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Self-Host All the Things?

tedium.co

271–280 of 295 posts

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#271
post #270

Help me out here: I do a lot of this "self-hosting stuff," I have fiber internet. And a whole lot of y'all talk about what feels like a TON of overkill. I still don't really get what kubernetes is (20 year Linux user) or the necessity of buying a "server" for this purpose. I use (what is relatively old) a $200 office desktop from someones surplus (Dell Optiplex 900-something, I don't even remember because it's in the…

I agree. I have one of those fairly efficient mini PCs also running Ubuntu+Docker and it's totally fine for my use-case. I don't need 100% uptime (or even 99%) and nightly backups are more than sufficient. I can spin up an equivalent machine in about an hour from backup if necessary. (I could spend some time learning Ansible to automate this further.)

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#272
post #270

Help me out here: I do a lot of this "self-hosting stuff," I have fiber internet. And a whole lot of y'all talk about what feels like a TON of overkill. I still don't really get what kubernetes is (20 year Linux user) or the necessity of buying a "server" for this purpose. I use (what is relatively old) a $200 office desktop from someones surplus (Dell Optiplex 900-something, I don't even remember because it's in the…

But Google uses Kubernetes so you have to use it.

My plumbing can barely scale to handle a dinner party, but apparently my home lab needs to be ready to provision nodes if I ever find 2 billion people in my living room.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#273
post #270

Help me out here: I do a lot of this "self-hosting stuff," I have fiber internet. And a whole lot of y'all talk about what feels like a TON of overkill. I still don't really get what kubernetes is (20 year Linux user) or the necessity of buying a "server" for this purpose. I use (what is relatively old) a $200 office desktop from someones surplus (Dell Optiplex 900-something, I don't even remember because it's in the…

I agree. I have one of those fairly efficient mini PCs also running Ubuntu+Docker and it's totally fine for my use-case. I don't need 100% uptime (or even 99%) and nightly backups are more than sufficient. I can spin up an equivalent machine in about an hour from backup if necessary. (I could spend some time learning Ansible to automate this further.)

Right? I live in North Florida, meaning "the power will go out 7-10 times a year," so my "uptime" is not important at all, just "the thing in the bios that automatically turns the computer on without pressing the button when it recieves power"

I don't need access to the music and TV shows with no TV/stereo to play them on :) READ A BOOK, kids.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#274
post #22

Loving the "just right" labels. How does n8n compare to Activepieces? Also those who are looking to dive deeper into self-hosting should join us at /r/selfhosted on Reddit.

Creator of Activepieces here; we do our best to design for the simplest user so we keep our UX as straightforward and non-technical as possible. Our license is very permissive (MIT), and we encourage community collaboration on pieces which made us grow very fast to 41 pieces until today. Here is our HN launch about a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34723989 And this is our /r/selfhosted launch: https:…

Thanks!

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#275
post #237
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of annoying-once-you-notice-it idioms, should readers assume dishonesty on all other statements made by people that prefix only some small subset of their claims with 'Honestly ...' and 'To be honest ...'?

No, because they mean "honest" in the sense of "frank/unguarded", not "truthful".

'To be frank [or candid] ...' seems like a superior phrase, in that case.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be, or it could be that those systems are so aggressively tuned that newcomers have no chance to not be labeled spam while established players are whitelisted. (I truly don't know, but I don't think it's as simple as you're saying)

Email delivery is not purely a protection racket. People use Gmail because they legitimately want to filter out the unsolicited spam, marketing, etc. To an anonymous attacker, there is no cost to send these emails. Middlemen like MailChimp and Sendgrid play the role of converting email from a free, publicly exploitable channel into a paid, KYC one. Email fbfw is the de facto standard communication channel for almost…

> What is the alternative to spam filtering?

Make sending email cost the sender. No, I don't know how. The best ideas I've heard (1) make the sender store the message and (2) have no hope of being widely adopted.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#277
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The cost of maxing out a mini from Apple typically puts it at least double the cost in a computational power per watt model.

It might be feasible to but 2 or 3 usffs to cover one max mini at a fraction of the cost, or stick the mini to doing only certain tasks on 8 or 16gb.

Since the m1 addresses memory differently less ram should go further, but I’m not sure if those efficiencies extend to virtualized machines.

I’ll try to dig up an old spreadsheet and add the the m1’s and m2’s stack up to the above.

The arm docker image is a real deterrent. Forums have more and more workarounds and tweaks so hopefully they’ll become available as time goes on. It’s often not worth fighting with compiling.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#278
post #270

Help me out here: I do a lot of this "self-hosting stuff," I have fiber internet. And a whole lot of y'all talk about what feels like a TON of overkill. I still don't really get what kubernetes is (20 year Linux user) or the necessity of buying a "server" for this purpose. I use (what is relatively old) a $200 office desktop from someones surplus (Dell Optiplex 900-something, I don't even remember because it's in the…

Sometimes I still host things on LAMP servers, there are many apps/websites/platforms that just use PHP/MySQL so I can just upload some files or edit them directly on the server.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#279

Self-hosting is a big operations problem, with few tools to automate it. Long ago, I had an associate tell me that he was having some success with setting up Wordpress sites for local political organizations. I said to him: "Oh, that's really neat! What are you doing to ensure that the sites stay up to date with security patches?" His response was completely unrelated to my question, which I figured was my answer and…

> Anything I deploy needs to have an upgrade plan. Ideally, something that provides a package (either on distro or a repo the package provides), so "apt update" will resolve it. Docker can be a good way as well, Sentry does a pretty good job at this. I wrote an article called "Never update anything": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/never-update-anything which in truth argued that while updates are necessary, they're…

I agree, I ran many WordPress sites, UXWizz dashboards or even my own tools written in Node.js, and they never ever broke by themselves in 10+ years. The only time there is an issue if I decide to update/change anything. In general, software that has once worked will always work. If I open my PSP (Playstation Portable) from 2005 it will still work as well as in the first day, all the games work the same and the boot time and interface are faster than most consoles nowadays. Why does it still work? Because it once worked and nothing changed.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have run a lot of WordPress sites, it's easy for a skilled admin to run it securely for a long time with barely any effort and unfortunately it's also easy for a user to make it insecure.

Sure, and that was what I floated with that guy, but the impression I got from him is that he installed it and moved on. So, as you say, a skilled admin can do it, given some ongoing attention. Which is exactly what I'm talking about WRT operations.

I consider myself a "skilled admin", yet I don't feel like I have to do much to keep a WordPress instance running. Now it even updates itself. I often just install WP, a theme, and maybe one or two plugins, and then it runs without issues forever.
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