Start Self Hosting • Hacker News Board

Re: Start Self Hosting

#481

Post by lou1306 » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 9:34 AM UTC

sgt wrote: post #463

IncRnd wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are severely underestimating people.

Reading this thread - exactly my thoughts too. Most people (if given the incentive and interest) would understand systemd just fine. Some effort would be needed.

It would take one hell of an incentive to make someone with

* No previous tech knowledge

* A full-time job

* No external help

learn systemd, or how to setup and maintain a web server, or whatever. Individuals may still self-host of course, but I'm skeptical people will do it en masse anytime soon. After all, if the entry barrier weren't so high, we wouldn't have an entire service industry that does this for you (SquareSpace, Wix, Substack...)

Re: Start Self Hosting

#482

Post by gigatexal » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 9:34 AM UTC

kodah wrote: post #98

Self-hosting is something that we should be constantly iterating on making easier; it's really the path forward for privacy centric folks. The main challenges are managing workload scheduling (SystemD is complicated for a layperson). Networking is another challenge; for instance, if you wanted all or part of these services to remain offline or on a Mesh VPN there's a lot of knowledge required. There's some projects t…

This. I think -- speaking for myself mostly -- folks move to cloud for the simplicity a web interface provides. If you like, there's usually a CLI that abstracts the compute and other things. Self hosting -- at least whenever I did it -- was always: start with a VM, install Linux, configure ports, configure security, install a webserver, deal with the security of that, manage conf files, deploy website, etc etc

Host a static page on github pages makes all that a ton easier and also free.

That's a trite example sure. But when I was at a previous company who did almost everything on premises I couldn't help but think if we had an internal portal/system a la GCP's console or that of Amazon's that could be a way for devs to spin up resources and have it all managed and even be a bit programmatic (no no K8s doesn't solve all of this it's its own bag of crazy) then we'd not need cloud much since we'd not need the almost infinite scale that cloud offers.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#483

Post by account42 » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 9:36 AM UTC

Gigachad wrote: post #256

macinjosh wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear a lot of stories like this. I've been self-hosting for a few years out of my home. I have a symmetrical gigabit fiber connection. My IP changes very frequently (DDNS and a low TTL solves that problem for my use cases). _anyway_ I haven't been hacked.. yet. /me knocks on wood The precautions I take are basic: - Use unique and secure credentials on each service I expose. - I only expose ports 80 and 443 to the p…

The first hack I noticed was that someone had set a password on my redis server because the default was no password and I had accidentally exposed it to the wider internet. This was exposed for 6 months before this happened. Who knows what else was accessed without me knowing.

It's pretty silly how many services are public by default when ideally they should only listen on a unix domain socket (or nothing) until you configure something else.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#484

Post by cyberge99 » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 9:37 AM UTC

nobody9999 wrote: post #247

kodah wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it? It has clean and logical abstractions, and consistency. Services depending in each other isn‘t complex or difficult to understand. For a technologist or engineer, yes. For a layperson , no. The average consumer who desires privacy is probably neither a technologist or engineer, so the longterm target is something that just works . Laypeople also aren't going to entertain the kind of pedantry that is systemd…

>For a technologist or engineer, yes. For a layperson, no. The average consumer who desires privacy is probably neither a technologist or engineer, so the longterm target is something that just works. In comparison to system V initd startup files, systemd unit files are, arguably, less complicated. I'd say the "complexity" of systemd unit files is mostly irrelevant to end users. For a relatively non-technical user, i…

I think a good example of this is what Synology has done with their NAS devices. They’re as basic or as complex as you want to get (to a point). At the highest level of Synology complexity, you promote to a real general purpose server or homelab infrastructure.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#485

Post by leonroy » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 9:51 AM UTC

I've been self hosting since the early 00s. I used to host:

* Email (for years rolled my own using Procmail, Postfix, Squirrelmail before finally using Zimbra Email Server - an all in one software package)

* FreeNAS/TrueNAS for storage (3x SC836 16 bay Supermicro servers)

* VMware vSphere for virtualization (clustered setup with vmotion running on 2x dual Xeon servers)

* Elastix IP Phone Server (Asterisk PBX hooked up to Aastra IP phones in every room in my house)

* Cisco Call Manager - proprietary IP phone server (helped with my job...)

