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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

#471

Post by zobzu »

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…

put simply and fairly bluntly: because they do not know how things work.

but actually it's worse. this is HN - supposedly, most commenters are curious by nature and well versed into most basic computer stuff. in practice, it's slowly less and less the case.

worse: what is learned and expected is different from what you'd think.

for example, separating service users sure is better than nothing, but the OS attack surface as a local user is still huge, hence why we use sandboxes, which really are just OS level firewalls to reduce the attack surface.

the open port attack surface isnt terrible though: you get a bit more of the very well tested tcp/ip stack and up to 65k ports all doing the exact same thing, not terrible at all.

Now, add to it "AI" which can automatically regurgitate and implement whatever reddit and stack overflow says.. it makes for a fun future problem - such forums will end up with mostly non-new AI content (new problem being solved will be a needle in the haystack) - and - users will have learned that AI is always right no matter what it decides (because they don't know any better and they're being trained to blindly trust it).

Heck, i predict there will be a chat, where a bunch of humans will argue very strongly that an AI is right while its blatantly wrong, and some will likely put their life on the line to defend it.

Fun times ahead. As for my take: humans _need_ learning to live, but are lazy. Nature fixes itself.

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

#472

Post by drnick1 »

gambiting wrote: post #393
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…

"Back in the day"(just few years ago) I used to expose a port for RDP on my router, on a non-standard port. Typically it would be fine and quiet for a few weeks, then I assume some automatic scanner would find it and from that point onwards I could see windows event log reporting a log in attempt every second, with random login/password combinations, clearly just looking for something that would work. I would change…

> someone will scan it and try to attack it. Maybe not if it's a random game server, but any popular service will get under attack.

That's fine, it's only people knocking on a closed door. You cannot host things such as email or HTTP without open ports, your service needs to be publicly accessible by definition.

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

#473

Post by observationist »

buran77 wrote: post #84
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…

> I'd rather expose a Wireguard port and control my keys than introduce a third party like Tailscale. Ideal if you have the resources (time, money, expertise). There are different levels of qualifications, convenience, and trust that shape what people can and will deploy. This defines where you draw the line - at owning every binary of every service you use, at compiling the binaries yourself, at checking the code th…

This is where using frontier models can help - You can have them assist with configuring and operating wireguard nearly as easily as you can have them walk you through Tailscale, eliminating the need for a middleman.

The mid-level and free tiers aren't necessarily going to help, but the Pro/Max/Heavy tier can absolutely make setting up and using wireguard and having a reasonably secure environment practical and easy.

You can also have the high tier models help with things like operating a FreePBX server and VOIP, manage a private domain, and all sorts of things that require domain expertise to do well, but are often out of reach for people who haven't gotten the requisite hands on experience and training.

I'd say that going through the process of setting up your self hosting environment, then after the fact asking the language model "This is my environment: blah, a, b, c, x, y, z, blah, blah. What simple things can I do to make it more secure?"

And then repeating that exercise - create a chatgpt project, or codex repo, or claude or grok project, wherein you have the model do a thorough interrogation of you to lay out and document your environment. With that done, you condense it to a prompt, and operate within the context where your network is documented. Then you can easily iterate and improve.

Something like this isn't going to take more than a few 15 minute weekend sessions each month after initially setting it up, and it's going to be a lot more secure than the average, completely unattended, default settings consumer network.

You could try to yolo it with Operator or an elevated MCP interface with your system, but the point is, those high tier models are sufficiently good enough to make significant self hosting easily achievable.

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

#475

Post by dpacmittal »

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…

Tailscale works behind NAT, wireguard does not unless you also have a publicly reachable relay server which introduces its own maintenance headaches and cost.

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

#476

Post by efilife »

efilife wrote: post #9

how many times will I get clickbaited by some cool title only to see AI praise in the article and nothing more? It's tiring and happens way too often related "webdev is fun again": claude. https://ma.ttias.be/web-development-is-fun-again/ Also the "Why it matters" in the article. I thought it's a jab at AI-generated articles but it starts too look like the article was AI written as well

psa: The title has been changed since

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

#477

Post by VTimofeenko »

rootusrootus wrote: post #223
VTimofeenko wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a 5 day outage last year, got a generator at the tail end of the windy season and made exact same jokes. A year later another atmospheric river hit and we had a 4 hour outage. No more jokes. Make sure to run that generator once every few months with some load to keep it happy.

Well, it's an EV with a big inverter, not a generator, but I get your point. And I do periodically fire it up and run the house on it for a little while, just to exercise the connection and maintain my familiarity with it in case I need to use it late at night in the dark with an ice storm breaking all the trees around us.

Oh, I see! Genuinely curious -- what kind of EV has a battery to power a house for a week?

> maintain my familiarity with it in case I need to use it late at night in the dark with an ice storm breaking all the trees around us.

That's the way to do it. I usually did my trial runs during the day with light readily available but underestimated how much I needed to see what I am doing. Now there's a grounding plug and a flashlight in the "oh shit kit".

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

#478

Post by fhennig »

sroerick wrote: post #267
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

I don't actually need much, I think basically just encrypted cloud storage would be great. If there was something like proton mail, but ran as a co-op, I'd also use that (it has great calendar support too).

I'd really focus on it being usable for non-techies, I don't think I'd want a linux login for anything. IMO, the focus should be on the basic infrastructure of digital life for the everyday person.

tilde.club sounds interesting though! Hadn't heard of it before.

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

#479

Post by tech_ken »

ryandrake wrote: post #13
philips wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree! Before Tailscale I was completely skeptical of self hosting. Now I have tailscale on an old Kindle downloading epubs from a server running Copyparty. Its great!

Maybe I'm dumb, but I still don't quite understand the value-add of Tailscale over what Wireguard or some other VPN already provides. HN has tried to explain it to me but it just seems like sugar on top of a plain old VPN. Kind of like how "pi-hole" is just sugar on top of dnsmasq, and Plex is just sugar on top of file sharing.

Managing the wg.conf is a colossal PITA, especially if I'm trying to like provision a new client and don't have access to my main laptop. It's crying out for a CRUD app on top of it, and I think tailscale is basically that plus a little. The value add seems obvious.

Also plex is way more than sugar on top of file sharing; it's like filesharing, media management, and a CDN rolled into one product. Soulseek isn't going to handle transcoding for you.

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