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I host this blog from my garage

eevans.co

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Re: I host this blog from my garage

#11

Post by cma »

chomp wrote: post #7
treesknees wrote: post #4

Heh, I'm actually more interested in the "garage" piece of the blog which is barely touched on. I also run a home lab, but from my climate-controlled relatively clean basement. I've thought about moving it to the garage, but I'm worried about temperature and dust/dirt ingress. Do you have a sealed cabinet or air filters or any other environmental controls around the servers? Or are you using industrial machines rated…

I live in the Southern US and it's extremely humid and hot in the summers. Only certain systems are fine with being in the garage. For instance, a Supermicro chassis I put out there began rusting in a few spots after a few months, but my custom system that I built was perfectly fine. I suspect the metals Supermicro uses are treated in some way and then cut, but the edges aren't re-treated, allowing rust to form on al…

There was a talk from comma.ai with a part on what they did to prevent corrosion running a datacenter in their garage to avoid the nvidia datacenter tax or something:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0JO5dr8cPE&t=15m12s

Re: I host this blog from my garage

#12

Post by scubbo »

shosti wrote: post #9
superkuh wrote: post #6

>Well, hosting a blog from home is probably not a great idea from a practical perspective. I'm not a hater, but maybe he perceives it as not practical here because of all the fun unnecessary complexity. Keeping something like this going for more than a couple years would require complex sysadmin maintainence for updates (which is fun till it isn't). But if you just install nginx from your system repositories, have yo…

(Author here) I mostly worry about security for this. If you have nothing private on your network it's probably fine, but if you have, say, a NAS that isn't using proper authentication (pretty common), an os/nginx vulnerability could end up exposing stuff. Of course there are much simpler ways to lock things down also :)

Thank you for a great article! I recently took the plunge of building-and-hosting a blog too - but, due to security concerns, I took the entirely opposite approach of making it fully cloud-based (Git repos for infra and for content -> AWS CodePipeline, Hugo during CodeBuild -> S3 and CloudFront). This was sadly ironic since I'd mostly wanted to blog about my experiences with homelabbing, but I didn't trust myself to open a port to the outside world. Thanks to your blog I might finally learn Kubernetes and use a Cloudflare tunnel to implement a similar truly-selfhosted blog!

Re: I host this blog from my garage

#13

Post by chomp »

cma wrote: post #11
chomp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in the Southern US and it's extremely humid and hot in the summers. Only certain systems are fine with being in the garage. For instance, a Supermicro chassis I put out there began rusting in a few spots after a few months, but my custom system that I built was perfectly fine. I suspect the metals Supermicro uses are treated in some way and then cut, but the edges aren't re-treated, allowing rust to form on al…

There was a talk from comma.ai with a part on what they did to prevent corrosion running a datacenter in their garage to avoid the nvidia datacenter tax or something: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0JO5dr8cPE&t=15m12s

Fascinating, thanks for this!

Re: I host this blog from my garage

#14

Post by shosti »

scubbo wrote: post #12
shosti wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Author here) I mostly worry about security for this. If you have nothing private on your network it's probably fine, but if you have, say, a NAS that isn't using proper authentication (pretty common), an os/nginx vulnerability could end up exposing stuff. Of course there are much simpler ways to lock things down also :)

Thank you for a great article! I recently took the plunge of building-and-hosting a blog too - but, due to security concerns, I took the entirely opposite approach of making it fully cloud-based (Git repos for infra and for content -> AWS CodePipeline, Hugo during CodeBuild -> S3 and CloudFront). This was sadly ironic since I'd mostly wanted to blog about my experiences with homelabbing, but I didn't trust myself to…

I would say you don't really need Kubernetes for this sort of setup (I already was running all the K8s stuff which is why I went with it, but docker compose or even just running things in systemd without containers would work too).

I think the main thing is to have some sort of network isolation (like a separate VLAN or a server that blocks outbound traffic) between stuff that's exposed to the internet and stuff that's private on the network.

Re: I host this blog from my garage

#15

Post by throwaway894345 »

superkuh wrote: post #6

>Well, hosting a blog from home is probably not a great idea from a practical perspective. I'm not a hater, but maybe he perceives it as not practical here because of all the fun unnecessary complexity. Keeping something like this going for more than a couple years would require complex sysadmin maintainence for updates (which is fun till it isn't). But if you just install nginx from your system repositories, have yo…

If all you're ever doing is hosting a static blog, then yeah, you don't need something like Kubernetes; however, if you want to host other services (e.g., database, authentication, comments, etc) then it quickly behooves you to build on some higher-level platform or else you'll end up building your own (poorly) and missing out on all of the experience, documentation, and tooling that are publicly available for Kubernetes, Docker, etc.

