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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

#221

Post by sgarland »

motorest wrote: post #170
zdw wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, because there are a stunning number of people within r/homelab who simply want to run Plex and torrent clients.

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

#223

Post by sgarland »

motorest wrote: post #92
zdw wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tools like Ansible exist and can do everything you mention on the deploy side and more, and are also cross platform to a wider range of platforms than Linux-only Docker. Isolation technologies are also available outside of docker, through systemd, jails, and other similar tools.

> Tools like Ansible exist and can do everything you mention on the deploy side and more (...) Your comment is technically correct, but factually wrong. What you are leaving out is the fact that, in order to do what Docker provides out of the box, you need to come up with a huge custom Ansible script to even implement the happy path. So, is your goal to self host your own services, or to endlessly toy with the likes…

Is your goal to run your own services, or to understand them? The two are not mutually exclusive, and one can certainly understand containers, but the general vibe from this thread seems to be “I like containers because I don’t have to understand the magic they’re doing.”

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

#224

Post by TacticalCoder »

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…

[dead]

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

#225

Post by safety1st »

agumonkey wrote: post #190
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…

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

CPU: Intel i7-3630QM (8) @ 3.400GHz

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M

Memory: 7818MiB

Those specs are showing their age for sure, but I run the TV at 1366x768, so they've been enough. The CPU has been an absolute champ. I'm sure running XFCE as the window manager has a lot to do with why it trucks along, XFCE is amazingly low footprint and snappy.

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

#226

Post by quectophoton »

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…

Do you also have a trusted TLS certificate authority? If yes, how has been your experience maintaining and securing it?

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

#227

Post by articsputnik »

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…

I have one like these, too as my home server, HP Elitedesk 800 G5 DM, to be explicit.

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

#228

Post by justsomehnguy »

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 think you're grossly overblowing how much work it takes to refresh your containers.

last thing I want is to build my own CI/CD pipeline and tend it

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

#229

Post by tacker2000 »

sunshine-o wrote: post #181
tacker2000 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why are you assuming my age and experience because I use Docker? This doesnt help your argument.

I have been around since long before Docker was a thing, so yes I have been there, serving apps on bare metal and then using unwieldy VMs.

It doesnt matter if its my home lab or some Saas server, how is it simpler to serve 3 PHP apps with different PHP versions on raw linux than simply using docker for example?

This is called progress and thats why its a popular tool. Not because of some “hype” or whatever you are implying.

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

#230

Post by mxuribe »

hobs wrote: post #193
znpy wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

True...but there are alternative approaches...such as maybe register a couple (not alot) of alternative, different domains. I think the trick is to keep the number of alternative domains low enough that it wont break the bank, but still give the option of serving as sort of backups. Then again, one would need to understand one's "threat" model before beginning to post content that might be "attacked" by others.
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