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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

#261

Post by byb »

drnick1 wrote: post #26
simonw wrote: post #3

This posts lists inexpensive home servers, Tailscale and Claude Code as the big unlocks. I actually think Tailscale may be an even bigger deal here than sysadmin help from Claude Code at al. The biggest reason I had not to run a home server was security: I'm worried that I might fall behind on updates and end up compromised. Tailscale dramatically reduces this risk, because I can so easily configure it so my own devi…

I'd rather expose a Wireguard port and control my keys than introduce a third party like Tailscale. I am not sure why people are so afraid of exposing ports. I have dozens of ports open on my server including SMTP, IMAP(S), HTTP(S), various game servers and don't see a problem with that. I can't rule out a vulnerability somewhere but services are containerized and/or run as separate UNIX users. It's the way the Inter…

My biggest source of paranoia is my open home assistant port, while it requires a strong password and is TLS-encrypted, I'm sure that one day someone will find an exploit letting them in, and then the attacker will rapidly turn my smart home devices on and off until they break/overheat the power components until they start a fire and burn down my house.

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

#262

Post by CGamesPlay »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #204
CGamesPlay wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the shout-out! If you have any experiential reports using QTM, I'd love to hear them!

Oh yeah this is a really funny story considering what thread we are on, but I remember asking chatgpt or claude or gemini or anything xD to make QTM work and none of them could figure out But I think in the end what ended up working was my frustration took over and I just copy pasted the commands from readme and if I remember correctly, they just worked. This is really ironical considering on what thread we are on bu…

You aren't actually supposed to ever need to deal with tickets manually, unless you are trying to get a tunnel between two machines and neither can SSH into the other. It could be streamlined with something like Magic Wormhole, though. I'll add that to the backlog and see if there's interest. The normal way is to use SSH / docker exec / any remote shell to let QTM swap the tickets over it.

I've added an asciinema to the README now https://asciinema.org/a/z2cdsoVDVJu0gIGn>, showing the manual connection steps. Thanks for the kind words. Hope you find it useful!

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

#263

Post by seszett »

byb wrote: post #261
drnick1 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather expose a Wireguard port and control my keys than introduce a third party like Tailscale. I am not sure why people are so afraid of exposing ports. I have dozens of ports open on my server including SMTP, IMAP(S), HTTP(S), various game servers and don't see a problem with that. I can't rule out a vulnerability somewhere but services are containerized and/or run as separate UNIX users. It's the way the Inter…

My biggest source of paranoia is my open home assistant port, while it requires a strong password and is TLS-encrypted, I'm sure that one day someone will find an exploit letting them in, and then the attacker will rapidly turn my smart home devices on and off until they break/overheat the power components until they start a fire and burn down my house.

That seems like a very irrational fear. Attackers don't go around trying to break into Home Assistant to turn the lights on at some stranger's house.

There's also no particular reason to think Home Assistant's authentication has to have a weakness point.

And your devices are also unlikely to start a fire just by being turned on and off, if that's your fear you should replace them at once because if they catch fire it doesn't matter if it's an attacker or yourself turning them on and off.

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

#264

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

atmosx wrote: post #21

Just make sure you have a local and remote backup server. From to time, test the restore process.

I haven't tried it yet, but the evil twin to this practice is to nuke everything periodically to ensure that your agent isn't relying on any filesystem state that it hasn't specified builds for (i.e. https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/).

They tend to slip out of declarative mode and start making untracked changes to the system from time to time.

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

#265

Post by croes »

enos_feedler wrote: post #222
valcron1000 wrote: post #221

> When something breaks, I SSH in, ask the agent what is wrong, and fix it. > I am spending time using software, learning What are you actually learning? PSA: OP is a CEO of an AI company

you are learning what it takes to keep a machine up and running. You still witness the breakage. You can still watch the fix. You can review what happened. What you are implying from your question is that compared to doing things without AI, you are learning less (or perhaps you believe nothing). You definitely are learning less about mucking around in linux. But, if the alternative was not ever running a linux machi…

How can you review if you don‘t know in the first place?

