Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

fulghum.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 570 posts

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

#401

Post by lucb1e »

devonhk wrote: post #56
notesinthefield wrote: post #30

I find myself a bit overwhelmed with hardware options during recent explorations. Seemingly everything can handle what I want a local copy of my Bandcamp archive to stream via jellyfin. Good times we’re in but even having good sysadmin skills, I wish someone would just tell me exactly what to buy.

> I wish someone would just tell me exactly what to buy. I’ll bite. You can save a lot of money by buying used hardware. I recommend looking for old Dell OptiPlex towers on Facebook Marketplace or from local used computer stores. Lenovo ThinkCentres (e.g., m700 tiny) are also a great option if you prefer something with a smaller form factor. I’d recommend disregarding advice from non-technical folks recommending bran…

What's the power consumption on those?

I'm not familiar with Dell product names specifically but 'tower' sounds like it'll sit there burning 200W idle. Old laptops (sliding out the battery) is what I've been opting for, which use barely anything more than the router it sits next to. Especially if you just want to serve static files as GP seems to be looking for, an old smartphone will be enough but there you can't remove the battery (since it won't run off of just the charger)

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

#402

Post by dannersy »

compounding_it wrote: post #321

I don't really understand this post completely. >I am spending time using software, learning, and having fun - instead of maintaining it and stressing out about it. Using software, learning and having fun with with what? everything is being done by Claude here. The part of fun and learning is to learn to use and maintain it in the first place. How will you learn anything if Claude is doing everything for you ? You ar…

They get to feel like hackerman without understanding any of it. Also, this feels like a security nightmare. I wouldn't self host anything without understanding what you're opening yourself up to.

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

#403

Post by [deleted] »

b112 wrote: post #398
johnisgood wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same applies to Tailscale. A Tailscale client, coordination plane vulnerability, or incomplete understanding of their trust model is also all it takes. You are adding attack surface, not removing it. If your threat model includes "OpenSSH might have an RCE" then "Tailscale might have an RCE" belongs there too. If you are exposing a handful of hardened services on infrastructure you control, Tailscale adds complexity…

There was a time when people were allowed to drive cars unlicensed. These days, that seems insane. As the traffic grew, as speeds increased, licensing became necessary. I think, these days, we're almost into that category. I don't say this happily. But having unrestricted access seems like an era coming to an end. I realise this seems unworkable. But so was the idea of a driver's license. Sometimes society and safety…

[deleted]

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

#404

Post by lucb1e »

rr808 wrote: post #210
notesinthefield wrote: post #30

I find myself a bit overwhelmed with hardware options during recent explorations. Seemingly everything can handle what I want a local copy of my Bandcamp archive to stream via jellyfin. Good times we’re in but even having good sysadmin skills, I wish someone would just tell me exactly what to buy.

Get started a corporate surplus mini pc on ebay. They super cheap - search for micro pc - if you get a recent CPU from Dell or Lenovo should be under $200, you can install Fedora or other Linux distribution. Ask Claude for everything else.

That's twice what I'd spend on a first server when you're still figuring out what you need!

My first "server" was a 65€ second-hand laptop including shipping iirc, in ~2010 euros so say maybe 100€ now when taking inflation into account. I used that for a number of years and had a good idea of what I wanted from my next setup (which wasn't much heavier, but a little newer cpu wasn't amiss after 3 years). Don't think one needs to even go so far as 200$ for a "local Bandcamp archive" (static file storage) and serving that via some streaming webserver

Jellyfin docs do mention "Not having a GPU is NOT recommended for Jellyfin, as video transcoding on the CPU is very performance demanding" but that's for on-the-fly video transcoding. If you transcode your videos to the desired format(s) upon import, or don't have any videos at all yet as in GP's case, it doesn't matter if the hardware is 20x slower. Worst case, you just watch that movie in source material quality: on a LAN you won't have network speed bottlenecks anyway, and transcoding on GPU is much more expensive (purchase + ongoing power costs) than the gigabit ethernet that you can already find by default on every laptop and router

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

#405

Post by lee_ars »

PeterStuer wrote: post #290
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…

These are two very separate issues. Tailscale or other reverse proxies will give you access from the WAN. Claude Code or other assistants will give you conversational management. I already do the former (using Pangolin). I'm building towards the latter but first need to be 100% sure I can have perfect rollback and containement across the full stack CC could influence.

I've started experimenting with Claude Code, and I've decided that it never touches anything that isn't under version control.

