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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

#91

Post by motorest »

phito wrote: post #74
zdw wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> docker There's your problem. Docker adds indirection on storage, networking, etc., and also makes upgrades difficult as you have to either rebuild the container, or rely on others to do so to get security and other updates. If you stick to things that can be deployed as an upstream OS vendor package, or as a single binary (go-based projects frequently do this), you'll likely have a better time in the long run.

Oh my god no, docker is so damn useful I will never return to package managers/manual installation.

>>Oh my god no, docker is so damn useful I will never return to package managers/manual installation.

This. These anti-containerisation comments read like something someone oblivious to containers would say if they were desperately grabbing onto tech from 30 years ago and refused to even spend 5 minutes exploring anything else.

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

#92

Post by motorest »

zdw wrote: post #45
eddythompson80 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely disagree. > Docker adds indirection on storage, networking, etc., What do you mean by "indirection"? It adds OS level isolation. It's not an overhead or a bad thing. > makes upgrades difficult as you have to either rebuild the container, or rely on others to do so to get security and other updates. Literally the entire selfhost stack could be updated and redeployed in a matter of: docker compose pull doc…

Tools like Ansible exist and can do everything you mention on the deploy side and more, and are also cross platform to a wider range of platforms than Linux-only Docker. Isolation technologies are also available outside of docker, through systemd, jails, and other similar tools.

> Tools like Ansible exist and can do everything you mention on the deploy side and more (...)

Your comment is technically correct, but factually wrong. What you are leaving out is the fact that, in order to do what Docker provides out of the box, you need to come up with a huge custom Ansible script to even implement the happy path.

So, is your goal to self host your own services, or to endlessly toy with the likes of Ansible?

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

#93

Post by itsafarqueue »

larodi wrote: post #85
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…

having a .zip of the world, also helps, even though being a lossy one. i mean - always have one of the latest models around, ready for spin. we can easily argue llms are killing the IT sphere, but they also are a reasonable insurance against doomsday.

If by doomsday you mean “power out for a few hours”, sure.

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

#94

Post by motorest »

zdw wrote: post #65
kilburn wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. You are still running within the same kernel. If your images use the same base container then the libraries exist only once and you get the same benefits of a non-docker setup. This depends on the storage driver though. It is true at least for the default and most common overlayfs driver [1] [1] https://docs.docker.com/engine/storage/drivers/overlayfs-dri...

The difference between a native package manager provided by the OS vendor and docker is that in a native package manager allows you to upgrade parts of the system under the applications. Let's say some Heartbleed (which affected OpenSSL, primarily) happens again. With native packages, you update the package, restart a few things that depend on it with shared libraries, and you're patched. OS vendors are highly motiva…

> With docker, someone has to rebuild every container that contains a copy of the library.

I think you're grossly overblowing how much work it takes to refresh your containers.

In my case, I have personal projects which have nightly builds that pull the latest version of the base image, and services are just redeployed right under your nose. All it take to do this was to add a cron trigger to the same CICD pipeline.

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

#95

Post by imrejonk »

anotherpaul wrote: post #75
kassner wrote: post #73

Warning: shameless plug ahead Self-hosting doesn’t mean you have to buy hardware. After a few years, low-end machines are borderline unusable with Windows, but they are still plenty strong for a Linux server. It’s quite likely you or a friend has an old laptop laying around, which can be repurposed. I’ve done this with an i3 from 2011 [1] for two users, and in 2025 I have no signs that I need an upgrade. Laptops are…

Glad I am not alone in this. Old laptops are much better than Raspberry pies and often free and power efficient.

And: they have a crash cart (keyboard, mouse and display) and battery backup built-in. An old laptop is perfect for starting a homelab. The only major downside I can think of, and as another commenter already mentioned, is the limited storage (RAID) options.

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

#96

Post by kassner »

motorest wrote: post #89
kassner wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My laptop from 2011 idles at 8W, with two SATA SSDs. I have an Intel 10th-gen mini PC that idles at 5W with one SSD. 3W is not groundbreaking, but for a computer you paid $0, it would take many years to offset the $180 paid on a mini PC.

> My laptop from 2011 idles at 8W, with two SATA SSDs. some benchmarks show the Raspberry Pi 4 idling below 3W and consuming a tad over 6W under sustained high load. Power consumption is not an argument that's in favor of old laptops.

