Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

ssp.sh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 247 posts

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

#151

Post by coldfoundry »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #64
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.

"You can only rent a domain." If ICANN-approved root.zone and ICANN-approved registries are the only options. As an experiment I created own registry, not shared with anyone. For many years I have run own root server, i.e., I serve own custom root.zone to all computers I own. I have a search experiment that uses a custom TLD that embeds a well-known classification system. The TLD portion of the domainname can catgori…

This sounds like a wonderful project, do you have any documentation of the process you wouldn't mind sharing? Would love to play around with something similar to what you did, almost like a mini-internet.

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

#152

Post by netfortius »

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

I wish I took a picture of my MacBook pro mid-2015, which happens to be my home hosted stuff server, before I changed it's battery. As it was just sitting in a corner, almost forgotten, I noticed the problem when cleaning, one day, and it started wobbling when I moved the piece of furniture it was sitting on. Once I gave it to a guy who disposes of such things, he told me I was lucky it didn't explode.

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

#153

Post by cowmix »

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…

OTOH, no.

Been self-hosting for 35+ years. Docker's made the whole thing 300% easier — especially when thinking long term.

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

#154

Post by xcircle »

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 use an old thinkpad with Linux. There you can set a charging stop at e.g. 85%. Then you don’t have a need to unplug the battery

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

#155

Post by zdw »

motorest wrote: post #94
zdw wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd argue that the number of homelab folks have a whole CICD pipeline to update code and rebuild every container they use is a very small percentage. Most probably YOLO `docker pull` it once and never think about it again.

TBH, a slower upgrade cycle may be tolerable inside a private network that doesn't face the public internet.

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

#156

Post by washadjeffmad »

cherryteastain wrote: post #83
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…

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.

Nodes don't need to store data, and they can be PXE booted if they have a little RAM, so they only need redundant devices for their system partitions if you want to boot them locally (how often will they really be rebooted, though?). A hard drive plus a flash / USB drive would be plenty.

Consumer NASes have been around for 20 years, now, though, so I think most people would just mount or map their storage.

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

#157

Post by zer00eyz »

mkayokay wrote: post #77
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 can also recommend Lenovo ThinkCentre MiniPCs or similar brands. Those can often be found cheap when companies upgrade their Hardware. These machines are also power efficient when idling, use even less space than a laptop and the case fan is very quiet (which can be annoying with laptops under load). I'm currently running Syncthing, Forgejo, Pihole, Grafana, a DB, Jellyfin, etc... on a M910 with an i5 (6th or 7th G…

> M910 with an i5

These are great and the M920q is also nice.

At 100 to 160 used these are a steal, just test the disks before you commit to long term projects with them (some have a fair bit of wear). Its newer cousins quickly climb in price to the $300+ range (still refurb/used)

The bleeding edge of this form factor is the Minisforum MS-01. At almost 500 bucks for the no ram/storage part it's a big performance jump for a large price jump. This isnt a terrible deal if you need dual SFP+ ports (and you might) and a free PCIE slot but it is a large price jump.

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

#158

Post by darkwater »

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…

Convenience. If you lose a disk you can just replace it and don't need to reinstall/restore the backup.

Also, because it's fun and probably many self-hosters had racked servers and plugged disks in noisy, cold big chambers and they want to live again the fun part of that.

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

#159

Post by znpy »

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…

> Selfhosting is a pain in the ass

I use rhel/rocky Linux exactly because of this. I don’t need the latest software on my home server, and i am reasonably sure i can run yum update without messing up my system.

Most of the time people complain about system administration when self-hosting it’s because they’re using some kind of meme-distro that inevitably breaks (which is something you don’t want on a server, irrespective if it’s at work or at home).

Bonus point: i can run rootless containers with podman (orchestrated via docker-compose).

And i get professionally curated software (security patches backported, selinux policies, high-quality management and troubleshooting tooling).

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

#160

Post by sunshine-o »

ndriscoll wrote: post #145
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…

Nixos is perfectly usable without an Internet connection. I've never encountered an issue, and in fact I've joked with my wife that considered as an overall end-to-end system (i.e. including the Internet dependency), my jellyfin instance gets better uptime than something like Spotify would. You can't install or update new software that you'd pull from the web, but you couldn't do that with any other system either. I…

So this is what I thought for a long time and tested several time sucessfully.

But surprisingly the day I needed to change a simple network setting without the internet I got stuck ! I still can't explain why.

So I now feel we are rolling the dices a bit with an offline NixOS

Post reply on HN