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CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

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Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#171
Interesting use case for Claude Code, or any similar local executor talking to a remote AI (Gemini suggests that "Hybrid-Local AI Agent" is a generic name for these, although I've never heard it called that before).

I wonder if a local model might be enough for sysadmin skills, especially if were trained specifically for this ?

I wonder if iOS has enough hooks available that one could make a very small/simple agentic Siri replacement like this that was able to manage the iPhone at least better than Siri (start and stop apps, control them, install them, configure iPhone, etc) ?

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#172
I used Codex to set up a raspberry pi as a VPN with WireGuard. I had no similar experience before and it was super easy. I used Claude Code to audit and clean up a 10+ year old AWS account- patching security, shutting down redundant services, simplifying the structure. I want Claude Code to replace every bad UI out there. I know what outcome I want and don’t need to learn all the details to get there.

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long time ago, it was popular for ISPs offer a small amount of space for personal websites. We might see a resurgence of this, but with cheap VPS. Eventually.

Free static site hosting and cheap VPSs already exist. Self hosting is less about putting sites on the internet now and more about replicating cloud services locally.

VPS's are really so dirt cheap that some of them only work because people dont use the servers 100% that they are allocated at or when people dont use the resources they have for most part because of economies of scale but vps's are definitely subsidized.

Cheap vps servers 1 gb ram and everything can cost around 10-11$ per year and using something like hetzner's cheap as well for around 30$ ish an year or 3$ per month most likely while having some great resilient numbers and everything

If anything, people self host because they own servers so upgrading becomes easier (but there are vps's which target a niche which people should look at like storage vps, high perf vps, high mem vps etc. which can sometimes provide servers for dirt cheap for your specific use case)

The other reason I feel like are the ownership aspect of things. I own this server, I can upgrade this server without costing a bank or like I can stack up my investment in a way and one other reason is that with your complete ownership, you don't have to enforce t&c's so much. Want to provide your friends or family vps servers or people on internet themselves? Set up a proxmox or incus server and do it.

Most vps servers sometimes either outright ban reselling or if they allow, they might sometimes ban your whole account for something that someone else might have done so somethings are at jeopardy if you do this simply because they have to find automated ways of dealing with abuse at scale and some cloud providers are more lenient than others in banning matters. (OVH is relaxed in this area whereas hetzner, for better or for worse, is strict on its enforcement)

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the way the internet was meant to work but it doesn't make it any easier. Even when everything is in containers/VMs/users, if you don't put a decent amount of additional effort into automatic updates and keeping that context hardened as you tinker with it it's quite annoying when it gets pwned. There was a popular post less than a month ago about this recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46305585 I agre…

> There was a popular post less than a month ago about this recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46305585 This incident precisely shows that containerization worked as intended and protected the host.

It protected the host itself but it did not protect the server from being compromised and running malware, mining cryptocurrency.

Containerizing your publicly exposed service will also not protect your HTTP server from hosting malware or your SMTP server from sending SPAM, it only means you've protected your SMTP server from your compromised HTTP server (assuming you've even locked it down accurately, which is exactly the kind of thing people don't want to be worried about).

Tailscale puts the protection of the public portion of the story to a company dedicated to keeping that portion secure. Wireguard (or similar) limit the protection to a single service with low churn and minimal attack surface. It's a very different discussion than preventing lateral movement alone. And that all goes without mentioning not everyone wants to deal with containers in the first place (though many do in either scenario).

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the way the internet was meant to work but it doesn't make it any easier. Even when everything is in containers/VMs/users, if you don't put a decent amount of additional effort into automatic updates and keeping that context hardened as you tinker with it it's quite annoying when it gets pwned. There was a popular post less than a month ago about this recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46305585 I agre…

I just run an SSH server and forward local ports through that as needed. Simple (at least to me).

I do that as well, along with using sshd as a SOCKS proxy for web based stuff via Firefox, but it can be a bit of a pain to forward each service to each host individually if you have more than a few things going on - especially if you have things trying to use the same port and need to keep track of how you mapped it locally. It can also a lot harder to manage on mobile devices, e.g. say you have some media or home automation services - they won't be as easy to access via a single public SSH host via port forwarding (if at all) as a VPN would be, and wireguard is about as easy a personal VPN as there is.

That's where wg/Tailscale come in - it's just a traditional IP network at that point. Also less to do to shut up bad login attempts from spam bots and such. I once forgot to configure the log settings on sshd and ended up with GBs of logs in a week.

The other big upside (outside of not having a 3rd party) in putting in the slightly more effort to do wg/ssh/other personal VPN is the latency+bandwidth to your home services will be better.

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the way the internet was meant to work but it doesn't make it any easier. Even when everything is in containers/VMs/users, if you don't put a decent amount of additional effort into automatic updates and keeping that context hardened as you tinker with it it's quite annoying when it gets pwned. There was a popular post less than a month ago about this recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46305585 I agre…

I just run an SSH server and forward local ports through that as needed. Simple (at least to me).

Also to Simon: I am not sure about how Iphone works but in android, you could probably use mosh and termux to then connect to the server as well and have the end result while not relying on third party (in this case tailscale)

I am sure there must be an Iphone app which could probably allow something like this too. I highly recommend more people take a look into such workflow, I might look into it more myself.

Tmate is a wonderful service if you have home networks behind nat's.

I personally like using the hosted instance of tmate (tmate.io) itself but It can be self hosted and is open source

Once again it has third party issue but luckily it can be self hosted so you can even have a mini vps on hetzner/upcloud/ovh and route traffic through that by hosting tmate there so ymmv

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#178
post #46
post #42

I would really like some kind of agnostic backup protocol, so I can simply configure my backup endpoint using an environment variable (e.g. `-e BACKUP_ENDPOINT= https://backup.example.com/backup -e BACKUP_IDENTIFIER=xxxxx`), then the application can push a backup on a regular schedule. If I need to restore a backup, I log onto the backup app, select a backup file and generate a one time code which I can enter into th…

I use Pika Backup which runs on the BorgBackup protocol for backing up my system’s home directory. I’m not really sure if this is exactly what you’re talking about, though. It just sends backups to network shares.

I'm actively in the process of setting this up for my devices. What have you done for off-site backups? I know there are Borg specific cloud providers (rsync.net, borgbase, etc.). Or have you done something like rclone to an S3 provider?

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#179
I used Claude Code just yesterday in a similar way: to solve a computer problem that I previously would have tried googling.

I had a 30-year-old file on my Mac that I wanted to read the content of. I had created it in some kind of word processing software, but I couldn’t remember which (Nexus? Word? MacWrite? ClarisWorks? EGWORD?) and the file didn’t have an extension. I couldn’t read its content in any of the applications I have on my Mac now.

So I pointed CC at it and asked what it could tell me about the file. It looked inside the file data, identified the file type and the multiple character encodings in it, and went through a couple of conversion steps before outputting as clean plain text what I had written in 1996.

Maybe I could have found a utility on the web to do the same thing, but CC felt much quicker and easier.

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#180

I feel the same way. I now have around 7 projects hosted on a home server with Coolify + Cloudflare. Always worry about security and I have seen many posts related to self hosting on HN trending recently

For security just don't expose the server to the internet. Either set up wireguard or tailscale. You can set it up in a split tunnel config so your phone only uses the VPN for LAN requests.

I am expecting Cloudflare Tunnel to take care of security. In fact, that is the only reason I am okay hosting from home. Are you talking about something more on top of Cloudflare Tunnel or extra security features or a replacement?
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