Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by PhilipRoman » Sun, Jun 08, 2025, 8:50 PM UTC

mikeocool wrote: post #187

PhilipRoman wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting, I've had the exact opposite experience. My oldest HDD from 2007 is still going strong. Haven't had even a single micro SD card fail in a RPI. I built some fancy backup infrastructure for myself based on a sharded hash addressed database but so far have only used the backups to recover from "Layer 8" issues :)

I had a look at my notes and so far the only unexpected downtime has been due to 1x CMOS battery running out after true power off, 1x VPS provider randomly powering off my reverse proxy, 2x me screwing around with link bonding (connections always started to fail a few hours later, in middle of night).

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

#192

Post by kassner » Sun, Jun 08, 2025, 8:52 PM UTC

philjohn wrote: post #177

kassner wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> M920q I’m pissed at Lenovo for making the perfect machine for a home server, and then cheaping out by not adding the $0.50 M.2 connector on the back of the board. 2xM.2 + 1xSATA requires upgrading to “Tall” Intel NUCs if you want 3 discs.

If you want 2 m.2 slots you want the p330, same form factor as the m920q[1] [1] https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/116583724775

Thank you! I thought only ThinkCentre were in the 1-liter form factor

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

#193

Post by hobs » Sun, Jun 08, 2025, 9:36 PM UTC

znpy wrote: post #161

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.

> 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…

Host the wrong content, you are out, get sued because of someone elses trademark on your domain, you are out, registrar actually dissolved or has weird stuff? out.

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

#194

Post by turtlebits » Sun, Jun 08, 2025, 9:43 PM UTC

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…

Find any self hosted software, the docker deployment is going to be the easiest to stand up/destroy and migrate.

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

#195

Post by czhu12 » Sun, Jun 08, 2025, 10:04 PM UTC

I was able to replicate some of this by building my own hosting platform (https://canine.sh) that can deploy a Github repo to anywhere -- from a Kubernetes cluster to a home raspberry pi server.

I've built tons of stuff in my career, but building the thing that can host all of it for myself has been hugely rewarding (instead of relying on hosting providers that inevitably start charging you)

I now have almost 15 apps hosted across 3 clusters:

https://imgur.com/a/RYg0wzh

One of the most cherised things I've built, and I find myself constantly coming back and improving / updating out of love.

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

#196

Post by neepi » Sun, Jun 08, 2025, 10:05 PM UTC

godelski wrote: post #180

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…

On topic, this is how I got into computing and Linux. I moved out as soon as I graduated high school and the only computer I had was an gen 1 mac mini and a tiny netbook with a blazing 1Ghz single core Intel atom (32bit). Even XP ran slow. Couldn't install vista nor the relatively new windows 7. A friend told me about Linux. So I thought I had nothing to lose. What I didn't know is what I had to gain. Ended up gettin…

Yep same. Amazing what you can pull out of the skip these days and run for nothing. I lifted a couple of dead Lenovo P720 workstations out and managed to get a working dual Xeon silver 32 core machine with 64Gb of ECC RAM.

Uses a bunch of power but two orders of magnitude less in cash than buying another ECC ram desktop over 3 years.

If it blows up it cost me nothing other than an hour of part swapping.

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

#197

Post by movedx » Sun, Jun 08, 2025, 10:36 PM UTC

feirlane wrote: post #169

movedx wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

That sounds like a great option to me. The more functionality you can get out of a container without giving up privileges, the better. Podman is just a tool like any other - I'd happily use it if it's right for the job.

All I would say is: can you run that same thing without a containerisation layer? Remember that with things like ChatGPT it's _really_ easy to get a systemd unit file going for just about any service these days. A single prompt and you have a running service that's locked down pretty heavily.

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

#198

Post by danparsonson » Sun, Jun 08, 2025, 11:43 PM UTC

motorest wrote: post #88

princevegeta89 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Why do you need to update docker? For starters, addressing security vulnerabilities. https://docs.docker.com/security/security-announcements/ > I kept my box running for more than 1 year without upgrading docker. You inadvertently raised the primary point against self-hosting: security vulnerabilities. Apparently you might have been running software with known CVEs for over a year.

Much of this risk is mitigated by hiding everything behind Wireguard or similar. None of my self-hosted stuff is publicly exposed but I can reach it from anywhere. You can go one step further and run some kind of gateway OS (e.g. opnSense) on a separate cheap VPS, route everything through that, then firewall your main server off completely.

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

#199

Post by Infernal » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 12:39 AM UTC

kassner wrote: post #173

safety1st wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I bet Framework laptops would take this dynamic into overdrive It’s in my (long-term) TODO list to build my own enclosure for a Framework motherboard, to make a portable server to carry around during long trips. Something compact that carries the punch of an i7. One day…

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

#200

Post by feirlane » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 12:45 AM UTC

movedx wrote: post #197

feirlane wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That sounds like a great option to me. The more functionality you can get out of a container without giving up privileges, the better. Podman is just a tool like any other - I'd happily use it if it's right for the job. All I would say is: can you run that same thing without a containerisation layer? Remember that with things like ChatGPT it's _really_ easy to get a systemd unit file going for just about any service…

Yeah I could run them as regular systemd daemons themselves, but I would lose the easy isolation between different services and main OS. Feels easier to limit what the services have access to in the host OS by running them in containers.

I do run the containers as systemd user services however, so everything starts-up at boot, etc