I had problems with tailscale being flaky about a year ago and it would stop responding taking down networking with it. I've since ripped it out and went with a VPS based wireguard for all PCs and mobiles. Stable since then.
CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
241–250 of 570 posts
Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is very cool! But I also think it's worth a mention that for basic "I want to access my home LAN" use cases you don't need P2P, you just need a single public IP to your lan and perhaps dynamic dns.
A public IP and DDNS can be impossible behind CGNAT. A VPN link to a VPS eliminates that problem.
When I said "you just need a single public IP" I figured it was clear that I wasn't claiming this works for people who don't have a public IP.
Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where will you host the wg endpoint to open up? - Each device? This means setting up many peers on each of your devices - Router/central server? That's a single point of failure, and often a performance bottleneck if you're on LAN. If that's a router, the router may be compromised and eavesdrop on your connections, which you probably didn't secure as hard because it's on a VPN. Not to mention DDNS can create signific…
To establish a wg connection, only one node needs a public IP/port. > Router/central server? That's a single point of failure Your router is a SPOF regardless. If your router goes down you can't reach any nodes on your LAN, Tailscale or otherwise. So what is your point? > If that's a router, the router may be compromised and eavesdrop on your connections, which you probably didn't secure as hard because it's on a VPN…
> one node needs a public IP/port
A lot of people are behind CGNAT or behind a non-configurable router, which is an abomination.
> Secure your router
A typical router cannot be secured against physical access, unlike your servers which can have disk encryption.
> Your router is a SPOF regardless
Tailscale will keep your connection over a downstream switch, for example. It will not go through the router if it doesn't have to. If you use it for other usecases like kdeconnect synchronizing clipboard between phone and laptop, that will also stay up independent of your home router.
Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
#244I 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.
I don’t give them direct access to my computer. I just use them as an alternative to scrolling reddit for answers. Then I take the actions myself.
Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
#245I 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.
Getting it up and running is fun but I find maintaining some services a pain. For example, Authelia has breaking configuration changes every minor release, and fixing that easily takes 1-X hours every time. I gave up for 4.38 and just tossed the patch notes into NotebookLM.
Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
#246Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
#247Been self-hosting for last 20 years and I would have to say LLMs were good for generating suggestions when debugging an issue I hadn't seen before, or for one I had seen before but was looking for a quicker fix. I've used it to generate bash scripts, firewall regex. On self-hosting: be aware that it is a warzone out there. Your IP address will be probed constantly for vulnerabilities, and even those will need to deal…
~10 years ago I remember how shocked I was the first time I saw how many people were trying to probe my IP on my home router, from random places all over the globe.
Years later I still had the same router. Somewhere a long the line, I fired the right neurons and asked myself, "When was the last time $MANUFACTURER published an update for this? It's been awhile..."
In the context of just starting to learn about the fundamentals of security principles and owning your own data (ty hackernews friends!), that was a major catalyst for me. It kicked me into a self-hosting trajectory. LLMs have saved me a lot of extra bumps and bruises and barked shins in this area. They helped me go in the right direction fast enough.
Point is, parent comment is right. Be safe out there. Don't let your server be absorbed into the zombie army.
Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
#248Earlier 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…
Fairly frequently, 6kVA UPSs come up for sale locally to me, for dirt cheap (Is it perfect? No, but it's more than enough to cover most brief outages, and also more than enough to allow you to shut down everything you're running gracefully, after you used it for a couple hours.
Major caveat, you'll need a 240V supply, and these guys are 6U, so not exactly tiny. If you're willing to spend a bit more money though, a smaller UPS with external battery packs is the easy plug-and-play option.
> How bottomless of a pit it becomes depends on a lot of things. It CAN become a bottomless pit if you need perfect uptime.
At the end of the day, it's very hard to argue you need perfect uptime in an extended outage (and I say this as someone with a 10kW generator and said 6kVA UPS). I need power to run my sump pumps, but that's about it - if power's been out for 12-18 hours, you better believe I'm shutting down the rack, because it's costing me a crap ton of money to keep running on fossil fuels. And in the two instances of extended power outages I've dealt with, I haven't missed it - believe it or not, there's usually more important things to worry about than your Nextcloud uptime when your power's been out for 48 hours. Like "huh, that ice-covered tree limb is really starting to get close to my roof."
Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on your risk tolerance. I personally wouldn't trust a machine if a container was exploited on it, you don't know if there were any successful container escapes, kernel exploits, etc. Even if they escaped with user permissions, that can fill your box with boobytraps if they have container-granted capabilities. I'd just prefer to nuke the VPS entirely and start over than worry if the server and the rest of my s…
Yea I feel that too. there are some well respected compute providers as well which you can use and for very low amount, you can sort of offload this worry to someone else. That being said, VM themselves are good enough security box too. I consider running VM's even on your home server with public facing strategies usually allowable
Yeah, I only run very little on VPS, so this is practically free to me. Everything else I host at home behind Wireguard w/ Pangolin.
Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
#250I 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 thought I was smart because I invested in UPS backup from the start.
Then 5 years later there was a power outage and the UPS lasted for about 10 seconds before the batteries failed. That's how I learned about UPS battery maintenance schedules and the importance of testing.
I have a calendar alert to test the UPS. I groan whenever it comes up because I know there's a chance I'm going to discover the batteries won't hold up under load any more, which means I not only have to deal with the server losing power but I have to do the next round of guessing which replacement batteries are coming from a good brand this time. Using the same vendor doesn't even guarantee you're going to get the same quality when you only buy every several years.
Backup generators have their own maintenance schedule.
I think the future situation should be better with lithium chemistry UPS, but every time I look the available options are either exorbitantly expensive or they're cobbled together from parts in a way that kind of works but has a lot of limitations and up-front work.