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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

#441

Post by RulerOf »

markozivanovic wrote: post #312

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.

>Ask me anything you like, I'll try to answer every question.

What's stopping you from hosting at home?

While I admit that I often feel claustrophobic with only ~35-40 Mbps of usable bandwidth, my power costs for several orders of magnitude more usable storage+cpu are in line with what you're paying for VPS right now.

>I was hoping to get some feedback.

Do you run any additional layers of security of top of NextCloud? From something simple like requiring SNI to ward off casual scanning activity, or more advanced like a WAF layer?

I ask because I've been hesitant to trust my whole digital life to something that doesn't have a full-time paid security staff.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#442

Post by 8fingerlouie »

As someone who has selfhosted for a couple of decades, i can understand the lure of it, but the author forgets to mention the huge effort it is to keep public servers available and free of unwanted visitors.

I've gone the other way. I had everything on a Synology box at home, backed up locally and remote, with a Proxmox server on a DMZ network, mounting all (data) storage from the Synology via Kerberized NFSv4 through the firewall, and exposing select services to the world (limited by IDS/IPS and geoip filtering)

I spent around 1-2 hours daily checking logs, installing patches, checking backups, and other sysadm maintenance jobs. When 2021 rolled around i decided i no longer wanted to be a sysadm in my spare time, so i quit.

Everything previously hosted at home was pushed to dedicated hosting providers for that type of service (pythonanywhere for django projects, etc). Not just VPS as that's essentially just self hosting on other peoples hardware.

Basic file synchronization went to Microsoft 365 Family. Sensitive data are manually encrypted with either LUKS or Encrypted Sparsebundles.

As for my Synology, i pushed all data on it to Jottacloud via rclone and the crypt backend. I then have a machine at home with a 1TB SSD acting as my "NAS", but in reality it's just mounting the Jottacloud data and using the 1TB SSD as a vfs cache. It then exposes the Jottacloud data through Samba.

The NAS handles backups of Jottacloud and Onedrive to a local 8TB USB drive. A remote machine wakes up once per day, mounts the cloud shares, and makes a backup as well.

In case i get locked out, it's just a matter of restoring one of the backups to whatever storage i have sitting around, and i'm back in business.

As for speed, the VFS cache really speeds things up. I get gigabit speeds on cached data, and even uncached data arrives in an acceptable pace (500/500 mbit connection), to the point that when i'm on Wifi (802.11ac Wave2)i can't tell the difference.

On top of having a lot less noise around me, i also save about 1/2 the cost of the self hosting hardware spread over a 5 year period.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#443

Post by christophilus »

rkachowski wrote: post #179
Semaphor wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's pretty awesome, what provider are you with?

Not the OP, but I’ve been using Netcup for video transcoding. It was the best bang for the buck out of a large number of providers I tried.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#444

Post by stiray »

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 am self hosted since forever or I will rather say - since ADSL was available. The server has changed "a bit" during the last 20 years (oh, Mercury mail server :D), but last "few" years (from FreeBSD 8 :D) I am happy camper there. Just using it casually and learn a thing or two by the way. Upgrading it, migrating (2 times until now), adding disks. Nothing special.

Just got into situation where mobo has started failing and I have said it is time to reinstall, bought new hardware and throw it together. Migrated in a week, everything that was customized during ~20 years without taking notes (but with my good ol trusty diffing software) and was migrated from previous server, optimized a bit, removed unnecessary settings, upgraded postfix and dovecot to new server, replaced spamassasin with rspamd, php-fmt,...

The server was mostly operational in 2 days. Everything else was studying new software, doing things that i always wanted to but didnt want to turn around whole configuration (like stuffing everything into jails), customizing netdata, upgrading database/nextcloud/... etc. It would take longer if I would loose the data, but I trust zraid and my LTO drive, they never failed me.

Now I will sniff around it every week, maybe run some update etc. and I will be fine until some disk fails.

Being system administrator is not my occupation, but it helps if you NEVER EVER become a hostage to a cloud provider. The more you go into leisure of someone else doing everything for you - the less chances you will have to learn new things and the more you will be on mercy of someone else. And the longer you are enjoying such situation, the more technology progresses and the bigger the gap between the knowledge you have and the knowledge needed to, in this case, setup a server.

I remember dreaming in 1991, as a kid, that in 20 years everyone will have his own server at home, and how we will transfer files simply. But now everyone is saying they don't have time and buy ready made boxes or pay for the cloud.

The technology came, now it is simpler to use than ever.

But no one has "time" for that now. Or is really the time?

---

Dont take having a home server as a pain. It is a great way to learn things.

I can bake a perfect bread too. "Kicked" all my girlfriends out of kitchen. Brewing home beer. ...

But all this wouldn't happen if I would rather go to bakery. Eat in restaurants. Buying beer in a store. ... Sure I could, but I didnt.

---

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#445

Post by habi »

thayne wrote: post #385

> you should consider switching from... Google Maps to OpenStreetMap I've looked into it, but there is very, very little in OpenStreetMap in my area. And I do not have the time, resources, or expertise to map out my entire area enough to make it useful myself. I would like to contribute to the project, but switching over entirely just isn't an option for me.

I wonder where you live, do you mind sharing the region?

(I have the privilege to live in central Europe, where OSM is actually chock-full of information.)

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#446

Post by shaan7 »

nicbou wrote: post #305
squarefoot wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I second this. I use FolderSync Pro to sync with Nextcloud. Straightforward setup and quite reliable.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#447

Post by GordonS »

gorgoiler wrote: post #411
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…

You don’t even need Docker. Another great technology to learn is LXC and driving it from the CLI / a script. All my hosts run a default OS with a 20 line firewall and a bridge. The top level host has a zpool backed by a blank file in /tank.device. The actual work is done by a bunch of LXC hosts all cloned from a standard base installation. Anything persistent goes in a per container zfs filesystem mounted in each con…

I personally found Docker and Compose pretty simple to learn, and after years working with them I'm pretty well acquainted, but am interested to learn if there are any tangible benefits of using LXC instead of Docker?

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#448

Post by vinceguidry »

kelnos wrote: post #336
vinceguidry wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My solution is Kubernetes. Everything's configured in YAML files. The solution to all those problems is... change fields in YAML files. Of course, you need to figure out what you need to change and why, but you'll never not need to do this, if you're rolling your own infra. K8s allows you to roll a lot more of the contextual stuff into the system.

Do you find there to be a good amount of overhead in running your own Kubernetes cluster? I'd think initial setup would be a bit of work, and then keeping the cluster updated and patched would be a good amount of work as well. Then you've just traded maintaining one system for maintaining another.

Once you learn it it's pretty straightforward. K8s has a very simple underlying architecture. It's intimidating at first, but yields to study and care.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#449

Post by ololobus »

The main thing about building all these private cloud setups, that bothered me most of time is security. It is not a big deal to take from GitHub and run all these bricks of your infrastructure, but how to maintain? Everything should be updated regularly, otherwise you risk to get your data dumped and leaked by some automatic crawler or home-grown hacker, once new vulnerability is discovered in any part of your tech stack.

The only easy solution I see is to hide everything in the private network and make accessible only under VPN. However, it is not that useful, when you need to get some file or read/reply email from some new device not owned by you.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#450

Post by random_kris »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #309
belval wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

There is a cryptocurrency called siacoin. It offers cloud storage and there exist a nextcloud plugin for it to integrate it as a storage backend. I have some plans on trying this setup. What do you think?

https://nextcloud.com/blog/introducing-cloud-storage-in-the-...

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