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Start Self Hosting

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Re: Start Self Hosting

#491

Post by fps_doug »

asoneth wrote: post #344
lnxg33k1 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with you, only for the fact that right now, in this age computers are everywhere, everything is digital, it is not luxury to learn how things work, it's survival, it's not expendable time, it's professional time

I have various friends who have made similar statements about food (everyone should cook meals for themselves), cars (everyone should do their own basic repairs and maintenance), homes (everyone should do their own basic home maintenance), keyboards (everyone should do basic soldering and learn a non-qwerty layout), accounting (everyone should have a budget and do their own taxes), gardening, fitness, investing, educ…

You know, I have kids too, but I still wonder how much more dependent on big tech we might potentially get over the next decades, and how much responsibility I have in protecting and educating them in that regard. I'm postponing self-hosting mail for several years now, because it has A LOT of gotchas and requires tweaking and debugging every couple weeks/months because someone considers you a Spammer again (looking at you, Hotmail (German: Schrottmail)).

But eventually they will be old enough to require an email address, so should I just let them use Gmail and stop worrying, or try to have something up and running until then? At least protect them from the data kraken until they can make their own informed decisions about that. But then I'm not just responsible for my email, but my whole family's email. What about 30 years down the road, when they long moved out? Am I still gonna sysadmin my family's self-hosting galore when they finally have kids on their own? Is it even still possible then? At least for mail it looks like when it's growing over my head I can just sign up with some mail provider (that hopefully values privacy) and let them handle that whole BS.

It might not even be worth it anymore at some point though, if basically everyone else you communicate with via mail is on Gmail. Then Google already has all my email as well.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#492

Post by jiri »

I like the Picasa example. I am stuck with just looking for Picasa (ofcourse with sharing and cloud stuff) self-hosted alternative :-(

Re: Start Self Hosting

#494

Post by pandacasi »

yewenjie wrote: post #68

What are you all self-hosting? For me - - Gitea (git forge) - Maddy (email) - Calendso (scheduling) - Vaultwarden (password manager) - linx (filesharing) - Syncthing (file syncing) - Wireguard (VPN) - a couple of metasearch engines I am not mentioning all the tools and services for monitoring and management. Self hosting is easy for me cause I am managing all of this with NixOS.

- Nextcloud (personal data)

- Mailu (email)

- Harbor (docker registry)

- gitlab (git+ci)

- portainer (deployment)

- matrix+bridges (chat)

- openVPN

- grafana, prometheus, ... (monitoring)

Re: Start Self Hosting

#495

Post by lnxg33k1 »

asoneth wrote: post #344
lnxg33k1 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with you, only for the fact that right now, in this age computers are everywhere, everything is digital, it is not luxury to learn how things work, it's survival, it's not expendable time, it's professional time

I have various friends who have made similar statements about food (everyone should cook meals for themselves), cars (everyone should do their own basic repairs and maintenance), homes (everyone should do their own basic home maintenance), keyboards (everyone should do basic soldering and learn a non-qwerty layout), accounting (everyone should have a budget and do their own taxes), gardening, fitness, investing, educ…

I guess put like that, I would say that my thought about the matter were a bit bullshit and I agree with you

Re: Start Self Hosting

#496

Post by Zeik0s »

Phlogi wrote: post #446
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…

Can CasaOS run compose stacks or simply containers?

can do both, iirc.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#497

Post by prox »

fps_doug wrote: post #491
asoneth wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have various friends who have made similar statements about food (everyone should cook meals for themselves), cars (everyone should do their own basic repairs and maintenance), homes (everyone should do their own basic home maintenance), keyboards (everyone should do basic soldering and learn a non-qwerty layout), accounting (everyone should have a budget and do their own taxes), gardening, fitness, investing, educ…

You know, I have kids too, but I still wonder how much more dependent on big tech we might potentially get over the next decades, and how much responsibility I have in protecting and educating them in that regard. I'm postponing self-hosting mail for several years now, because it has A LOT of gotchas and requires tweaking and debugging every couple weeks/months because someone considers you a Spammer again (looking a…

I think it’s here Linux devs or the selfhost ecosystem should focus itself : making the software more accessible. It’s a bit like Blender before the big UI overhaul. There were actually a sizeable group of people who were very much against it, but now we are further along and its been a great success for both newbies and experts.

An awareness campaign to go the extra mile in terms accessibility would be great (and that doesn’t mean dumbing down, the two seems to be equated sometimes)

Re: Start Self Hosting

#498

Post by linker3000 »

lumost wrote: post #264
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…

Having started my career in hosting, I would suggest that this world is unlikely to come back except for exceptionally small applications with minimal business impact. What does self-hosting provide which end-end encryption does not? Self-hosting means: - Needing to know how to configure your linux host across firewalls, upgrades, backups. - Negotiating contracts with network service providers. While verifying that y…

... so, basically, just how we ran an IT services department in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Except that:

Build servers took a day or so depending on the approval chain.

Hardware could be leased, or the capital expendite written off over 3 years, plus it came with a 4-hr onsite service warranty (if you worked with the right partners), and it being a capital, rather than operational, cost had bottom-line benefits.

24/7 service coverage for major incidents was very doable if you planned correctly, plus you owned the kit and so could control how you brought in resources to support incident recovery, rather thank waiting for your service provider to put the green dot back on their service status page.

//CSB The max total outage time for one corporate where I ran the IT dept was 12 minutes in 3 years, while we swapped out an HP battery-backed disk cache controller that took itself offline due to a confidence check failure.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#499

Post by Sammi »

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…

What I don't get is if the problem was the risk of unexpected bills from a cloud provider, then why not just use simple virtual servers that you can rent for a fixed price from almost any hosting provider?

Gives you all that extra benefit you speak of of the extra compute headroom that you can use for spinning up any demo server application you want, and saves you all the costs, risks, and headache of managing your own hardware.

Why the debate of cloud vs on prem? The logical sweet spot in the middle seems to be vps to me.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#500

Post by swiftcoder »

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…

The only model I've ever seen this work is the Mac/Windows model. You provide a standard installer for the server (or even distribute it via the app store). The user launches it through the standard graphical app launch model (Finder or Start Menu), the server displays a suitably user-friendly GUI configuration panel, and then minimises itself to the notifications tray.

The linux model of "first learn how to use a package manager, edit configuration files by hand, and configure init scripts" is never going to be something that I can comfortably explain to computer users like my parents...

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