Live data from Hacker News

Screw it, I’ll host it myself

markozivanovic.com

471–480 of 495 posts

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconding this – Hetzner also has pretty decent technical support considering the price. If you get one of their servers, make sure to check the manufacturer and type of hard drives and compare to Backblaze's Hard Drive Stats[1]. Also keep an eye on the S.M.A.R.T. status of your disks. In the past Hetzner has shipped servers with less-than-ideal hard disks (e.g. Seagate ST3000DM001). While their staff is pretty fast…

Oh thank you, that is good to know. Sadly before ordering a server from the sb, I cannot see the exact HDD models. It just says if it is or isn't the enterprise version and that is it, e.g. like: "2x HDD SATA 2,0 TB Enterprise" Which is too bad.

That's right, although in my experience the staff at Hetzner were quick to replace faulty disks in the past. You should be fine if you keep an eye on your disks (e.g. SMART status reports via cron or systemd timers) and contact support before a disk fails entirely.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#472

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 think it's important to document anything, be it at home or for business. I've done good and not so good jobs with this at times, and you feel like a hero when it's well done and you suffer through reinventing things if it's poorly done. I agree you should have config files and backups, but like with work, I think it would be good to go through a "disaster" where you have to build a version of your config from an unconfigured environment. A colleague had built such a config for a small office (10 people), but it depended on a specific DNS that ... wasn't set up until 1/2 way through the config. It worked because in testing they were using the network with a DNS that was already working. Small things like that are hard to catch in a working environment.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is great ASCII viz ! Did you do it purely by hand ? I often need to but give up...

Some good suggestions in the sibling comment. This one is from asciiflow, but I haven't tried others; not sure if they're better.

Ow wow, I didn't realise Asciiflow has started supporting extended ASCII - I've been using Asciiflow (via asciiflow.com) for years, but haven't used it for a few months, and missed this being introduced!

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#474

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 almost guarantee that when you need to make a change to your home server in 10 years, docker compose will no longer be able to pull any images from docker hub without being upgraded, and upon upgrading you'll find all your config is now invalid and no longer supported...

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#475
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I agree with your sentiment, your details are a little off. “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.” It would be difficult because you’d have to have host access. VM disk encryption is now tied into an HSM or TPM these days, host access wouldn’t help. As for memory, that is now us…

> Encryption tied to TPM Common on laptops, but I wouldn’t assume that for systems/SANs in a data center, much less their virtual disks. Would love to be corrected.

TPM is a server technology recently backported to laptops.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#476
post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, depends on your needs, risk model, pricing etc... I use DO but couldn’t use AWS due to price for example. Hoping platforms whenever you catch the ire of the gods is a bad CX for this problem space.

You're the second person to mention DO. I have no idea what that is. But here is a list of 20 VPS providers: https://techjury.net/best/vps-hosting/ As you can see, AWS is far from the only game in town. If you can't find two or three from that list that will meet your needs then perhaps you should reassess your quality metric. (I note in passing that my preferred provider, Linode, is not even on that list.)

DO = Digital Ocean Again, depending on your needs, VPS are not a commodity. GCP offers a few things that Azure or AWS don’t, etc... Often times making sweeping generalizations without deep industry knowledge is a bad idea. If you don’t even know what DO is, why do you feel experienced enough to argue?

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but when the original docker image is no longer available on docker hub, chances are there will be something better and even easier to setup. And with docker you don't care about installing / uninstalling apps and figuring out where that obscure setting was hidden - all you need is just a stock distro and a bunch of docker-compose.yml files, plus some mounted directories with the actual data.

But a lot of those unofficial docker images are of unknown quality and could easily contain trojans. It's completely different from installing a package from your distro.

So don't use unofficial ones. :)

Plenty of primary sources package their software for Docker these days.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're from Sandstorm, can you please add Restyaboard?

I'm a contributor, I wouldn't say I am "from Sandstorm" though. I actually looked at Restyaboard packaging a couple times, but the roadblock I hit is that there is currently no working example of a Sandstorm app running Postgres as the backend. I believe another contributor managed to get an app running using Postgres, but I don't know how they did it. I think there's some aspect of the Sandstorm sandbox that throws…

> I believe another contributor managed to get an app running using Postgres, but I don't know how they did it. I think there's some aspect of the Sandstorm sandbox that throws Postgres for a loop, and you have to kinda hack around it.

That would be me. I've done it on a private app and helped bring it to another app, so it's repeatable. I'll try to explain it on the sandstorm-dev group in the next week or so.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#479
post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're the second person to mention DO. I have no idea what that is. But here is a list of 20 VPS providers: https://techjury.net/best/vps-hosting/ As you can see, AWS is far from the only game in town. If you can't find two or three from that list that will meet your needs then perhaps you should reassess your quality metric. (I note in passing that my preferred provider, Linode, is not even on that list.)

DO = Digital Ocean Again, depending on your needs, VPS are not a commodity. GCP offers a few things that Azure or AWS don’t, etc... Often times making sweeping generalizations without deep industry knowledge is a bad idea. If you don’t even know what DO is, why do you feel experienced enough to argue?

Because I've been self-hosting my internet services on VPS's for the last 15 years on various providers. There are literally dozens of them. They are absolutely a commodity.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh thank you, that is good to know. Sadly before ordering a server from the sb, I cannot see the exact HDD models. It just says if it is or isn't the enterprise version and that is it, e.g. like: "2x HDD SATA 2,0 TB Enterprise" Which is too bad.

That's right, although in my experience the staff at Hetzner were quick to replace faulty disks in the past. You should be fine if you keep an eye on your disks (e.g. SMART status reports via cron or systemd timers) and contact support before a disk fails entirely.

Makes sense, thank you!
Post reply on HN