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

Start Self Hosting

rohanrd.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 625 posts

Re: Start Self Hosting

#511

Post by spacemanmatt »

wallacoloo wrote: post #501
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…

i started self-hosting a bunch of stuff last month: Pleroma (like Mastodon/Twitter), Matrix (chat), Gitea (like Github) and Jellyfin (like Plex, a media server). AFTER i set up the hardware/OS, these each took about 1-2 hours to setup, and it gets faster each time as i get more accustomed to the common parts (nginx, systemd, Lets Encrypt, and whatever containerization you use). today i accidentally nuked everything b…

After I've built a server for a purpose, the one thing I want most is a script that does it again. Spending another identical hour on a similar server just makes me sad.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#512

Post by slightwinder »

Gigachad wrote: post #262
u2077 wrote: post #153

I don’t need a reason why to self host, I need nice, clear, up-to-date tutorials on how to self host various services. Self hosting should be easy enough for everyday people. Perhaps preconfigured servers that treat services just like apps. Once I have a server setup, I should be able to install (and uninstall) services in a single click. The OS can handle permissions and containers.

There are numerous projects which have attempted to create this. https://sandstorm.io/ was the biggest one but as far as I can tell its largely unmaintained and most of the apps are outdated https://yunohost.org/ probably has the best "just works" experience but I didn't like that it wasn't using any kind of containerization which has caused them issues with shared libraries like PHP being difficult to update. As wel…

It's kinda sad that something like yunohost is still the best "just working"-solution we have at the moment. I tested it some weeks ago for a homelab-server, and holy crap was this a poor experience.

But the general problem with those projects is, they all are packaging their own apps, and most of those have a very low number available. Some of thise apps are outdated, or are not well tested. It's quite strange that we have dozens of linux-distributions, each with thousand of packages, yet we have no good solution that actually works well enough.

You either have solutions which are hiding everything in a tanglement which is hard to understand, or you must do all the work yourself, or you live with the in-betweens which offer only a handful of apps. Maybe in another 20 years we have something workable on all levels...

Re: Start Self Hosting

#513

Post by southerntofu »

mikewarot wrote: post #406

I am not aware of any OS which will stand up to the internet without management for months at a time. Until that problem is solved, self hosting remains a dream. Ideally you should be able to set up a machine, and just have it work for at least a year, on average, with no need to intervein, do updates, patches, etc. Like the old Novell systems we keep hearing about, serving files from rooms since closed off to humans…

Any selfhosting distro on which you enable unattended-upgrades will do the trick: libreserver.org, yunohost.org, freedombox.org are good examples.

Of course, it's even better if you setup the backups before you forget :)

Re: Start Self Hosting

#514

Post by rb666 »

sylware wrote: post #171

Bringing self hosting to lambda users is _REALLY_ hard and Big Tech won't let you do it too easily. Many corp email smtp servers will IP block your email server (big thanks to spamhaus), or won't support no-DNS email address and servers (which is RFC from the start) or won't have the decency to handle grey listing or will send all your emails to their spam boxes (gogol) even though ppl did remove your emails from the…

You can and should self-host about everything, apart from email.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#515

Post by asim »

jart wrote: post #238
asim wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because its a product by western digital. No one wants that. Let's put it like this. Cloud 1.0 was infrastructure, Cloud 2.0 was services, Cloud 3.0 is personal/private.

I respect Western Digital and think they're trying their best to do a good thing. It's that word in general though. Buzzword paradigms always make me feel unwell. As someone who's usually a ahead of the herd in terms of adopting tech, once the broader public catches on and starts making up jargon, I always get a sense that it twists the meaning I personally associated with these concepts and causes me to feel negativ…

Everything starts out as a buzzword but it's only because it's trying to distil down an entire category into a word. As much as you may dislike it, every industry is quite literally built and defined that way. Something has to be a hook, even if you can explain in detail what it is. Cloud is just this idea that everything goes to a remote place that appears as one thing, which you don't control or manage. In all these trend setting new categories you either play the game or lose out and get left behind as a relic aka like WD, IBM, Seagate and everyone else.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#516

Post by southerntofu »

nitnelave wrote: post #473

I've been self hosting for nearly 10 years now, and in all this time the biggest pain point I remember is setting up OpenLDAP. That's why I created LLDAP ( https://github.com/nitnelave/lldap ), a minimalistic LDAP server with a nice web interface that is very easy to set up and configure. It needs a little bit more love before the 1.0 release, but it's already very usable.

