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.
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.
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.
I had a similar experience with NixOS-anywhere and a VPS issue. Reset the OS, setup SSH key access and ran NixOS-anywhere and within like 15 minutes was back up and running.
I’ve been in love with the concept of ansible since I discovered it almost a decade ago, but I still hate how verbose it is, and how cumbersome the yaml based DSL is. You can have a role that basically does the job of 3 lines of bash and it’ll need 3 yaml files in 4 directories.
About 3 years ago I wrote a big ansible playbook that would fully configure my home server, desktop and laptop from a minimal arch install. Then I used said playbook for my laptop and server.
I just got a new laptop and went to look at the playbook but realised it probably needs to be updated in a few places. I got feelings of dread thinking about reading all that yaml and updating it.
So instead I’m just gonna rewrite everything in simple python with a few helper functions. The few roles I rewrote are already so much cleaner and shorter. Should be way faster and more user friendly and maintainable.
EDIT: As I suspected, the changes that u/mesamunefire is referencing are the ones that taken out of context awhile back and incorrectly assumed to apply to user VPS’ and the data on them, which is not the case. Those terms only apply to information posted publicly to their website, like the community forums.
Can’t speak for OP, but I bailed on Vultr because of how they handled the arbitration agreement change. Basically, I couldn’t access my containers without accepting the new TOS, so I “hacked” the website with Inspect Element so I could access support to close my account. For me, the arbitration change wasn’t the issue (my current host has similar policies), but being forced to accept a new TOS to use my account. I had no option do disagree or “remind me later,” I literally only had an “accept” button. I refuse to use any service that treats me like that.
I’m now with Hetzner, so we’ll see if they pull that nonsense. I only use the VPS to get around my ISP’s CGNAT (WireGuard VPN w/ HAProxy at the edge to route domains), so if they pull the same nonsense, I’ll copy my config to another VPS.
Seems to work fine and meets my needs. I’m in the US though, and options are pretty limited. So far the only snag I’ve had was having to upload my ID, I guess their signup process is a little strict.
https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1boz5ne/vultr_new_tos_claims_all_commercial_rights_to/
"
You hereby grant to Vultr a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid-up, worldwide license (including the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to use, reproduce, process, adapt, publicly perform, publicly display, modify, prepare derivative works, publish, transmit and distribute each of your User Content, or any portion thereof, in any form, medium or distribution method now known or hereafter existing, known or developed, and otherwise use and commercialize the User Content in any way that Vultr deems appropriate, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties, for purposes of providing the Services to you."
And you could not opt out. You had to click agree in order to login. That’s the biggest one.
It was later removed after the fact but there were other changes that sucked.
Incorrect. It applies only to the forums. It does not apply in any way, shape, or form to your VPS or the content on it. It’s one thing to be mistaken, but let’s not spread misinformation on purpose.
A Reddit post incorrectly took portions of our Terms of Service out of context, which only pertain to content provided to Vultr on our public mediums (community-related content on public forums, as an example) for purposes of rendering the needed services – e.g., publishing comments, posts, or ratings. This is separate from a user’s own, private content that is deployed on Vultr services.
Since our inception, Vultr has been committed to upholding and adhering to the strictest data privacy and protection standards across the world (including HIPAA, GDPR, and DPDPA). Our customers own 100% of their content.
I had customer data as well as some personal stuff on a couple of servers. It was low hanging fruit so I just started self hosting. It’s silly how much rights they suddenly wanted. Not worth the hassle, they just provide basic boxes to begin with.
They also would not let you login without accepting those new rights now were you able to opt out. So I just threw my infa on some local systems, deleted everything and then had to say yes to their TOS. Again silly and great way to lose business.
Not needing Kubernetes is a broad statement. It allows for better management of storage and literally gives you a configurable reverse-proxy configured with YAML if you know what you’re doing.
Funnily enough Docker compose has never worked for me on Podman. There always seems to be something that is incompatible (also due to me running on Debian). However, I feel like it should become a standard amongst homelabbers and professionals to use Kubernetes manifests going forward, since it is the most portable.