You can watch your doctor, your plumber, your car mechanic and still wouldn’t know if they di something wrong if you don’t know the subject as such.

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

#266

Post by catlifeonmars »

> I have flirted with self-hosting at home for years. I always bounced off it - too much time spent configuring instead of using. It just wasn't fun.

No judgement, but wanting to tinker/spend time on configuration is a major reason why many people do self-host.

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

#267

Post by sroerick »

fhennig wrote: post #106

I think it's great that people are getting into self-hosting, but I don't think it's _the_ solution to get us off of big tech. Having others run a service for you is a good thing! I'd love to pay a subscription for a service, but ran as a cooperative, where I'm not actually just paying a subscription fee, instead I'm a member and I get to decide what gets done as well. This model works so well for housing, where the…

Hey, I was thinking about this same idea lately. What exactly would you want hosted by somebody?

I was thinking about what if your "cloud" was more like a tilde.club, with self hosted web services plus a Linux login. What services would you want?

Email and cloud make sense. I think a VPN and Ad Blocker would too. Maybe Immich and music hosting? Calendar? I don't know what people use for self hosting

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

#268

Post by catlifeonmars »

drnick1 wrote: post #26
simonw wrote: post #3

This posts lists inexpensive home servers, Tailscale and Claude Code as the big unlocks. I actually think Tailscale may be an even bigger deal here than sysadmin help from Claude Code at al. The biggest reason I had not to run a home server was security: I'm worried that I might fall behind on updates and end up compromised. Tailscale dramatically reduces this risk, because I can so easily configure it so my own devi…

I'd rather expose a Wireguard port and control my keys than introduce a third party like Tailscale. I am not sure why people are so afraid of exposing ports. I have dozens of ports open on my server including SMTP, IMAP(S), HTTP(S), various game servers and don't see a problem with that. I can't rule out a vulnerability somewhere but services are containerized and/or run as separate UNIX users. It's the way the Inter…

Honestly the managed PKI is the main value-add from Tailscale over plain wireguard.

I’ve been meaning to give this a try this winter: https://github.com/juanfont/headscale

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

#269

Post by dangus »

cryostasis wrote: post #218
dangus wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No off-site backup for me, these items aren’t important enough, it’s more for “oops I broke my computer” or “set my new computer up faster” convenience. Anything I really don’t want to lose is in a paid cloud service with a local backup sync over SMB to my TrueNAS box for some of the most important ones. An exception is GitHub, I’m not paying for GitHub, but git kinda sorta backs itself up well enough for my purposes…

Good to know! I have shifted more to self hosting, e.g., Gitea rather than Github, and need to establish proper redundancy. Hopefully Borg Backup, with it's deduplication will be good, at least for on-site backups.

I am much more in-between. I don’t mind cloud stuff and even consider it safer than my local stuff due to other smart people doing the work. And I’m not looking for a second job self hosting, except for my game servers.

I mostly just don’t want to be stuck with cloud services from big tech that have slimy practices. I’d rather pay for honest products that let me own my data better. With the exception given to GitHub which I guess is out of my own laziness and maybe I should do something about that.

If you’re using gitea you might be interested in Forgejo, it’s a fork and I think it’s well regarded since gitea went more commercial-ish IIRC?

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

#270

Post by [deleted] »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #183
JodieBenitez wrote: post #91

So it's self hosting but with a paid and closed saas dependency ? I'll pass.

Doesn't have to be that way though. As discussed here recently, a basic local agent like Claude Code is only a couple hundred lines of code, and could easily be written by something like Claude Code if you didn't want to do it yourself. If you have your own agent, then it can talk to whatever you want - could be OpenRouter configured to some free model, or could be to a local model too. If the local model wasn't know…

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