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Self-hosting is being enshittified

troubled.engineer

111–120 of 121 posts

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backing up entire VMs with all the configuration in case an update breaks something or just bricks your server is a smart idea aswell as running stuff in containers. Also, 4GB per VM? Besides sometimes you need to run software that is not avaliable on linux.

If you backup the entire VM you are just backing up the Linux kernel itself and all the (GNU) tools with it. Seems like a waste to me. Backup your docker config and your data, that's what you actually need. The rest is just available online if you ever need it. >Besides sometimes you need to run software that is not available on linux. Really, like what?

Not all server executables for video games are avaliable on linux for example. There is a lot of use cases and just saying "you just need X" is somewhat of an ignorant statement. No, I don't.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#112
post #74

There’s always risk of a rug pull or going the wrong direction with “open-source” software developed by a for-profit company (Plex, MinIO, Mattermost in this example). When choosing software that I run in my “homelab” I lean towards community developed projects first. They may not always have as high quality as the ones offered by commercial entities but they’re just safer for the long term and have no artificial lim…

Another Plex (Pass) user here. What exactly is the bullshit you deal with? Over the years I have been streaming all my movies and shows to as many people I want. Plex added HDR support for transcoding, live subtitles syncing and more. Especially the subtitle syncing is fantastic. It completely solved the problem.

For me it was the creep of "Not my content" constantly showing up front and center post Plex updates. I'd have to navigate to some side menu to actually access the content I set the entire fucking service up for. Jellyfin has never done that. It's just my content and only my content and I don't have to fight against nonsense slipping in each update.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#113
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you want a k3s based homelab and then connect it all with Tailscale or Netbird. FWIW: My Intel Nuc on Ubuntu LTS with a cron apt update / upgrade job works for years without a hickup. I have reliable electricity and internet at home, though.

> Sounds like you want a k3s based homelab and then connect it all with Tailscale or Netbird. I apologize if it was confusing. I was suggesting the exact opposite. It's not about how to build a mini enterprise cluster. It's about how to change the service infrastructure to suit the small computers we usually find at homes, without any modifications. I'm suggesting a more fundamental change. > I have reliable electric…

You can do this now. It would likely require packaging your services up in Windows installers that deploy Windows services. Will run across most computers you find in homes.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#114

If you’re self-hosting, do you need 128GB of ram? I suspect you don’t. I suspect a couple of beelinks could run your whole business (minus the GPU needs).

I self-host and generally put 64GB of RAM in servers (DDR3, thankfully). Certain arrangements of Docker-based services simply chew up a lot of RAM.

I'd rather over-purchase on ram and never have to think about it again rather than try to carefully tailor the amount of memory in the machine based on the workloads I think I'll be running on it at the time of purchase. Fortunately my latest server upgrade was before the ram prices went insane.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly my point: It runs on your computer, on your LAN, serving your media. How is it doing anything outside your control, then?

It talks to Plex servers to give outside access....

Thanks. I've only heard of people using it to stream stuff around their own house; didn't even know it exposed access remotely.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This article is lame. How about focusing on back-ends that pretend to support self-hosting but make it difficult by perpetuating massive gaps in its documentation (looking at you, Supabase)? that's one way of enshittifying, but what the article talks about is nonetheless very important. People rely on projects being open source (or rather: _hosted on github_) as some sort of mark of freedom from shitty features and…

I don't doubt the validity of those sentiments. I'm just perplexed (see what I did there) as to what the specific issue is in this case because I thought Plex was for streaming stuff from one side of your house to the other (and/or playing it back).

not necessarily, you can also have a plex server at home and as a student have a laptop in your dorm or at school and watch stuff there. or on the move when you're using a mobile phone, etc.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#117

This blog seems to be from "that side" of the self-hosting world: the homelabbers. If you ask these people you need to buy expensive hardware and build your own datacenter at home. I have been hosting all my services on a single Intel Nuc from 10 years ago and a RPI5 as backup for critical services like DNS. That's it. You'll truly be amazed at how much stuff you can actually run on very little hardware if you only h…

> I have been hosting all my services on a single Intel Nuc from 10 years ago and a RPI5 as backup for critical services like DNS.

Yes, fully agree with this and I've a similar setup. I even started with using wsl on the default windows install hoping to switch later to linux, but didn't have much need for this. Only gripe is tailscale seems to be flaky (rare) in windows.

Better to start with something small and cheap, see if it solves your needs and then upgrade if needs. Don't overcomplicate things based on what others do.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I self-host and generally put 64GB of RAM in servers (DDR3, thankfully). Certain arrangements of Docker-based services simply chew up a lot of RAM.

I'd rather over-purchase on ram and never have to think about it again rather than try to carefully tailor the amount of memory in the machine based on the workloads I think I'll be running on it at the time of purchase. Fortunately my latest server upgrade was before the ram prices went insane.

I generally run “obsolete” machines and then just max them out on RAM and CPUs, stick a dual 10G card in the 16X slot, and shove the latest NVMe SSDs in the 4X slot and forget about it.

For bulk storage / logs I toss in a few of whatever the cheapest drives are right now.

Have lots of spares for failures… haven’t had one failure since 2019.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#119
If you self host and also write some of your own services, the same requirements are as they always were.

minimal ~ install your linux distro, use your preferred containers, or just run as services on the os.

There's no ads, no ai, no layer of shite, it can't be "enshittified" unless you're doing the shittifying.

Re: Self-hosting is being enshittified

#120

This blog seems to be from "that side" of the self-hosting world: the homelabbers. If you ask these people you need to buy expensive hardware and build your own datacenter at home. I have been hosting all my services on a single Intel Nuc from 10 years ago and a RPI5 as backup for critical services like DNS. That's it. You'll truly be amazed at how much stuff you can actually run on very little hardware if you only h…

> You do not need S3 in your house. Just use the filesystem.

For your home, no, you don’t need it. But if setting up a remote backup, ie at your parents / in-laws / children / summerhouse / whatever, S3 can help cut down on network traffic by offloading checksum calculations to the remote server. It won’t help (much) with backups, but verification of backups will be much faster as you don’t have to transfer everything back home to verify it like with SMB.

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