Heavy disagree on the storage statement from what I’ve used and seen but it works for lots of people so not going to detract. NFS is always a pain but longhorn seems to have advantages
NFS is a pain, no question about it. I used to use longhorn but these days since I’m doing a single node k3s I’m just doing hostpath. It’s that PVCs make intuitive sense to me, but I guess podman will likely work just fine for such cases other than canary deployments and OOTB service-meshes
It is much easier to buy one “hefty” physical machine and run ProxMox with virtual machines for servers than it is to run multiple Raspberry Pis. After living that life for years, I’m a ProxMox shill now. Backups are important (read the other comments), and ProxMox makes backup/restore easy. Because eventually you will fuck a server up beyond repair, you will lose data, and you will feel terrible about it. Learn from my mistakes.
Podman quadlets have been a blessing. They basically let you manage containers as if they were simple services. You just plop a container unit file in /etc/containers/systemd/, daemon-reload and presto, you’ve got a service that other containers or services can depend on.
The big thing for #2 would be to seperate out what you actually need vs what people keep recommending.
General guidance is useful, but there’s a lot of ‘You need ZFS!’ and ‘You should use K8s!’ and ‘Use X software!’
My life got immensely easier when I figured out I did not need any features ZFS brought to the table, and I did not need any of the features K8s brought to the table, and that less is absolutely more. I ended up doing MergerFS with a proper offsite backup method because, well, it’s shockingly low-complexity.
And I ended up doing Docker with a bunch of compose files and bind mounts, because it’s shockingly low-complexity. And it’s just running on Debian, instead of some OS that has a couple of layers of additional software to make things “easier” because, again, it’s low-complexity.
I can re-deploy the entire stack on new hardware in about ~10 minutes (I’ve tested this a few times just to make sure my backup scripts work), and there’s basically zero vendor tie-in or dependencies that you’d have to get working first since it’s just a pile of tarballs and packages from the distro’s package manager on, well, ANY distro.
Everything is deployed with a docker compose, and all the docker volume data are bind mounts and, for example, a Jellyfin install would have everything in /stacks/jellyfin.
The backup script makes a tarball of each service individually (and stops the stack if there’s anything in there doing database things or anything else that might end up being inconsistent by just archiving the filesystem), and uploads them to a S3 storage provider AND burns them to a BluRay.
The recovery script does the opposite: it downloads and unarchives the data.
As long as you’re on Linux and have Docker, it should just magically work.
If you write the script yourself, just make sure you test it a couple of times, and preferably with different datasets from different runs.
I found some edgecase stuff that would have prevented a restore even after I had tested it successfully (some permission issues due to changes in containers and whatnot were resulting in less than the expected data being archived and restored) a couple of times.
I have made that migration myself going from a Raspberry PI 4 to a n100 based NAS. It was 10 minutes for the software stack as you said This not taking into account media migration which was done on the background over a few hours on WiFi (I had everything on an external hard drive at the time).
That last part is the only thing I would change about my self hosting solution. Yes, the NAS has a nice form factor, is power efficient and has so far been very optimal for my needs (no lag like rpi4), however I have seen they don’t really sell motherboard or parts to repair them. They want you to replace it with another one. Reason 2 on the same is vendor lock in. Depending on the options you select when creating the storage groups/pools (whatever they are called), you could be stuck needing to get something from the same vendor to read your data if the device stops working but the disks are salvageable. Reason 3 is they’ve had security incidents so a lot of the “features” I would not recommend using ever to avoid exposing your data to ransomware over the internet. I don’t trust their competitors either. I know how commercial software is made with the smallest amount of care for security best practices.
Yeah, I just use plain boring desktop hardware. (Oh no! I’m experiencing data corruption due to the lack of ECC!) It’s cheap, it’s available, it’s trivial to upgrade and expand, and there’s very few little gotchas in there: you get pretty much exactly what it looks like you get.
Also nice is that that you can have a Ship of Theseus NAS by upgrading what needs upgrading as you go along and aren’t tied into entire platform swaps unless it makes sense - my last big rebuild was 3 years ago, but this is basically a 10 year old NAS at this point.
My life got immensely easier when I figured out I did not need any features ZFS brought to the table, and I did not need any of the features K8s brought to the table, and that less is absolutely more.
Same here. Sometimes I get carried away, but overall, a very basic setup is more than fine. Nearly all of my devices run Ubuntu/Debian, and only the work-related stuff gets over-engineered.
It’s helpful for me to have something like a home lab where I can get hands-on experience with many different technologies. I’ve worn many hats, from developer to sysadmin, so a certain segment of my network tends to be built like Fort Knox. However, overall, 90% of my installs are minimalist with common best practices applied.
