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Self-Host All the Things?

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Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#211

Post by simongray »

bsnnkv wrote: post #112

My experience has been that after having become comfortable with Nix, self-hosting is the path of least resistance for the majority of "mainstream" tooling where you can pick between paying for a SaaS or self-hosting. So nice to not have to deal with Docker containers to deploy (most things) anymore. I see a lot of people suggesting hosting on a VPS, but I feel that a Hetzner Auction box is often much better bang-for…

One of the main reasons I use Docker is being able to run the exact same Dockerfiles locally and in prod, with virtualisation taken care of automatically on e.g. Mac.

Is Nix a viable alternative to that?

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#214

Post by dvisca »

dmje wrote: post #39

I've been impressed with Yunohost [0]. I only have it setup on an internal box for now but it works well, and super easy to use. Good for people like me who aren't interested in admin. [0] https://yunohost.org/en

Yunohost is great! I have a small Hetzner VPS set up at Yunohost with Baikal, Nextcloud, Outline Wiki, Bitwarden (or Vaultwarden) and Wallabag. I haven't had any major problems since the initial installation about a year ago, although I happily install and uninstall software every now and then, not necessarily ensuring a stable environment.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#215

Post by 8fingerlouie »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #148
stonewall wrote: post #68

I self-host literally everything (email, calendar/contacts, VOIP, XMPP, you name it) from by basement with used 1U servers from eBay and a cable internet connection. It was probably more hassle than most people would want to bother with to get it set up. But, with everything up and running, there's very little maintenance. I probably spend a few hours a month tinkering still, just because I enjoy it. I use a stack of…

I had fun doing this until I had kids. I have a rack with 10gbe, ups, kubernetes a zfs storage server, multiple vlans, 4 unifi APs & locally hosted controller and all sorts of self-hosted stuff. My heart breaks slightly as I watch things slowly degrade and break down due to bit-rot and version creep, I now wish I had a synology, flat network and cloud everything possible. There are days when the kids can't watch a pa…

> I had fun doing this until I had kids.

As i keep telling people, self hosting is fun as long as your user count is 1. When it grows beyond that, you suddenly have a SLA.

I self hosted almost everything (e-mail is pointless from privay concerns), and when we had kids i moved to a dual Synology setup with a single proxmox server for running services. Fast forward some years and electricity suddenly costs about an arm and a leg, so i had to do "something".

I completely stopped self hosting anything "publicly" available. Everything moved to the cloud including most file storage, using Cryptomator for privacy where applicable.

The server got reduced to a small ARM device with the prime task of synchronizing our cloud content locally, and making backups of it, both remote and local. As a side bonus it also runs a Plex server off of a large USB hard drive. All redundancy has been removed, and my 10G network has been switched off, leaving only a single 16 port POE switch for Access Points and cameras.

The Synology boxes now only comes online a couple of times every week to take a snapshot of all shares, pull a copy from the ARM device, after which it powers down again.

In the process i reduced my network rack power consumption from just below 300W to 67W, and with electricity prices for the past year averaging around €0.6/kWh that means i save around 2050 kWh/year, which adds up to €1225/year, or just over €100/month.

Subtract from those savings the €25/month i pay for cloud services and i still come out ahead. On top of that i literally have zero maintenance now. My home network is only accessible from the outside through a VPN. The only critical part is backups, but i use healthchecks.io to alert me if those fail.

I still kept the network seggregation, so everything "IoT" is on it's separate VLAN, as well as the kids. The only major change was that the "adults" VLAN is now the management VLAN. I have no wired computers, so maintaining a management VLAN over WiFi was more trouble than i could be bothered with :)

Why are the kids on their own VLAN/WiFi ? Because kids wants to play games with their friends, something the normal Guest network does not support. Kids also brings all sorts of devices with new and exiting exploits/vira, and i didn't feel like doing the maintenance on that. So instead my kids have their very own VLAN with access to just printers, AirPlay devices and the Plex server.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#216

Post by college_physics »

dewey wrote: post #142
college_physics wrote: post #139

Why isnt this a more widespread business model? DIY is "fun" but streamlining everything for the average household would have a much bigger audience. Offer a linux distro that is customized to provide from a menu of self-hosted services (with as little pain as possible), along with a subscription for support. Could be offered as an extra service by the ISP provider or partners or entirely independent.

