this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024
158 points (92.0% liked)

Selfhosted

39893 readers
345 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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?
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [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] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I have a k3s cluster for fun and I can admit that k8s is way too complicated.

I don't want to dig hours through documentation to find what I'm looking for. The docs sometimes feel like they were written for software devs and you should figure part of the solution yourself.

I have a ExternalName service that keeps fucking up my cluster everytime it restarts, bringing down my ingresses, because for some reason it doesn't work and I have no idea where to look at to figure out why it doesn't work - I just end up killing the service and reapplying the yaml file and it works.

I had to diagnose why my SSL certificates would get stuck in "issuing" in cert-manager, had to dig through 4 or 5 different resources until I got to an actual, descriptive error message telling me that I configured my ClusterIssuer wrongly.

I wanted a k3s cluster to learn but every time I have issues with it I realize it's a terrible idea.

I wish I had podman + compose but it does seem like a docker-compose is more complicated. Also, I wish I could do ansible but I have no idea where to start (nor how it works).

EDIT: oh yeah I also lost IPv6 support because k3s by default doesn't enable v6 and I was planning on using Hetzner CCM to have a 2 node cluster until I realized Hetzner Networks don't support v6.

load more comments (17 replies)
load more comments (24 replies)