For me, it was PhotoPrism. I used to be an idiot, and used Google Photos as my gallery. I knew that it was terrible for privacy but was too lazy to do anything about it. When Google limited storage for free accounts, I started looking for alternatives. Tried out a lot of stuff, but ended up settling on PhotoPrism.
It does most things that I need, except for multiple user support (it’s there in the sponsored version now). It made me learn a bit about Docker. Eventually, I learned how to access it from outside of my home network over Cloudflare tunnel. I’m happy that I can send pics/albums to folks without sharing it to any third party. It’s as easy as sending a link.
Now I have around a dozen containers on a local mini pc, and a couple on a VPS. I still route most things through Cloudflare tunnels (lower latency), only the high bandwidth stuff like Jellyfin are routed through a wireguard tunnel through the VPS.
Anyway, how did you get into selfhosting? (The question is mostly meant for non-professionals. But if you’re a professional with something interesting to share, you’re welcome as well.)
Having own media library without having to use so many sub based services :)
- Privacy :)
Definitely stayed with Plex for me.
- Piracy :)
Honestly? Probably boredom. Computer-related projects are addictive to me.
Haven’t ventured too far, but searxng was my first selfhosted service. It’s very easy, single container, no database.
Piracy. I couldn’t live with 25%+ of my TV watching time being advertisements. Manually downloading episodes became too much trouble so I setup a Plex/sab/sonars/radarr config on a pi connected to a 4-bay external drive enclosure featuring refurbished HGST 2tb HDDs in an lvm raid-5 config.
Eventually I also substituted my radio with paid Spotify so about the only ads im served are product placements and billboards. Its amazing how much less you’ll spend without ads!
I avoid product placements using SponsorBlock and billboard by being a stubborn bastard who refuses to look at them.
A pihole. Given how much I’ve spent over the years on self hosting kit, few ‘cheap’ things have ended up costing me more than that first 30 quid raspberry pi
What do you spend on? For me, the only recurring expenditures are VPN, and VPS. I think I pay <$5 a month on all of it.
My home network is somewhat overkill ;p but so far, about £500 on compute to run VMs, >£1000 on a nas and various other offsite and local stoarage, a couple hundred quid on networking gear, and then the extra premium on smart home devices you pay for non-tracking versions of the hardware (e.g a ring video doorbell would have cost me £40 less than the reolink I ended up buying). I’ve also so far spent over £75 on smart light switches trying to find one that both works with home assistant and fits inside my really narrow back boxes without yet finding one that works, so the number is continuing to go up!
holy crap, that was … … … … 25 years ago???
I don’t honestly remember the very first, if I had to bet I’d say it was Samba, likely on my 350MHz K6 (later snagged a K6-III+ for this board, fastest Socket 7 chip ever produced) so I could share files with my laptop, a Dell, 300MHz Celeron. Running all Linux at the time, not sure what flavors, although I first encountered a Debian derivative with Corel LinuxOS believe it or not, and have used Debian on servers about 95% of the time forever after.
My first self-hosting on dedicated hardware was a Samba share and DHCP/DNS server, since at the time routers weren’t always a thing, and in fact it was plugged directly into the cable modem … and for a while accidentally served competing DHCP to my neighborhood cable segment, causing intermittent problems for who knows how many users including myself, because the cable company didn’t filter broadcast traffic!!! When I finally found that config mishap, holy shit was it an awkward monkey moment … fix the typo and walk away slowly … wild west days!!
Heh, I did about same but on FreeBDS. Plus proxy server to share dialup connection around home.
Me too. I had a FreeBSD box that routed my dialup and ran a transparent caching squid proxy. Had a cronjob for scheduled downloads.
External? Apache and ftp. Once cable was available had an IPsec wan with a couple friends for file sharing and “lan” gaming. Used samba to span the subnets into a big windows workgroup called “biggroup”.
I used to tinker with php alot back then. Made sense to run my own web server.
Damn. I’m 25 years old lol.