IMO a homelab for learning and a server that you’re self-hosting services on really aren’t the same thing and maybe shouldn’t be treated that way, if you can swing it.
I’d rather my password manager or jellyfin or my peertube instance or whatever not be relying on a tech stack I don’t entirely understand and might not be able to easily fix if it breaks.
I guess a lot of it is new to doing this vs greybeard split, since the longer I’ve done sysadmin work the less I care about the cool new thing and have a preference for the old, stable, documented, bugfixed, supported, and with a clear roadmap software.
I should probably get a job doing sysadmin work for a bank, lmao.
If they’re a beginner, what better way is there to learn? My home lab and their Windows laptop running VirtualBox are two different things. The topic of security is too deep to cover now, but if they don’t open it up to the world, there shouldn’t be much risk. Local access only should be safe enough, and they might try a dozen different services before settling on one—or none at all.
Edit: Sysadmin is boring, I need to create. DevOps or some other automation role would be perfect IMO
This is going to be a bit of my grumpy-greybeard, but again: if you’re learning, then something like Docker and docker-compose is much simpler and less prone to fuckups than a bunch of K8s.
If you don’t know ANYTHING about what you’re doing, starting with the simplest tools and then deciding if you want to learn the more complicated ones is probably a less insane path than jumping right into the configuration-as-code DevOps pipeline.
And, at that point, you should have your “production” and “testing” environments set up in such a way they won’t eat each other when you do an oops.
Oh ok, we’re talking about two very different things then. That’s a very strong opinion for a simple question. I understand what you mean a little better now. Docker is better, but Windows has some weirdness going on with Docker Desktop last time I tried using it. WSL + Docker might be even better to avoid the VM stuff altogether
btrfs with its send/receive (incremental fs-level backups) is already stable enough for mostly everything (just has some issues with raid 5/6), and is much more performant than zfs. And it is also in the linux kernel tree (quite hugely useful). Of course, if more zfs-like functionality is what you look for.
Honestly it’s not; BTRFS has been in my ‘that’s neat, but it’s still got a non-zero chance of deciding to light everything on fire because it’s bored’ list for, uh, a decade now?
The NAS build is old enough to more or less predate BTRFS being usable (closing in on a decade since I did the initial OS install, jeez) and none of the features matter for what I’m storing: if every drive in my NAS died today, I’d be very annoyed for a couple of hours during the rebuild, and would lose terrabytes of linux ISOs that I can just download again, if I wanted to use Jellyfin to install them a 2nd time. (Any data I care about is pulled offsite at least once a day, so I’ve got pretty comprehensive backups minus the ISOs.)
I know EXT4 and mergerfs and snapraid are not cool, or have shiny features, but I’ve also had zero problems with them over the last decade, even between Ubuntu upgrades (16.04, 18.04, 20.04, 22.04) and hardware platform upgrades (6600k, 8700k, 10950k) and the entire replacement of all the system drives (hdd -> ssd -> nvme) and the expansion of and replacement of dead HDDs, of varying sizes (4tb drives to 8tb drives to 16tb drives to some 20tb drives).
It all just… worked, and at no point was I concerned about the filesystem not working if I replaced or upgraded or changed something, which is not something ZFS or BTRFS would have guaranteed during that same time window.
My only experience with btrfs was when trying out Opensuse Tumbleweed.
Within a couple days my home partition was busted, next time it was another partition. No idea if the problems could be fixed as these were fairly new installations to give Opensuse a try and I couldn’t be bothered to fix a system that’s troubling me from the very beginning.
Between all the options that just work ™, btrfs is the one I’ve learned to stay away from.
IMHO 99% of the time btrfs features are used as a band-aid for things that would be much better done otherwise. Generally by using a stable distro and a decent backup solution (like Debian + Borg). And you get to use a truly stable, proven, boring fs ike ext4 or xfs.
You can protect important data with backups, which you should do anyway, and in practice I feel like the added complexity of BTRFS and ZFS is not worth the COW.
BTRFS is cool but they tried to cram way too much too fast into it and it added a ton of complexity and it’s still not 100% done after all these years. A COW mode for ext4 would have been adopted much faster.
Things like changes to TOS or services can be seriously mitigated by hosting it yourself. WHat happens if Spotify changes the music they host or inserts ads into everything. Well for me, nothing. On the flip side, if some of my stuff goes down, kids and wife will bark. But honestly its mostly set it and forget it.
