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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

#51

Post by crabmusket »

klabb3 wrote: post #46

I propose a slightly different boundary: not ”to self-host” but ”ability to self-host”. It simply means that you can if you want to, but you can let someone else host it. This is a lot more inclusive, both to those who are less technical and those who are willing to pay for it. People who don’t care, ”I’ll just pay”, are especially affected, and the ones who should care the most. Why? Because today, businesses are mo…

This sounds like the "credible exit" idea Bluesky talk about.

Also shout-out to Zulip for being open source, self hostable, with a cloud hosted service and transfer between these setups.

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

#52

Post by nodesocket »

I run a Kubernetes 4x pi cluster and an Intel N150 mini PC both managed with Portainer in my homelab. The following open source ops tools have been a game changer. All tools below run in containers.

- kubetail: Kubernetes log viewer for the entire cluster. Deployments, pods, statefulsets. Installed via Helm chart. Really awesome.

- Dozzle: Docker container log viewing for the N150 mini pc which just runs docker not Kubernetes. Portainer manual install.

- UptimeKuma: Monitor and alerting for all servers, http/https endpoints, and even PostgreSQL. Portainer manual install.

- Beszel: Monitoring of server cpu, memory, disk, network and docker containers. Can be installed into Kubernetes via helm chart. Also installed manually via Portainer on the N150 mini pc.

- Semaphore UI: UI for running ansible playbooks. Support for scheduling as well. Portainer manual install.

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

#53

Post by ehnto »

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…

> and NixOS is unusable offline if you do not host a cache (so that is pretty bad).

I think a cache or other repository backup system is important for any software using package managers.

Relying on hundreds if not thousands of individuals to keep their part of the dependency tree available and working is one of the wildest parts of modern software developmemt to me. For end use software I much prefer a discrete package, all dependencies bundled. That's what sits on the hard-drive in practice either way.

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

#54

Post by ehnto »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #32
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…

Each downtime is an opportunity to learn the weaknesses of your own system. There are certain scenarios you have no control over (upstream problems), but others have contingencies. I enjoy working out these contingencies and determining whether the costs are worth the likelihoods - and even if they're not, that doesn't necessarily mean I won't cater for it.

When my rental was damaged by a neighbouring house fire, we were kicked out of the house the next day. This was a contingency I hadn't planned well for.

I have long thought that I need my homelab/tools to have hardcases and a low power, modularity to them. Now I am certain of it. Not that I need first world technology hosting in emergency situations, but I am now staying with family for at least a few weeks, maybe months, and it would be amazing to just plonk a few hardcases down and be back in business.

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

#55

Post by mjrpes »

whartung wrote: post #21
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…

My singular issue with self hosting specifically with email is not setting it up. Lots of documentation on setting up an email server. But running it is different issue. Notably, I have no idea, and have not seen a resource talking about troubleshooting and problem solving for a self hosted service. Particularly in regards with interoperability with other providers. As a contrived example, if Google blackballs your s…

> But running it is different issue. Notably, I have no idea, and have not seen a resource talking about troubleshooting and problem solving for a self hosted service. Particularly in regards with interoperability with other providers.

It's nearly impossible to get 100% email deliverability if you self host and don't use a SMTP relay. It might work if all your contacts are with a major provider like google, but otherwise you'll get 97% deliverability but then that one person using sbcglobal/att won't ever get your email for a 4 week period or that company using barracuda puts your email in a black hole. You put in effort to get your email server whitelisted but many email providers don't respond or only give you a temporary fix.

However, you can still self host most of the email stack, including most importantly storage of your email, by using an SMTP relay, like AWS, postmark, or mailgun. It's quick and easy to switch SMTP relays if the one you're using doesn't work out. In postfix you can choose to use a relay only for certain domains.

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

#56

Post by data-ottawa »

danillonunes wrote: post #22
doubled112 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As for the domain risks, my suggestions is to stick with the .com/.net/.org or something common in your country and avoid novelty ones such as .app, .dev, etc, even if you can't get the shortest and simpler name. And if you have some money to spare, just renew it to 10 years.

Even if you renew for 10 years, set a calendar reminder annually to check in and make sure your renewal info is still good.

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

#58

Post by Lvl999Noob »

bluGill wrote: post #48
zdw wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can running a single binary under systemd need more memory/disk space than having that identical binary with supporting docker container layers under it on the same system, plus the overhead of all of docker? Conflicting versions, I'll give you that, but how frequently does that happen, especially if you mostly source from upstream OS vendor repos? The most frequent conflict is if everything wants port 80/443, an…

I didn't mean the two paragraphs to imply that they are somehow opposites (though on hindsight I obviously did). There are tradeoffs. a single binary is between docker and a library that uses shared libraries. What is right depends on your situation. I use all three in my selfhosted environment - you probably should too.

If you are using docker, do you save anything by using shared libraries? I thought docker copies everything. So every container has its own shared libraries and the OS running all those containers has its own as well.

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

#59

Post by XorNot »

sdf4j wrote: post #57

> I always say to buy a domain first. You can only rent a domain. The landlord is merciless if you miss a payment, you are out. There are risks everywhere, and it depresses me how fragile is our online identity.

It's something of a technical limitation though: there's no reason all my devices - the consumers of my domain name - couldn't just accept that anything signed with some key is actually XorNot.com or whatever...but good luck keeping that configuration together.

You very reasonably could replace the whole system with just "lists of trusted keys to names" if the concept has enough popular technical support.

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

#60

Post by chairmansteve »

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?"

Not in this case. It's a learning accelerator, like having an experienced engineer sitting next to you.
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