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Start Self Hosting

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Re: Start Self Hosting

#581

Post by asim »

jart wrote: post #537
asim wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I come from an era of datacenters, colos and whatever else but I learned to adopt new terminology. Cloud isn't just a datacenter, it's all the services on top of it that exist remotely. All the things you don't manage. All the services you make use of. Anything you are not personally installing is in the cloud. That's how we've come to know it and that is the language the mainstream user knows. Just as we'll have difficulty accepting the rebranding of the internet to the Metaverse, it will be a thing that spans far beyond network connectivity.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#582

Post by wallacoloo »

southerntofu wrote: post #529
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…

> 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 anoth…

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

here’s my best guess: in my setup i have a host running a qemu vm and most of the interesting stuff happens inside the vm. originally that vm image was just 8 GB, but then i got a HDD to dedicate to it. with VM powered off, i partitioned the HDD and then dd’d the VM image onto it. then i booted the VM via KVM passthrough of /dev/sdb…

it booted fine; i ran ‘df’ and noticed that i forgot to resize the fs to the HDD, so i ran resize2fs. 3 days later, i `shutdown` the VM and then `reboot`d the host. the host didn’t actually come back: the power light and activity lights were off. after 5 minutes of this i power-cycled at the wall socket.

host came back up. vm wouldn’t boot. ran fsck from the rescue shell. now it booted, but no services were operational. since i couldn’t login to the vm (ssh broken + password logins had long been deactivated), i shutdown the vm and mounted its fs on the host. ‘df’ showed that the host thought the fs was only 8 GB in capacity.

i don’t think it was outright disk corruption, because the poweroff wasn’t that messy (but i come from btrfs, which has handled like 20 power faults on me w/ zero issue: idk how solid EXT4 is to these things). my best guess is that somewhere along the way, the changes from resize2fs didn’t actually make it to disk, or were overrided with stale in-memory values. maybe when i updated the guest’s kernel some post-upgrade script did something to push the old fs size to disk somewhere. or maybe the host had the old 8 GB fs size cached and flushed that during shutdown/start. unfortunately i’m not sure i’ll ever know.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#583

Post by jethro_tell »

klodolph wrote: post #566
jethro_tell wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I defiantly agree with you. I've never heard mac people sit around and talk about which init system it's running it's a complete non issue. It just doesn't matter to self-hosters and end users in any way shape or form.

Ah, well, back in 2005 or so, Mac people were talking about launchd. Things have settled down since then.

Back in 2005 I would guess many people using a Mac cared. Now? probably a much smaller percentage of the user base.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#584

Post by HenriTEL »

It only saves the problems if you can maintain the same level of availability and integrity, what happen when you have an outage, when your hard drive die or when your house burns? What if you forgot to encrypt your data and your drive gets stolen? Can you patch your server vulnerabilities faster than company x ? What about simple maintenance like certificates renewal? It's not that easy to be better than a tech company.

Regarding pure privacy, it's getting better with new regulations like GDPR, but yes, the best is to not share data with third parties.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#586

Post by rr808 »

hsn915 wrote: post #429
rr808 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those cheap $5 servers are weak, probably best to compare to a rasberry pi which is cheap.

powerful enough to serve a lot of basic websites (blogs, forums, chat .. etc) without breaking a sweat

yes, and so is a rpi.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#587

Post by NeutronStar »

scottLobster wrote: post #541
mdavis6890 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What “lay person” is going to install a web server??? That’s insane. Maybe a lay faang-er would. Lay people work in a factory or shoe store or accounting firm. They have 1 or more kids. They hear what their friends are doing, and as long as it only requires signing up on a web page, they will consider it. They will use the same password as they do for their bank. And that’s FINE! There is life outside technology, and…

You know there are 12 year olds who run their own minecraft servers, right? I wouldn't call them sophisticated admins, and I wouldn't trust them with anything mission critical, but the servers often work.

No post body was provided.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#588

Post by aetherspawn »

me_me_mu_mu wrote: post #452
aetherspawn wrote: post #321

My business just started self-hosting, but we severely underestimated the cost of air conditioning (installation), SFP adapters, enterprise Ethernet and electrical infrastructure and ended up spending as much on peripheral stuff as servers. So far the whole operation has cost around $30k (small business). We stand to save $1-1.5k per month at the moment, less the cost of symmetrical fiber about $500/mo. Next year it…

Dumb question. I’m building little social apps, and I’m hosting stuff in GCP or AWS. I have a few old computers that are still kinda beefy (quad cores and a 6-core, 16+ Gb ram, some old but still working 3TB hdd). Would it be stupid to run some of my code and data on these? Not everything I have needs to be geographically close to users or something like that, such as a mass notifier service that runs every so often.…

Well, to host anything serious, you’d have to have the right infra.

Like a good edge router, redundant power supplies, RAID arrays, a backup mechanism, and a very good upload connection (ie 500mbit). By the time you setup all that, you may as well be using new hardware to make the investment worth it.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#589

Post by jart »

asim wrote: post #581
jart wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I come from an era of datacenters, colos and whatever else but I learned to adopt new terminology. Cloud isn't just a datacenter, it's all the services on top of it that exist remotely. All the things you don't manage. All the services you make use of. Anything you are not personally installing is in the cloud. That's how we've come to know it and that is the language the mainstream user knows. Just as we'll have dif…

Who's we? In many countries Metaverse is the Internet by your definition. Lots of PR money has been spent making that the social truth for probably billions of humans. I'm sure everyone over in those continents who likes to use the actual technology that underpins the buzzwords is being force teamed too into thinking they're a dinosaur for not accepting Facebook's dominion.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#590

Post by hsn915 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #540
hsn915 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Using a cloud service is more like riding a train.
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