nobody is talking about the freedombox? https://freedombox.org/
Start Self Hosting
531–540 of 625 posts
Re: Start Self Hosting
#532Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Looking at the /r/selfhosted crowd comes with some serious survivorship bias though. It's not considering the (potentially large) group of people who would like to self-host, but don't even make it to /r/selfhosted or similar forums.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#533Self-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…
There was a time when everyone and their brother were self hosting: napster, kazaa, hotline etc. Why has this trend stalled for 20 years
Re: Start Self Hosting
#534Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did this once. Don't overthink it too much - yes, it is as simple as finding a rack with sufficient space, power and network, plugging it in and going. You'll most likely get a public IP and have no access to your neighbors, so they won't really care what you do with it as long as it's not illegal or against the Terms of Service for your host. So yeah, if you want to do it, just do it. Get an OS you know, install a…
Thanks for the response! I gotta disagree with you though on cost. You can get a beefy refurbished dual Xeon blade for a couple hundred bucks. Rack space where I live is like $50/month for 1U and gets much cheaper/machine as you scale up. $50 on aws will get me maybe 1 medium ec2 instance and an s3 bucket. With a used blade I get 20x the compute for the same price.
You're quite welcome. I'm not trying to dissuade you, just provide a point of view I've got from having felt the same way.
I'm definitely not comparing to AWS, because yeah those can get super expensive, super fast. What you're paying for with AWS is Amazon-tier stability (whatever that's worth these days), but the difference in uptime between them and a Linode is more than fine for my needs.
With your $50/mo, make sure that includes power - Xeons eat watts. Also, be sure to compare apples-to-apples on bandwidth. By comparison, Linode's dedicated CPU plan (not shared, closer to bare metal, but still not) starts at $30 for 2 CPUs and 4GB of RAM and 4TB of transfer, and they'll take care of keeping you on the latest hardware. Again, I don't want to dissuade you, because colo is fun and it's cool to think about your own box out in the world. If anything, I'm envious of how easy it is nowadays compared to when I drove 3 hours to South Bend, Indiana to colo a box of my own, or the first time I needed to engage remote hands because the box got in an irreparable state.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
aye - and it took time to setup all of those things, time to maintain the gear, delays for business/dev teams while the IT department made sure they knew how to run something stably.
> Build servers took a day or so depending on the approval chain.
This would only be true in a large shop with cold spares or virtualization. Server hardware generally has a 6-12 week lead time. The exception being if you are paying out the nose to a reseller who could do faster delivery.
Just imagine the time it took to setup Nagios or Zabbix for monitoring. In a small shop you are probably talking about at least 1-3 days of work + calendar time for hardware. Add to that some time for dealing with scale of metrics storage etc. depending on the shop.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#536I have a home server. It runs on a 2013/14 HP Pavillion laptop. I am indeed a linux user. I currently have arch linux installed on it. I run a blog at [0] and use a dynamic dns provider. I must say, it has not been easy at all. I learned a lot of things. I did not attend any school lectures to learn this. I am still in high school, but thanks to the beauty of the internet and a ton of effort I was able to get a stati…
I love arch for a lot of things, but I've learned to keep stick to more "traditional" operating systems when it comes to servers. There's simply no auto-update functionality available in Arch so you need to constantly remind yourself to update. I wish you the best of luck with your arch server endeavours, may they treat you better than they have treated me.
Ubuntu is pushing me away with their idiotic focus on snap every new release but I'm not hosting anything on a server that I can't just run sudo dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades on to auto install security patches. I still need to reboot my servers from time to time, but that's rarely ever really necessary for security. It's a shame because I think the "closer to the metal" approach of Arch works quite well for server setups.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 thes…
What you'd call a cloud I'd call a datacenter and a datacenter is something we use when a problem is too big to fit on a computer.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#538Earlier 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 it has come the time where the society starts to advance without caring about laypeople, if some folks can learn it, if there is documentation, then we can just go on without caring about who doesn't know how to use it, because that's fixable. And I speak considering the German government who had to pull back from Linux because employee didn't know how to use it Let's start treating tech as the world treats e…
I appreciate your perspective and I greatly value my own computer expertise. Having said that, I want to ask: what if doctors, lawyers, and engineers adopted the same mindset? Instead of translating their knowledge and recommendations into language a layperson can understand, what if these experts spoke only in their domain's technical jargon?
We would be much worse off. In order to survive, everyone would have to become a dabbler in everything and many would be unable to keep up at all. We would lose all of the efficiency gains of specialization.
So assuming we do not want everyone to have to learn a bit about medicine and law and engineering etc, why is computer knowledge different? Is a computer not merely a tool to accomplish a task? We don't expect people to learn to become a mechanic, let alone an automotive engineer, to be able to drive a car. We expect cars to be reasonably easy to drive and low maintenance, with occasional help from mechanics. Shouldn't we expect the same from computers?
Re: Start Self Hosting
#539Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think there might be a vast gap between what what the article is talking about, and what you're suggesting. Somebody self-hosting their project management app on a LAMP server on some random web hosting company is one thing. What you're talking about is something else entirely. And yes, having a web hosting company manage your server isn't "real" self hosting, for all the reasons you described, but it's a far cry f…
There are a few tiers of hosting providers ranging from "We rent you server space", "We rent you a physical server with internet access", too "We rent you a VM" or "We rent you services you may want to access".
The privacy angle of self-hosting generally ends as soon as you are renting a physical server with internet access. Someone else has access to the hard drives, the network traffic, the hardware, and via hardware remote access the OS/Data. At this point you would need to trust the legal bindings on what the hosting company can and can't do to your physical machine.
One really exciting angle on end2end encryption is that your provider may be technically incapable of any malpractice (for better or worse, I may wish my provider could have a sys eng bail me out every now and then).
Re: Start Self Hosting
#540The 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…
If you're comparing configuration to a car, the builders would be the people hosting the software and the users would be the people logging in from the web interface.
Software drivers are the people that use Gmail, iCloud, Fastmail, you name it. Self hosting means building your own alternative, for better or for worse.
For comparison, I can order a gearbox but I've never been under a car, let alone worked on one. If I want a specific gearbox because I like the feel of it, I'll need to learn how to install it or pay someone to do that for me. If I'll ever need a car, I'll probably buy one with all the components I need, and with no real preference for the technology underneath.
Debian is a tool to build your own car. If configuration is too difficult, use a tool designed for your use case instead. There are plenty of big-name brands like Amazon or Google, or smaller brands like shared hosts that will do all the difficult parts for you. Stuff some PHP files on your favourite shared host and follow the five step install guide and you're up and running.
Of course defaults still matter, but people just sticking to the defaults often find that their niche use cases don't align with the defaults. Defaults merely provide most of the right work flows to most users.