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Start Self Hosting

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Re: Start Self Hosting

#251

Post by v-yadli »

mceachen wrote: post #179
v-yadli wrote: post #125

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,…

I'm writing PhotoStructure, which you might be interested in. It's self-hosted, but also runs on Windows and macOS without docker, libraries are portable, and photo and video deduplication is robust. Photoprism had a couple features I haven't built out yet, but I'm getting there. More details are here: https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/ Also, if nextcloud gives you attitude (I had scaling issues with…

Very interesting project, and nice landing page! Will definitely check it out.

I'm a long time ownCloud/NextCloud user and I'm aware of the alternatives. With multiple android phones come and go in the past 8 years or so, the background upload seems to stand its ground.

The real problem here is iOS and its lack of proper background tasks. See: https://github.com/nextcloud/ios/issues/215 -- they tried every possible way to persuade iOS into running background sync, but still hit and miss.

I have to request access to my wife's iPhone and manually trigger some :)

One small suggestion here -- PhotoPrism went with `tensorflow.js` to load up classification models, and I recommend a "real" TF or PyTorch installation to properly leverage the computation resources. The difference is huge even running cpu-only because it's wasm vs. proper BLAS library.

I worked on a nodejs binding for native ONNX runtime (not publicly) so that's also a possible way out.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#252

Post by denton-scratch »

p_j_w wrote: post #226
denton-scratch wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many corp email smtp servers will IP block your email server (big thanks to spamhaus) Nope. Spamhaus doesn't block self-hosted email servers. Spamhaus just publishes a number of lists, which postmasters can use or not, whether for filtering or just for scoring. The PBL in particular is likely to catch people self-hosting from a retail connection, because it lists most residential IP address-space. But it's the rece…

GP never said Spamhaus blocks anything.

True. but he did say that the blocking is "thanks to spamhaus". That is not true.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#253

Post by quesera »

bsder wrote: post #185
quesera wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use the LetsEncrypt staging server for testing. When you have a process that works, switch to prod.

That's a tautology saying "Don't make mistakes." A DNS misconfiguration can cause your Let's Encrypt to do weird things on a configuration that was (and still is) perfectly correct. That was how I hit it. I eventually figured out what people screwed up in DNS. But certificates still didn't clear. So I spent an extra couple hours staring at DNS trying to figure out what I missed when the issue was that we bumped into…

Sorry, quick comment, didn't mean to be glib.

I've hit the problem you describe, and I feel your pain. I also respect LetsEncrypt's choice to rate limit failures. I renew a couple dozen domains at a time, so one error can quickly cascade into being blocked. IIRC the block timeout starts at 24 hrs and goes up from there if you keep trying -- this is easy to do if you don't see the raw response error message!

After being bitten by this a couple times, I added a dry-run step to my autorenewal script. If the dry-run exits with success and generates a good new cert for the domain, I repeat by pointing to the LE prod server. This works every time (so far, but for years now).

I'm suggesting that any LetsEncrypt certificate automation system (or docs) targeted at relatively low-sophistication users (i.e. not you or me) should include this sort of dry-run check so that the user doesn't paint themselves into a corner with a somewhat persnickety, but essential, service.

Also of course, it should attempt to renew after 60 days, so that if things go badly wrong, there are a few block-timeout retries available before the 90 day expiration.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#254

Post by ndiddy »

kodah wrote: post #160
Hendrikto wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SystemD is complicated for a layperson Is it? It has clean and logical abstractions, and consistency. Services depending in each other isn‘t complex or difficult to understand. I suspect that a nice GUI would make systemd quite usable for non-expert users. BTW: It‘s called ”systemd“: > Yes, it is written systemd, not system D or System D, or even SystemD. And it isn't system d either. [0] [0]: https://www.freedeskt…

> Is it? It has clean and logical abstractions, and consistency. Services depending in each other isn‘t complex or difficult to understand. For a technologist or engineer, yes. For a layperson , no. The average consumer who desires privacy is probably neither a technologist or engineer, so the longterm target is something that just works . Laypeople also aren't going to entertain the kind of pedantry that is systemd…

Laypeople don't know that systemd exists. They will install a webserver or something and the package manager will automatically install and enable its unit file.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#255

Post by Gigachad »

edgyquant wrote: post #142
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.

