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Start Self Hosting

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Re: Start Self Hosting

#121

Post by haswell »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #107
haswell wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most important aspects of choosing a solution is understanding the problem first. There's a place for both: 1. Blogs that moralize and talk about a much larger philosophical underlying problem. These help the reader understand a problem that they may not have fully understood. Before, the problem was: "I need a place to host my photos". If that's your only problem, there's no reason not to choose something…

If you're trying to frame the problem in your mind like that, I suggest doing an HN search like https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... to give you a good idea why people self-host. There's lots of prior art.

As a person who self hosts quite a few things, I'm intimately familiar with why people self host. That was not my point.

The point is that there exist people who do not understand why self hosting can be valuable, nor should we assume that they will come to HN, do a "self-host" query, and then comb through the myriad of results to back into why this is an interesting topic.

You were criticizing the blog post...essentially for existing in its current form...and I pointed out that there are legitimate reasons for such posts to exist.

The post was probably not meant for you or I.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#122

Post by egberts1 »

rsync wrote: post #85
blenderdt wrote: post #35

Self hosting is hard. You need to take care of security, backups, software updates, software installation and so on. Even on something like a QNAP (which can be compared to managed hosting) this can be hard. Flip the wrong switch and you expose something to the world. Missed a security update: your device is now vulnerable. While I host a lot of things myself I can understand self hosting is not for everyone.

"Flip the wrong switch and you expose something to the world." One strategy for dealing with accidental misconfigurations is to employ a "network slug"[1]: "A Network Slug, or "Slug", is a transparent layer 2 firewall running on a device with only two interfaces. ... The purpose of a Slug is to reinforce a security policy or to block uninentional leaks of information." [1] https://john.kozubik.com/pub/NetworkSlug/tip…

Got one of those. It is hard. Very hard. Absolutely freakin’ hard to make a bump-in-the wire dynamic 5-tuple blocking “hub”.

It also does “waterfall” egress packet delaying.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#123

Post by pronoiac »

I run Caprover on a $5 Linode VPS, and it makes it easy to spin up new apps from a curated selection or from a Docker Compose file. I checked out Dokku, but the learning curve out of the box was harder.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#124

Post by nirvdrum »

dcchambers wrote: post #97
blenderdt wrote: post #35

Self hosting is hard. You need to take care of security, backups, software updates, software installation and so on. Even on something like a QNAP (which can be compared to managed hosting) this can be hard. Flip the wrong switch and you expose something to the world. Missed a security update: your device is now vulnerable. While I host a lot of things myself I can understand self hosting is not for everyone.

> You need to take care of security Easiest solution is to just host stuff on a local network without access to the wider internet. E.g. running on an old laptop/raspberry pi/server in your basement. Sure, that means you can no longer access your self-hosted stuff when you're out of the house, but the tradeoff is peace of mind about your data leaking or worse.

Setting up a VPN is pretty easy these days. If you don't want to run it on your router, you can look at something like Tailscale for remote access.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#125

Post by v-yadli »

PhotoPrism[1]+NextCloud is a potential solution to the Picasa problem. I run them on my personal NAS.

The devops experience is fine -- I can wrap up PWAs for all the devices (PCs and phones) in the family. Need to set up a few systemd timers to synchronize data, build indices and check for PhotoPrism app updates but that's not too bad. Docker makes deployment super easy.

The user experience, hmm, modern, minimalism, tolerable.

Modern = it knows about iPhone live photos and all sorts of photo metadata; has machine learning for classification. Recognizes faces. etc.

Minimalism = just a viewer, no photo editing (Picasa photo editing and the ability to put an album together into one picture totally rocks)

Tolerable = meh classification precision, slow geotagged map (dreaming of Picasa + Google Earth), NextCloud iOS autoupload constantly breaks (you want non-iCloud cloud on iOS and you're not a megacorp huh? good luck) etc.

Conclusion? It has been a decade since Picasa is gone. I'd expect a lot more improvements to happen, but in reality, the best thing we have now is just that. Some good, some bad, some ugly.

