this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024
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Selfhosted

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I saw this post today on Reddit and was curious to see if views are similar here as they are there.

  1. What are the best benefits of self-hosting?
  2. What do you wish you would have known as a beginner starting out?
  3. What resources do you know of to help a non-computer-scientist/engineer get started in self-hosting?
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[–] [email protected] 53 points 3 months ago (26 children)
  • you do not need kubernetes
  • you do not need anything to be „high availability”, that just adds a ton of complexity for no benefit. Nobody will die or go broke if your homelab is down for a few days.
  • tailscale is awesome
  • docker-compose is awesome
  • irreplaceable data gets one offsite backup, one local backup, and ideally one normally offline backup (in case you get ransomwared)
  • yubikeys are cool and surprisingly easy to use
  • don’t offer your services to other people until you are sure you can support it, your backups are squared away, and you are happy with how things are set up.
[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (18 children)

To piggy back on your “You don’t need k8s or high availability”,

If you want to optimize your setup in a way that’s actually beneficial on the small, self hosted scale, then what you should aim for is reproducibility. Docker compose, Ansible, NixOS, whatever your pleasure. The ability to quickly take your entire environment from one box and move it to another, either because you’re switching cloud providers or got a nicer hardware box from a garage sale.

When Linode was acquired by Akamai and subsequently renamed, I moved all my cloud containers to Vultr by rsyncing the folder structure to the new VM over SSH, then running the compose file on the new server. The entire migration short of changing DNS records took like 5 minutes of hands-on time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Ansible is so simple yet so elegant.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I've been in love with the concept of ansible since I discovered it almost a decade ago, but I still hate how verbose it is, and how cumbersome the yaml based DSL is. You can have a role that basically does the job of 3 lines of bash and it'll need 3 yaml files in 4 directories.

About 3 years ago I wrote a big ansible playbook that would fully configure my home server, desktop and laptop from a minimal arch install. Then I used said playbook for my laptop and server.

I just got a new laptop and went to look at the playbook but realised it probably needs to be updated in a few places. I got feelings of dread thinking about reading all that yaml and updating it.

So instead I'm just gonna rewrite everything in simple python with a few helper functions. The few roles I rewrote are already so much cleaner and shorter. Should be way faster and more user friendly and maintainable.

I'll keep ansible for actual deployments.

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