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Start Self Hosting

rohanrd.xyz

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Re: Start Self Hosting

#521

Post by slightwinder »

mholt wrote: post #132

This is why I'm building Timelinize [1]. It's a follow-up to my open source Timeliner project [2], which has the potential to download all your digital life onto your own computer locally, and projects it all onto a single timeline, across all data sources (text messages, social media sites, photos, location history, and more). It's a little different from "self hosting" but it does have a similar effect of bringing…

Not the first project of this kind, I see. But something we need more from. But a kind of problem all those project have is their lack of modularity and thus their ability to integrate with other projects. For example, why are your sources builtin? Can you call external sources to allow any user usage of custom sources?

IMHO there are three parts for those tools. Fetching data, storing data and Letting People working with them. But most project I've seen so far for this, are doing all this together, instead of having individual parts, which would allow other people to build optimized parts for themself.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#522

Post by jethro_tell »

lou1306 wrote: post #481
sgt wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (Squa…

I think most of the people on r/selfhosted aren't super technical. Lots of them install a snap or docker container with a web UI for self hosting and they are off to the races.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#523

Post by PedroBatista »

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…

You’re talking about running a tank battalion in WWII when we were talking about learning how to drive a car with manual transmission.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#524

Post by jethro_tell »

input_sh wrote: post #462
yawnxyz wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought I was a pretty good "tech person" until I read this thread... and now I'm more layperson than what this thread considers a "layperson" bc none of this makes sense to meh aha

systemd → does a lot of things on modern Linux systems, amongst which is dealing with services that should autostart (think: both low-level stuff like Bluetooth or user-level stuff like a Dropbox client or a VPN or whatever). Unit files → fairly simple text files that are used to define such stuff for systemd (usually in /etc/systemd/system and /usr/lib/systemd/system). Package manager → essentially the same as an ap…

It's a bit crazy that it even matters. Or that systemd comes up at all in a selfhosting convo.

I have friends that selfhost stuff on mac, windows, and linux. They are probably above average as far as tech goes but they are all 30 somethings in non-tech jobs, real-estate, finance, advertising, sales.

I field questions from time to time, but it's pretty rare. Never once got a question about an init system. On any os or distro.

These guys aren't writing init scripts, they are going through the apps documentation and typing 'systemctl start appName.service' and then moving on.

or starting it with docker or even one of the clever little web UIs that you can install that helps you install selfhosted apps.

I thing there's a part of us that wants to believe this shit matters to normal users but they just don't care. And if the service doesn't start, they file a bug upstream and the maintainer usually takes care of it.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#525

Post by southerntofu »

teleforce wrote: post #373
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…

Totally agreed, for the sake of humanity we should strive to make self-hosting as easy and as seamless as possible. But why stop at self-hosting? Beyond self-hosting, it could be extended to local-first paradigm meaning that there's a choice to have a scalable on demand auxiliary cloud based for handling bursty access demands if you need it. In addition, you can have extra backup for the peace of mind. I'm currently…

> I'm currently working on realiable solutions (physical wireless and application layers) to extend the local-first system to be automatically secured even you have intermittent Internet outage unlike TailScale and ZeroTier

Sorry but i don't understand what this means. Internet outage should not affect your LAN services, no matter what selfhosting distro you use.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#526

Post by jethro_tell »

number6 wrote: post #422
yawnxyz wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought I was a pretty good "tech person" until I read this thread... and now I'm more layperson than what this thread considers a "layperson" bc none of this makes sense to meh aha

I drive in the final nail and tell you that the page in the Arch wiki[0] is a wonderful starter on systemd. Ah.. I was there when it was all SystemV vs Upstart vs Systemd... the golden days... [0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/systemd

I still have living systems that I put through the manual transition of the init systems and the /usr/ merge.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#527

Post by southerntofu »

spacemanmatt wrote: post #511
wallacoloo wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's precisely why i started working on https://codeberg.org/southerntofu/ansible-selfhosted

Its abstractions are still a bit shaky and a lot can be improved so it's far from ready for the general public, but i still consider it a great step forward because for the supported configurations, all i have to do to setup a new server is:

- edit config.yml

- run roles/deploy.sh

- enjoy

I'm happy to answer any questions on why (politics) and how (technics) i'm building this, and i'd be more than thrilled to receive feedback and contribution. In the past week i started working on a test suite so it's easier to contribute.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#528

Post by jethro_tell »

fps_doug wrote: post #488
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…

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…

To be fair, a bus driver probably isn't writing a self-hosted service anyway. So if there is an issue with the service init 3 years later, they will probably file a bug and let the maintainer handle it. And they wouldn't be parsing a bash script for a sysV-init if that broke either? SysV-init was to complex for the layman as well. Because gracefully starting and stopping system services with their dependency chains is generally too complex for the layman as well.

There's this strange idea that laymen self-hosters are doing all this stuff and the choice of init system matters in the lease. They were going to run the command to start the service blindly regardless of which init system it was and if it breaks, they aren't going to really troubleshoot either one.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#529

Post by southerntofu »

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…

> today i accidentally nuked everything by not flushing the disk before rebooting

What do you mean? Did you interrupt the reboot process (eg. repetitive ^C)? Otherwise the OS should flush everything properly.

> after this i have to figure out a better backup solution

If you have other friends doing selfhosting, giving them a HDD to put in their server so you can rsync your data is a good solution. Also, keeping another local backup is a good solution. Doing both is even better.

> AFAICT it’s pretty much impossible to 100% self-host email because of blacklisting

It depends. It's almost impossible with some bad-faith providers (google/microsoft) otherwise everything works well. And even with those bad-faith providers, residential IPs usually have better reputation (if only because your ISP likely blocks outgoing TCP 25 by default and you have to ask them to unfilter it) than VPS IPs which all have a long history of abuse.

> and in between that i may spin up a DNS server to overcome the part where it takes 60min for any new service to be accessible

If you didn't previously query that domain name on your resolver, it will not be cached and will resolve quasi-instantly. The question is how long does your authoritative name server take to apply your changes to the config: if it takes any longer than 10s you should consider switching providers.

> but maybe we can federate, so that you just need to have one friend who cares about this stuff manage the infra and provide it to their peers as a social good.

Very good point! That's the entire premise behind hosting coops like disroot.org or various members of the libreho.st/chatons.org federations.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#530

Post by specialist »

mholt wrote: post #132

This is why I'm building Timelinize [1]. It's a follow-up to my open source Timeliner project [2], which has the potential to download all your digital life onto your own computer locally, and projects it all onto a single timeline, across all data sources (text messages, social media sites, photos, location history, and more). It's a little different from "self hosting" but it does have a similar effect of bringing…

I vividly remember talking to Eric Freeman at a conference (JavaOne?) about his LifeStream notion. I've wanted it ever since. (Freeman coauthored a book about JavaSpaces and IIRC had a booth demonstrating an implementation. https://books.org/books/javaspaces-principles-patterns-and-p... Another terrific idea ahead of its time.)

For instance, I'll remember where I was while listening to a podcast or song. But I won't remember which episode or the artist. I'd like to cross reference and search my listening history with my location tracking. Should be easy, right?

I've dabbled a bit with journaling, habit tracking, etc. I've created Shortcuts on my iPhone for quickly adding entries. When I circle back, I intend to add my location to each entry. Resulting in something like "20220324T120000 LAT/LONG I just saw a pair of bald eagles at the beach".

Another to do item is always tracking my location. One of the apps I've got installed is OwnTracks, but I haven't config'd the server stuff.

Any way, I'll definitely be trying your timeliner. Thanks for sharing.

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