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Start Self Hosting

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Re: Start Self Hosting

#601

Post by ddaalluu2 »

hotpotamus wrote: post #296
ndiddy wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laypeople don't know that systemd exists. They will install a webserver or something and the package manager will automatically install and enable its unit file.

You know, nothing is really ever that simple and this comment makes me realize that. You actually hit on a philosophical difference in package managers lol. Ubuntu (not sure about Debian) will install, enable, and start a package, But Red Hat only installs it, because they expect you to configure the service first.

That is actually not true for the most part. RHEL-based distros have a vanilla config file, where Ubuntu yes does make some extra efforts to configure the packages in a sensible manner.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#602

Post by asoneth »

fps_doug wrote: post #491
asoneth wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I feel the same pain as you do about being complicit in all of this and I have no ready answers.

The best I managed to do is that my family's email addresses use a custom domain I manage so I am not locked into a single webmail provider. Occasionally I have to deal with some issue or delivery delays (especially for authentication emails) but it's orders of magnitude less effort than when I made the mistake of trying to run my own mailserver.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#603

Post by asoneth »

lnxg33k1 wrote: post #495
asoneth wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I guess put like that, I would say that my thought about the matter were a bit bullshit and I agree with you

I wouldn't say bullshit, just a tad idealistic. Then again, I'm old, and I admire your idealism.

Being self-sufficient is a noble goal, but I think it's also helpful to be realistic about the costs in order to make the proper cost/benefit decisions.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#604

Post by chousuke »

nerdyadventurer wrote: post #378
chousuke wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you might've had an unusually bad experience. Might've also been the distro; I don't like Ubuntu much myself. :P Maintaining inherited environments is also much more painful than ones you get to design from the ground up. I work with varied environments, and one with ~250 RHEL / CentOS machines has approximately the same level of maintenance burden as another with a dozen or so Ubuntus because the first e…

What do you suggest as a maintainable distro?

I like RHEL and derivatives more for servers myself. It's probably just preference, but I find that RHEL-like distros step on my toes less often. In particular, I don't like debconf at all, and Ubuntu pushing snaps everywhere also leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#605

Post by wmf »

rattray wrote: post #575
wmf wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the choice between $5/month and, say, $300 upfront most people will choose monthly. I think both options should be available but realistically not many people are going to buy the box. There have been a bunch like FreedomBox, IndieBox, Helm, etc. but they don't seem to take off.

Interesting – Helm definitely looks cool, close to what I had in mind. Pricing of $400 plus $99/yr subscription sounds tough – and it doesn't include a wifi router, which I think is an element that would make more sense to the average home user (and ensure it's not connected to the internet over wifi).

I prefer the router+server approach as well but Helm takes a different approach of VPNing all traffic through AWS so it can have a public static IP; unfortunately this introduces a bunch of cost and overhead.

For hardware there's some interesting stuff like https://www.servethehome.com/inexpensive-4x-2-5gbe-fanless-r...

Re: Start Self Hosting

#606

Post by rank0 »

dangus wrote: post #328
rank0 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 overestimating AWS/cloud costs by a decent amount. t3a.medium is under $30/month and that price only goes down when you reserve for the year. Save even more if you can run your service on ARM/Gravitron. A VPS service like Linode will have even better pricing than AWS. Driving over to a data center isn't free (time and cost), either. Those used Xeon blades are cheap for good reason – the companies that original…

You’re right about the time not being free and certainly hardware failure. Although HW is way more reliable than people let on.

But aws is extremely expensive per unit of raw compute performance. Obviously I concede that the stability and availability is unmatched compared to DIY solutions.

For my specific workload I need lots of memory and cpu cores. (Lots meaning my single 32c/64t 32Gb Xeon tower in my home). I almost fully utilize my resources and STIL need to pay aws for storage/tunneling/DNS/etc.

Consuming equivalent compute in aws would be hundreds of dollars per month.

Hybrid is just my preference!

Re: Start Self Hosting

#607

Post by ParetoOptimal »

Gigachad wrote: post #262
u2077 wrote: post #153

I don’t need a reason why to self host, I need nice, clear, up-to-date tutorials on how to self host various services. Self hosting should be easy enough for everyday people. Perhaps preconfigured servers that treat services just like apps. Once I have a server setup, I should be able to install (and uninstall) services in a single click. The OS can handle permissions and containers.

There are numerous projects which have attempted to create this. https://sandstorm.io/ was the biggest one but as far as I can tell its largely unmaintained and most of the apps are outdated https://yunohost.org/ probably has the best "just works" experience but I didn't like that it wasn't using any kind of containerization which has caused them issues with shared libraries like PHP being difficult to update. As wel…

> the best "just works" experience but I didn't like that it wasn't using any kind of containerization which has caused them issues with shared libraries like PHP being difficult to update. As well as security concerns about one insecure app giving access to the whole server.

imo the reproducability guarantees of docker aren't enough and domething like NixOS is needed.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#608

Post by monkeyjoe »

dragonwriter wrote: post #135
monkeyjoe wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but my old Google cloud apps on python 2.7 will one day get rug-pulled and forced to upgrade. It can only stay working forever if the platform doesn't change underneath it.

> Sure, but my old Google cloud apps on python 2.7 will one day get rug-pulled and forced to upgrade “Degradation over time” was being cited as a reason not to self-host. Pointing out that not self-hosting exposes you to risk of others changing the environment so it no longer supports your software is a diametrically-opposed argument.

Oops! I missed that point entirely.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#610

Post by beaugunderson »

mholt wrote: post #132

This is why I'm building Timelinize [1]. It's a follow-up to my open source Timeliner project [2], which has the potential to download all your digital life onto your own computer locally, and projects it all onto a single timeline, across all data sources (text messages, social media sites, photos, location history, and more). It's a little different from "self hosting" but it does have a similar effect of bringing…

very curious if you've come across prior state of the art here e.g. singly/the locker project... this stuff is annoyingly fiddly and standardizing it all seemed like tilting at windmills
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