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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

#551

Post by cyberrock »

visageunknown wrote: post #506
cyberrock wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting it up and running is fun but I find maintaining some services a pain. For example, Authelia has breaking configuration changes every minor release, and fixing that easily takes 1-X hours every time. I gave up for 4.38 and just tossed the patch notes into NotebookLM.

Definitely. That's a great use case. How do you use NotebookLM? First I'm hearing about it

I've been mostly using it as what I would call a "medium scope search engine". Instead of searching "$topic" or "$topic site:wikipedia.org", I can pick a few dozen links from different sources (wiki, documentation, tax code, papers, videos), toss it in NotebookLM, submit my search query in the form of a question, and look at the linked source. I see it as an evolution of doing research through library books, Internet search, and Wikipedia. I didn't know I wanted something like this until I used NotebookLM this way. It also seems to handle multiple languages reasonably well.

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

#552

Post by ibizaman »

mlrtime wrote: post #544
ibizaman wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I target small businesses and possibly individuals that are already aware of the issues and are okay to pay a small premium for this solution.

Also I am currently only targeting locals so I can physically go to their place and configure their server.

I don’t mind growing slowly here btw. It’s my side business and I plan to keep my current job for the time being.

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

#553

Post by iLoveOncall »

mlrtime wrote: post #545
iLoveOncall wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well my PiHole uses the DNS servers from CloudFlare so I don't actually self-host DNS, but having PiHole as DHCP server was the only way for me to have all my devices going through the PiHole.

In the end I literally had to give up, it's just too problematic.

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

#554

Post by dangus »

cryostasis wrote: post #218
dangus wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No off-site backup for me, these items aren’t important enough, it’s more for “oops I broke my computer” or “set my new computer up faster” convenience. Anything I really don’t want to lose is in a paid cloud service with a local backup sync over SMB to my TrueNAS box for some of the most important ones. An exception is GitHub, I’m not paying for GitHub, but git kinda sorta backs itself up well enough for my purposes…

Good to know! I have shifted more to self hosting, e.g., Gitea rather than Github, and need to establish proper redundancy. Hopefully Borg Backup, with it's deduplication will be good, at least for on-site backups.

I also learned this exists today: https://www.urbackup.org/

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

#555

Post by Ir0nMan »

drnick1 wrote: post #26
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…

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 worth considering: Run the PiVPN script on a Ubuntu/Debian based VM. Set it to use a non-standard random port. That will be your only port exposed to the internet.

Add the generated Wireguard key to any device (laptops, phones, etc) and access your home LAN as if it was local from anywhere in the world for free.

Works well, super easy to setup, secure, and fast.

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

#556

Post by visageunknown »

cyberrock wrote: post #551
visageunknown wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely. That's a great use case. How do you use NotebookLM? First I'm hearing about it

I've been mostly using it as what I would call a "medium scope search engine". Instead of searching "$topic" or "$topic site:wikipedia.org", I can pick a few dozen links from different sources (wiki, documentation, tax code, papers, videos), toss it in NotebookLM, submit my search query in the form of a question, and look at the linked source. I see it as an evolution of doing research through library books, Internet…

very cool. thanks!

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

#557

Post by uhfraid »

zrail wrote: post #530
uhfraid wrote: post #528

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. What setup did you go with for whole house backup power?

Generac 26kW Guardian, natural gas fueled, connected to a pair of automatic transfer switches. We have two electric meters due to having a ground source heat pump on its own meter.

During winter outages, do you stick to the heat pump or switch to a backup heat (e.g. furnace)?

I regrettably removed our old furnace/tank when installing the air source heat pump we have now (northeast), but that’s been my biggest concern power wise

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

#558

Post by apstls »

eqvinox wrote: post #536
bjt12345 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SSH is TCP though and the outside world can initiate a handshake, the point being that wireguard silently discards unauthenticated traffic - there's no way they can know the port is open for listening.

Uh, you know you can scan UDP ports just fine, right? Hosts reply with an ICMP destination unreachable / port unreachable (3/3 in IPv4, 1/4 in IPv6) if the port is closed. Discarding packets won't send that ICMP error. It's slow to scan due to ICMP ratelimiting, but you can parallelize. (Sure, you can disable / firewall drop that ICMP error… but then you can do the same thing with TCP RSTs.)

That's why you discard ICMP errors.

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

#559

Post by gsich »

lee_ars wrote: post #399
gsich wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

change port.

After years of cargo-culting this advice—"run ssh on a nonstandard port"—I gave up and reverted to 22 because ssh being on nonstandard ports didn't change the volume of access attempts in the slightest. It was thousands per day on port 22, and thousands per day on port anything-else-i-changed-it-to. It's worth an assessment of what you _think_ running ssh on a nonstandard port protects you against, and what it's actu…

it did for me.

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

#560

Post by eqvinox »

apstls wrote: post #558
eqvinox wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, you know you can scan UDP ports just fine, right? Hosts reply with an ICMP destination unreachable / port unreachable (3/3 in IPv4, 1/4 in IPv6) if the port is closed. Discarding packets won't send that ICMP error. It's slow to scan due to ICMP ratelimiting, but you can parallelize. (Sure, you can disable / firewall drop that ICMP error… but then you can do the same thing with TCP RSTs.)

That's why you discard ICMP errors.

If anything, that's why you discard ICMP port unreachable, which I assume you meant.

If you're blanket dropping all ICMP errors, you're breaking PMTUD. There's a special place reserved in hell for that.

(And if you're firewalling your ICMP, why aren't you firewalling TCP?)

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