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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

#541

Post by mlrtime »

VTimofeenko wrote: post #213
rootusrootus wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah we did a similar thing. Same situation, spouse and I both work from home, and we got hit by a multiple day power outage due to a rare severe ice storm. So now I have an EV and a transfer switch so I can go for a week without power, and I have a Starlink upstream connection in standby mode that can be activated in minutes. Of course that means we’ll not have another ice storm in my lifetime. My neighbors should t…

We had a 5 day outage last year, got a generator at the tail end of the windy season and made exact same jokes. A year later another atmospheric river hit and we had a 4 hour outage. No more jokes. Make sure to run that generator once every few months with some load to keep it happy.

I just asked my wife the other day: "Does it feel like we're having less power outages now that we got the generator?" :)

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

#542

Post by mlrtime »

gorgoiler wrote: post #292
zrail wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My spouse and I work at home and after the first couple multi-day power outages we invested in good UPSs and a whole house standby generator. Now when the power goes out it's down for at most 30 seconds. This also makes self-hosting more viable, since our availability is constrained by internet provider rather than power.

2025 was the year of LiFePo power packs for me and my family. Absolute game changers: 1000Wh of power with a multi-socket inverter and UPS-like failover. You lose capacity over a gas genny but the simplicity and lack of fumes adds back a lot of value. If it’s sunny you can also make your own fuel. https://www.ankersolix.com/ca/products/f2600-400w-portable-s...

Yeah how does that work if you statistically have a outage > 24 hours a few times a year? How long does that last?

Also generators are still cheap compared to batteries?

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

#543

Post by mlrtime »

thrownawaysz wrote: post #149
tehlike wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink backup sounds fun now!

Way too expensive for that imo (but then again might as well just go all in). Probably a 5G connection is more than enough

$5/mo is too expensive for starlink backup?

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

#544

Post by mlrtime »

ibizaman wrote: post #515
fhennig wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who would be your market exactly?

What you're describing is possible but you would need to market it differently if selling to non-tech people.

Now if you could make something like this https://oxide.computer/ for home users and make it affordable, that would be cool.

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

#545

Post by mlrtime »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #493
jordanf wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing this, and asking for examples, and there aren't really any.

I've broken my internet many times by asking ChatGPt for help setting up PiHole as a DHCP server. I'll post conversation excerpts later if I remember. It was just giving commands to run that were plain wrong and extremely destructive, and unless you already knew what they were doing you were screwed. Here: https://chatgpt.com/share/696539b6-65f0-8010-9324-5e35da42ee... I have 4-5 more conversations like this. It's ho…

I'm a sysadmin / infra engineer by trade. DNS is something I stopped hosting myself because it's always DNS and when it goes down everything else does to.

Email/DNS I outsource, everything else I homelab.

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

#546

Post by mlrtime »

chaz6 wrote: post #42

I would really like some kind of agnostic backup protocol, so I can simply configure my backup endpoint using an environment variable (e.g. `-e BACKUP_ENDPOINT= https://backup.example.com/backup -e BACKUP_IDENTIFIER=xxxxx`), then the application can push a backup on a regular schedule. If I need to restore a backup, I log onto the backup app, select a backup file and generate a one time code which I can enter into th…

Why not virtualize everything and then just backup the entire cluster?

Proxmox Backup Server?

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

#547

Post by cirelli94 »

mtoner23 wrote: post #305
simonw wrote: post #3

This posts lists inexpensive home servers, Tailscale and Claude Code as the big unlocks. I actually think Tailscale may be an even bigger deal here than sysadmin help from Claude Code at al. The biggest reason I had not to run a home server was security: I'm worried that I might fall behind on updates and end up compromised. Tailscale dramatically reduces this risk, because I can so easily configure it so my own devi…

People are way too worried about security imo. Statistically, no one is targeting you to be hacked. By the time you are important and valuable enough for your home equipment to be a target you would have hired someone else to manage this for you

Crying inside myself after a crypto miner took my VM this past week.

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

#548

Post by gorgoiler »

mlrtime wrote: post #542
gorgoiler wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2025 was the year of LiFePo power packs for me and my family. Absolute game changers: 1000Wh of power with a multi-socket inverter and UPS-like failover. You lose capacity over a gas genny but the simplicity and lack of fumes adds back a lot of value. If it’s sunny you can also make your own fuel. https://www.ankersolix.com/ca/products/f2600-400w-portable-s...

Yeah how does that work if you statistically have a outage > 24 hours a few times a year? How long does that last? Also generators are still cheap compared to batteries?

You’re right, it’s not much, but it is convenient and clean. A few lamps, USB charging, and a router/modem will use a few tens of watts and the big power pack will keep that going for eight hours.

For longer outages there is an outhouse with triple-redundant generators:

- Honda c. 2005

- Honda c. 1985

- Briggs & Stratton c. 1940

The “redundancy” here is that the first is to provide power in the event of a long power outage, and the other two are redundant museum pieces (which turn over!)

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

#550

Post by le_meer »

kilobaud wrote: post #238
le_meer wrote: post #235

Just got a home-server. Immich is awesome! How's Caddy working out though? I need a way to expose immich to public internet (not just a VPN). Something like photos.domain.com For now I'm just using Cloudflare tunnels, but ideally I also want to do that myself (without getting DDoS)

I am curious what you mean by doing it yourself, i.e., do you mean (as perhaps an oversimplification) having a DNS record pointing at your home IP address? What are you wanting to see as the alternative to a Cloudflare tunnel?

I mean, how do I expose my home server to the internet, without relying on externally hosted platforms like Cloudflare or Tailscale? While still minimising the risk of DoS
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