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Screw it, I’ll host it myself

markozivanovic.com

371–380 of 495 posts

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#371

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 u…

The author focuses the entire blog post on remote third party services that are alternatives to popular third party services financed by data collection as a "business model". IMO, the single most important component of a home network is not any piece of the hardware/software outside the home that the third parties may control, it is the internet gateway in the home. Routers were the most important computers at the d…

I am surprised too, it trully is home computer, connected to all computers inside and outside, and yet usual routers are cheap and dumb.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#372
I prefer the lower overhead of having things hosted elsewhere, but keep regular backups and have a well detailed business continuity plan for each vendor that could go hostile, belly up, or otherwise no longer viable.

You take advantage of off-the-shelf options at the same time that you prepare for the worst.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#373
The more I think about owning your data but not having to deal with maintenance crap, I think more tools should work with git.

Give me a pretty UI but use my GitHub repo for storage.

I kinda want something like notion UI but stores documents as JSON blobs in git (could use GitHub api and GitHub auth too)

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#374
post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also you disconnect email from other cloud services. So if you do something bad with your android app development you don't suddenly loose your email. Or if you forgot to pay your apple card you don't loose access to the email etc. I think diversification is valuable here.

The Apple example was proven to be inaccurate. The loss of access to email wasn't due to him not paying his Apple Card; it was for not paying for his iCloud services. In other words, his shutoff could have happened if he had his iCloud account set up to charge to any other credit card.

This is incorrect. (Author of that article.)

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#375
post #369
post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay. How can we fix this? I'm dealing with it right now and this space is so hard -- likely somewhat deliberately so. I'm a 20+ year Linux user trying to get a single home network with multiple ISPs going and it just seems way harder than it ought to be; i.e. -- not that every bit of software needs to be idiot-proof, but this iptables/pfSense/netplan etc etc universe just feels downright hostile to the aspiring home…

It is. Multi-wan is easier with appliances. I used pfSense over the last 12 years or so with multi-wan on and off (currently off). I've run pfSense in a kvm VM, and you can do multi-wan with this. Though I generally recommend dedicated NICs for the WANs and LAN. I've looked at the linux based appliances (as late as last week) and only clearos or openwrt supported multi-wan. I could be wrong (I'd like to be as pfSense…

I believe vyos supports WAN balancing (and/or failover).

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#376
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author focuses the entire blog post on remote third party services that are alternatives to popular third party services financed by data collection as a "business model". IMO, the single most important component of a home network is not any piece of the hardware/software outside the home that the third parties may control, it is the internet gateway in the home. Routers were the most important computers at the d…

I wonder how much a gateway router can do here. Most of the data passing it are encrypted: https, SSH. Cutting off the phone-home requests is best done on respective devices: you can run firewalls on most desktops and laptops, and even phones. Рhones often go online via GSM or LTE, without passing through the home router. While a proxy like pihole can be helpful sometimes, cutting off tracking and ads is done best by…

"I wonder how much a gateway router can do here."

"... cutting off tracking and ads is best done by browser extensions ..."

What if the browser vendor, who is also a data collector, requires user to log in or otherwise identify herself before she can use extensions.

A home "gateway" is a computer running a kernel with IP forwarding enabled that is being used as the point of egress from the home network to the internet. That is a broad definition and allows for much creativity. That is what I mean by the term "gateway". As such, a gateway can, both in theory and in practice, do anything/nothing that "desktops and laptops, and even phones" can do. Relying solely on pre-configured "limited/special purpose" OS projects as a replacement for DIY and creativity in setting up a gateway was not what I had in mind, but is certainly an option amongst many others.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#377
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm in the process of moving to OPNsense. Unlike pfsense it's actually open source, not controlled by a company that tries to drive competition out with dirty tricks and they aren't trying to move their customers to a DRM solution.

How hard has it been to move to opnsense? I've been dragging my feet on doing it because my pfsense router is setup just where it needs to be but i really do want to move.

OPNsense has recently upgraded to a new major version. To save aggravation, if you are not in a hurry, I would wait until minor version of 21.7.x

https://opnsense.org/about/road-map/

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you have N problems... What happens when those images are not available, terraform/packer change APIs, etc?

My solution is Kubernetes. Everything's configured in YAML files. The solution to all those problems is... change fields in YAML files. Of course, you need to figure out what you need to change and why, but you'll never not need to do this, if you're rolling your own infra. K8s allows you to roll a lot more of the contextual stuff into the system.

I have also been using Kubernetes for this for years now. My favorite property is that it will run forever, no matter what happens.

The annoying part is that when I do want to do updates (i.e. updating cert-manager from 0.1.x to 1.0.x, etc) it can be a pain. So I save these large updates for once a year or so.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#379

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 u…

Nix helps with this. Or at least it intends to. I still need to track down what's vulnerable and what isn't, but most of my setup is reproducible thanks to Nix.

Nix combined with a tmpfs root fixes this. You have no choice but to opt-in to state, or you lose it.

https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"HN doesn't make that much traffic" Cite your sources, that claim sounds made up. Your inference that if somebody doesn't use a CDN or have acceptable load times for you, that they don't care about user experience, and so their opinion on self hosting is not worth listening to is absurd.

Well here is a link about someone who made the front page in January: https://nicklafferty.com/blog/what-happens-when-you-re-on-th... They said they got 18,000 hits in one day. That's a tiny amount of traffic for any decent static website (which this one that we are talking about is). Even assuming they got all that traffic in one hour, that's only 5 requests per second.

Poking around the source code I see the time on the cache is after this comment so I feel the issue is more likely cache configuration wasn't prepared for frontpage of HN. Anecdotally, I'm not experiencing any performance issues anymore.
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