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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

#211

Post by bongodongobob »

bisby wrote: post #208
JamesSwift wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, its not a bottomless pit really. Yes you need a UPS. That’s basically it though.

Power outages here tend to last an hour or more. A UPS doesn't last forever, and depending on how much home compute you have, might not last long enough for anything more than a brief outage. A UPS doesn't magically solve things. Maybe you need a home generator to handle extended outages... How bottomless of a pit it becomes depends on a lot of things. It CAN become a bottomless pit if you need perfect uptime. I host…

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

#212

Post by lelandbatey »

ryandrake wrote: post #13
philips wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree! Before Tailscale I was completely skeptical of self hosting. Now I have tailscale on an old Kindle downloading epubs from a server running Copyparty. Its great!

Maybe I'm dumb, but I still don't quite understand the value-add of Tailscale over what Wireguard or some other VPN already provides. HN has tried to explain it to me but it just seems like sugar on top of a plain old VPN. Kind of like how "pi-hole" is just sugar on top of dnsmasq, and Plex is just sugar on top of file sharing.

If Plex is "just file sharing" then I guarantee you'd find Tailscale "just WireGuard".

I enjoy that relative "normies" can depend on it/integrate it without me having to go through annoying bits. I like that it "just works" without requiring loads of annoying networking.

For example, my aging mother just got a replacement computer and I am able to make it easy to access and remotely administer by just putting Tailscale on it, and have that work seamlessly with my other devices and connections. If one day I want to fully self-host, then I can run Headscale.

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

#213

Post by VTimofeenko »

rootusrootus wrote: post #194
zrail wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My spouse and I work at home and after the first couple multi-day power outages we invested in good UPSs and a whole house standby generator. Now when the power goes out it's down for at most 30 seconds. This also makes self-hosting more viable, since our availability is constrained by internet provider rather than power.

Yeah we did a similar thing. Same situation, spouse and I both work from home, and we got hit by a multiple day power outage due to a rare severe ice storm. So now I have an EV and a transfer switch so I can go for a week without power, and I have a Starlink upstream connection in standby mode that can be activated in minutes. Of course that means we’ll not have another ice storm in my lifetime. My neighbors should t…

We had a 5 day outage last year, got a generator at the tail end of the windy season and made exact same jokes.

A year later another atmospheric river hit and we had a 4 hour outage. No more jokes.

Make sure to run that generator once every few months with some load to keep it happy.

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

#215

Post by navigate8310 »

ryandrake wrote: post #13
philips wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree! Before Tailscale I was completely skeptical of self hosting. Now I have tailscale on an old Kindle downloading epubs from a server running Copyparty. Its great!

Maybe I'm dumb, but I still don't quite understand the value-add of Tailscale over what Wireguard or some other VPN already provides. HN has tried to explain it to me but it just seems like sugar on top of a plain old VPN. Kind of like how "pi-hole" is just sugar on top of dnsmasq, and Plex is just sugar on top of file sharing.

Tailscale is able to punch holes in CGNAT which a vanilla wireguard cannot

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

#216

Post by altmanaltman »

thrownawaysz wrote: post #126

I went down the self host route some years ago but once critical problems hit I realized that beyond a simple NAS it can be a very demanding hobby. I was in another country when there was a power outage at home. My internet went down, the server restart but couldn't reconnect anymore because the optical network router also had some problems after the power outage. I could ask my folks to restart, and turn on off thin…

I mean you're right in terms of it being a demanding hobby. The question is, is it worth the switch from other services.

I have 7 computers on my self-hosted network and not all of them are on-prem. With a bit of careful planning, you can essentially create a system that will stay up regardless of local fluctuations etc. But it is a demanding hobby and if you don't enjoy the IT stuff, you'll probably have a pretty bad time doing it. For most normal consumers, self-hosting is not really an option and the isn't worth the cost of switching over. I justify it because it helps me understand how things work and tangentially helps me get better my professional skills as well.

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

#218

Post by cryostasis »

dangus wrote: post #202
cryostasis wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No off-site backup for me, these items aren’t important enough, it’s more for “oops I broke my computer” or “set my new computer up faster” convenience. Anything I really don’t want to lose is in a paid cloud service with a local backup sync over SMB to my TrueNAS box for some of the most important ones. An exception is GitHub, I’m not paying for GitHub, but git kinda sorta backs itself up well enough for my purposes…

Good to know! I have shifted more to self hosting, e.g., Gitea rather than Github, and need to establish proper redundancy. Hopefully Borg Backup, with it's deduplication will be good, at least for on-site backups.

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

#219

Post by legojoey17 »

I just got around to a fresh NixOS install and I couldn't be happier as I've been able to do practically everything via Codex while keeping things concise and documented (given it's nix, not a bunch of commands of the past).

I recently had a bunch of breakages and needed to port a setup - I had a complicated k3s container in proxmox setup but needed it in a VM to fix various disk mounts (I hacked on ZFS mounts, and was swapping it all for longhorn)

As is expected, life happens and I stopped having time for anything so the homelab was out of commission. I probably would still be sitting on my broken lab given a lack of time.

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

#220

Post by visageunknown »

I find LLMs remove all the fun for me. When I build my homelab, I want the satisfaction of knowing that I did it. And the learning gains that only come from doing it manually. I don't mind using an LLM to shortcut areas that are just pure pain with no reward, but I abstain from using it as much as possible. It gives you the illusion that you've accomplished something.
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