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CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

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Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#251

Post by Aurornis »

JamesSwift wrote: post #160
thrownawaysz wrote: post #126

I 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…

Well, its not a bottomless pit really. Yes you need a UPS. That’s basically it though.

UPS batteries don't last forever.

So now you need to test them regularly. And order new ones when they're not holding a charge any more. Then power down the server, unplug it, pull the UPS out, swap batteries, etc.

Then even when I think I've got the UPS automatic shutdown scripts and drivers finally working just right under linux, a routine version upgrade breaks it all for some reason and I'm spending another 30 minutes reading through obscure docs and running tests until it works again.

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#252

Post by Aurornis »

jmb99 wrote: post #248
bisby wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

This is a great example of how the homelab bottomless pit becomes normalized.

Rewiring the house for 240V supply and spending $400+500 to refurbish a second-hand UPS to keep the 2500W rack running for 15 minutes?

And then there's the electricity costs of running a 2.5kW load, and then cooling costs associated with getting that much heat out of the house constantly. That's like a space heater and a half running constantly.

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#254

Post by tehlike »

numpad0 wrote: post #189
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I think that there must be adapters which can use unlimited 5g sim's data plans as fallback network or perhaps (even primary?) They would be cheaper than starlink fwiw and most connections can be robust usually. That being said, one can use tailscale or cloudflare tunnels to expose the server even if its behind nat which you mention in your original comment that you might be against at for paranoid reasons a…

Some SOHO branch office routers like Cisco ISR models can take cellular dongles and/or SIM. Drivers for supported models are baked into ROM and everything works through CLI.

I would do this on OPNSense - with a separate WLAN. Fairly easy to do.

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#256

Post by refulgentis »

appplication wrote: post #137
lmm wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's simple, you increase your attack surface, and the effort and expertise needed to mitigate that. Sure, but opening up one port is a much smaller surface than exposing yourself to a whole cloud hosting company.

Ah… I really could not disagree more with that statement. I know we don’t want to trust BigCorp and whatnot, but a single exposed port and an incomplete understanding of what you’re doing is really all it takes to be compromised.

This felt like it didn’t do your aim justice, “$X and an incomplete understanding of what you’re doing is all it takes to be compromised” applies to many $X, including Tailscale.

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#257

Post by [deleted] »

dwd wrote: post #70

Been 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…

[deleted]

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#258

Post by justinparus »

appplication wrote: post #137
lmm wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's simple, you increase your attack surface, and the effort and expertise needed to mitigate that. Sure, but opening up one port is a much smaller surface than exposing yourself to a whole cloud hosting company.

Ah… I really could not disagree more with that statement. I know we don’t want to trust BigCorp and whatnot, but a single exposed port and an incomplete understanding of what you’re doing is really all it takes to be compromised.

Using a BigCorp service also has risks. You are exposed to many of their vulnerabilities, that’s why our information ends up in data leaks.

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#259

Post by jmb99 »

zamadatix wrote: post #176
SoftTalker wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just run an SSH server and forward local ports through that as needed. Simple (at least to me).

I do that as well, along with using sshd as a SOCKS proxy for web based stuff via Firefox, but it can be a bit of a pain to forward each service to each host individually if you have more than a few things going on - especially if you have things trying to use the same port and need to keep track of how you mapped it locally. It can also a lot harder to manage on mobile devices, e.g. say you have some media or home a…

> and wireguard is about as easy a personal VPN as there is.

I would argue OpenVPN is easier. I currently run both (there are some networks I can’t use UDP on, and I haven’t bothered figuring out how to get wireguard to work with TCP), and the OpenVPN initial configuration was easier, as is adding clients (DHCP, pre-shared cert+username/password).

This isn’t to say wireguard is hard. But imo OpenVPN is still easier - and it works everywhere out of the box. (The exception is networks that only let you talk on 80 and 443, but you can solve that by hosting OpenVPN on 443, in my experience.)

This is all based on my experience with opnsense as the vpn host (+router/firewall/DNS/DHCP). Maybe it would be a different story if I was trying to run the VPN server on a machine behind my router, but I have no reason to do so - I get at least 500Mbps symmetrical through OpenVPN, and that’s just the fastest network I’ve tested a client on. And even if that is the limit, that’s good enough for me, I don’t need faster throughput on my VPN since I’m almost always going to be latency limited.

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#260

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

danpalmer wrote: post #40

There's something ironic about using Claud Code – a closed source service, that you can't self-host the hardware for, and that you can't get access to the data for – to self-host so that you can reduce your dependencies on things.

There is, but if I have to chose between tolerating the irony, and waiting for the hardware/model performance situation to improve before getting started, I'll ironically mark self-hosting a claude-equivalent as a TODO and get started on the other stuff now.
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