[1]: https://photoprism.app/

Re: Start Self Hosting

#126

Post by sgarman »

macinjosh wrote: post #111
brettermeier wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried it but there are so many traps you can fall in, like security settings as mentioned by you. When i had my server online back then, it was hacked 1 week later :D

I hear a lot of stories like this. I've been self-hosting for a few years out of my home. I have a symmetrical gigabit fiber connection. My IP changes very frequently (DDNS and a low TTL solves that problem for my use cases). _anyway_ I haven't been hacked.. yet. /me knocks on wood The precautions I take are basic: - Use unique and secure credentials on each service I expose. - I only expose ports 80 and 443 to the p…

IMO separate hardware for your self-hosted network puts you into a whole new class of hosting at "home."

Re: Start Self Hosting

#127

Post by TheBozzCL »

Been on this route for a while. Currently, I have:

- My blog (Jekyll + Apache 2 + nginx)

- An Invidious instance

- My VPN (Wireshark)

- A DNS server (Pi-hole + nginx for DNS-over-TLS)

- My password manager, up to a point (KeePass + OneDrive for backups and sync, but I'm thinking of ways to self-host that)

The big ones left are making my password manager self-hosted, email (not sure if I want to go beyond having my own domain yet) and code repo. I feel these need more reliable hardware and internet connections to be fully viable as self-hosted.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#128

Post by ngcc_hk »

mertd wrote: post #83

The post is conflating two separate things as if they are the same. 1) Personal stuff that you created and own. For example photos on Google Photos. If Google decides to remove a random photo from my collection, that would be a big problem for me. But they don't. On the upside, the probability of Google losing my photos is an order of magnitude lower than my personal hard disk failing and me having forgotten to back…

Google issue is whether they will pull the plug of the whole service, change name or what. Then you will ask what. And if you are not looking in that several months … it is really what.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#129

Post by brimble »

dragonwriter wrote: post #74
disqard wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! This is what experience has taught me too. We tend to underappreciate the importance of time in everything. A button click can instantiate something powerful (and useful (and easy-to-use...)), but it will degrade over time, and eventually flat-out stop working. I had a stack that worked just fine for my own needs, but it ran on shudder Python 2.7 -- everyone knows how that worked out (I chose to rebuild my stack…

> A button click can instantiate something powerful (and useful (and easy-to-use...)), but it will degrade over time, and eventually flat-out stop working Software doesn't degrade over time (other than, you know things like cosmic ray bit flips, but in most realistic situations that should be fully mitigatable.) The needs of the software user (including hardware and software they want the piece of software to interac…

I would absolutely use "degrade" to describe what happens to public-facing or Internet-connected software over time—eventually you'll have to upgrade it for security reasons, and you'll often find that this is way more involved than just upgrading the server-side package itself, or even its immediate dependencies. The alternative is even more work back-porting security patches. All this is assuming someone's actively working on the software you're self-hosting, at least enough to spot, advertise, and fix vulnerabilities.

Ditto the average Rails/Python/Javascript project, as anyone who's tried to resurrect one that's gone so much as six months without being touched can attest. Which might not matter except that a ton of the software people might actually want to self-host are in one or more of those high-entropy ecosystems. Extraordinary levels of care and organization on the part of the creators and maintainers can mitigate this, but that amount of taste and effort is vanishingly rare.

These are degradation due to a changing environment, sure, but I wouldn't describe it as due to evolution in the needs of the user (presumably "must not have any well-publicized remote vulnerabilities" was a need from the beginning).

Re: Start Self Hosting

#130

Post by rank0 »

eddieroger wrote: post #44
rank0 wrote: post #30

I run a few services from my home but still have to rely on aws/fly.io for some portions of my infrastructure. I really want is to learn how to rent rack space from a colocation. The documentation available does not make it easy to learn. Can I just buy an old 1U blade, throw xen on it and show up at my nearest colo? What do I need to preconfigure to ensure I have remote access without giving remote access to the col…

I did this once. Don't overthink it too much - yes, it is as simple as finding a rack with sufficient space, power and network, plugging it in and going. You'll most likely get a public IP and have no access to your neighbors, so they won't really care what you do with it as long as it's not illegal or against the Terms of Service for your host. So yeah, if you want to do it, just do it. Get an OS you know, install a…

Thanks for the response!

I gotta disagree with you though on cost. You can get a beefy refurbished dual Xeon blade for a couple hundred bucks. Rack space where I live is like $50/month for 1U and gets much cheaper/machine as you scale up. $50 on aws will get me maybe 1 medium ec2 instance and an s3 bucket. With a used blade I get 20x the compute for the same price.

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