That looks really nice, thanks for sharing!

Just curious about "<100 MB RAM including the DB"... that sounds like a lot for a small LDAP database, doesn't it? I don't remember slapd using that much. Is 100MB a realistic RAM consumption for lldap or is it more like "you can be sure it will never under any circumstance go beyond that"?

Re: Start Self Hosting

#517

Post by southerntofu »

louison11 wrote: post #278
pjerem wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I don’t understand why you conflate security with privacy. Or to be more precise, it depends on your threat model. A badly secured self hosting will make yourself vulnerable to targeted attacks over your privacy. While it’s an issue you should consider, those attacks are pretty unlikely. However traditional cloud services will harvest every bit of what they get about you with a frightening efficiency but they’ll n…

I think there needs to be clarity about what is harvested and how. Most centralized services actually respect people’s privacy to the extent that they’re not asked to infringe it by law order. Most major tech cos have encryption at rest and highly regulated access checks. It’s also not clear that they actually do harvest every bit of data they can. They might for the purpose of better UX within the service, but Googl…

> Most centralized services actually respect people’s privacy to the extent that they’re not asked to infringe it by law order.

cough cough

Re: Start Self Hosting

#518

Post by raxxorrax »

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…

You can still self-host and use external resources to manage network and system security. You would keep full control over the machine this way. Having professionals sensibly partitioning different resources in respective subnets is still one of the most valuable defense mechanisms against many threats.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#519

Post by emptysongglass »

viburnum wrote: post #249
evantahler wrote: post #183

The world of Synology products is fascinating in this regard. Take photos - They’ve got iOS and android apps that replace your photo app; a truly self-hosted server you run in your home with pretty easy to use DNS support tools. Even shared albums work without much fuss. I think they’ve invested in the UX in recent versions, and it shows. https://www.synology.com/en-global/DSM70/SynologyPhotos

I've had a Synology raid for a few years but I'm completely baffled by it. There seem to be three options for everything (Photo Station, Moments, Photos. Similar situation for video). Nothing ever seems to work and it's very slow. It's never clear exactly where you're supposed to put your files either. Constantly doing security updates isn't very reassuring either. I feel like I'm going to get hit with ransomeware al…

Synology Photos is what Moments has been rebranded too. It's fantastic and our whole household uses it.

Apart from that admitted indecision of product naming, I love my Synology. Synology MailPlus handles all my selfhosted mail without any fuss. Synology Drive handles file sync to the NAS but you can use whatever protocol you want.

The Docker support is really handy. I run more than 35 services on mine without it breaking a sweat. This is a DS-218+.

> Constantly doing security updates isn't very reassuring either.

That's why you do them. To keep your system secure. I'm not really sure what would be more reassuring to you since security is an always-evolving landscape that requires mitigations quickly. It's not something you sit on.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#520

Post by southerntofu »

yksflip wrote: post #470

Checkout https://coopcloud.tech "Co-op Cloud is a software stack that aims to make hosting libre software applications simple for small service providers such as tech co-operatives who are looking to standardise around an open, transparent and scalable infrastructure. It uses the latest container technologies and configurations are shared into the commons for the benefit of all."

Thanks for sharing! There are *a lot* of such solutions in the docker/k8s space, but i feel like mentioning some lower-tech solutions: alternC, ISPconfig, yunohost, libreserver, freedombox...
Post reply on HN