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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

#201

Post by ndriscoll »

buran77 wrote: post #97
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.

It doesn't matter if you upgrade Docker or not. All tech, self hosted or not, fails for three reasons: 1) You did something to it (changed a setting, upgraded software, etc.) 2) You didn't do something to it (change a setting, upgrade a software, etc.) 3) Just because. When it does you get the wonderful "work-like" experience, frantically trying to troubleshoot while the things around your house are failing and your…

Besides 2 of my hard drives failing over the last 30 years, I can't recall ever encountering 2) or 3). I also can't really even imagine the mechanism by which a self-hosted solution could fail without you touching it or without a hardware failure. Software does not rot.

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

#202

Post by j45 »

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…

It's incredibly valuable. It makes redundancy really affordable.

This means nothing until the need to replace one drive arises, then it's not an if..

No downtime with raid 5, you can swap out one drive as needed while the rest runs just fine.

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

#203

Post by xcrunner529 »

philjohn wrote: post #174
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…

The best bang for buck at the moment seems to be tiny mini micro machines https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic... Typically available regularly via ebay (or similar) as businesses rotate them out for new hardware. The other week I picked up an i5 9400T Lenovo m720q with 16GB of memory for £100 delivered. They practically sip power, although that's less true now I've shoved a 10Gb dual SFP NIC…

Yep. I have bought 3 or 4 for different uses. So perfect as servers. I run plex and lots of docker containers. Development. Etc. all of those machines are so useful for console Linux and containers.

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

#204

Post by owl_vision »

for the past 20 odd years, old hardware with tweaked, custom compiled and build FreeBSD, NetBSD served me and my few customers quiet well. There is lot of joy in it. Recently, I started modifying open source software to be self hostable. Some does not work well enough when the internet is not accessible. for example FarmOS.

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

#205

Post by xcrunner529 »

j45 wrote: post #202
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…

It's incredibly valuable. It makes redundancy really affordable. This means nothing until the need to replace one drive arises, then it's not an if.. No downtime with raid 5, you can swap out one drive as needed while the rest runs just fine.

I like snapraid for media drives. As long as it’s something without lots of deletes and changes, I bet more space and can use mixed drives and get a bit of a backup too since it’s a manual sync to create or update the “parity”. And the added advantage that any drive taken out or they dies you still can read any if the content on the other drives at any time.

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

#206

Post by godelski »

neepi wrote: post #196
godelski wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

  > If it blows up it cost me nothing other than an hour of part swapping.
I think this is part of the magic sauce.

When you're poor you're probably less risky with expensive stuff and what's considered expensive is a low threshold.

But if it was a dumpster find... who cares?

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

#207

Post by [deleted] »

mr_mitm wrote: post #105
buran77 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter if you upgrade Docker or not. All tech, self hosted or not, fails for three reasons: 1) You did something to it (changed a setting, upgraded software, etc.) 2) You didn't do something to it (change a setting, upgrade a software, etc.) 3) Just because. When it does you get the wonderful "work-like" experience, frantically trying to troubleshoot while the things around your house are failing and your…

And if you're security conscious like me and want to do things the "right way" just because you can (or should be able to), you now have to think about firewall rules, certificate authorities, DNS names, notifications, backup strategies, automating it in Ansible, managing configs with git, using that newfangled IPv6, ... the complexity piles up quickly. Coincidentally, I just decided to tackle this issue again on my…

[deleted]

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

#208

Post by neepi »

godelski wrote: post #206
neepi wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If it blows up it cost me nothing other than an hour of part swapping. I think this is part of the magic sauce. When you're poor you're probably less risky with expensive stuff and what's considered expensive is a low threshold. But if it was a dumpster find... who cares?

Having been poor for most of my life, it's what you didn't pay for that keeps you afloat generally. If it blows up, I will move to the Lenovo M70s I found without a hard disk or RAM the other week. I put an 8 gig stick in it and it works so will get some more off ebay.

I have a fairly high end M4 Macbook Pro but prefer to live as if I don't most of the time. All of us can take a big fall in life so it makes sense to keep one foot in both worlds.

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

#209

Post by eximius »

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…

Is there any difference here from running a normal DNS server?

Any of your special domains will be ones your server claims as authoritative, so I don't understand why you need a root server?

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

#210

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

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 recommend everyone to remove the battery before using it plugged 24x7

I agree but not all laptops can run without battery being plugged in. I use a Acer E5 575 as a home-lab and it can’t run without battery being plugged in, but interestingly the laptop has decided to bypass the battery completely after it died. Operating Systems detect no battery but its there and without it the laptop won’t boot.

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