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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

#231

Post by mxuribe »

whitefang wrote: post #216

With self hosting my biggest pain point is disaster and recovery management. I would like to know how do you handle it.

I'm not an expert on disaster recovery, but have to think of it for $day_job on occasion. The way i think about it is something along the lines of when (not if), disaster strikes, what needs to be saved vs what can wait a while to have it recovered...plus what level of effort are the different sets of activities worth. For example, if i host my public blog website on my machine at my home, and power goes out (thus making my blog unavailable during the power outage), am i ok with this, or do i need to ensure that it can be brought back up? If i feel that it needs to be brought back up during such a scenario, how much effort (which really means time plus money) do i wish to plan for? Obviously this is a vast oversimplification...but that kind of thinking has helped me bring up topics and questions in advance in order to plan for extreme scenarios...and you know what? Sometimes the things people think they "really need to be up/available" are not that important. Other times, sure, but then you commit, plan, test, and prepare for such truly essential activities. (And, of course, other times, whether the thing that needs to be recovered is important or not, you might be compelled by laws, regulations, contracts, etc...but that's a whole separate topic.)

So, again, start at the end - when disaster strikes - and consider what you think is worth keeping/bringing back up, and then plan backwards from there to make it so.

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

#232

Post by j45 »

xcrunner529 wrote: post #205
j45 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'll check out snapraid, thanks.

The challenge is a "bit of a backup" is risky. There's no back up if it's only a single copy of something, or even a single copy of something.

3-2-1 backups are really in time teach everyone the lesson that you don't buy storage, you buy backups, some that are more quickly accessible than others.

The cost of "maximizing" space with the drives I have, for example, is relatively trivial and simpler, its in the hundreds of dollars now instead of thousands. The upside is huge.

Solely trusting third party services is risky, and locally holding your data can be relatively managed well.

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

#233

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

quectophoton wrote: post #226
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

For this system, I have alternatives to "TLS" and to "trusted TLS certificate authorities".

None of this is connected to the internet. It is "home lab" stuff.

I have alternatives for so-called "modern" web browsers controlled by advertising companies, too.

For all the third-party-mediated stuff on today's internet I generally have alternatives that let me have more control.

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

#234

Post by eddythompson80 »

sgarland wrote: post #223
motorest wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.”

funny because it seems to me that the general vibes are "I don't like containers because I can't learn something new"

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

#235

Post by godelski »

neepi wrote: post #208
godelski wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yeah my partner laughs at how cheap I am a lot of the time. But also I just now like making stuff too. It is very rewarding and it's always a useful skill. Maybe AI will be able to repair everything but sometimes it's about logistics

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

#236

Post by neepi »

godelski wrote: post #235
neepi wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah my partner laughs at how cheap I am a lot of the time. But also I just now like making stuff too. It is very rewarding and it's always a useful skill. Maybe AI will be able to repair everything but sometimes it's about logistics

Mine didn't because it meant she could spend more on shoes. Anyway she's gone now...

It's about making the most of opportunity, something which is all around us and needs to be utilised.

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

#237

Post by movedx »

feirlane wrote: post #200
movedx wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can isolate and lock down services in systemd too! Not too hard at all, and again AI can help here.

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/mastering-systemd

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

#238

Post by xcrunner529 »

j45 wrote: post #232
xcrunner529 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'll check out snapraid, thanks. The challenge is a "bit of a backup" is risky. There's no back up if it's only a single copy of something, or even a single copy of something. 3-2-1 backups are really in time teach everyone the lesson that you don't buy storage, you buy backups, some that are more quickly accessible than others. The cost of "maximizing" space with the drives I have, for example, is relatively trivial…

Sure. I am just using it for my media server which I could “re-acquire” if I really needed too.

What I meant by “bit of backup” was you could actually restore files that were deleted since the last sync since it’s not always live like RAID and requires scheduled syncs to update the parity info. It’s a compromise I make as a home user for my media server.

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

#239

Post by chairmansteve »

haiku2077 wrote: post #71
chairmansteve wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in this case. It's a learning accelerator, like having an experienced engineer sitting next to you.

I would describe it as the opposite- like having an inexperienced but very fast engineer next to you.

That too!

I'm using it to learn unfamiliar languages and frameworks.

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

#240

Post by fourfour3 »

briHass wrote: post #140

I highly recommend anyone going this route to use Proxmox as your base install on the (old) hardware, and then use individual LXCs/VMs for the services you run. Maybe it's just me, but I find LXCs to be much easier to manage and reason about than Docker containers, and the excellent collection of scripts maintained by the community: https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts makes it just as easy as a Dock…

I think it depends what you’re used to. LXC containers I see as more of a lightweight pseudo VM, whereas docker is more about truly ephemeral containers that you don’t maintain, but instead throw away and replace regularly just keeping data.
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