That wiki has some pretty wild quotes:
Unlike professional hosting services with static IPs, residential plans assign dynamic IP addresses that change as often as the relationship partners of people with borderline personality disorder.
this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
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Hey everyone in the comments complaining, this video is for me and other like me not for you. He took time to go through each step as if a complete beginner (aka me) was doing this. That means working through something as simple as downloading pfsense iso. Show me another complete guide that troubleshoots along with me and doesn't assume everything works perfectly.
He clearly states at the beginning this is not the only way to do this. He also clearly states where things could be better (pf vs OPN) but why momentum has kept him from making a change.
I'm glad y'all are at where y'all are at but this video will help win so many more people over. Having a single tutorial that takes me from zero to a selfhost solution that replicates 80% of google's everyday offering is HUGE. Is it perfect, probably not? Does it work, looks like it! And hopefully, finally getting something working will give me the confidence to implement improvements or try my own thing.
@Sips thanks for providing this as I might have missed it since it's not Rossman's channel. I was disappointed to come into the comments and see more complaints than appreciation. I've been thinking about this for a while and occasionally looking at tutorials and guides but everytime it felt like I had to piece meal all the parts to get the features I wanted. This meant troubleshooting each individual tutorial and then hoping it was completely interoperable with the next tutorial for the features/software I want. That kept me from even starting at all. Glad this exists now and knowing Rossman/Futo, it will only be improved as time goes on. Rant over.
Yep
Warning:Β This becomes a rabbit hole very quickly because there are so many items to cover. Iβm not going to breadcrumb you. I want to provide you with everything, which means we have to start from the BEGINNING!
Thanks dude! Best of luck on your selfhosting adventures β¨
I get how momentum keeps you on a path, and he admits that he'd rather use OPNsense in the wiki, but dammit, now he's got a bunch of other people going down the same pfSense road to the rugpull. And man, Wireguard is so much less confusing and difficult than OpenVPN, but because of the drama the pfSense weirdos made with Donnenfeld over the kernel patches for WG, there's precious little support for WG in the pfSense environment. Wireguard is definitely more noob friendly.
And if you're watching this because you need this level of help to selfhost, you definitely should not be hosting email yourself. Love Mailcow, used it for years, but I'm a veteran of the spam wars from way back and know how to deal with the current landscape. He is too, so he should know better.
Rule one of self hosting. Do not self host your own email. Only pain will you find.
You of course can, but there are so many additional hoops you have to jump through. I use my main domain for my email, but proton is one of the few subscriptions I happily pay for
I've been self-hosting email for so long (and ran/consulted on corporate email systems for a long time), I'm pretty sure my original domain (25 years) lends it's respectability to new domains I host at the same address. The hell of it is I host on a resi IP address and have never had a single blacklist event. I don't even know how that's possible other than the fact that I've done it for so long with no incidents that I think I'm on a whitelist or something.
I selfhost my own mail server (my primary mail in fact).
My LE certs expired on Christmas eve, when I was also getting sick. I didn't realize my mail server was down for a week until about NYE. Luckily Postfix queued all my emails and there was nothing important lost, but I am reevaluating self hosting my mail server. That being said, this was also the worst issue I've faced in over a year of self hosting mail. And it only arose because my dumbass still hasn't automated my certificate rotation.
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Same principle as, "A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client?"
This mentality is backwards. Hosting email has pitfalls yes but in a world where more people do it the less deep those pitfalls will become.
If you are curious and want to host email go for it!
Until you have a bad config as the other commenter pointed out and miss a critical email like an interview or medical item
@[email protected] There is absolutely no way any starter will see that page and not be intimidated. I am a well seasoned selfhoster and even I saw that and went "Wow that's a lotta words and images on a single page."
Even arch wiki has sensible ToC with pages divided into what the current topic is.
I've been self hosting for years, and am familiar with many of the topics here, but it's still an interesting read for things like talking about breaking out the three part router yourself. I'm really glad he out this together because it means I can see what others do in detail, even if it's NOT the 100% recommended way (OPNSense, wireguard, etc)
On one hand, I agree that having a small overview with links to make this non monolithic would go a long way to making this functional and less scary.
On the other hand some information is scattered fairly heavily. Take the switch discussion. He mentions a 15 dollar switch, and then the upper end 1000$ switch early on, to emphasize the range. It's not until a much much later section he talks about the more practical 20$ switch or 400$ switch he'd use here. So it being monolithic aides Ctrl+F to find this segmented info.
