this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024

633 points (98.2% liked)

Selfhosted

39253 readers

233 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:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
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.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.

Resources:

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

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

633

After 1.5 years of learning selfhosting, this is where I'm at (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

124 comments fedilink hide all child comments

@[email protected]

Mid 2022, a friend of mine helped me set up a selfhosted Vaultwarden instance. Since then, my "infrastructure" has not stopped growing, and I've been learning each and every day about how services work, how they communicate and how I can move data from one place to another. It's truly incredible, and my favorite hobby by a long shot.

Here's a map of what I've built so far. Right now, I'm mostly done, but surely time will bring more ideas. I've also left out a bunch of "technically revelant" connections like DNS resolution through the AdGuard instance, firewalls and CrowdSec on the main VPS.

Looking at the setups that others have posted, I don't think this is super incredible - but if you have input or questions about the setup, I'll do my best to explain it all. None of my peers really understand what it takes to construct something like this, so I am in need of people who understand my excitement and proudness :)

Edit: the image was compressed a bit too much, so here's the full res image for the curious: https://files.catbox.moe/iyq5vx.png And a dark version for the night owls: https://files.catbox.moe/hy713z.png

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (2 children)

btw why did you choose tailscale over zerotier

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Tail scale is stupid easy to set up and free for first ~~ten~~ 100 devices and supports 3 custom domains.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

zerotier is open source and free with up to 25 nodes per network, and supports custom ip assignments (in custom ranges, with option to have multiple subnets per network), custom dhcp, managed dns, and custom, multiple managed routes (with option to point to a custom gateway), and traffic flow rules.

for example here are the rules i have set up for my "gaming" network that i use to play LAN games with my friends (only allows ipv4, arp and ipv6 traffic and prevents clients from self-assigning ip addresses)

route settings page:
my "personal" network (which just links all of my personal devices together) exists in 172.16.0.0/24 and auto-assigns ipv4 addresses in 172.16.0.101-172.16.0.199 range using dhcp (but i have configured custom ip addresses for each device anyway), and ipv6 is auto-assigned using RFC4196.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Tail scale can be self hosted also. But for example, it took me 5 clicks to set up a tail scale network with 3 devices.

Also it's apparently been buffed to 100 devices for free and 3 custom domains.

Also open source https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I heard about tailscale first, and haven't yet had enough trouble to attempt a switch.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

huh i thought zerotier is more popular.
i love it but their android app sucks. hasn't received a single large update since android 5 and constantly keeps disconnecting

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Are you talking about the Tailscale App or the ZeroTier app? Because the TS Android app is the one thing im somewhat unhappy about, since it does not play nice with the private DNS setting.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

I'm talking about the zerotier's app

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What did you use to chart this? And nicely done.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Excalidraw. Reading is hard. (Yeah, I missed that it was mentioned in the thread)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Excalidraw is nice. Also, I want to throw in a mention for mermaid.live (mermaid js). A little less flexiblity but it’s nice. There’s also kroki.io which hosts a lot of these types of apps.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Yeah, definitely a concert to Mermaid.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I am sorry, I am but a worm just starting Docker and I have two questions.

Say I set up pihole in a container. Then say I use Pihole's web UI to change a setting, like setting the web UI to the midnight theme.

Do changes persist when the container updates?

I am under the impression that a container updating is the old one being deleted and a fresh install taking its place. So all the changes in settings vanish.

I understand that I am supposed to write files to define parameters of the install. How am I supposed to know what to write to define the changes I want?

Sorry to hijack, the question doesn't seem big enough for its own post.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

With containers, most will have a persistent volume that is mapped to the host filesystem. This is where your config data is. When you update a container, just the image is updated(pihole binaries) but it leaves the config files there. Things like your block lists and custom dns settings, theme settings, all of that will remain.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Thank you.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

This is oddly similar to some informal workups I've done for our work network.

Nice work 👍.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I just have a UniFi firewall, a Synology Diskstation, and a linux server running everything. Provides torrenting, video streaming with plex, file sharing, game server hosting, music hosting, and more, and I don't ever have to mess with it :). This is impressive but I don't know if I would want to support it personally

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'd love to have everything centralized at home, but my net connection tends to fail a lot and I dont want critical services (AdGuard, Vaultwarden and a bunch of others that arent listed) to be running off of flakey internet, so those will remain in a datacenter. Other stuff might move around, or maybe not. Only time will tell, I'm still at the beginning of my journey after all!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Fair. I'm lucky enough to be able to get business internet at home so I have a static IP and 99.9% uptime. My plex watchers and game hosting players know that sometimes around 3am, they might be booted when my networking gear auto updates itself, haha

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Since nobody else asked about this, why ruTorrent over the other typical download clients?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

Pretty sure ruTorrent is a typical download client. The real reason is that it came preinstalled and I never had a reason to change it ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You’re usually stuck with what your seedbox provider gives you.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Ahh I'm not too familiar with seedboxes, thanks 🌻

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Sorry if someone already asked this, but do you have any tutorials or guides that you used and found helpful for starting out? I have some small experience with nginx and such, but I would definitely need to follow along with something that tells me what to do and what each part does in a infrastructure like you have haha

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I've been dabbling in self hosting recently and found that chatgpt can help you setup a lot if you don't get annoyed and keep fixing your prompts. It even writes out your docker compose files for you and you can ask it questions on what things mean and what's linked to each other. If you do try it out though, avoid giving personal info like passwords in the chat.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

That's a tough one. I've pieced this all together from countless guides for each app itself, combined with tons of reddit reading.

There are some sources that I can list though:

https://awesome-selfhosted.net/ is great to find apps you might want to host
https://docs.ibracorp.io/ mainly aims at Unraid hosting, but the information can oftentimes be transferred
https://how2host.it has some start-to-finish guides that explain every setup step
https://github.com/mikeroyal/Self-Hosting-Guide is an incredibly long list of apps and ressources you can use as a launchpad. Note the "Tutorials & Ressources" Section for further links

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Had to look up what a few of these were myself, check the sidebar resources: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I saved this! Yeah, it seems like a lot of work, but I got inspired again (I had a slight self-hosting burnout and nuked my raspberry setup ~year ago) so I appreciate it. :) Can I ask what hardware you run this on? edit: I just wanted to ramble some more: I just fired up my rPI4 again just last week, setup it with just as barebone VPS with wireguard, samba, jellyfin and pi-hole+unbound (as to not burn myself again :D )

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Glad to have gotten you back into the grind!

My homelab runs on an N100 board I ordered on Aliexpress for ~150€, plus some 16GB Corsair DDR5 SODIMM RAM. The Main VPS is a 2 vCPU 4GB RAM machine, and the LabProxy is a 4 vCPU 4GB RAM ARM machine.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What VPS service do you use/recommend and what's your monthly cost?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I use Hetzner, mainly because of their good uptime, dependable service and being geographically close to me. Its a "safe bet" if you will. Monthly cost, if we're not counting power usage by the homelab, is about 15 bucks for all three servers.

load more comments