101–110 of 570 posts
All fine and great with Tailscale until you company places an iOS restriction on external VPNs and your work phone is also your primary phone :(
This posts lists inexpensive home servers, Tailscale and Claude Code as the big unlocks. I actually think Tailscale may be an even bigger deal here than sysadmin help from Claude Code at al. The biggest reason I had not to run a home server was security: I'm worried that I might fall behind on updates and end up compromised. Tailscale dramatically reduces this risk, because I can so easily configure it so my own devi…
Besides the company that operates it, what is the big difference between Tailscale and Cloudflare tunnels? I've seen Tailscale mentioned frequently but I'm not quite sure what it gets for me. If it's more like a VPN, is it possible to use on an arbitrary device like a library kiosk?
But Tailscale is just a VPN (and by VPN, I mean: Something more like "Connect to the office networ" than I do "NordVPN"). It provides a private network on top of the public network, so that member devices of that VPN can interact together privately.
Which is pretty great: It's a simple and free/cheap way for me to use my pocket supercomputer to access my stuff at home from anywhere, with reasonable security.
But because it happens at the network level, you (generally) need to own the machines that it is configured on. That tends to exclude using it in meaningful ways with things like library kiosks.
There's something ironic about using Claud Code – a closed source service, that you can't self-host the hardware for, and that you can't get access to the data for – to self-host so that you can reduce your dependencies on things.
Before you had to rely on blog posts and reddit for information, something you also couldn't self host. And if you are just asking it questions and taking actions yourself, you are learning how it works to do it yourself next time.
I agree you could use LLMs to learn how it works, but given that they explain and do the actions, I suspect the vast majority aren't learning anything. I've helped students who are learning to code, and very often they just copy/paste back and forth and ignore the actual content.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wish someone would just tell me exactly what to buy. I’ll bite. You can save a lot of money by buying used hardware. I recommend looking for old Dell OptiPlex towers on Facebook Marketplace or from local used computer stores. Lenovo ThinkCentres (e.g., m700 tiny) are also a great option if you prefer something with a smaller form factor. I’d recommend disregarding advice from non-technical folks recommending bran…
I spent so long trying to make Raspberry Pis work but they just kind of suck and everything is harder on them. I only just discovered that there are an infinite supply of these micro desktops second hand from offices/government. I was able to pick up a 9th gen intel with 16gb ram for less than the cost of a Pi 5, and it's massively more powerful.
Tailscsle was never the unlock for me, but I guess I never was the typical use case here. I have a 1U (or more), sitting in a rack in a local datacenter. I have an IP block to myself. Those servers are now publicly exposed and only a few ports are exposed for mail, HTTP traffic and SSH (for Git). I guess my use case also changes in that I don’t use things just for me to consume, select others can consume services I h…
Having others run a service for you is a good thing! I'd love to pay a subscription for a service, but ran as a cooperative, where I'm not actually just paying a subscription fee, instead I'm a member and I get to decide what gets done as well.
This model works so well for housing, where the renters are also the owners of the building. Incentives are aligned perfectly, rents are kept low, the building is kept intact, no unnecessary expensive stuff added. And most importantly, no worries of the building ever getting sold and things going south. That's what I would like for my cloud storage, e-mail etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I spent so long trying to make Raspberry Pis work but they just kind of suck and everything is harder on them. I only just discovered that there are an infinite supply of these micro desktops second hand from offices/government. I was able to pick up a 9th gen intel with 16gb ram for less than the cost of a Pi 5, and it's massively more powerful.
Pi’s are incredible little basic home servers but they can’t handle transcoding. Great option for places with very expensive electricity too.
And then you can only use distros which have a raspberry pi specific build. Generic ARM ones won't work.
This posts lists inexpensive home servers, Tailscale and Claude Code as the big unlocks. I actually think Tailscale may be an even bigger deal here than sysadmin help from Claude Code at al. The biggest reason I had not to run a home server was security: I'm worried that I might fall behind on updates and end up compromised. Tailscale dramatically reduces this risk, because I can so easily configure it so my own devi…
I'd rather expose a Wireguard port and control my keys than introduce a third party like Tailscale. I am not sure why people are so afraid of exposing ports. I have dozens of ports open on my server including SMTP, IMAP(S), HTTP(S), various game servers and don't see a problem with that. I can't rule out a vulnerability somewhere but services are containerized and/or run as separate UNIX users. It's the way the Inter…
But some peers are sometimes on the same LAN (eg phone is sometimes on same LAN as pc). Is there a way to avoid forwarding traffic through the server peer in this case?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before you had to rely on blog posts and reddit for information, something you also couldn't self host. And if you are just asking it questions and taking actions yourself, you are learning how it works to do it yourself next time.
Or you could read man pages, ask people for help, read books... all of which are more closely aligned with self-hosting than outsourcing the whole process. I agree you could use LLMs to learn how it works, but given that they explain and do the actions, I suspect the vast majority aren't learning anything. I've helped students who are learning to code, and very often they just copy/paste back and forth and ignore the…
And I find the stuff that the average self hoster needs is so surface level that LLMs flawlessly provide solutions.
One day when I have some extra bucks I'd try to get a home server running, but the idea of having something eating grid electricity 24/7 doesn't seem to play along well with this 3rd world budget. Are there some foolproof and not so costly off-grid/solar setups to look at (like a Raspberry-based thingy or similar)?
Mac Mini (M1 and later) under Asahi Linux just uses 5 W for a normal workload. If you push it to 100% of CPU it reaches 20 W. That’s very little.