Re: I host this blog from my garage

#16

Post by jmnicolas »

treesknees wrote: post #4

Heh, I'm actually more interested in the "garage" piece of the blog which is barely touched on. I also run a home lab, but from my climate-controlled relatively clean basement. I've thought about moving it to the garage, but I'm worried about temperature and dust/dirt ingress. Do you have a sealed cabinet or air filters or any other environmental controls around the servers? Or are you using industrial machines rated…

I have seen production servers run for ten years upstairs a dirty bus repair shop. The room is never cleaned so there's a few millimeters of black dust on everything.

In fact you know the age of a server depending on the amount of dust on it.

There's a defective A/C unit that sometimes throw some water all around.

There's power cut 2 or 3 times a year, the batteries are old so the servers get their hard reboot.

As far as reliability is concerned, sometimes a disk fail, but that's about it.

Now if you think I'm describing something from the third world, you're wrong. It's in France and I'm not exaggerating about it.

So what I'm saying is that for a homelab, don't fret over cleanliness or optimal conditions.

Re: I host this blog from my garage

#17

Post by btilly »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #15
superkuh wrote: post #6

>Well, hosting a blog from home is probably not a great idea from a practical perspective. I'm not a hater, but maybe he perceives it as not practical here because of all the fun unnecessary complexity. Keeping something like this going for more than a couple years would require complex sysadmin maintainence for updates (which is fun till it isn't). But if you just install nginx from your system repositories, have yo…

If all you're ever doing is hosting a static blog, then yeah, you don't need something like Kubernetes; however, if you want to host other services (e.g., database, authentication, comments, etc) then it quickly behooves you to build on some higher-level platform or else you'll end up building your own (poorly) and missing out on all of the experience, documentation, and tooling that are publicly available for Kubern…

Sorry, but we did all of that 20 years ago, and those approaches remain a lot simpler for basic use cases. You know, like serving 100k dynamic pages/hour database backed site. (That's what I was doing 20 years ago, how about you?)

See https://pythonspeed.com/articles/dont-need-kubernetes/ for some of the reasons NOT to use Kubernetes for this.

With, of course, a giant exception for two cases. The first is, as with the author, if the purpose of using Kubernetes is to learn how to use Kubernetes. The second is if you are aware of the tradeoffs and have specific reason to say that Kubernetes really is appropriate for your circumstance.

And if you think that Kubernetes is always the right approach, then you clearly are NOT aware of the tradeoffs.

Re: I host this blog from my garage

#18

Post by hinkley »

If you wanted to 'publish' a more interactive website to the internet while still keeping all of the publishing tools safe inside an enclave/intranet somewhere, then you probably need a read-only copy of a database. But any time I look at read-replica configurations, it looks like they expect the replica to contact the master. You can't set up a proper bastion server if you have to have a secret door back into your intranet to replicate data. This has left me stuck on the starting blocks for a couple of pet projects I might like to work on.

Anybody know how to solve this problem, short of roll-your-own?

Re: I host this blog from my garage

#19

Post by scubbo »

shosti wrote: post #14
scubbo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for a great article! I recently took the plunge of building-and-hosting a blog too - but, due to security concerns, I took the entirely opposite approach of making it fully cloud-based (Git repos for infra and for content -> AWS CodePipeline, Hugo during CodeBuild -> S3 and CloudFront). This was sadly ironic since I'd mostly wanted to blog about my experiences with homelabbing, but I didn't trust myself to…

I would say you don't really need Kubernetes for this sort of setup (I already was running all the K8s stuff which is why I went with it, but docker compose or even just running things in systemd without containers would work too). I think the main thing is to have some sort of network isolation (like a separate VLAN or a server that blocks outbound traffic) between stuff that's exposed to the internet and stuff that…

Ah, I see - I misread and got the impression that `cloudflared` could only connect to Kubernetes pods, but I see from reading the docs[1] that it can connect to traditional apps-on-ports as well. I'll have a poke around - thanks again!

[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections...

Re: I host this blog from my garage

#20

Post by kayodelycaon »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #15
superkuh wrote: post #6

>Well, hosting a blog from home is probably not a great idea from a practical perspective. I'm not a hater, but maybe he perceives it as not practical here because of all the fun unnecessary complexity. Keeping something like this going for more than a couple years would require complex sysadmin maintainence for updates (which is fun till it isn't). But if you just install nginx from your system repositories, have yo…

If all you're ever doing is hosting a static blog, then yeah, you don't need something like Kubernetes; however, if you want to host other services (e.g., database, authentication, comments, etc) then it quickly behooves you to build on some higher-level platform or else you'll end up building your own (poorly) and missing out on all of the experience, documentation, and tooling that are publicly available for Kubern…

Running Wordpress on a single server is relatively painless. Document the setup and configure automatic backups of the relevant configs, www folder, and database.

I have another server ssh in every night and drop everything to a folder in my dropbox account. Replicates to computers that have incremental backups and less granular off-site backups.

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