101–110 of 194 posts
install ubuntu server either locally or on a cheap VM read the ubuntu server docs about setting up a firewall and get started setting up a firewall that only allows inbound ssh and https ( be careful and don't firewall yourself out of your system! :) ) https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/security-firewall from there, read the docs on setting up a webserver and create an index.html with just the text "hello world" https://…
Been down this self-hosted route many times … from the ground up … as a local neighborhood IT dude. Don’t you hate being that guy? Not me, I get tons of free stuff from my neighbors. For a simple default-deny-firewall IPv6 NAT gateway (zero HTTP3 support), I used Gentoo, no initramfs, all static (no kernel modules, eBPF JIT disabled, no strace/perfmon2) on 2013 Dell Optiplex 790 SFF. This is the extreme tinkerer mode…
I have been there. The progress was rather slow until I started to use NixOS. The learning curve is a bit steep but is very rewarding. It is not specific to self-hosting stuff, but as a side effect it makes self hosting super easy (declarative, readable, etc). For most of the services that you would like, you just write a simple configuration and deploy it. For example, to run the service shiori ( https://github.com/…
But for server stuff it might be a good way to go...? Maybe I'll try it.
I'd recommend to take a look at OPNSense and pfSense. One of the challenges of learning networking properly is that many consumer devices go into great lengths to try abstract the details away from the user. OPNSense and pfSense bring some level of openness into the situation, by letting you to SSH into the networking equipment and generally providing a web user interface with more knobs than any sane person needs. T…
If you start "self hosting" on a cloud based instance, all that you learn in doing so will carry over to when you finally are able to move everything to a machine in house. It will give you results faster, you will make all the same mistakes and have similar problems, without having to fight hardware. You'll also have the network expertise of your hosting provider to fall back on. As much as you don't want someone waltzing in and walking all over your system, they don't particularly want that to happen to you either.
The hosting plans are cheap enough that you can run for several years for the price of hardware in your home. And in the end, if you find you're unhappy with it, it's a mouseclick to get it of your life instead of now having a some extra hardware (even if it's a just a Pi and an SSD) lingering and collecting dust in your house.
I think the virtual hosting is a smoother on ramp to this journey, you'll find faster success with it (which can keep you motivated rather than frustrated), and it'll give you a baseline to compare against if and when you decide to take the final step and bring it in to the broom closet. You can readily transition incrementally as you go forward depending on how you architect it.
To understand networking: read a book. Much of my early networking knowledge came from https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/1593414 but you can probably find more modern variants of such a book. Getting a good grasp of networking requires reading and experimentation; luckily, you've got the tools for experimentation already. Most of application deployment is little more than reading the docs and tuning the configurati…
> To understand networking: read a book. Much of my early networking knowledge came from https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/1593414 > [Computer networking: a top-down approach, Kurose and Ross 2009] This is the kind of reference I was looking for. Anybody else have a favorite. Maybe more accessible? "For Dummies?" :-) Thanks for all these concrete suggestions. EDIT: "Free t-shirt"?! AWESOME :-)
Most of those chapters are probably not relevant to you. All the wireless stuff is nice if you want to dig into setting up your own radio network but you can stick to the internet stuff. Not even everything in there may be relevant to your interests, I've forgotten most of the network/routing graph discovery stuff myself because it's not really relevant unless you're planning on running a corporate network or an ISP. I recommend just giving it a good go, and skipping the parts you probably won't ever need. You can always read them later if a later chapter refers to them and you need to understand after all.
As for Linux stuff, last month's Humble Bundle had a bunch of Linux related books: https://web.archive.org/web/20220913000217/https://www.humbl...
You can probably find people talking about this bundle online and find out what books/alternatives they recommend. There were a few Reddit threads about this at the very least, maybe a HN thread or two as well.
https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/ is a great community with lots of resources as well. Check the sidebar and wiki there. Also, if you are into Docker, I love the images hosted by these guys. https://www.linuxserver.io/
I came here to literally say the exact same thing. These two resources are likely some of the most valuable things you'll find. I know some others have said "use the official docker images" and I'd say for selfhosting: don't. The folks who run LinuxServer.IO are awesome and the consistency of their documentation and container images is some of the best, in one place, that's out there today. I would add two things to…
For hardware: in the past, I would say start with a raspberry pi. But those are impossible to find at list price now. So instead, if you look on ebay for SFF (small form-factor) workstations, you can find something like an HP Prodesk G1 with cpu/storage/memory for ~$50-60. Which is significantly cheaper than a raspberry pi 4B @ $100+ by resellers. Slap on a distro, and you're off to the races. Checkout /r/homelab and…
If you prefer books check out
https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Networking-Top-Down-Approach...
Or for video lectures:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoCMsyE1cvdWKsLVyf6cP...