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Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

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Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#11

Post by JoshTriplett »

ryandrake wrote: post #3

> The premise is that by learning some of the fundamentals, in this case Linux, you can host most things yourself. Not because you need to, but because you want to, and the feeling of using your own services just gives you pleasure. And you learn from it. Not only that, but it helps to eliminate the very real risk that you get kicked off of a platform that you depend on without recourse. Imagine if you lost your Gmai…

Own your own domain, point it to the email hosting provider of your choice, and if something went horribly wrong, switch providers.

Domains are cheap; never use an email address that's email-provider-specific. That's orthogonal to whether you host your own email or use a professional service to do it for you.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#12

Post by haiku2077 »

holoduke wrote: post #4

I spend quite some years with linux systems, but i am using llms for configurating systems a lot these days. Last week i setup a server for a group of interns. They needed a docker kubernetes setup with some other tooling. I would have spend at least a day or two to set it up normally. Now it took maybe an hour. All the configurations, commands and some issues were solved with help of chatgpt. You still need to know…

Similarly, I was reconfiguring my home server and having Claude generate systemd units and timers was very handy. As you said you do need to know the material to fix the few mistakes and know what to ask for. But it can do the busywork of turning "I need this backup job to run once a week" into the .service and .timer file syntax for you to tweak instead of writing it from scratch.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#13

Post by doubled112 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #11
ryandrake wrote: post #3

> The premise is that by learning some of the fundamentals, in this case Linux, you can host most things yourself. Not because you need to, but because you want to, and the feeling of using your own services just gives you pleasure. And you learn from it. Not only that, but it helps to eliminate the very real risk that you get kicked off of a platform that you depend on without recourse. Imagine if you lost your Gmai…

Own your own domain, point it to the email hosting provider of your choice, and if something went horribly wrong, switch providers. Domains are cheap; never use an email address that's email-provider-specific. That's orthogonal to whether you host your own email or use a professional service to do it for you.

This is my plan.

I will lose some email history, but at least I don’t lose my email future.

However, you can’t own a domain, you are just borrowing it. There is still a risk that gets shut down too, but I don’t think it is super common.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#14

Post by JoshTriplett »

doubled112 wrote: post #13
JoshTriplett wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Own your own domain, point it to the email hosting provider of your choice, and if something went horribly wrong, switch providers. Domains are cheap; never use an email address that's email-provider-specific. That's orthogonal to whether you host your own email or use a professional service to do it for you.

This is my plan. I will lose some email history, but at least I don’t lose my email future. However, you can’t own a domain, you are just borrowing it. There is still a risk that gets shut down too, but I don’t think it is super common.

> I will lose some email history, but at least I don’t lose my email future.

I back up all my email every day, independent of my hosting provider. I have an automatic nightly sync to my laptop, which happens right before my nightly laptop backups.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#15

Post by aucisson_masque »

I get why you want to self host, although I also get why you don’t want.

Selfhosting is a pain in the ass, it needs updating docker, things break sometimes, sometimes it’s only you and not anyone else so you’re left alone searching the solution, and even when it works it’s often a bit clunky.

I have a extremely limited list of self hosted tool that just work and are saving me time (first one on that list would be firefly) but god knows i wasted quite a bit of my time setting up stuffs that eventually broke and that i just abandoned.

Today I’m very happy with paying for stuff if the company is respecting privacy and has descent pricing.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#16

Post by SoftTalker »

haiku2077 wrote: post #12
holoduke wrote: post #4

I spend quite some years with linux systems, but i am using llms for configurating systems a lot these days. Last week i setup a server for a group of interns. They needed a docker kubernetes setup with some other tooling. I would have spend at least a day or two to set it up normally. Now it took maybe an hour. All the configurations, commands and some issues were solved with help of chatgpt. You still need to know…

Similarly, I was reconfiguring my home server and having Claude generate systemd units and timers was very handy. As you said you do need to know the material to fix the few mistakes and know what to ask for. But it can do the busywork of turning "I need this backup job to run once a week" into the .service and .timer file syntax for you to tweak instead of writing it from scratch.