Plex, then Jellyfin, then it snowballed out of control.
1TB hard drives were on sale, and I wanted to digitize all my DVDs and stream them to my Xbox 360. That was 15 years ago.
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 HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol NAS Network-Attached Storage PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) Plex Brand of media server package RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) nginx Popular HTTP server
[Thread #3 for this sub, first seen 18th Jul 2023, 22:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Home Assistant was the first thing I self hosted. It wasn’t until now with Lemmy though that I am hooked. I’m looking into hosting a Matrix instance next. I tried Mastodon but it’s resource needs were much higher than I needed for my usage. I may give it a try again sometime. Peertube is also on the list.
Probably Apache? I’ve been running web servers since the early 2000’s.
Yeah. Probably Apache. Can’t remember what that I was doing, but it almost certainly ran on Apache, and I almost certainly spent 90% of my energy configuring Apache.
XAMPP? I started with that in Secondary School (equivalent to high school)
At the beginning of the pandemic I looked into ways to de-Google and found Nextcloud. It wasn’t the easiest thing to start with, especially for a novice, but I had the time and the hardware, and I’m the type to not mind jumping into something difficult if it means solving a specific problem. I then found out about Bitwarden and had a great experience setting that up. After that I was confident enough to try hosting anything I could find. It’s been good times ever since 😀
I also started with nextcloud because of my degoogle journey 😄
Are you still using it? I went through many deployments before I finally thought I had it settled.
Yeah, im still using it. Started on a digitalocean server installed hardmetal but now i got a small home server where i installed it with docker
Samba (and later NFS) on a crappy bulldozer-era AMD laptop combined with a set of USB drives as a ghetto NAS, so I could access data from any system without leaving my desktop on 24/7. It worked, but that thing overheated so easily that I had to undervolt and underclock it to get it to run reliably. I relatively recently switched to a affordable Terramaster NAS, and to using containers, and have been expanding pretty rapidly. The whole Reddit situation got me to start revaluating the services I was using. A kind of software/service spring cleaning if you will.
Off topic but could you explain a little on how you use a VPS to access your internal services? There’s a few services I want to open up but I don’t trust cloudflare and I don’t want to port forward.
Not the OP, but my current solution involves a small instance in AWS with a wireguard server in docker. This is configured with a few peers. One peer is a container on my home server that can access my jellyfin deployment. This container is also running socat to redirect the traffic to jellyfin. Then my phone and laptop are the other peers and I have a DNS record pointed to the IP of the wireguard peer on the server, if that makes sense.
I’ve been using this image pretty painlessly. The only hiccup I had with setup was ensuring persistent keep alive was configured on the peer forwarding traffic to jellyfin.
Basically what the other guy said. I have a wireguard tunnel set up between my home server and the VPS, with persistent keepalive. The public domain name points to the VPS, then I have it set up (simply using iptables) so that any traffic there in port 80 and 443 is sent back to my honeserver and there it’s handled by nginx reverse proxy, and sent to jellyfin.
So, the only ports I need to open are 80 and 443 on my VPS to make this setup work.
Not quite related to selfhosting but modding routers and then DIYing x86 routers kinda got me into the scene.
Yea modding routers can be a lot of fun. Can be super unstable sometimes too. Are you still practicing? What’s your favorite custom firmware?
No not anymore. I no longer find it necessary now. Things have become much easier. Many routers have out-of-factory OpenWrt support or are outright built with/on OpenWrt. Companies like GL.iNet has made the barrier to entry the lowest ever.
Gone were the days we had to spot the right hardware versions, find ways to access debug ports, tinker with das uboot (or it had to be added…), flush the official firmware, and flash the right OpenWRT image. And this often would set you down on a path to compile the “right” kernel to work with proprietary driver/firmware blob files so hardware acceleration (e.g. NAT or WiFi radio) could work properly… Indeed I have learnt a lot but honestly I don’t really miss those days lol
Mid 90s, my ftp server with music and warez over dial-up that wasn’t always online!
