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Screw it, I’ll host it myself

markozivanovic.com

181–190 of 495 posts

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#181
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

Use borg or other encrypted backup tool (Restic is also recommended by others in this thread). rsync.net is my offsite backup. Doesn't matter what anyone demands of them, all they ever see is an encrypted blob.

You do then need to find somewhere to store an offsite backup of your encryption keys. That said, since those change far less often than your backups, options like a safety deposit box are a more realistic place to store keys than the backups themselves.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#182
post #8

I'm curious as to for how long you've been using this setup specifically in regard to Nextcloud, and how many and what volume of files you store in it? I've set up a few Nextcloud instances in the last 2 years on Digital Ocean VPSs and Raspberry Pis and I ran into so many problems and difficulties which scaled with the quantity and size of files I hosted on it. I took care in setting up everything to a relatively sol…

When I was picking a self-hosted Dropbox alternative, I ended up going with Seafile rather than Nextcloud since it was a lot more focused (just file sync) and people said it was much faster. It's got a few rough edges but the core functionality has been rock solid. Granted, I've only had about 100 GB max stored in it.

I didn’t realise Seafile Pro was free for up to 3 users. I had previously looked but gave up as no self hosted solution was really comparable to OneDrive or Dropbox.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#183
post #118
post #18

IMO you can get 90% of the utility here (owning your data) with just the NAS and rsync. 1. Don't feed the FAANG 2. Store your SoR media, notes, documents on your own NAS 3. Automate a backup of the NAS, preferably both on and off site (I use rsync from a pi + large disk + cloud blob storage)

NAS fails for smartphone integration. Photos should auto upload. Calendar, todos, and contacts need to show up in the usual apps. It needs to be available from remote.

Syncthing may be used to sync remotely the relevant directories. It's multiplatform and has a Android app too (still not iOS though).

https://syncthing.net/

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#184
post #73

Hosting my own too. There's gmail as backup. But host my mail server, webmail, imap, smtp everthing. Blocking spam isn't that problem. But making sure your mail goes to the receiver's inbox is. You can block 90% of the spam by using only reverse DNS lookup -- doesn't match? Reject. 90% of the remaining can blocked using DKIM, SPF checks. No need for ip black hole check or spamassassin training. The benefit : I can bl…

Flexibility of self-hosted mail is very nice.

At the moment I don't filter on the server at all, because I think anyone should be able to reach me no matter how dumb the mail setup is. Send me mail by manually typing to a TCP:25 connection from a residential or mobile IP, I don't care. No DNS checks, etc. My postfix config is very permisive, only relaying is disabled.

I filter using bogofilter on emails delivered to my public addresses.

Private randomly generated aliases don't get filtered at all (only the sender knows them, so I just disable the address if it gets abused).

It works nicely, especially the private alias part.

I have alias/mailbox table in PostgreSQL DB, but don't bother with trying to connect postfix directly to the DB. I just dump the tables to the postmap files on each change. It's infinitely more performant and reliable, which is what this has to be.

I can also dump the DB to my MUA's config, and have it rewrite all the random addresses into something readable.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#185
post #181
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use borg or other encrypted backup tool (Restic is also recommended by others in this thread). rsync.net is my offsite backup. Doesn't matter what anyone demands of them, all they ever see is an encrypted blob.

You do then need to find somewhere to store an offsite backup of your encryption keys. That said, since those change far less often than your backups, options like a safety deposit box are a more realistic place to store keys than the backups themselves.

Yes, borg also has the option of storing them in the repo itself, protected by a passphrase (think encrypted ssh key files).

Anyway, my "home burned down rescue bundle" consists of a flash drive with a keepass export of my password vault and encrypted borg repo key / rsync.net ssh keys at the office.

Slightly less accessible in this pandemic world, but no safety deposit boxes needed.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#186
post #61

I always wonder why people don't trust their offsite back-ups to cloud providers. I know they're trying to get away from getting locked out of their data, but what are the odds a burglar steals their computers on the exact same day their cloud provider locks them out because they violated the 'no making fun of ridiculous cloud provider lockout policies' policy? As long as your house burning down and your cloud gettin…

I agree. I was especially surprised by: > Every last weekend of the month, I will manually backup all the data to Blu-ray discs. Not once, but twice. One copy goes to a safe storage space at home and the other one ends up at a completely different location. This is one paragraph after mentioning a 2TB+2TB NAS. Even assuming that's RAID1, a standard Blu-ray only stores 50 GB, so you need 40 of those. And then you need…

> it's probably cheaper to buy a new 4 TB hard drive every month

The reason for blurays might be that he's following rule 2 of the 3-2-1 Backup Strategy. 3 backups, 2 different types of storage media, 1 copy off-site.

If your house is hit by lightning it could wipe all your magnetic and solid state drives, but optical discs would probably be ok.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#187
I hear ya buddy! The internet was supposed to be decentralized and democratic. Why does everybody seem to think the "cloud" is AWS, Microsoft and Google . That's completely nuts. Lets make 3 companies the biggest and richest on earth -- while the rest of us are fighting for crumbs.

I am running https://picc.io to share images as a link ( think simpler imgur alternative) on some small hosting services.

To hell with big tech and to hell with their censorship too!

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#188

Y'know what, Although I'm currently self hosting my email, my websites, my storage, my SQL, my Active Directory etc., I'm also in the process of migrating the whole lot to Azure and/or independent hosting. Why? It's just too much hassle these days; I want my down-time to be no longer dictated by my infrastructure. I don't want to have to spend off-work hours making sure my boxes are patched, my disks are raided, my o…

Because apparently you don't need to keep stuff running in Azure patched, I guess?

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#189
The problem I have always had when building elaborate home server setups is the "set it and forget it" nature of the systems I've installed bites me in the ass. Since it's not my full-time job to manage these systems, I'm really not familiar with them the way I might be with the systems I manage at work. These systems cruise along for years, and when something finally does go belly-up, I can't remember how I set it up in the first place. Now I have a giant chore looming over me, ruining a perfectly good weekend.

These days, I design everything for home with extreme simplicity coupled with detailed documentation on how I set things up.

Docker has helped tremendously, since you can essentially use an out-of-the-box Linux distro with docker installed, and you don't really have to install anything else on the hardware. Then if at all possible, I use standard docker images provided by the software developer with no modifications (maybe some small tweaks in a docker-compose file to map to local resources).

Anyway, my advice is to keep the number of customizations to a bare minimum, minimize the number of moving parts in your home solutions, document everything you do (starting with installing the OS all the way through configuring your applications), capture as much of the configuration as you can in declarative formats (like docker compose files), back up all your data, and just as importantly, back up every single configuration file.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#190

Doing something very similar, hosting a lot of things on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 400 GB SD card. Dockerizing most things https://github.com/divyenduz/dev-infrastructure Not as easy though, I still need to figure backup strategy and everything. My goal is to eventually remove photos, and almost everything hosted entirely really.

What kind of SD card are you using? How many writes/transfer speed? The fact that the card can die on you and lose 400 GB of data gives me nightmares.

I got a Rock Pi recently and it supports M.2 slot and eMMC that goes up to 64 GB, this makes me less nervous.

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