KISS is a thing that applies to many things in life. Anything “smart” in your home should ideally function without your “smart” features working. Ie: light switches should be dumb light switches if something breaks etc etc. Also dont get caught in using rack or enterprise gear. You can learn just as much using smaller, fatter desktops with bigger fans and air cooling over a power hungry rack servers with 80mm fans that blow your eardrums out. My entire lab runs on old dell workstations and raspberry pis’
less is more, it’s fine to sunset stuff you don’t use enough to afford them using cpu cycles, memory and power
search warrants are a real thing and you should not trust others to use your infrastructure responsibly because you will be the one paying for it if they don’t.
Well, turns out that when you host a private service that allows others to share files, they might share files that they are not allowed to share. But in return your door gets kicked in in the morning and suddenly no one wants to take credit for the actual upload anymore.
Yeah… Becoming a public-facing file host for others to use seem rather irresponsible.
If/when a user’s given a means of uploading files to my server, there’s no method/permissions for them to share those files with others; it’s really just for them to send files to me. (Filebrowser is pretty good for that)
That and almost nothing is public access; auth or gtfo.
Cheap storage that I can use both locally and as a private cloud. Very convenient for piracy storing all my legally obtained files.
Network wide adblocking. Massive for mobile games/apps.
Pivate VPN. Really useful for using public networks and bypassing network restrictions.
Gives me an excuse to buy really cool, old server and networking hardware.
As for things I wish I knew… Don’t use windows for servers. Just don’t.
SMB sucks, try NFS.
Use docker, managing 5 or 10 different apps without containers is a nightmare.
Bold of you to assume I’m a computer scientist or engineer or that I have a degree lmao. I just hate ads, subscriptions and network restrictions, so I learned how to avoid those things. As for resources to get started… Look up TrueNAS scale. It basically does all of the work for you.
You either set the DNS settings per device to the system running PiHole / AdGuard Home, or if your router allows, set the DNS there. It’s ideal to set it on the router.
Any time a device makes a DNS request to a domain, it’s checked against the list. If found, it’s stopped. If not found, it gets sent upstream to your choice of a public DNS configured during setup. I use Cloudflare (1.1.1.1, 1.0.0.1).
My reason for self hosting is being in control of my shit, and not the cloud provider.
I run jellyfin, soulseek, freshRSS, audiobookshelf and nextcloud. All of that on a pi 4 with an SSD attached and then accessible via wireguard. Also that sad is accessible as nfs share.
As I had already known Linux very well before I’ve started my own cloud, I didn’t really had to learn much.
The biggest resource I could recommend is that GitHub repository where a huge amount of awesomely selfhosted solutions are linked.
For #2 and #3, it’s probably exceedingly obvious, but wish I would have truly understood ssh, remote VS Code, and enough git to put my configs on a git server.
So much easier to manage things now that I’m not trying to edit docker compose files with nano and hoping and praying I find the issue when I mess something up.
I know this is coming up on my radar, but I am not quite sure where to start. Might you have any resources on hand to point me in the right direction?
Especially once I have everything dialed in the way I want, I’d love to be able to pull from my own repo to get stuff running again/spin up a new instance
I’ve diverged a good bit since then of the services I’ve added and the specifics of how I configure things (I still use Traefik whereas I think they’ve shifted to Nginx), but they have a great example of a GitHub repo and what it looks like to manage a self-hosted server.
Our internet goes out periodically, so having everything local is really nice. I set up DNS on my router, so my TLS certs work fine without hitting the internet.
I wish someone would’ve taught me how to rip blurays. It wasn’t a big deal, but everything online made it sound super sketchy flashing firmware onto a Bluray drive.
I’m honestly not sure. I’m in CS and am really into Linux, so I honestly don’t know what would be helpful. I guess start small and get one thing working at a time. There’s a ton of resources online for all kinds of skill levels, and as long as you do one thing at a time, you should eventually see success.
Plex is a great example here. I’ve been Hetzner customer for many many years, and bought a lifetime license to Plex. Only to receive few months later a notification from Plex that I am no longer allowed to self-host Plex for myself(and only myself) at Hetzner and that they will block all access to my self-hosted Plex instance. I tried to ask for leniency or a refund, but that was wasted effort as well.
In short, I was caught on a crossfire when for-profit company tried to please hollywood by attempting to reduce piracy, so they could get new VC funding.
…
I am now a happy Jellyfin user and warmly recommend all Plex users to try it, the Jellyfin community is awesome!
