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Start Self Hosting

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Re: Start Self Hosting

#81

Post by plainnoodles »

ryandrake wrote: post #37
Isthatablackgsd wrote: post #7

Self-hosting is not always the answer for a lot of people. Self-hosting are not easy for laypeople (someone who are not familiar with it) to try to get their feet wet with it. For myself, I am on the level of beginner and I do struggle to stay on self-hosting path. When I set it up, I learn there is more steps that I have to do because the documentations and guides did not bother to explain those step and expect me t…

I think the whole "self hosting isn't easy" meme gets repeated so much that people just take it as given now and default to managed software. Or, someone might argue "Well, my grandmother who knows nothing about tech cannot self-host, so it's not viable!" ignoring there is a huge spectrum of competence between grandma and a seasoned Linux sysadmin. People aren't morons, and there's enough info out there on how to do…

I agree it's overblown. It's amazing how robust of a setup (more than sufficient for residential use!) you can get with little effort given how easy things are nowadays.

I've been self-hosting a lot of load-bearing household stuff (I have stuff on the "wife-critical" path: if it goes down, "the internet goes down" and I get a text from her) for almost 10 years and I've only had 2 incidents of particular reputational-risk note:

1) a routine reboot of the main server triggered a BTRFS bug that blocked mounting it again. This took an evening and a reboot into an arch linux ISO to fix (arch had a new-enough version of the btrfs tools that had the ability to fsck/repair the fs).

2) my proxmox setup was initially installed with zfs and zfs-on-root. This exploded and the "on root" part stopped working one day. This was the most annoying thing to fix so far because I ended up dumping any interesting data to an external HDD and just re-paving the server, this time reinstalling with just ext4 and lvm (which is admittedly a setup I'm much more comfortable debugging). No issues since then.

Both these events are from over 3 years ago, so it's been smooth sailing in recent times.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#83

Post by mertd »

The post is conflating two separate things as if they are the same.

1) Personal stuff that you created and own. For example photos on Google Photos. If Google decides to remove a random photo from my collection, that would be a big problem for me. But they don't. On the upside, the probability of Google losing my photos is an order of magnitude lower than my personal hard disk failing and me having forgotten to back it up.

2) Stuff that others created like movies and songs. I really don't care if a show that I was watching drops off of Netflix. I don't have the same emotional investment to it as the stuff in #1. I'll just find something else to watch.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#84

Post by spansoa »

mohaine wrote: post #11
spansoa wrote: post #2

I haven't tried it, but Piwigo[0] looks promising for photo albums & management. That or Ente[1] although Ente doesn't have a self-hosting option like Piwigo. If you really want true self hosting you would run it off your own on-prem machine and use your ISP to push & pull content. Putting things on a VPS is not really 'self' hosting as you're entrusting a third party to not get their datacenter burned down, or the h…

IANAL but I believe another reason to true self host, at least in the US, is that rules for things inside your house have extra protection. Sure they can still get a warrant, but this is a totally different level than what they need to get the same data off of a VPS. Do you really have any search and seizure protections on a VPS?

> Do you really have any search and seizure protections on a VPS?

I'm aware of this, which is why I do full disk encryption of any VPS instance I operate. See the Third Party Doctrine[0] which applies to the US only AFAIK.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

Re: Start Self Hosting

#85

Post by rsync »

blenderdt wrote: post #35

Self hosting is hard. You need to take care of security, backups, software updates, software installation and so on. Even on something like a QNAP (which can be compared to managed hosting) this can be hard. Flip the wrong switch and you expose something to the world. Missed a security update: your device is now vulnerable. While I host a lot of things myself I can understand self hosting is not for everyone.

"Flip the wrong switch and you expose something to the world."

One strategy for dealing with accidental misconfigurations is to employ a "network slug"[1]:

"A Network Slug, or "Slug", is a transparent layer 2 firewall running on a device with only two interfaces. ... The purpose of a Slug is to reinforce a security policy or to block uninentional leaks of information."

