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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

#381

Post by InfinityByTen »

johnisgood wrote: post #366
duckmysick wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that no, managing your own VPN is not a basic skill - certainly not in the realms of software engineering (more like network engineering).

WireGuard is ~10 lines of config and wg genkey. Calling that "network engineering" is a stretch. The siloing of basic infrastructure knowledge into "not my discipline" is part of the problem. Software gets deployed somewhere: understanding ports, keys, and routing at a basic level is not specialized knowledge. Honestly, if 10 lines of config is "network engineering", then the bar for software engineering has dropped…

I am probably in the camp where I've found myself ovewhelmed with the amount of information about networks and I'm an alleged software engineer (without formal training in CS albeit).

The 10 loc is not a valid measure.

`sudo rm -rf /` is a 1 line of code. It's not the lines that are hard to wrap your brain around, it's the implication of the lines that really what we are talking about.

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

#382

Post by wiether »

johnisgood wrote: post #323
wiether wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First and foremost they are humans, with a limited time on Earth. Being a software engineer doesn't mean you want to spend you free time tinkering about your self-hosting setup and doing support for your users. With Tailscale, not only you don't have to care about most things since _it just works_, but also on-boarding of casual users is straightforward. Same goes for Plex. I want to watch movies/shows, I don't want…

There is a difference between "I choose not to" and "I cannot". The thread is full of people saying Tailscale "unlocked" self-hosting, implying capability, not time savings or time preference. Choosing convenience is fine. But if basic port forwarding or WireGuard is beyond someone's skill set, "software engineer" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I am not saying they are, but if it really is the case, then yeah. As f…

To me the "unlocked" is just another hyperbole used by some people, partly because they lack initial knowledge, partly because its click-bait.

The way I understand it is more like "without the ease of use provided by X, even though I could have done it, I wouldn't have done it because it would require time and energy that I'm not willing to put in".

Since we're talking about self-hosting, to me the main focus is not skill set but time and energy.

There's the same debate around NAS products like Synology that are sold with a high markup, meanwhile "every SWE should be able to make their own NAS using recycled hardware".

Sure. And I did all of this: - homemade NAS setup - homemade network setup - homemade mediaplayer setup

It was fun and I learned a lot.

But I moved to some more convenient tools so that I can just use them as reliable services, and focus on other experimentations/tinkering.

To be honest, the fact that you insist that Plex is just "file sharing" that can be replaced by torrents makes me think you either don't know what Plex actually is, or you are acting in bad faith.

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

#386

Post by piqufoh »

I'm working on something very similar, but I've found that if I'm not doing the work - I forget what has been set up and how its running a lot faster.

For example - I have ZFS running with a 5-bay HDD enclosure, and I honestly can't remember any of the rules about import-ing / export-ing to stop / start / add / remove pools etc.

I have to write many clear notes, and store them in a place where future me will find them - otherwise the system gets very flaky through my inability to remember what's active and what isn't. Running the service and having total control is fun, but it's a responsibility too

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

#389

Post by jeena »

I self host a lot of stuff myself: https://uptime.jeena.net/status/everything

And until now without AI, but I'm kind of curious but afraid that it will bring my servers down and then I can't roll back :D But perhaps if I would move over to NixOS, then it would be easy to roll back.

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

#390

Post by darkwater »

Frotag wrote: post #108
drnick1 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Speaking of Wireguard, my current topology has all peers talking to a single peer that forwards traffic between peers (for hole punching / peers with dynamic ips). 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?

I don't fully understand your topology use case. You have different peers that are "road-warriors" and that sometimes happen to be both on the same LAN which is not your home LAN, and need to speak the one to the other? And I guess you are connecting to the other peer via DNS, so your DNS record always points to the Wireguard-provided IP?
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