(Use your favourite search engine to look up “Hetzner Plex ban” for more details)
Eh, my main reason for switching is that Caddy builds in LetsEncrypt. My Caddyfile is really simple, it’s just a reverse proxy that handles TLS and proxies regular HTTP to my services. I don’t have it serving any files or really knowing anything about the services. Here’s my setup:
HAProxy - directs subdomains to devices (in VPN) based on SNI
Caddy - manages TLS and LetsEncrypt and communicates w/ services over HTTP
Nginx - serves files for things like NextCloud, if needed (most services have their own HTTP server)
Each of these are separate Docker containers, which makes it really easy to manage and diagnose problems. The syntax for Nginx is more complex for 1&2, and the performance benefit of managing it all in one service just isn’t relevant for a self-hosted system, so I use this layered approach that makes each level as simple as possible.
You usually want less integration, not more. Simple self-contained things. Nginx is good at that. That’s also why you don’t want to use Nginx Proxy Manager or Certbot’s Nginx integration etc. It first looks like they make it easier, but there is too much hidden complexity under the hood.
Also, sooner or later you will run into some software that you would really like to try, which is only documented for Nginx and uses some sort of image caching or so, that is hard to replicate with Caddy etc.
I switched to Dehydrated (with dns-01 challenge), but Certbot itself is fine, the problem is the Nginx integration that tries to automatically change your Nginx config files.
??? The location and the file name of the certificates don’t change, so why would I have to do that?
On the contrary, before I disabled the certbot’s Nginx integration, every three months certbot would “manage” to break my Nginx and I had to manually repair it.
I think we are not talking about the same thing. I mean the Certbot extension that automatically modifies the Nginx config files. A telltale sign are usually the comments "#managed by certbot” that it likes to leave behind all over your config files.
Not sure I agree about proxy manager. Anything you need to access is in the gui. You can easily add advanced configs to the entries. Been using it for 5 or so years, and there hasnt been anything I was missing from using straight nginx before that.
The benefit of using config files is easy version management via git.
Makes it easy to rebuild from scratch and easy to rollback a change that breaks something
It lets you change reverse proxy or run a website with TLS completely independently of the certbot. The certbot deals with obtaining certs and leaves them in a dir, and the proxies or webservers just take them from that dir. If the proxy container breaks the certbot still does its thing etc.
It also makes it easier to do stuff like run different proxies in paralel for different things, chain proxies (for instance if you need to use a VPS because you can’t forward ports) and so on.
But it’s all for advanced setups, for basic stuff I’d still go with NPM.
Apparently traefik might be better if you run docker compose and such, as it does auto-discovery, which reduces the amount of manual configuration required.
I maintain the DNS plugin for Vultr and I can say that it’s “safe”, but if you’re worried you should check their source code.
I believe it’s easier to have a vulnerability in the external provider’s API (for example, caddy-dns/vultr uses govultr) than Caddy. But I wouldn’t take things for granted if I was skeptical about these plugins.
LOL, as a noob I went with caddy, then traefik before settling on NPM. Ironically, all the “QoL” features people brag about just made base configs harder and lead to shit randomly failing.
NPM has been solid as a rock, even if I have to do slightly more work, it’s more reliable and does what I want quicker and easier than the alternative.
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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.
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.
I had a similar experience with NixOS-anywhere and a VPS issue. Reset the OS, setup SSH key access and ran NixOS-anywhere and within like 15 minutes was back up and running.
Ansible is so simple yet so elegant.
I’ve been in love with the concept of ansible since I discovered it almost a decade ago, but I still hate how verbose it is, and how cumbersome the yaml based DSL is. You can have a role that basically does the job of 3 lines of bash and it’ll need 3 yaml files in 4 directories.
About 3 years ago I wrote a big ansible playbook that would fully configure my home server, desktop and laptop from a minimal arch install. Then I used said playbook for my laptop and server.
I just got a new laptop and went to look at the playbook but realised it probably needs to be updated in a few places. I got feelings of dread thinking about reading all that yaml and updating it.
So instead I’m just gonna rewrite everything in simple python with a few helper functions. The few roles I rewrote are already so much cleaner and shorter. Should be way faster and more user friendly and maintainable.
I’ll keep ansible for actual deployments.
I just moved everything from vultr to self host because of their latest changes.