* Plex + the usual accompanying VMs

* HomeBridge + HomeAssistant

* Openfire (because everyone needs their own chat server)

* ZoneMinder (CCTV server hooked up to cameras around the property)

* Zabbix (to monitor it all)

The whole family (about 20 folks) would use the above for their day to day personal and small businesses.

It got to the point where I was spending several hundred in licenses and close to £1k in electricity a year.

I'd get paid by some folks to maintain the above, but after a while the fun of building gets replaced by the chore of maintaining - and the few outages I've had (can count on one hand - proudly) were a royal PITA since I'd have to drop everything and try and get it back online again.

In the 2000s and 2010s the skills my homelab taught me were still relevant; Routing, VLANs, Firewalls, NAT, subnets. But having just studied for an AWS certification I was struck by how much less application those basic skills have in today's marketplace - the cloud has representations of those sure, but maintaining a homelab doesn't give you exposure to what a VPC or a Security Group is.

Also back in the day it was far cheaper to self host vs rent servers in the cloud - today (especially after energy price increases in the UK) self hosting my now much smaller homelab of 1x Intel NUC and two Synology boxes (250W total) is gonna cost about £640 a year in electricity alone. That'll buy me a lot of stuff in AWS/GCP and frankly I'd rather have the practise and experience with a more relevant tech stack.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#486

Post by ThrashBeard » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 9:53 AM UTC

v_p_n_p_v wrote: post #410

johnny22 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what they are saying is that they edited the file in /usr/lib , which definitely would get overwritten. You're supossed to copy it into /etc/systemd/ for the appropriate service type.

I think you all proved the point that this system is too complicated for anyone outside of a small group of professional IT people.

It's complicated because it is complicated.

It's like saying a car is too complicated because I can't just swap the engine out without any prior knowledge. It's not designed for the average guy to be able to do that.

systemd is not some product meant for the average Joe, it's an integral part of the system for managing services and other things. To run a web server at least somewhat reliably you don't even need a lot of systemd knowledge but you still need to know some networking, firewalls, DNS, in general how the internet works, how to configure a web server and other services, some basic security. If you don't want to learn these things then there are managed services that you pay to do those things for you or you hire someone to run it for you. Just like you take your car to a mechanic when you're not interested in figuring out how to reassemble the engine.

Yeah, things can always be improved and made simpler but to create something fool-proof for the average person would take a huge amount of work and there would need to be a business opportunity there for someone to invest in that or there would need to be some passionate generous soul that would invest their time in a project like that.

And like I already mentioned, there are already solutions to the "it's too complicated" problem: 1) companies offering managed services, 2) companies/individuals for hire to do it for you.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#487

Post by comprev » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 10:19 AM UTC

me_me_mu_mu wrote: post #452

aetherspawn wrote: post #321

My business just started self-hosting, but we severely underestimated the cost of air conditioning (installation), SFP adapters, enterprise Ethernet and electrical infrastructure and ended up spending as much on peripheral stuff as servers. So far the whole operation has cost around $30k (small business). We stand to save $1-1.5k per month at the moment, less the cost of symmetrical fiber about $500/mo. Next year it…

Dumb question. I’m building little social apps, and I’m hosting stuff in GCP or AWS. I have a few old computers that are still kinda beefy (quad cores and a 6-core, 16+ Gb ram, some old but still working 3TB hdd). Would it be stupid to run some of my code and data on these? Not everything I have needs to be geographically close to users or something like that, such as a mass notifier service that runs every so often.…

I would recommend plugging the hardware into power measuring units before the wall sockets to give you an estimated running cost. Depending on where you are in the world electricity can be crazy expensive.

The cost of purchasing a lower power SBC (x86, ARM) might be very quickly offset.

