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Start Self Hosting

rohanrd.xyz

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Re: Start Self Hosting

#591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe I'm unaware or mistaken but if you're editing anything inside /usr as a normal user, I'm not doing any of this as a normal user. I'm doing all of this as root

Even in that case, if you're manually editing anything inside /usr either by being root or by using sudo, you're doing something wrong or unexpected. Anything inside /usr should only ever be modified by the package manager, not by the root user, or any other user for that matter. If you want to make system wide changes, make them in /etc. If you want to make user specific changes, make them in $HOME/.config, $HOME/.l…

So here's the thing, right. You are correct. And I agree.

I'll admit something; I forgot where the service files were (I don't use systemd often). So, in my unix wisdom I used `find` to find the files ending with 'service'. The only ones that came up were in /usr/lib

You're right, I'd typically never edit files in /usr. But I wasn't sure how else to do it at the time.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#592
post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't get is if the problem was the risk of unexpected bills from a cloud provider, then why not just use simple virtual servers that you can rent for a fixed price from almost any hosting provider? Gives you all that extra benefit you speak of of the extra compute headroom that you can use for spinning up any demo server application you want, and saves you all the costs, risks, and headache of managing your o…

I mean, I see VPS as the worst of both worlds. You're still managing a server, but now you're paying through the nose to do it. The costs just simply don't work out nicely to anyone who can afford to buy at even small scales. A 4 cpu, 8gb ram machine will pretty commonly run you $50 a month, with less than 200gb storage. You're paying 600/year for a machine that I can build (with better specs) for ~400. Not to mentio…

My thoughts are same as above, and also -- if the app that you're hosting only runs on Windows -- then Windows VPS are really ridiculously expensive. Some providers charge around $30/mo for a key. You save a lot of money being able to buy/manage your own Windows keys.

ATM we're running Windows under KVM and the performance is great anyway. But if you have to run a lot of Windows boxes, it seems like the cost effective way is to buy a Windows Server DC license ... then all the guest VM licenses are free, and with the right server hardware you can probably cram like 20 VMs on a single box.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#593

I've been self hosting for nearly 10 years now, and in all this time the biggest pain point I remember is setting up OpenLDAP. That's why I created LLDAP ( https://github.com/nitnelave/lldap ), a minimalistic LDAP server with a nice web interface that is very easy to set up and configure. It needs a little bit more love before the 1.0 release, but it's already very usable.

That looks really nice, thanks for sharing! Just curious about "<100 MB RAM including the DB"... that sounds like a lot for a small LDAP database, doesn't it? I don't remember slapd using that much. Is 100MB a realistic RAM consumption for lldap or is it more like "you can be sure it will never under any circumstance go beyond that"?

It's more that I never properly measured it, but I know that it doesn't use more than that :) I should probably get a more accurate figure in there.

EDIT: From docker stats, I can see the container using about 2.5MB RAM, which is more in line with what I had in mind. It might scale up a bit if you start having 100K users, though :D (but it's really not meant for this and the frontend will crash your browser way before because there's no pagination)

Re: Start Self Hosting

#594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For silo self hosting, Internet outage should not affect your services, but for most of local-first services it's critical to maintain your systems security with necessary credentials. For an example consider a rental car that you take for camping in the countryside. Internet outage that makes your rental car useless is unacceptable.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#595

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I have various friends who have made similar statements about food (everyone should cook meals for themselves), cars (everyone should do their own basic repairs and maintenance), homes (everyone should do their own basic home maintenance), keyboards (everyone should do basic soldering and learn a non-qwerty layout), accounting (everyone should have a budget and do their own taxes), gardening, fitness, investing, educ…

You know, I have kids too, but I still wonder how much more dependent on big tech we might potentially get over the next decades, and how much responsibility I have in protecting and educating them in that regard. I'm postponing self-hosting mail for several years now, because it has A LOT of gotchas and requires tweaking and debugging every couple weeks/months because someone considers you a Spammer again (looking a…

As teenagers when they realize that you (or any family member with access to the server) can look at all their emails, they will most certainly never use it for anything personal and/or move away to gmail as that would massively improve their privacy situation!

Re: Start Self Hosting

#596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've come to recognize my view that "anyone could install this web server" is a view most commonly shared among fellow techies, and not one shared by the greater population.

Yeah. Of course not 'everyone' will be able to, and maybe that's what we should be considering the 'lay person' now... But there is a wide range of knowledge in this space. A 'lay person' is kind of hard to get down to a spot without potentially lumping people together improperly. Take my customer for example. She's not stupid. She knows she could probably fix the computer I am fixing for her, herself. But she also k…

I totally started there, knowing a lot of stuff was in my reach but would take some reading to succeed with. It's still hard for me to anticipate who will persist and who will throw their hands up and declare they aren't technical.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#597

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Same here. Is that a synonym for a lay person?

French here. Lambda user is definitely the term we use for the Average Joe. Comes from Greek. Never heard of Lay Person or read about it before, happy to discover the term !

Thank you; today you taught me something! :-)

Re: Start Self Hosting

#598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most things offer a docker image, so maybe learn how to work with those.

Simple things are easy :D But running docker, with multiple images that should interact withanother and with the public and it now it gets complex. "Just docker run" is not always the answer Look at Radarr: https://radarr.video/#downloads-v3-docker It's nice that they give tipps about pitfalls, but there are more than this and a step by step tutorial would also be good. Often times you have to google and search 10 re…

Usually if it really is more complicated than one container, they'll have a docker-compose file.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, that means you can no longer access your self-hosted stuff when you're out of the house, but the tradeoff is peace of mind about your data leaking or worse. Lots of things I'd consider self-hosting are functionally useless if I can't access them from my phone while out and about. I could put my phone on a VPN, but that's just another layer of complexity to add to the self-hosting process.

Tailscale solves the “a vpn is annoying to setup” problem pretty nicely.

It does, but I found it to drain a lot of battery on mobile (iOS). I'd say that for a simple setup you're likely to be accessing your services via their LAN IPs or their TailScale IPs, so if you have these bookmarked etc. on your phone then it means you either:

1) Have separate bookmarks for accessing services via the LAN or the VPN, and need to remember to turn on and off the VPN when you need to access things out of the house; or 2) Always access services via the TailScale IP, which means you need to be connected to the VPN on your phone even to access them from your LAN, which in turn either means toggling the VPN on and off even when at home or leaving it connected all the time and letting it drain 20% of your battery every day.

It's a great service but I didn't find it to make accessing self-hosted services from out of the home on a phone to be as nice as using them at home, or using a managed service.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#600
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…

First off it's systemd not systemD. And it's not complicated, in fact it's simpler than writing shell scripts. Portainer is a bad docker clone but more often than not doesn't work with docker scripts. But containerization is the wrong way anyway. If you can't setup a certain service on your machine you should not expose that host to the internet. That might sound arrogant but only for the inexperienced mind. Packaging everything in a docker package doesn't remove the burden of responsibility of operating an internet-exposed host. Idk what you're even trying to say. It feels like you're just throwing buzzwords out there without knowing what they mean or what they're for. If you want VPN wireguard is your choice. If you need a gatekeeper/firewall opnsense or openwrt.
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