Isn't depending on Claude to administer your systems rather divergent from the theme of "Self-Host and Tech Independence?"

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#17

Post by Larrikin »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #15

I get why you want to self host, although I also get why you don’t want. Selfhosting is a pain in the ass, it needs updating docker, things break sometimes, sometimes it’s only you and not anyone else so you’re left alone searching the solution, and even when it works it’s often a bit clunky. I have a extremely limited list of self hosted tool that just work and are saving me time (first one on that list would be fir…

What project did you run into issues with? I've found any project that has gotten to the point of offering a Docker Compose seems to just work.

Plus I've found nearly every company will betray your trust in them at some point so why even give them the chance? I self host Home Assistant, but they seem to be the only company that actively enacts legal barriers for themselves so if Paulus gets hit by a bus tomorrow the project can't suddenly start going against the users.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#18

Post by teddyh »

elashri wrote: post #8
sunshine-o wrote: post #7

I self-host most of what I need but I recently faced the ultimate test when my Internet went down intermittently. It raised some interesting questions: - How long can I be productive without the Internet? - What am I missing? The answer for me was I should archive more documentation and NixOS is unusable offline if you do not host a cache (so that is pretty bad). Ultimately I also found out self-hosting most of what…

I find that self hosting "devdocs" [1] and having zeal (on linux) [2] solves a lot of these problems with the offline docs. [1] https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/devdocs [2] https://zealdocs.org/

For offline documentation, I use these in order of preference:

• Info¹ documentation, which I read directly in Emacs. (If you have ever used the terminal-based standalone “info” program, please try to forget all about it. Use Emacs to read Info documentation, and preferably use a graphical Emacs instead of a terminal-based one; Info documentation occasionally has images.)

• Gnome Devhelp².

• Zeal³

• RFC archive⁴ dumps provided by the Debian “doc-rfc“ package⁵.

1. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/info/

2. https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Devhelp

3. https://zealdocs.org/

4. https://www.rfc-editor.org/

5. https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/doc-rfc

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#19

Post by iforgotpassword »

SoftTalker wrote: post #16
haiku2077 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly, I was reconfiguring my home server and having Claude generate systemd units and timers was very handy. As you said you do need to know the material to fix the few mistakes and know what to ask for. But it can do the busywork of turning "I need this backup job to run once a week" into the .service and .timer file syntax for you to tweak instead of writing it from scratch.

Isn't depending on Claude to administer your systems rather divergent from the theme of "Self-Host and Tech Independence?"

I think it's just a turbo mode for figuring things out. Like posting to a forum and getting an answer immediately, without all those idiots asking you why you even want to do this, how software X is better than what you are using etc.

Obviously you should have enough technical knowledge to do a rough sanity check on the reply, as there's still a chance you get stupid shit out of it, but mostly it's really efficient for getting started with some tooling or programming language you're not familiar with. You can perfectly do without, it just takes longer. Plus You're not dependent on it to keep your stuff running once it's set up.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#20

Post by teeray »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #11
ryandrake wrote: post #3

> The premise is that by learning some of the fundamentals, in this case Linux, you can host most things yourself. Not because you need to, but because you want to, and the feeling of using your own services just gives you pleasure. And you learn from it. Not only that, but it helps to eliminate the very real risk that you get kicked off of a platform that you depend on without recourse. Imagine if you lost your Gmai…

Own your own domain, point it to the email hosting provider of your choice, and if something went horribly wrong, switch providers. Domains are cheap; never use an email address that's email-provider-specific. That's orthogonal to whether you host your own email or use a professional service to do it for you.

Agreed. I’ve had the same email address for a decade now but cycled through the registrar’s email, Gmail, and M365 in that time. Makes it easy to switch.
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