A RaspberryPi can handle a surprising amount, especially the 4/8GB models. The trick is using low resource software.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#488

Post by fps_doug » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 10:21 AM UTC

kodah wrote: post #160

Hendrikto wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SystemD is complicated for a layperson Is it? It has clean and logical abstractions, and consistency. Services depending in each other isn‘t complex or difficult to understand. I suspect that a nice GUI would make systemd quite usable for non-expert users. BTW: It‘s called ”systemd“: > Yes, it is written systemd, not system D or System D, or even SystemD. And it isn't system d either. [0] [0]: https://www.freedeskt…

> Is it? It has clean and logical abstractions, and consistency. Services depending in each other isn‘t complex or difficult to understand. For a technologist or engineer, yes. For a layperson , no. The average consumer who desires privacy is probably neither a technologist or engineer, so the longterm target is something that just works . Laypeople also aren't going to entertain the kind of pedantry that is systemd…

I think this discussion thread is basically people looking at this in different contexts. A lot of the replies seem to interpret your post as saying "systemd is more complicated than sysvinit was" which is most definitely not what you meant regarding your further replies in this thread. You seem to say "even systemd is too complicated for the layperson". I somewhat agree, if we assume someone totally not dealing with tech in any way on a daily basis, except for typical Office work. But the "in-betweeners"? They totally could. Like, not even Linux users, but curious tinkerers that fiddle aound with .ini files and registry settings to tweak their machines; do overclocking? They totally have what it takes to chew through a tutorial that tells you how to set up a Linux VPS with a couple services running.

For the layperson that's a bus driver by day, not so much, most definitely, but I think no matter how simple you make setting this up, just having to maintain this and having to do something when the setup eventually has some unexpected bug a few years down the line is just too much.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#489

Post by dusted » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 10:31 AM UTC

account42 wrote: post #480

dusted wrote: post #472

It's not self hosting if it's not on your hardware, on your property, using your internet connection. It's still just having some other random person or company hosting it FOR you. The single biggest problem with real self-hosting is not a software one, even with all the software and hardware setup and working, the real problem is limits imposed on normal internet subscriptions by modern ISPs: Carrier grade NAT, lack…

You're also not hosting any parties if you rent your home. But mainly that's because your pedantry will not be entertaining enough to keep any guests. Others however will realize that hosting your own services on a generic VPS or dedicated server gives you much more freedom than a you-are-the-product service that does anything legally possible and then some to lock you in. Sure, hosting on your own hardware in a plac…

I actualy think it's the best excuse to dismiss other options, as those options makes self-hosting even harder because it gives the ISPs ample reason to keep restrictions in place "Oh, you don't NEED to host it yourself you can just trust your data to live on some random machine somewhere else"

What I dislike about this use of the term "selfhosting" is that it's practically an advertisement for hosting providers vaguely disguised as a way to privacy and freedom, which it most certainly is not.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#490

Post by egberts1 » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 10:31 AM UTC

hsn915 wrote: post #417

egberts1 wrote: post #343

The hardest part is drafting a series of questions for the end-user to understand and answer before we get that “MAGIC-PRESTO-CHANGO” get those configuration files that just works. I blame the program providers. Some Debian maintainers are trying to do this simple querying of complex configurations (dpkg-reconfigure `). And I applaud their limited inroad efforts there because no else one has seem to bother. I have ma…

The problem is configuration itself. Things should not need configuration. Configuration is for builders, not users. When you buy a car, do you "configure" the gearbox? The engine? Imagine yourself buying a car, and the car dealer starts to ask you "where would you like to place the gas tank?" or "How many pipes do you want going from the engine to the gas tank?". Oh and by the way, if you place the gas tank in the w…

That’s why pressing enter several times for a manufacturer-recommended default setting works for most car drivers, oh wait, I meant end-users.

Mean Time to Consult the Manufacturing Specs (MTTCTM, or HOWTOs) should be cut down … drastically.

Oh yeah, say “YES” to that fancy option of the Positron rear axle (cue in increase to manufacturing delivery time). This is the Information Age! You’ve only lost the “trial period” to get it right.