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Fuck the cloud (2009)

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41–50 of 114 posts

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#42

I echo similar sentiments. It is high time to choose self-hosting over handing over essentials to the cloud. You don't know when it could be inaccessible due to plethora of reasons. It is just that, every time I looked into setting up a home lab, it feels cost prohibitively expensive.

It’s like drugs, the first hit is cheap or free, but you end up spending all your money and your entire life on it!

Just get an old server for free somewhere and go …

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#43

I echo similar sentiments. It is high time to choose self-hosting over handing over essentials to the cloud. You don't know when it could be inaccessible due to plethora of reasons. It is just that, every time I looked into setting up a home lab, it feels cost prohibitively expensive.

> home lab

Well that's your problem right there. The home labber setups are for experimentation or "hot rodding" purposes and they typically way overbuild their solutions.

What most people need is an old desktop in a corner somewhere (preferably close to your router so you can get to it with an ethernet cable).

It's won't be Grandma proof, but if you're remotely technical you can write a docker compose file that glues together some useful home server utilities that sound interesting to you.

My setup is roughly speaking: Ubuntu LTS, ZFS (with 4 disks in a RAID10 style config), and a docker compose file that runs plex, transmission, syncthing, vaultwarden behind an nginx-proxy[1] container that even automagically renews my Let's Encrypt certs for me (though it's probably even easier if you use a Cloudflare tunnel).

If you're confident all your apps are available on these platforms, the storage part is easier with something like TruNAS or Unraid. If you don't need storage at all you can slim down your hardware a lot and just use a raspberry pi.

IMO, just find an old beater machine and get hacking :)

[1]: https://github.com/nginx-proxy/nginx-proxy

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#44

I echo similar sentiments. It is high time to choose self-hosting over handing over essentials to the cloud. You don't know when it could be inaccessible due to plethora of reasons. It is just that, every time I looked into setting up a home lab, it feels cost prohibitively expensive.

People overengineer homelabs all the time for fun and practice. To selfhost (which is not, in fact, the same thing), you can get a mini PC and probably host all of the basics. A small two-bay NAS plus a mini PC and you're really cooking with gas.

Homelab = Experimenting with environments you might use at work. Selfhost = Hosting what you need at home.

These are two very different goals with very different reasonable choices. People homelab with Kubernetes clusters, selfhosting with Kubernetes is dumb.

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#45
post #20

Counter-take: this was almost entirely wrong, and the author should be embarassed looking back after 17 years. I mean, it was 2009. How much of your personal data from then is still around on non-archival media you still control? Even among the geek set here, the answer is likely to be "almost none of it". At best it's "backed up" on media you haven't validated. Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secure…

Yeah I have all this data backed up on a couple different drives. IRC and ICQ logs going back to when I was a teenager. Digitised photos from when I was a kid through to the present day. Source code for projects I worked on from when I was 10. Rips of all the cds I used to own. And yes, email exports dating back to about 2003.

I wish I kept more, honestly. It’s a beautiful record.

I think my most treasured possession is videos of myself and my parents from when I was young. I’m thinking of sitting my sisters kids down in front of a camera for 15 minutes and getting them to talk about their life. It’s beautiful to rewatch this stuff decades later. It’s transporting.

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#46
post #20

Counter-take: this was almost entirely wrong, and the author should be embarassed looking back after 17 years. I mean, it was 2009. How much of your personal data from then is still around on non-archival media you still control? Even among the geek set here, the answer is likely to be "almost none of it". At best it's "backed up" on media you haven't validated. Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secure…

> How much of your personal data from then is still around on non-archival media you still control? Even among the geek set here, the answer is likely to be "almost none of it".

As other commenters have stated, maybe this isn't the best place to ask.

I'm definitely in the "almost all of it" camp. I have Diablo II game saves on my desktop that are carried forward directly from my Windows 98 SE box circa 2002-2003. As well as Linux ISO's I acquired on Kazaa while still on dial-up internet.

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#47
post #24

The idea of offshoring computing is good. However, the cloud developed as a centralized computing platform instead of a distributed one. This has created power dynamics that harm customers. The same happened with social media, and has happened to other industries. I think it would be better for customers if there were many small cloud providers and they could easily switch between them. But even migrating from one cl…

If you actually mean offshore as in located in a different country or especially a different continent, then that is a terrible idea for latency for many forms of computation. There are acceptable use cases, eg when round trips are infrequent and average latency is already high like batch workloads or some forms of LLM, but even then closer compute is pretty much always a better experience.

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#48

Resource Limit Is Reached - Hug of death

That's really odd. If I remember correctly Jason Scott has talked in his podcast about how textfiles.com is a co-lo'd self hosted box. I wonder what "resource limit" got hit.

It really isn’t odd at all.

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#49
I've taken to buying the occasional CD and DVD. While I still use spotify more than physical cds, I still have my old CD collection and the sound quality is so refreshing. And soundtracks aren't on Spotify. With movies it's hard to rewatch favourites because they don't stay on the streaming services. Again it's much more satisfying to own them yourself.

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#50
post #32
post #20

Counter-take: this was almost entirely wrong, and the author should be embarassed looking back after 17 years. I mean, it was 2009. How much of your personal data from then is still around on non-archival media you still control? Even among the geek set here, the answer is likely to be "almost none of it". At best it's "backed up" on media you haven't validated. Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secure…

I still have hour long techno/house mixes that I downloaded from some dude who was trying to get into DJing in 2008/did house shows or something, because we played on the same garry's mod server. They don't exist anywhere else on the internet as far as I could possibly find. Searching his dj name doesn't bring up anything.

A UK trance artist called Deathboy left directory-traversal open on his website about 23 year ago. Since then I've had a lot of mp3's that he's never released or put on albums, which is sad because a lot of them are pretty great.

Similarly (also from ~2003), the (Australian) ABC's website held a lot of recorded breakfast radio show clips from when Adam & Wil hosted it, getting the awesome comedy band Tripod [0] to write songs in an hour. Many of these were released on their CD's, but nowhere near all of them.

Eventually that ABC server was shutdown due to lack of government funds. There's a very good chance I'm the only one on the planet with these excellent songs & interviews from those shows.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripod_(band)

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