He also mentions the capability/value of having a manged switch (the latter switch is managed) specifically with VLAN, and yet doesn't to my mind ever state why/when I would do something with the switch management to that end. As far as I can tell, many newer switches will pass VLAN tags (even when unmanaged) from the router, which will enable you to offer a WAP with split SSIDs so you could use something like TP-link 8 port 2.5gb unmanged switch (which at 100$ seems like a meaningful bridge between the 15$ 4 port 1 GB switch, and $400 16 port 2.5gb, 8 port poe switch). He talks about PoE & speed merits but IMHO doesn't really cover the significance of a managed switch other than saying it had features for vlan (even though the cheapie would pass VLAN tags)
What does the managed switch offer me for VLAN? Specifically just the capability to isolate certain ports so specific hard lines are mapped to a certain vlan?
That's a possibility indeed, but at least he documented all the steps, it's great to see that because it looks like a lot of work. But I agree at the first that big long page for sure can be intimidated (CTRL+F is your best friend here).
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actually yeah, fair point. I think perhaps the videoes are probably what they aim to be more beginner friendly rather than the written one.
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I haven't finished going through all of it yet, but it seems pretty extensive and inclusive. This is great!
This guide is heavily opinionated and simply outdated. 2 examples:
- use of openvpn. Wireguard is by design way more secure (use of keys instead of passwords) and is way more performant.
- use of pfSense. Yes pfSense is ok but the company behind it has shown it hostility towards open source and foss multiple times. Why should a beginner use PFsense when OPNsense exists. OPNsense is not even mentioned.
And that are only 2 points i discovered while scrolling through. Louis is a great guy but as it looks like he should leave that topic to other people.
Edir: i see this was already mentioned.
Not sure if you meant the video, or written guide, but for the written guide -
OPNsense is not even mentioned.
When we build a router using a standard computer, we can install router software like pfSense or OPNsense,
Thereβs a bit of a debate between pfSense and OPNsense. TL;DR, the developers of pfSense are not the nicest people sometimes. If this bothers you, consider checking out OPNsense. Since Iβve been using pfSense for a decade, Iβve built much of my infrastructure around it. I am well aware of its quirks and donβt feel like setting up my network from scratch, so I am using pfSense for this tutorial. Regardless of the developers, you are infinitely better off using pfSense on your own hardware than standard routers.
I completely agree that WireGuard and OPNsense are excellent choices, and I would have chosen them myself. However, I don't think it's fair to suggest that someone should "leave the topic to others" simply because they've made different choices. While WireGuard is indeed superior, OpenVPN is still a solid option and widely used today. Similarly, although OPNsense is better, pfSense remains a great piece of software - even though the company behind it isnt perfect.
People should still be able to use whatever software they like without being juged by it. Its better for people to at least start with something, rather than nothing: then its also more likely they will get more educated on topic and the different matters of opinions later on.
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heavily opinionated
Is that of itself not an opinion...?
outdated
Tbf I haven't looked at the source material but I don't think two points make it "outdated". It's like calling Debian outdated.
Is that of itself not an opinion...?
Nope. It is objectively opinionated, since he only shows his solution and offers or shows no other solution.
Tbf I haven't looked at the source material but I don't think two points make it "outdated". It's like calling Debian outdated.
Debian is not outdated, also is the technology not outdated he used in the guide (as far as i can tell since i have not read through everything). But using those to get to the shown solution is outdated. When someone in this community asks for a VPN solution most ppl will recommend Wireguard and or tailscale and not OpenVPN.
OpenVPN has other benefits like better user management and more customizability but for this use case it is not the fit, since other solutions are easier to setup and harder to fuck up the security part for a beginner.
Edit: Those are only the 2 examples i picked. I have not looked through everything, but those 2 stood out to me by just looking at the ToC.
Also, you must have not read the wiki properly, because he does mention OPNsense.
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Appreciate the written version, though the wiki formatting looks a little weird on mobile. The text on the table of contents is rather small.
This should be added to the Self Hosted community wiki
Long live futo, I hope they stay this way
@Sunny sadly in an ironic twist, they no longer seem to be maintaining their #selfhosted #peertube instance @futo_tech :(
So they do have a PeerTube instance, just chose not to upload anything to it?
@jeena they had been up until 1 mth ago, I assume it was mirrored until YouTube broken the auto syncingπ€·ββοΈ
@jeena Thankfully I just spotted a recent upload by #louisrossman on their instance, though it seems it only includes some short videos that he put up, it's not entirely synced with their YT channel. Regarding #immich photo #peertube
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So why are the videos not self hosted?
Probably because in the current state it would not reach many people. I like PeerTube as much a the next guy but FUTO has to keep things a bit pragmatic too I imagine.
video for beginners
"why is this not available for my niche viewer? smh those beginners need to do some research on their own and hopefully find the same niche instance that I use so they can start calling themselves beginners. They are, uh... beta beginners? alpha? nightly beginners! posers!"
Viewership 101: go where your audience is.
How hard are the concept of uploading to more than one platform and dogfeeding selfhosting to understand.
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