Not exactly self hosting but maintaining/backing it up is hard for me. So many “what if”s are coming to my mind. Like what if DB gets corrupted? What if the device breaks? If on cloud provider, what if they decide to remove the server?
I need a local server and a remote one that are synced to confidentially self-host things and setting this up is a hassle I don’t want to take.
So my question is how safe is your setup? Are you still enthusiastic with it?
First of all ignore the trends. Fuck docker, fuck nixos, fuck terraform or whatever tech stack gets shilled constantly.
Find a tech stack that is easy FOR YOU and settle on that. I haven’t changed technologies for 4 years now and feel like everything can fit in my head.
Second of all, look at the other people using commercial services and see how stressed they are. Google banned my account, youtube has ads all the time, the app for service X changed and it’s unusable and so on.
Nothing comes for free in terms of time and mental baggage
Yes, you should use something that makes sense to you but ignoring docker is likely going to cause more aggravation than not in the long term.
Yep, I went in this direction…until I gave in during a bare metal install of something…
Docker is not hassle free but usually most setup guides for apps are much much easier with docker
Docker/Podman or any containerized solution is basically the easiest way to get really nice maintenance properties like: updating one app won’t break others, won’t take down the whole system, can be moved from machine to machine.
Containers are a learning curve but I think very worth it for home setups. Compared to something like Kubernetes which I would say is less worth it unless you already know or want to learn Kubernetes.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| Git | Popular version control system, primarily for code |
| HA | Home Assistant automation software |
| ~ | High Availability |
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| LVM | (Linux) Logical Volume Manager for filesystem mapping |
| LXC | Linux Containers |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| PSU | Power Supply Unit |
| Plex | Brand of media server package |
| RAID | Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage |
| RPi | Raspberry Pi brand of SBC |
| SBC | Single-Board Computer |
| SSH | Secure Shell for remote terminal access |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
| ZFS | Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity |
| nginx | Popular HTTP server |
15 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.
[Thread #821 for this sub, first seen 21st Jun 2024, 17:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I work IT for my day job managing a datacenter and cloud infrastructure.
I host mostly Plex, home assistant, and immich. Immich has its data backed up, I don’t care about Plex data. If it all dies, so be it.
I have a server coloed that houses some websites and email, plus some random other things I’ve setup and tested. It’s got backups, and downtime is fine.
If my self hosted stuff dies, it doesn’t matter. Nothing in my life ultimately relies on it.
I got tired of having to learn new things. The latest was a reverse proxy that I didn’t want to configure and maintain. I decided that life is short and just use samba to serve media as files. One lighttpd server for my favourite movies so I can watch them from anywhere. The rest I moved to free online services or apps that sync across mobile and desktop.
Reverse proxy is actually super easy with nginx. I have an nginx server at the front of my server doing the reverse proxy and an Apache server hosting some of those applications being proxied.
Basically 3 main steps:
-
Setup up the DNS with your hoster for each subdomain.
-
Setup your router to port forward for each port.
-
Setup nginx to do the proxy from each subdomain to each port.
DreamHost let’s me manage all the records I want. I point them to the same IP as my server:
This is my config file:
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
server_name photos.my_website_domain.net;
location / {
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:2342;
include proxy_params;
}
}
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
server_name media.my_website_domain.net;
location / {
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8096;
include proxy_params;
}
}
And then I have dockers running on those ports.
root@website:~$ sudo docker ps
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
e18157d11eda photoprism/photoprism:latest "/scripts/entrypoint…" 4 weeks ago Up 4 weeks 0.0.0.0:2342->2342/tcp, :::2342->2342/tcp, 2442-2443/tcp photoprism-photoprism-1
b44e8a6fbc01 mariadb:11 "docker-entrypoint.s…" 4 weeks ago Up 4 weeks 3306/tcp photoprism-mariadb-1
So if you go to photos.my_website_domain.net that will navigate the user to my_website_domain.net first. My nginx server will kick in and see you want the ‘photos’ path, and reroute you to basically http://my_website_domain.net:2342. My PhotoPrism server. So you could do http://my_website_domain.net:2342 or http://photos.my_website_domain.net. Either one works. The reverse proxy does the shortcut.
Hope that helps!
fuck nginx and fuck its configuration file with an aids ridden spoon, it’s everything but easy if you want anything other than the default config for the app you want to serve
I had a pretty decent self-hosted setup that was working locally. The whole project failed because I couldn’t set up a reverse proxy with nginx.
I am no pro, very far from it, but I am also somewhat Ok with linux and technical research. I just couldn’t get nginx and reverse proxies working and it wasn’t clear where to ask for help.
TrueNAS scale helps a lot, as it makes many popular apps just a few clicks away. Or for more power-users, stuff like the linux cockpit also really helps.
To directly answer your questions…
- In the event of DB corruption (which hasn’t happened to me yet) I would probably rollback that app to the previous snapshot. I suspect that TrueNAS having ZFS as an underlayment may help in this regard, as it actually detects bitrot and bitflips, which may be the underlying cause of such corruption.
- In the case where a device breaks… if it’s a hard drive that broke, I just pop in a new one and add it to the degraded mirror set. If it’s “something else” that broke, my plan is to pop one of the mirror shards into a spare PoS computer (as truenas scale runs on common x86 hardware) and deal with the ugly-factor until I repair or replace the bigger issue.
- The only way to defend against a cloud provider is replication, so plan accordingly if that is a concern.
- If by “sync’d confidentially” you mean encrypted in transit, I’m pretty sure that TrueNAS has built in replication over SSH. If you meant TNO, then you probably want to build your setup over a cryfs filesystem so no cleartext bits hit the cloud, although on second thought… it’s not really meant for multi-master synchronization… my case just happens to fit it (only one device writes)… so there is probably a better choice for this.
- Setup is a hassle? Yes… just be sure that you invest that hassle into something permanent, if not something like a TrueNAS configuration (where the config gets carried along for the ride with the data) then maybe something like ansible scripts (which is machine-readable documentation). Depending on your organization skills, even hand-written notes or making your own “meta” software packages (with only dependencies & install scripts) might work. What you don’t want to do is manually tweak a linux install, and then forget what is “special” about that server or what is relying on it.
- How safe is my setup? Depends… I still need to start rotating a mirror shard as an offsite backup, so not very robust against a site disaster; Security-wise… I’ve got a lot of private bits, and it works for my needs… as far as I know :)
- Still enthusiastic? I try to see everything as both temporary and a work-in-progress. This can be good in ways because nothing has to be perfect, but can be bad in ways that my setup at any given time is an ugly amalgamation of different experimental ideas that may or may not survive the next “iteration”. For example, I still have centos 7 & python 2 stuff that needs to be migrated or obsoleted.
As an alternative, Unraid. While it’s paid, it strips away a lot of the hassle you mentioned in your post. Has a built in shop where you just click, set up ports/shares and docker containers just spin up for you.
While I’m not a huge fan of their recent subscription model change, I do love their OS (I got I’m still grandfathered into the pre-existing perpetual license.