EDIT: As I suspected, the changes that u/mesamunefire is referencing are the ones that taken out of context awhile back and incorrectly assumed to apply to user VPS’ and the data on them, which is not the case. Those terms only apply to information posted publicly to their website, like the community forums.
What changes would those be
Can’t speak for OP, but I bailed on Vultr because of how they handled the arbitration agreement change. Basically, I couldn’t access my containers without accepting the new TOS, so I “hacked” the website with Inspect Element so I could access support to close my account. For me, the arbitration change wasn’t the issue (my current host has similar policies), but being forced to accept a new TOS to use my account. I had no option do disagree or “remind me later,” I literally only had an “accept” button. I refuse to use any service that treats me like that.
I’m now with Hetzner, so we’ll see if they pull that nonsense. I only use the VPS to get around my ISP’s CGNAT (WireGuard VPN w/ HAProxy at the edge to route domains), so if they pull the same nonsense, I’ll copy my config to another VPS.
How is Hetzner?
Seems to work fine and meets my needs. I’m in the US though, and options are pretty limited. So far the only snag I’ve had was having to upload my ID, I guess their signup process is a little strict.
Nice. I’m all about new providers
https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1boz5ne/vultr_new_tos_claims_all_commercial_rights_to/ " You hereby grant to Vultr a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid-up, worldwide license (including the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to use, reproduce, process, adapt, publicly perform, publicly display, modify, prepare derivative works, publish, transmit and distribute each of your User Content, or any portion thereof, in any form, medium or distribution method now known or hereafter existing, known or developed, and otherwise use and commercialize the User Content in any way that Vultr deems appropriate, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties, for purposes of providing the Services to you."
And you could not opt out. You had to click agree in order to login. That’s the biggest one.
It was later removed after the fact but there were other changes that sucked.
That only applies to posts on their forums. Not the content on your VPS
Nope. It’s the content.
Incorrect. It applies only to the forums. It does not apply in any way, shape, or form to your VPS or the content on it. It’s one thing to be mistaken, but let’s not spread misinformation on purpose.
I had customer data as well as some personal stuff on a couple of servers. It was low hanging fruit so I just started self hosting. It’s silly how much rights they suddenly wanted. Not worth the hassle, they just provide basic boxes to begin with.
They also would not let you login without accepting those new rights now were you able to opt out. So I just threw my infa on some local systems, deleted everything and then had to say yes to their TOS. Again silly and great way to lose business.
Not needing Kubernetes is a broad statement. It allows for better management of storage and literally gives you a configurable reverse-proxy configured with YAML if you know what you’re doing.
Yes, but you don’t need Kubernetes from the start.
Well I guess podman works fine for the first few months. Interestingly I still use build-ah heavily for building my custom images
I find a lot of stuff is using docker compose, which works with Podman, but using straight docker is easier, especially if it’s nothing web-facing
Funnily enough Docker compose has never worked for me on Podman. There always seems to be something that is incompatible (also due to me running on Debian). However, I feel like it should become a standard amongst homelabbers and professionals to use Kubernetes manifests going forward, since it is the most portable.
Heavy disagree on the storage statement from what I’ve used and seen but it works for lots of people so not going to detract. NFS is always a pain but longhorn seems to have advantages
NFS is a pain, no question about it. I used to use longhorn but these days since I’m doing a single node k3s I’m just doing hostpath. It’s that PVCs make intuitive sense to me, but I guess podman will likely work just fine for such cases other than canary deployments and OOTB service-meshes
It is much easier to buy one “hefty” physical machine and run ProxMox with virtual machines for servers than it is to run multiple Raspberry Pis. After living that life for years, I’m a ProxMox shill now. Backups are important (read the other comments), and ProxMox makes backup/restore easy. Because eventually you will fuck a server up beyond repair, you will lose data, and you will feel terrible about it. Learn from my mistakes.
Podman quadlets have been a blessing. They basically let you manage containers as if they were simple services. You just plop a container unit file in
/etc/containers/systemd/, daemon-reload and presto, you’ve got a service that other containers or services can depend on.Is containers here used in the same context as docker? I’m not familiar with podman.
Just about but it’s more experimental.
The big thing for #2 would be to seperate out what you actually need vs what people keep recommending.
General guidance is useful, but there’s a lot of ‘You need ZFS!’ and ‘You should use K8s!’ and ‘Use X software!’
My life got immensely easier when I figured out I did not need any features ZFS brought to the table, and I did not need any of the features K8s brought to the table, and that less is absolutely more. I ended up doing MergerFS with a proper offsite backup method because, well, it’s shockingly low-complexity.
