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

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161–170 of 247 posts

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

#161
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.

> The landlord is merciless if you miss a payment, you are out.

That’s a skill issue though.

I have a domain that i used to pre-pay for years in advance.

For my current main domain i had prepaid nine years in advance and it was paid up to 2028. A couple of years ago i topped it up and now it’s prepaid up to 2032.

It’s not much money (when I prepaid for 9 years i spent like 60€ or so) and you’re usually saving because you’re fixing the price so skipping price hikes, inflation etc.

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

#162
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Macbooks do this as well automatically if kept plugged in for a certain period of time.

Is there something for Linux/debian? I’m assuming this is part of the OS and wouldn’t work on a MacBook with Linux.

Look up tlp's charging thresholds. Just set mines up for debian

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

#163
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

As a counterpoint my Lenovo X1 that was fresh from the factory had a battery swell so bad it cracked the case. So I think the risk being addressed was that, unless you're looking at the device every single day, the battery poses a fire/explosion risk that isn't worth it to some people

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

#164
I’m almost done with my switch away from a fully Apple ecosystem and I feel great about my Framework laptop, GrapheneOS Pixel and cluster of servers in my closet.

I can’t help but wonder if mainstream adoption of open source and self hosting will cause a regulatory backlash in favour of big corpo again (thinking of Bill Gates’ letter against hobbyists)

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

#166
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Macbooks do this as well automatically if kept plugged in for a certain period of time.

Is there something for Linux/debian? I’m assuming this is part of the OS and wouldn’t work on a MacBook with Linux.

It's managed by the OS when it's awake, by the bios (or uefi or whatever) when it's sleeping.

Both methods work under Asahi Linux on the ARM macs.

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

#168

I hope we can make hosting open source on VPS much more accessible to the average person. Something like Sandstorm[0] or Umbrel[1]. [0] https://sandstorm.org [1] https://umbrel.com/

Hosting on VPS has recently become much better for the average person with the introduction of Fastpanel. I know that people here are going to hate it because it's not open source, but it is free, user friendly, and very easy to use while still being powerful. It's a total win for me.

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

#169
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. > Everyt…

> you must go way out of your way to ignore how containerization makes everyone's job easier and even trivial to accomplish You'd have to go out of your way to ignore how difficult they are to maintain and secure. Anyone with a few hours of experience trying to design an upgrade path for other people's container; security scanning of them; reviewing what's going on inside them; trying to run them with minimal privile…

What is your opinion on podman rootless containers? In my mind running rootless containers as differe OS users for each application I'm hosting was an easy way of improving security and making sure each of those services could only mess with their own resources. Are there any known issues with that? Do you have experience with Podman? Would love to hear your thoughts

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

#170
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

What? You think the same guys who take an almost militant approach to how they build and run their own personal projects would somehow fail to be technically inclined to automate tasks?

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