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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

#511

Post by nobody9999 »

zamadatix wrote: post #89
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…

It's the way the internet was meant to work but it doesn't make it any easier. Even when everything is in containers/VMs/users, if you don't put a decent amount of additional effort into automatic updates and keeping that context hardened as you tinker with it it's quite annoying when it gets pwned. There was a popular post less than a month ago about this recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46305585 I agre…

>It's the way the internet was meant to work but it doesn't make it any easier. Even when everything is in containers/VMs/users, if you don't put a decent amount of additional effort into automatic updates and keeping that context hardened as you tinker with it it's quite annoying when it gets pwned.

As someone who spent decades implementing and securing networks and internet-facing services for corporations large and small as well as self-hosting my own services for much of that time, the primary lesson I've learned and tried to pass on to clients, colleagues and family is:

   If you expose it to the Internet, assume it will be pwned at some point.
No, that's not universally true. But it's a smart assumption to make for several reasons:

1. No software is completely bug free and those bugs can expose your service(s) to compromise;

2. Humans (and their creations) are imperfect and will make mistakes -- possibly exposing your service(s) to compromise;

3. Bad actors, ranging from marginally competent script kiddies to master crackers with big salaries and big budgets from governments and criminal organizations are out there 24x7 trying to break into whatever systems they can reach.

The above applies just as much to tailscale or wireguard as it does to ssh/http(s)/imap/smtp/etc.

I'll say it again as it's possibly the most important concept related to exposing anything:

   If you expose it to the Internet, assume that, at some point, it will be 
   compromised and plan accordingly.
If you're lucky (and good), it may not happen while you're responsible for it, but assuming it will and having a plan to mitigate/control an "inevitable" compromise will save your bacon much better than just relying on someone else's code to never break or have bugs which put you at risk.

Want to expose ports? Use Wireguard? Tailscale? HAProxy? Go for it.

And do so in ways that meet your requirements/use cases. But don't forget to at least think (better yet script/document) about what you will do if your services are compromised.

Because odds are that one day they will.

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

#512

Post by fhennig »

tech_ken wrote: post #486
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…

My (admittedly a bit tinfoil) take on the recent self-hosting boom is that it's highly compatible with individualist suburban capitalism; and that while there are elements of it that offer an alternative path to techno-feudalism, by itself it doesn't really challenge the underlying ideology. It's become highly consumerist, and seems more like a way of expressing taste/aesthetics than something that's genuinely revolu…

Interesting! I'm not sure how severe the consumerisation really is, but yeah I can totally see the whole home-automation thing playing into it too.

I don't think mainstream tech media is deliberately omitting co-ops in their reporting due to them challenging the status quo. I think it's rather that actually, there aren't really many initiatives in the space.

And I think that is due to a lot of tech people thinking that if only the technology becomes good enough, then the problem will be solved, then, finally, everyone can have their own cloud at home.

I think that's wrong though, I think the solution in this case is that we organize the service differently, with power structured in a different way. We don't need more software to solve the problem. We know how to build a cloud services, technically. We know how to do it will. It's just that if the service is run for-profit, counter to the interests of the users, it will eventually become a problem for the users. That's the problem to fix, and it's not one to fix with technology, but just with organizing it differently.

It works for housing, in some areas it also works for utilities like internet, there are also co-ops for food. Why shouldn't it also work for modern-day utilities like cloud storage and email?

As a techie, don't be content with just running your own self-hosted service. Run it for your family, run it for your friends, run it for your neighborhood! Band together!

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

#513

Post by fhennig »

allarm wrote: post #501
fhennig wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally find this information quite relevant to get the full picture and I'm glad someone else provided it.

The full picture of what exactly? How that fact is even relevant to this post? Do you expect anyone affiliated with AI to mention that every time they talk about AI? That's just ridiculous.

I expect someone writing a blog about AI agents help you run your home server to disclose that they are "helping companies automate operations with AI" as their job, which they get money for.

Why wouldn't you bring it up, or even lead with it?

Doesn't it make sense to want to know this? It's not far fetched at all that there is a conflict of interest. How can they be unbiased in the validity of the approach if this is exactly the same stuff they sell for money?