The way I've put this into practice is that instead of letting claude loose on production files and services, i keep a local repo containing copies of all my service config files with a CLAUDE.md file explaining what each is for, the actual host each file/service lives on, and other important details. If I want to experiment with something ("Let's finally get around to planning out and setting up kea-dhcp6!"), Claude makes its suggestions and changes in my local repo, and then I manually copy the config files to the right places, restart services, and watch to see if anything explodes.

Not sure I'd ever be at the point of trusting agentic AI to directly modify in-place config files on prod systems (even for homelab values of "prod").

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

#407

Post by pferde »

fooqux wrote: post #187
drnick1 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every time I put anything anywhere on the open net, it gets bombarded 24/7 by every script kiddie, botnet group , and these days, AI company out there Are you sure that it isn't just port scanners? I get perhaps hundreds of connections to my STMP server every day, but they are just innocuous connections (hello, then disconnect). I wouldn't worry about that unless you see repeated login attempts, in which case you m…

Port scanners don't try to ssh into my server with various username/password combinations. I prefer to hide my port instead of using F2B for a few reasons. 1. Log spam. Looking in my audit logs for anything suspicious is horrendous when there's just megs of login attempts for days. 2. F2B has banned me in the past due to various oopsies on my part. Which is not good when I'm out of town and really need to get into my…

You can tweak rate thresholds for F2B, so that it blocks the 100-attempts-per-second attackers, but doesn't block your three-attempts-per-minute manual fumbling.

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

#408

Post by _the_inflator »

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…

I made the same revelation.

Self hosting sounds so simple, but if you consider all the critical factors involved, in becomes a full time job. You own your server. In every regard.

And security is only one crucial aspect. How spam filters react to your IP is another story.

In the end I cherrish the dream but rely on third party server providers.

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

#409

Post by lee_ars »

InfinityByTen wrote: post #341

I was just thinking I should write something about this, because the words needs spreading. I cannot say how happy I am configuring my own immich server on a decade old machine. I just feel empowered. Because despite my 9 years of software development, I haven't gotten into the nitty gritties of networking, VPN and I always see something non-standard while installing an open source package and without all of this cus…

> PS: The rush was so great I was excitedly talking to my wife how I could port our emails away from google, considering all of the automatic opt in for AI processing and what not. The foolhardy me thought of even sabbatical breaks to work on long pending to-do's in my head.

I've been email self-hosting for a decade, and unfortunately, self-hosting your email will not help with this point nearly as much as it seems on first glance.

The reason is that as soon as you exchange emails with anyone using one of the major email services like gmail or o365, you're once again participating in the data collection/AI training machine. They'll get you coming or they'll get you going, but you will be got.

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

#410

Post by InfinityByTen »

johnisgood wrote: post #396
InfinityByTen wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am probably in the camp where I've found myself ovewhelmed with the amount of information about networks and I'm an alleged software engineer (without formal training in CS albeit). The 10 loc is not a valid measure. `sudo rm -rf /` is a 1 line of code. It's not the lines that are hard to wrap your brain around, it's the implication of the lines that really what we are talking about.

The rm -rf comparison is a bit dramatic. WireGuard's config is conceptually simple: your key, peer's key, endpoint, what IPs route through the tunnel. The "implications" are minimal. It is a point-to-point encrypted tunnel. Being overwhelmed by networking basics is worth addressing regardless. It comes up constantly: debugging connectivity, deployments, understanding why your app cannot reach a database. 30 minutes w…

I do agree on that using LLMs to demistify, learn and explore is better alternative than handing it off to go rouge on, is a better advice. That's how I used it last weekend and I think that's what I would advocate the usage instead of just letting YourFavouriteAI be the sys admin.

My problem is not just networking knowledge. I genuinely faced issues with open source tools. Troubleshooting in the days of terrible search is also a major annoyance. Sometimes, it's just the case that some of the tools have evolved and the same commands don't work as did for someone in 2020 in some obscure forum. I remember those days of tinkering with linux and open source where you'd rely on a Samaritan (bless their soul) who said they'd go home and check up and update you.

Claude suggested me Tailscale too, but I'm glad we're having this conversation (thanks for the tips btw), so that we don't follow hallucinations or bad advice by similarly trained agents. I'm cautiously positive, but I think there's still a case to go self hosted with AI assistance. I found myself looking at possibilities rather than fearing dead ends and time black holes.

Post reply on HN