single most important component of a home network is not any piece of the hardware/software outside the home that the third parties may control, it is the internet gateway in the home. Routers were the most important computers at the d…

Okay. How can we fix this? I'm dealing with it right now and this space is so hard -- likely somewhat deliberately so. I'm a 20+ year Linux user trying to get a single home network with multiple ISPs going and it just seems way harder than it ought to be; i.e. -- not that every bit of software needs to be idiot-proof, but this iptables/pfSense/netplan etc etc universe just feels downright hostile to the aspiring home…

It is.

Multi-wan is easier with appliances. I used pfSense over the last 12 years or so with multi-wan on and off (currently off). I've run pfSense in a kvm VM, and you can do multi-wan with this. Though I generally recommend dedicated NICs for the WANs and LAN.

I've looked at the linux based appliances (as late as last week) and only clearos or openwrt supported multi-wan. I could be wrong (I'd like to be as pfSense/OPNsense are FreeBSD based, and that comes with, sadly, huge amounts of baggage, limited hardware support, etc.). I'll likely be looking at that package as a potential replacement for the pfSense system, though if clearos can't handle what I need, OPNsense is like pfSense, but with far less baggage.

If you don't mind tinkering, you might be able to use mwan3[1].

If you prefer OpenWRT, you can look at running it in a VM[2] along with mwan3.

[1] https://github.com/Adze1502/mwan

[2] https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/virtualization/qemu

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#370

Post by hpcjoe »

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…

I work on trying to script each install. So if I need to repave, I have a documented, working script, and the source bits to work with.

I've preferred VMs for functional appliances for a while now. I like the isolation compared to containers. Though YMMV.

Right now, the hardest migration I have is my mail system, which makes use of a fairly powerful pipeline of filters in various postfix connected services. Its not fragile, but it is hard to debug.

I host it myself, as the core thesis of the article pointed out, you can be deplatformed, for any reason, with no recourse. And if you lose your mail, you are probably in a world of hurt.

The one thing I am concerned about is long term backup. I need a cold storage capability of a few 10s of TB, that won't blow up my costs too badly. Likely the best route will be a pair of servers at different DCs, running minio or similar behind a VPN that I can rsync to every now and then. Or same servers with zfs and zfs send/recv.

Thinking about this, but still not sure what to do.

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