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Self-Host All the Things?

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Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#241

Post by zamnos »

stonewall wrote: post #207
zamnos wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do for backups? If your house gets destroyed in a natural disaster, will all your pictures persist?

I regularly back up to some external HDDs that I keep outside the home. For pictures specifically, I recently discovered M-Disc [0], which are (allegedly) archival-quality, writable Blu-Ray discs. I'm considering burning an M-Disc of each year's pictures and storing them in jewel cases at a family member's house. [0] https://www.mdisc.com/

> some external HDDs that I keep outside the home.

Personally, I'm not remotely meticulous enough for that to work. Properly rotating drives sounds like a lot of work if you want to be rigorous about it. You start with running the backup to drive A, then shipping that drive a couple hundred miles away (to be properly location redundant), and then next week, run the backup to drive B, ship that drive a couple hundred miles away, but then at some point, you're going to want drive A back, so you can rotate drives and put a more recent backups on it. How do you retrieve those external drives, and consistently?

And then while the drive is in transit, and hopefully not lost, you don't have access to it, it's not an online (referring to its availability) backup solution.

So I mean, I do perform backups to an external HDs which I also keep offsite, but because that's nowhere near as rigorous as what teams of engineers and data center techs can do with a much larger budget, I supplement my backups with a cloud storage solution. And I encourage you to do so as well (especially considering encrypted backup services), but you do you.

As far as the mdisc; I mean it's interesting, but I'd also consider getting an LTO tape library. They're more purpose build for backing things up, and my personal opinion is they're going to be better for longevity given everything else.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#242

Post by seqizz »

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…

Oh I was looking the thread of the cult :) /s

As a fellow follower, I can also recommend SNM[0] if anyone wants to self-host their e-mail. Works with zero maintenance, except upgrades which cause few lines to change.

[0]: https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#243

Post by logifail »

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 watch things slowly degrade and break down due to bit-rot and version creep [..] > There are days when the kids can't watch a particular movie and I find out it's because a particular kube component failed (after an hour of root-causing) because I haven't touched it in 2 years. I then have regrets about my life choices. [..] > I now wish I had a synology, flat network and cloud everything possible

No snark intended, but this sounds as though you chose to include a lot of unnecessary complexity into your self-hosting, then discovered that there's almost always a cost to unnecessary complexity(?)

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#244

Post by Gigachad »

j45 wrote: post #196
Gigachad wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M1 Mac mini with linux will probably end up being the best self hosting hardware.

Agreed. Support for packages is improving but still not seamless. Can ram still be upgraded in Mac minis? The m2 Mac mini is a workhorse. Exciting times.

They can't be upgraded as its on the SoC. But if you are buying them new, you can just max it out initially. Asahi linux is pretty much complete for server use cases. The majority of what's missing is thunderbolt, suspend, video decoders, all stuff you don't need on a server.

Probably the main issue you will run in to is funding ARM docker images, usually you have to rebuild them yourself.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#246

Post by justinclift »

stonewall wrote: post #125
ryjo wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incredible. The usual response to "should I host my own email" is "don't do it; you'll get hacked." Three questions: 1. Have you heard of this complaint? 2. Do you use a home ISP connection, or a commercial ISP connection? A "home ISP connection" here usually comes with a dynamic IP address; you can't get your hands on a static address without paying a very large amount monthly or getting a commercial connection. 3.…

1. Yes, most people will tell you not to host your own email, because its too complicated/difficult to get your mail delivered reliably. A lot of this is FUD. Yes, email is a bit more difficult to get right than say, hosting a web app behind Nginx. It's an old protocol, with many "features" bolted on years later to combat spam. I'm not sure how email is easier to "hack," unless there is a zero day in Postfix or somet…

Also note that it's super easy to configure postfix (and likely others) to send all outbound email via a third party service.

I personally use smtp2go.com, and was on their free tier for ages (now upgraded via work). Can recommend, as it "just works" and avoids all the mucking around with SPF/DKIM/etc.

Oh, on a similar note, definitely avoid Sendgrid if you want to send email via a third party. They're outright blocked (as a spam source) by way too many places to be considered reliable any more. :(

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#247

Post by justinclift »

technothrasher wrote: post #171
PuffinBlue wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that hard to do. Harder for residential address blocks for sure. But if you do all the other things previously mentioned like SPF/DKIM etc then cleaning up an IP address isn't that hard. The only service we've ever had issues with is Outlook as they'll ban whole block for opaque reasons and we just escalate it to the provider and they sort it. We just moved two self-hosted mail servers to new IP addresses an…

I played around a bit with sending via SES and Sendgrid. I generally found that deliverability on either of those was actually worse than even one of my slightly dirty IPs.

Maybe try with smtp2go?

Previously, I was also using Sendgrid as well. But they seemed to start doing the "growth at any costs" bullshit which for an email sending company means accepting and delivering spam. (Regardless of their PR/weasel-words these places use to deny it, that's what it comes down to). Thus lots of places now just drop all mail that comes from Sendgrid, no workaround.

When that happened, a friend pointed me to smtp2go, which I've used since personally and we now use at work. We haven't (yet) had anything blocked as spam (less than 10k emails sent a month though), so it seems like they've not done the "growth at any costs" bullshit like Sendgrid.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#249

Post by nkrisc »

dijit wrote: post #77
nkrisc wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think a major issue is that people don't want to even check how to unsubscribe and they see the “mark as spam” button as a “just make this go away” button. You can thank unscrupulous actors for this. I get so much spam I’m not going to try to figure out what is actually spam or not, nor am I going to risk clicking “unsubscribe” links in emails I assume are malicious spam anyway. If it looks automated and I don’t…

> Especially marketing emails. I would never knowingly sign up to receive a marketing email thats fair, some people do it for the promise of getting some deals, something we actually delivered on often as when we wanted to clear the warehouse we sent discount/clearance emails to the signed up users rather than putting it on the site. We used to also trial “own produced” products at discounted rates for people as a so…

I’ve no doubt that some people do choose to sign up to receive marketing emails.

I don’t, and yet I still do, so I can’t tell what marketing emails are “legitimate” because a website pre-checked a small box I didn’t notice or are simply spam, so it all gets marked spam.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#250

Post by efields »

einhverfr wrote: post #198

At PGConf India, one of the keynotes addressed exactly this topic. The largest stock broker firm in India had made the decision to self-host everything. The CTO made a number of points that I think are missed in this discussion and article, namely: 1. You may think you are a software company, but HR, accounting etc are just as critical to your operations as the customer product. Therefore there isn't really a distinc…

This is me, a principal frontend engineer and “player-coach” team lead of a few engineers in a pharmaceutical. We do as much as we can for the various digital properties, short of intense design (leaders want a willing agency they can torment).
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