I used to love running my own servers with all the services etc. I’d manually write beautiful bash scripts to keep it all nice and easy to rebuild on the fly. My first job had 10 Ubuntu servers (on site) and I was the only guy who used Linux at home and had experience with sql. I have never volunteered to maintain servers since, it was horrible and everything was always my fault (it kinda was, I was a hobbyist at bes…

Yeah I tried self hosting everything. Getting it actually running is the easiest part. Its the maintenance, backups, and security that are 90% of the job. You can get it working pretty easily and forget about it and it will run for a while until something goes wrong or it needs to be upgraded.

Now I'd rather leave hosting to a someone dedicated to it who has internalized the latest state of things for all the relevant bits of software and is constantly keeping this knowledge in their brain. Set and forget self hosting can't work in the current environment we have where things require constant security updates and complex security hardening.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#256

Post by Gigachad »

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…

The first hack I noticed was that someone had set a password on my redis server because the default was no password and I had accidentally exposed it to the wider internet. This was exposed for 6 months before this happened. Who knows what else was accessed without me knowing.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#257

Post by olah_1 »

mholt wrote: post #132

This is why I'm building Timelinize [1]. It's a follow-up to my open source Timeliner project [2], which has the potential to download all your digital life onto your own computer locally, and projects it all onto a single timeline, across all data sources (text messages, social media sites, photos, location history, and more). It's a little different from "self hosting" but it does have a similar effect of bringing…

Have you considered using something like hypercore[1] for the timeline sharing? Or maybe you don't plan on making timelines shareable?

[1]: https://twitter.com/HypercoreProto

Re: Start Self Hosting

#258

Post by cuillevel3 »

What exactly is self-hosting? Are you just running services in isolation?

Updates come from a central place, I guess. With some appliances, there is integrated federation, "cloud" access? Those can still comprise you.

Do you share hosting with your family and friends? Are they still "self-hosted", or are you their provider?

Re: Start Self Hosting

#259

Post by alfiedotwtf »

Flip-side:

I self-hosted my blog and email for over 10 years, everything automated - first with Perl and Bash scripts, then much later with Ansible. It was beautiful. But last year I moved to S3/CloudFront via CloudFormation for my blog and Migadu for email. It's even more beautiful because it's now somebody else's problem and also a hell of a lot cheaper.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#260

Post by nobody9999 »

Isthatablackgsd wrote: post #178
Yhippa wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical that your layperson would be able to keep self-hosted applications secure constantly. Hell, huge corporations have a difficult time with it.

I have this issue too. When I tried to set up self-hosting, I assumed that there are steps that requires me to expose it to the internet. Turn out that it already exposed and didn't (or barely) provided the information of how to close it off securely and keep it private network only. When I tried to find information about it, there was always guides that are not consistent with it. Some will say I have to go in php.i…

>I understand those documentations are not for laypeople for me. However it is annoying when people out there kept pushing the self-hosting for beginners narrative without providing the necessary tools for laypeople to keep themselves secured and reliable.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem.

A few clicks, a configuration form and integrated tools to set up external dependencies (i.e., LetsEncrypt certs), et voila! You're running a self-hosted application.

AFAICT, this is more about developers not creating the packaging/configuration/management tools necessary for effective use by non-technical users.

Sure, I can write a sql query to modify the schema of an applications' database, but my highly educated and intelligent physician brother would just throw up his hands in disgust.

Make self hosting easy and people will use it. And Docker-compose isn't "easy" for a lay person.

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