[1] https://john.kozubik.com/pub/NetworkSlug/tip.html

Re: Start Self Hosting

#86

Post by bsder »

mhitza wrote: post #34
Isthatablackgsd wrote: post #7

Self-hosting is not always the answer for a lot of people. Self-hosting are not easy for laypeople (someone who are not familiar with it) to try to get their feet wet with it. For myself, I am on the level of beginner and I do struggle to stay on self-hosting path. When I set it up, I learn there is more steps that I have to do because the documentations and guides did not bother to explain those step and expect me t…

> My biggest beef with self-hosting is that they expect us to set up the SSL/TLS certificate without explaining the step to set it up. Some guides does have section about it but never provide the details about creating CA for my self-hosting needs. I turn to Google/DDG to find information about it and they are all over the place or leading into dead-end. If you have your own domain pointed at your server, the Let's E…

> If you have your own domain pointed at your server, the Let's Encrypt certbot can automatically pull in a certificate

Yeah, but don't have a mistake too many times, or Let's Encrypt will block you for a week until your rate limit times out.

I hit this. I understand why Let's Encrypt has to do this, but it's very annoying and you have no choice but to do nothing for a week.

There needs to be something in between Let's Encrypt (free) and a couple thousand a year (other CAs).

Re: Start Self Hosting

#87

Post by plainnoodles »

lbriner wrote: post #61
ryandrake wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the whole "self hosting isn't easy" meme gets repeated so much that people just take it as given now and default to managed software. Or, someone might argue "Well, my grandmother who knows nothing about tech cannot self-host, so it's not viable!" ignoring there is a huge spectrum of competence between grandma and a seasoned Linux sysadmin. People aren't morons, and there's enough info out there on how to do…

The complaint is fair though. Trying to find a complete or the "correct" guide to something is very difficult even when you already know roughly what you are doing. I took me ages to work out how to setup postfix properly from about 10 slightly different "guides". The Postfix book wasn't even that helpful. There are also lots of very out-of-date guides that might have been OK for 2015 but not anymore. They don't get…

Postfix is a special kind of hell though, in that getting a good setup requires wading though decades of legacy stuff and patching together a bunch of non-default stuff to get, for instance, dkim signing and stuff working right. I've done this before myself, and agree it was super annoying and not fun, but I also think it is potentially the biggest outlier in self-hosting difficulty I've encountered.

Lots of services are barely more than - apt install, systemctl enable --now, ufw allow 8080 (if you even firewall within your network).

Re: Start Self Hosting

#88

Post by losvedir »

molsongolden wrote: post #76
kerblang wrote: post #39

You know what would be kind of neat? Like, a web site you'd go to called makemeoneofthose.com, and you'd click some buttons, and then sometime later you'd have a hosting setup that you own with some software, web server(s) and database(s) on it, and then you can go hack on it yourself, add some features, whatever. Like they send you some AWS keys and say "It's all yours. Good luck and don't forget to pay your hosting…

The digitalocean marketplace is kind of like this. Also sandstorm.io.

I was so sad when sandstorm kind of fizzled out. I'm still hoping Kenton is on a secret mission to somehow bring it to life within Cloudflare. How cool would that be? One-click installs of docs, email hosting, photo sharing, etc apps from a server app marketplace, onto a cloud server you control. (Insofar as you "control" anything on a cloud host, but I feel like that's pretty far, still.)

Re: Start Self Hosting

#89

Post by Havoc »

blenderdt wrote: post #35

Self hosting is hard. You need to take care of security, backups, software updates, software installation and so on. Even on something like a QNAP (which can be compared to managed hosting) this can be hard. Flip the wrong switch and you expose something to the world. Missed a security update: your device is now vulnerable. While I host a lot of things myself I can understand self hosting is not for everyone.

Docker has taken much of the pain out of it though. And if kept on local network safety is largely a non issue.

Drop in replacement while outside LAN are admittedly a little harder and more at risk of mistakes

Re: Start Self Hosting

#90

Post by edgyquant »

mrmattyboy wrote: post #77
blenderdt wrote: post #35

Self hosting is hard. You need to take care of security, backups, software updates, software installation and so on. Even on something like a QNAP (which can be compared to managed hosting) this can be hard. Flip the wrong switch and you expose something to the world. Missed a security update: your device is now vulnerable. While I host a lot of things myself I can understand self hosting is not for everyone.

I'd love to see a blog post that says, this is how to setup X (I dunno.. mediawiki, owncloud, whatever).. and then go fully in-depth into _everything_ surrounding it.. security, backups, logging, alerting, monitoring, backup testing/restoration etc.. a blog post that really covers everything for a well-protected 21st century hosted application that won't leave the owner in tears after a year! There's honestly so many…

These are called instruction manuals and no one likes to read them.
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