> tad over 6W

That is the key. The RPi works for idling, but anything else gets throttled pretty bad. I used to self host on the RPi, but it was just not enough[1]. Laptops/mini-PCs will have a much better burstable-to-idle power ratio (6/3W vs 35/8W).

1: https://www.kassner.com.br/en/2022/03/16/update-to-my-zfs-ba...

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

#97

Post by buran77 »

princevegeta89 wrote: post #68
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…

Why do you need to update docker? I kept my box running for more than 1 year without upgrading docker. I upgrade my images but it hardly takes 15 minutes for me, in let's say a month. >>> if the company is respecting privacy It's very rare to see companies doing it, and moreover it is hard to trust them to even maintain a unique stance as years pass by.

It doesn't matter if you upgrade Docker or not. All tech, self hosted or not, fails for three reasons:

1) You did something to it (changed a setting, upgraded software, etc.)

2) You didn't do something to it (change a setting, upgrade a software, etc.)

3) Just because.

When it does you get the wonderful "work-like" experience, frantically trying to troubleshoot while the things around your house are failing and your family is giving you looks for it.

Self host but be aware that there's a tradeoff. The work that used to be done by someone else, somewhere else, before issues hit you is now done by you alone.

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

#98

Post by tacker2000 »

sunshine-o wrote: post #84
zdw wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> docker There's your problem. Docker adds indirection on storage, networking, etc., and also makes upgrades difficult as you have to either rebuild the container, or rely on others to do so to get security and other updates. If you stick to things that can be deployed as an upstream OS vendor package, or as a single binary (go-based projects frequently do this), you'll likely have a better time in the long run.

I would agree with that. Docker has a lot of use cases but self hosting is not one of them. When self-hosting you wanna think long term and the fact you will loose interest in the fiddling after a while. So sticking with software packaged in a good distribution is probably the way to go. This is the forgotten added value of a Linux or BSD distribution, a coherent system with maintenance and an easy upgrade path. The…

What are you talking about?

Docker is THE solution for self hosting stuff since one often has one server and runs a ton of stuff on it, with different PHP, Python versions, for example.

Docker makes it incredibly easy to a multitude of services on one machine however different they may be.

And if you ever need to move to a new server, all you need to do is move the volumes (if even necessary) and run the containers on the new machine.

So YES, self hosting stuff is a huge use case for docker.

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

#99

Post by magicalhippo »

sunshine-o wrote: post #84
zdw wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> docker There's your problem. Docker adds indirection on storage, networking, etc., and also makes upgrades difficult as you have to either rebuild the container, or rely on others to do so to get security and other updates. If you stick to things that can be deployed as an upstream OS vendor package, or as a single binary (go-based projects frequently do this), you'll likely have a better time in the long run.

I would agree with that. Docker has a lot of use cases but self hosting is not one of them. When self-hosting you wanna think long term and the fact you will loose interest in the fiddling after a while. So sticking with software packaged in a good distribution is probably the way to go. This is the forgotten added value of a Linux or BSD distribution, a coherent system with maintenance and an easy upgrade path. The…

I feel the exact opposite. Docker has made self-hosting so much easier and painless.

Backing up relevant configuration and data is a breeze with Docker. Upgrading is typically a breeze as well. No need to suffer with a 5-year old out of date version from your distro, run the version you want to and upgrade when you want to. And if shit hits the fan, it's trivial to roll back.

Sure, OS tools should be updated by the distro. But for the things you actually use the OS for, Docker all the way in my view.

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

#100

Post by safety1st »

kassner wrote: post #73

Warning: shameless plug ahead Self-hosting doesn’t mean you have to buy hardware. After a few years, low-end machines are borderline unusable with Windows, but they are still plenty strong for a Linux server. It’s quite likely you or a friend has an old laptop laying around, which can be repurposed. I’ve done this with an i3 from 2011 [1] for two users, and in 2025 I have no signs that I need an upgrade. Laptops are…

I'm posting right now from a 13 year old Acer laptop running Linux Mint XFCE. I always feel bad about throwing away old tech so when the time came to buy a new laptop I hooked this one up to my living room TV via HDMI, bought a $25 Logitech K400+ wireless keyboard/trackpad combo, and it's still trucking along just fine. Surfs the web, handles YouTube, Netflix with no problems, I occasionally pop open VS Code or Thunderbird to check into something work-related. Even runs a couple indie games on Steam with gamepad support.

I bet Framework laptops would take this dynamic into overdrive, sadly I live in a country that they don't ship to.

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