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

#514

Post by IgorPartola »

lillecarl wrote: post #502
IgorPartola wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every remote exploit and cloud-wide outage that has happened over the past 20 years my sshd that is exposed to the internet on port 22 has had zero of either. There were a couple of major OpenSSH bugs but my auto updater took care of that before I saw it on the news. You can trust BugCorp all you want but there are more sshd processes out there than tailnets and the scrutiny is on OpenSSH. We are not comparing ss…

If you only expose SSH then you're fine, but if you're deploying a bunch of WebApps you might not want them accessible on the internet. The few things I self host I keep out in the open. etcd, Kubernetes, Postgres, pgAdmin, Grafana and Keycloak but I can see why someone would want to hide inside a private network.

Yeah any web app that is meant to be private is not something I allow to be accessible from the outside world. Easy enough to do this with ssh tunnels OR Wireguard, both of which I trust a lot more than anything that got VC funding. Plus that way any downtime is my own doing and in my control to fix.

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

#515

Post by ibizaman »

fhennig wrote: post #510
ibizaman wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about self-hosting as a service? You get a server in your home which you own with your open source software and data in it. And you pay a subscription to have a remote sysadmin take care of maintenance for you and can train you on the software? What happens if you don’t pay anymore is you keep everything. But like a good insurance, you’d keep the subscription because of top notch customer service.

I want something that can work for non-techies too, that I can recommend to my friends as well.

I fully understand. That’s my goal too and what I want to provide here. No technical knowledge is required.

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

#516

Post by b112 »

sejje wrote: post #488
b112 wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of massive fines, and in some cases jailtime for driving without a license is control. If someone breaks regs, you want to be able to levy fines or jail. If they do it a lot, you want an inability to drive at all. It's about regulating poor drivers. And yes, initially vetting a driver too.

I don't really know any adults who don't drive, and nobody ever told me they weren't capable. I don't think it's about driving ability, besides the initial vetting.

From the perspective of those writing the regs, speeding, running lights, driving carelessly or dangerously (all fines or crimes here) are indeed indicators of safe driving or not.

Understand, I am not advocating this. I said I did not like it. Neirher of those statements have anything totk do with whether I think it will come to pass, or not.

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

#517

Post by tech_ken »

fhennig wrote: post #512
tech_ken wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My (admittedly a bit tinfoil) take on the recent self-hosting boom is that it's highly compatible with individualist suburban capitalism; and that while there are elements of it that offer an alternative path to techno-feudalism, by itself it doesn't really challenge the underlying ideology. It's become highly consumerist, and seems more like a way of expressing taste/aesthetics than something that's genuinely revolu…

Interesting! I'm not sure how severe the consumerisation really is, but yeah I can totally see the whole home-automation thing playing into it too. I don't think mainstream tech media is deliberately omitting co-ops in their reporting due to them challenging the status quo. I think it's rather that actually, there aren't really many initiatives in the space. And I think that is due to a lot of tech people thinking th…

> It's just that if the service is run for-profit, counter to the interests of the users, it will eventually become a problem for the users. That's the problem to fix, and it's not one to fix with technology, but just with organizing it differently.

100% agree with you here, and yeah I'm definitely leaning a bit too conspiratorial about it. It's probably not actually intentional, and instead just a product of the larger dynamics.

A while ago I read some interesting economic analysis about why more co-ops hadn't popped up specifically in the gig worker space, since it seems to natural to cut out the platform rent that eg. Uber extracts as profit. I'm failing to recall the specific conclusions, but IIRC the authors seemed to feel that there were some structural obstacles preventing co-ops from growing in those space. Something something capex and unit costs. It's certainly an area I'd be interested to see further analysis in.

Also you sounds like you might get a kick out of mayfirst.coop (if you're not familiar with them already). It's not exactly what you're describing, but the spirit is there. I use them for my web-hosting needs and have been extremely satisfied.

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

#518

Post by wiether »

johnisgood wrote: post #400
wiether wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me the "unlocked" is just another hyperbole used by some people, partly because they lack initial knowledge, partly because its click-bait. The way I understand it is more like "without the ease of use provided by X, even though I could have done it, I wouldn't have done it because it would require time and energy that I'm not willing to put in". Since we're talking about self-hosting, to me the main focus is not…

I did not say Plex is "just file sharing that can be replaced by torrents". Those were two separate points: 1. The "unlocked" framing implies capability, not time preference 2. General technical literacy has declined: non-SWEs used to torrent, use DC++ extensively, etc. I was not comparing Plex to torrenting. I was observing that basic file-sharing knowledge used to be common and now is not (see Netflix et al). > tim…

Okay, maybe I misunderstood what you were saying then.