Because not a lot of people care about this being a thing, ask anyone outside of HN if they would run Linux and they most likely don't even know what it is. There's not much upside for anyone using that over free Gmail/Drive/Photos for everyone except a small group who thinks they need to own their Email and Google is evil. It's a fair standpoint, but unrealistic to anyone not deep into the topic.

What you are saying is that the opinion of the most informed about a topic does not matter because ignorance rules.

The analogy is if all doctors were warning about the risks of smoking in their journals but because smokers dont read them and dont see the "upside" of quiting its not going to happen.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#217

Post by orangepurple »

xur17 wrote: post #147
stonewall wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some automation that does a weekly archive of everything important to a ZFS-based NAS. Home directories are also stored there over NFS, with hourly/weekly/monthly snapshots. Once a month or so, I plug in two separate 5TB external HDDs and run a backup script that rsync's everything to each one (2 is 1 and 1 is none). These are stored outside my home. I should probably get some kind of cloud-based / encrypted b…

> I should probably get some kind of cloud-based / encrypted backup thing going as well. I don't claim that my current backup system is very good. I recommend Backblaze B2 - $5 / TB, and supports s3's api.

Backing up 100+ gigs of data to Backblaze B2 is PAINFULLY slow. I tried to back up a few terabytes and gave up after a few gigabytes because it was so extremely throttled (paid plan) that a backup would have taken weeks or months to complete. (I have gigabit fiber optic service).

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#218

Post by [deleted] »

college_physics wrote: post #216
dewey wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because not a lot of people care about this being a thing, ask anyone outside of HN if they would run Linux and they most likely don't even know what it is. There's not much upside for anyone using that over free Gmail/Drive/Photos for everyone except a small group who thinks they need to own their Email and Google is evil. It's a fair standpoint, but unrealistic to anyone not deep into the topic.

What you are saying is that the opinion of the most informed about a topic does not matter because ignorance rules. The analogy is if all doctors were warning about the risks of smoking in their journals but because smokers dont read them and dont see the "upside" of quiting its not going to happen.

[deleted]

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#219

Post by chillfox »

dijit wrote: post #208
chillfox wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mark receipts as spam, but I do delete them without opening them and I really can't blame the people who mark them as spam. When I buy something, I get a notification from my bank, instantly, that's basically the receipt in a standardized compact form (2 lines of text) with the amount in my local currency. This is much more useful than the receipts online stores send where the relevant details are buried in s…

> When I buy something in a physical store they have the decency to ask if I want a receipt. I don't understand why that's such a hard concept for online stores/services to get, ask me if I want a receipt 2 things though. 1) Your goods arent given to you at point of sale with online transactions. what happens then if it doesn't show up? tracking numbers aren’t always generated on the fly (it depends mostly on the pos…

1) A lot of the things I buy are electronic, so yes, I get them immediately at point of sale.

And if that's not the case then how about asking me if I would like an email with a tracking number when it ships?

2) I have never had to show an email as proof when returning something, usually they know damn well that I bought and paid for it.

In general it seems like you are conflating all the different kinds of email as being one and the same. They are not. I specifically said I don't want receipts by default because they are just spam in the vast majority of cases. I never said anything about email verification emails or shipping emails with tracking numbers.

Edit: I just wanted to add that needing a receipt for a refund is a truly alien concept to me. I can’t even imagine how bad the consumer protection laws are where you live.

Here, even in physical stores we can just give them the card we used to buy the thing and that’s enough to process a refund.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#220

Post by teekert »

A quick plug for this very excellent podcast on self-hosting all the things (except maybe email ;)): [0]

They always have good suggestions and point to their repos and (example) code. They explore new things and the podcast gives you an excellent idea of the quality of services. Some things I discovered through them: Paperless NGS, PhotoPrism, Tailscale, Matrix Dendrite, Hugo, Docker-compose, Traefik, NixOS) and they talk about my fav projects a lot (Nextcloud and Home Assistant), which I have been using for years now. Recently they did a nice JellyFin challenge (they were all on Plex) and I learned a lot.

[0]: https://podverse.fm/podcast/nUl1ZCL76

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