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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

#121

Post by PeterStuer »

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 you are not afraid of shopping the used market, I'm currently building a Proxmox node with 3rd gen Threadripper 32Cores/64Threads, 256GB ram and 2x10G, 2x2,5G and a dedicated IPMI mgmnt 1G interface, 64 PCIe gen 4 lanes, all for less than 2k Euro.

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

#122

Post by paldepind2 »

PhilipRoman wrote: post #111
cherryteastain wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but arguably anything below the equivalent of RAID6/RAIDZ2 puts you at a not inconsiderable risk of data loss. Most laptops cannot do parity of any sort because of a lack of SATA/M.2 ports so you will need new hardware if you want the resilience offered by RAID. Ideally you will want that twice on different machines if you go by the "backups in at least 2 different physical locations" rule.

To be honest I never understood the purpose of RAID for personal use cases. RAID is not a backup, so you need frequent, incremental backups anyway. It only makes sense for things where you need that 99.99% uptime. OK, maybe if you're hosting a service that many people depend on then I could see it (although I suspect downtime would still be dominated by other causes) but then I go over to r/DataHoarder and I see peop…

RAID is not backup, but in some circumstances it's better than a backup. If you don't have RAID and your disk dies you need to replace it ASAP and you've lost all changes since your last backup. If you have RAID you just replace the disk and suffer 0 data loss.

That being said, the reason why I'm afraid of not using RAID is data integrity. What happens when the single HDD/SSD in your system is near its end of life? Can it be trusted to fail cleanly or might it return corrupted data (which then propagates to your backup)? I don't know and I'd be happy to be convinced that it's never an issue nowadays. But I do know that with a btrfs or zfs RAID and the checksuming done by these file systems you don't have to trust the specific consumer-grade disk in some random laptop, but instead can rely on data integrity being ensured by the FS.

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

#123

Post by yb6677 »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #119
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…

Why do you recommend removing the battery? Risk of fire? I would have thought any reasonably recent laptop would be fine to leave plugged in indefinitely. Not to mention many won't have an easily removable battery anyway

[dead]

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

#124

Post by PeterStuer »

Onavo wrote: post #80

No love for Pangolin? https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1kqrwev/im_addi...

I'm going with Pangolin, small hosted VPS on Hetzner, to front my Homelab. Takes away much of the complications of serving securely directly from the home LAN.

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

#125

Post by thatspartan »

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…

Speaking of laptop batteries as a UPS source, some laptops come with battery management features that keep the battery healthy even when plugged in full time, usually exposed as a setting in the BIOS/UEFI. I've found that business/enterprise type laptops like Thinkpads and Probooks have this as standard, for example Thinkpads from 2010 already had this, assuming you're lucky enough to find one with a usable battery of course.

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

#126

Post by ndriscoll »

motorest wrote: post #91
phito wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or they have explored other options and find docker lacking. I've used docker and k8s plenty professionally, and they're both vastly more work to maintain and debug than nixos and systemd units (which can optionally easily be wrapped into containers if you want on nixos, but there you're using containers for their isolation features, not for the ability to 'docker pull', and for many purposes you can probably e.g. just use file permissions and per-service users instead of bind-mounts into containers).

Containers as practiced by many are basically static linking and "declarative" configuration done poorly because people aren't familiar with dynamic linking or declarative OS config done well.

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

#127

Post by KronisLV »

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…

> 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.

My homelab servers have Athlon 200GE CPUs in them: https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/athlon-200ge.c2073

They're x86 so most software works, AM4 socket so they can have the old motherboards I had in my PC previously, as well as the slower RAM from back then. At the same time they were dirt cheap on AliExpress, low TDP so I can passively cool them with heatsinks instead of fans and still powerful enough for self-hosting some software and using them as CI runners as well. Plus, because the whole setup is basically a regular PC with no niche components, the Linux distros I've tried on them also had no issues.

Honestly it's really cool that old components can still be of use for stuff like that.

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

#128

Post by motorest »

ndriscoll wrote: post #126
motorest wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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.

Or they have explored other options and find docker lacking. I've used docker and k8s plenty professionally, and they're both vastly more work to maintain and debug than nixos and systemd units (which can optionally easily be wrapped into containers if you want on nixos, but there you're using containers for their isolation features, not for the ability to 'docker pull', and for many purposes you can probably e.g. ju…

> Or they have explored other options and find docker lacking.

I don't think so. Containerization solves about 4 major problems in infrastructure deployment as part of it's happy path. There is a very good reason why the whole industry pivoted towards containers.

> . I've used docker and k8s plenty professionally, and they're both vastly more work to maintain and debug than nixos and systemd units (...)

This comment is void of any credibility. To start off, you suddenly dropped k8s into the conversation. Think about using systemd to setup a cluster of COTS hardware running a software-defined network, and then proclaim it's easier.

And then, focusing on Docker, think about claiming that messing with systemd units is easier than simply running "docker run".

Unbelievable.

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

#129

Post by em-bee »

safety1st wrote: post #100
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 Thund…

same here, using the old laptops until they are physically so damaged that they can't be used anymore and the cost to repair exceeds the cost to replace them. got one in it's last breaths. working fine mostly, but the keyboard is badly damaged, so needs an external keyboard to be useful. for work of course i need something stronger, but when i need to replace my work laptop my kids get an "upgrade" :-)

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

#130

Post by motorest »

movedx wrote: post #107
motorest wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. None of your points make any sense. Docker works beautifully well as an abstraction layer. It makes trivially simple to upgrade anything and everything running on it, to the point you do not even consi…

Absolutely everything they said makes sense. Everything you're saying is complete overkill, even in most Enterprise environments. We're talking about a home server here for hosting eBooks and paperless documents, and you're implying Kubernetes clusters are easy enough to run and so are a good solution here. Madness. > I have news for you. I have news for _you_: using Docker to run anything that doesn't need it (i.e.…

> Absolutely everything they said makes sense.

Not really. It defies any cursory understanding of the problem domain, and you must go way out of your way to ignore how containerization makes everyone's job easier and even trivial to accomplish.

Some people in this discussion even go to the extreme of claiming that messing with systemd to run a service is simpler than typing "docker run".

It defies all logic.

> Everything you're saying is complete overkill, even in most Enterprise environments.

What? No. Explain in detail how being able to run services by running "docker run" is "overkill". Have you ever went through an intro to Docker tutorial?

> We're talking about a home server here for hosting eBooks and paperless documents, and you're implying Kubernetes clusters are easy enough to run and so are a good solution here. Madness.

You're just publicly stating your ignorance. Do yourself a favor and check Ubuntu's microk8s. You're mindlessly parroting cliches from a decade ago.

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