But still, I insist that it's important to understand that, even if we share some similarities based on our interests/skills/work, we come from different backgrounds and have different priorities.

And part of the issue here is probably how people are framing things when they write about their experience. In tech, some of us are coming from a world of nerds where the norm is to be mater-of-factly, while some others are more extroverted and tend to put emphasis on random boring things.

Regarding this post in particular, I was more concerned about how the author was amazed by the fact that a 2025 computer could run 10 services in parallel... or that relying on a proprietary service (Claude) to manage all their setup was giving them "a strong feeling of independence".

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

#519

Post by VTimofeenko »

Nextgrid wrote: post #504
VTimofeenko wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> what kind of EV has a battery to power a house for a week? Assuming their heating, cooking and hot water is gas, a house doesn't actually consume that much. With a 50kWh battery you can draw just under 300W continuously for a week. I'd expect the average house to draw ~200W with lighting and a few electronics, with a lean towards the evenings for the lighting.

On paper the numbers look right, but a week off _50kWh_ EV battery feels off.

What follows is back of the napkin calculations, so please treat it as such and correct me if I am wrong.

1. Inverters are not 100% efficient. Let's assume 90%

2. Let's also assume that the user does not want to draw battery to 0 to not become stranded or have to do the "Honda generator in the trunk" trick. Extra 10%?

3. 300W continuous sounds a bit low even with gas appliances. Things like the fridge and furnace blower have spiky loads that push the daily average. Let's add 100W to the average load? I might be being too generous here, but I used 300W, not the 200W lower bound.

4. Vehicle side might need some consumption. If powering off the battery, it would probably need to cool the battery or keep some smarts on to make sure it does not drain or overheat? Genuinely not sure how to estimate this, let's neglect it for now.

Math is (50kw - 10%(inverter loss) - 10%(reserve)) / 0.4 = 100 (hours), ~ 4 days.

The above calculations assume a sane configuration (proper bidirectional wire, not suicide cord into 12v outlet). Quick skim of search for cars with bidirectional charging support for home shows batteries between ~40kWh(Leaf) to 250 kWh (Hummer).

So looks like one should be looking for ~80kWh battery, which actually most of the cars in the list have.

Again, very back of the napkin, would probably wanna add 20% margin of error.

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

#520

Post by Nextgrid »

VTimofeenko wrote: post #519
Nextgrid wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what kind of EV has a battery to power a house for a week? Assuming their heating, cooking and hot water is gas, a house doesn't actually consume that much. With a 50kWh battery you can draw just under 300W continuously for a week. I'd expect the average house to draw ~200W with lighting and a few electronics, with a lean towards the evenings for the lighting.

On paper the numbers look right, but a week off _50kWh_ EV battery feels off. What follows is back of the napkin calculations, so please treat it as such and correct me if I am wrong. 1. Inverters are not 100% efficient. Let's assume 90% 2. Let's also assume that the user does not want to draw battery to 0 to not become stranded or have to do the "Honda generator in the trunk" trick. Extra 10%? 3. 300W continuous sou…

Actually yes one thing I didn't consider in my calculation is the fridge (mostly because it's a spiky load that rarely comes on and I based it off my own apartment's instantaneous consumption at the time which was ~100W since the fridge compressor wasn't running).

Indeed with the fridge it pushes it a bit. But to address some of your other points:

> it would probably need to cool the battery

I'd expect if you're in a storm then you probably don't need any cooling - not to mention a 300W load is nothing for an EV battery compared to actually moving the vehicle. I'd expect some computers in the vehicle to be alive but that should be a ~10-20W draw.

On the other hand, my calculation assumes ~300W continuous. I expect the consumption to lean into the evenings due to the extra lighting, and drop off during other times.

But yes 80kWh might very well be what the OP has; I intentionally picked 50kWh as the lowest option I found on a " battery kwh" search.

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