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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

#181

Post by sunshine-o »

tacker2000 wrote: post #98
sunshine-o wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I think your view show the success of Docker but also an over-hype and generation that only know how to do things with Docker (or and so think everything is easier with it).

But before Docker there was the virtualisation hype when people sweared every software/service needs its own VM. VM or containers we end up with frankenstein systems with dozens of images on one machine. And with Docker we probably lost a lot of security.

So this is fine I guess in the corporate world because things are messy anyway and there are many other contraints (hence the success of containers).

But in your home, serving a few apps for a few users you actually don't need that gas factory.

If you wanna run everything on your home lab with Docker or Kubernetes because you wanna build a skillset for work or reuse your professional skills, fine go for it. But everything you think is easy with Docker is actually simpler and easier with raw Linux or BSD.

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

#182

Post by dgb23 »

bluGill wrote: post #36
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.

Maybe. There are pros and cons. Docker means you can run two+ different things on the same machine and update them separately. This is sometimes important when one project releases a feature you really want, while a different one just did a major update that broke something you care about. Running on the OS often means you have to update both. Single binary sometimes works, but means you need more memory and disk spa…

I don’t understand why you would need docker for that.

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

#183

Post by zdw »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #103
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 run Debian on my machine, so package are not really up to date and I would be stuck, not being able to update my self hosted software because some dependencies were too old. And then, some software would require older one and break when you update the dependencies for another package. Docker is a godsend when you are hosting multiple tools. For the limited stuff I host, navidrome, firefly, nginx, .. I have yet to s…

FWIW, Navidrome has bare binaries, packages (apt, rpm, etc.) and docker container options: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome/releases

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

#185

Post by kldg »

ravetcofx wrote: post #178
kldg wrote: post #176

SBCs are great for public webservers and suited to save you quite a bit in energy costs. I've used a Raspbery Pi4B for about 5 years with around 10k human visitors (~5k bots) per year just fine. I'd like to try a RISC-V SBC as server, but maybe I have a few more years to wait. I don't run into resource issues on the Pi4B, but resource paranoia (like range anxiety in EVs) keeps me on my toes about bandwidth use and en…

how are you tracking visitors and differentiating them with bots?

crudely. apache2 logs are parsed every 5 minutes. if the IP address exists already in post-processed database, ignore the entry; if they didn't exist in database, a script parses user agent strings and checks against a list of known "consumer" browsers; a whitelist. If they match, we assume they're human. we then delete the detailed apache2 logs and put just the IP address, when we first saw them (date, not datetime), and whether they were deemed human or bot into database. faking user agent strings or using something like playwright would confuse the script; but the browser list will also inherently not have all entries of existing "consumer browsers".

every day, a script checks all IP addresses in the post-processed database to see if there are "clusters" on the same subnet. I think it's if we see 3 visitors on the same subnet, we consider it a likely bot and retroactively switch those entries to being a bot in the database. Without taking in millions of visitors, I think this is reasonable, but it can introduce errors, too.

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

#186

Post by spencerflem »

data-ottawa wrote: post #56
danillonunes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can also top it up every year as well. Two for one :)

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

#187

Post by mikeocool »

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 isn’t backup - but in my years running computers at my house I’ve been lucky enough to lose zero machines to theft, water damage, fire, etc. but I have had many hard drives fail.

Way more convenient to just swap out a drive then to swap out a drive and restore from backup.

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

#188

Post by spencerflem »

deadbabe wrote: post #43
layoric wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, it's a value judgement, so the answer is largely personal. For me, yes. The social license we give these larger companies after all the violated trust doesn't make sense. If your local shop owner/operator that you talked to everyday had the same attitude towards your when you went shopping and exchanged pleasantries with most weeks, people would confront them about their actions, and that shop wouldn't last lo…

The cloud is someone else’s computer and an apartment is just someone else’s property. How far do we take this philosophy?

Lots of people don't like landlords :)

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

#190

Post by agumonkey »

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…

what are the specs ? I use a 10yo thinkpad with a core i3 and arch based desktop, sometimes the web is too heavy (discord or similar webapps) but it's mostly fine.

it's true that with a bit of education, you can get pretty far with old machines

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