And I ended up doing Docker with a bunch of compose files and bind mounts, because it’s shockingly low-complexity. And it’s just running on Debian, instead of some OS that has a couple of layers of additional software to make things “easier” because, again, it’s low-complexity.
I can re-deploy the entire stack on new hardware in about ~10 minutes (I’ve tested this a few times just to make sure my backup scripts work), and there’s basically zero vendor tie-in or dependencies that you’d have to get working first since it’s just a pile of tarballs and packages from the distro’s package manager on, well, ANY distro.
Can you elaborate on how your backup script re-deploys on new hardware? Sounds very nice to have.
It’s a really simple script.
Everything is deployed with a docker compose, and all the docker volume data are bind mounts and, for example, a Jellyfin install would have everything in /stacks/jellyfin.
The backup script makes a tarball of each service individually (and stops the stack if there’s anything in there doing database things or anything else that might end up being inconsistent by just archiving the filesystem), and uploads them to a S3 storage provider AND burns them to a BluRay.
The recovery script does the opposite: it downloads and unarchives the data.
As long as you’re on Linux and have Docker, it should just magically work.
I see! Thanks, will try to back up my docker compose services this way.
If you write the script yourself, just make sure you test it a couple of times, and preferably with different datasets from different runs.
I found some edgecase stuff that would have prevented a restore even after I had tested it successfully (some permission issues due to changes in containers and whatnot were resulting in less than the expected data being archived and restored) a couple of times.
I have made that migration myself going from a Raspberry PI 4 to a n100 based NAS. It was 10 minutes for the software stack as you said This not taking into account media migration which was done on the background over a few hours on WiFi (I had everything on an external hard drive at the time).
That last part is the only thing I would change about my self hosting solution. Yes, the NAS has a nice form factor, is power efficient and has so far been very optimal for my needs (no lag like rpi4), however I have seen they don’t really sell motherboard or parts to repair them. They want you to replace it with another one. Reason 2 on the same is vendor lock in. Depending on the options you select when creating the storage groups/pools (whatever they are called), you could be stuck needing to get something from the same vendor to read your data if the device stops working but the disks are salvageable. Reason 3 is they’ve had security incidents so a lot of the “features” I would not recommend using ever to avoid exposing your data to ransomware over the internet. I don’t trust their competitors either. I know how commercial software is made with the smallest amount of care for security best practices.
Yeah, I just use plain boring desktop hardware. (Oh no! I’m experiencing data corruption due to the lack of ECC!) It’s cheap, it’s available, it’s trivial to upgrade and expand, and there’s very few little gotchas in there: you get pretty much exactly what it looks like you get.
Also nice is that that you can have a Ship of Theseus NAS by upgrading what needs upgrading as you go along and aren’t tied into entire platform swaps unless it makes sense - my last big rebuild was 3 years ago, but this is basically a 10 year old NAS at this point.
So did you buy ecc ram?
Same here. Sometimes I get carried away, but overall, a very basic setup is more than fine. Nearly all of my devices run Ubuntu/Debian, and only the work-related stuff gets over-engineered.
It’s helpful for me to have something like a home lab where I can get hands-on experience with many different technologies. I’ve worn many hats, from developer to sysadmin, so a certain segment of my network tends to be built like Fort Knox. However, overall, 90% of my installs are minimalist with common best practices applied.
IMO a homelab for learning and a server that you’re self-hosting services on really aren’t the same thing and maybe shouldn’t be treated that way, if you can swing it.
I’d rather my password manager or jellyfin or my peertube instance or whatever not be relying on a tech stack I don’t entirely understand and might not be able to easily fix if it breaks.
I guess a lot of it is new to doing this vs greybeard split, since the longer I’ve done sysadmin work the less I care about the cool new thing and have a preference for the old, stable, documented, bugfixed, supported, and with a clear roadmap software.
I should probably get a job doing sysadmin work for a bank, lmao.
If they’re a beginner, what better way is there to learn? My home lab and their Windows laptop running VirtualBox are two different things. The topic of security is too deep to cover now, but if they don’t open it up to the world, there shouldn’t be much risk. Local access only should be safe enough, and they might try a dozen different services before settling on one—or none at all.
Edit: Sysadmin is boring, I need to create. DevOps or some other automation role would be perfect IMO
This is going to be a bit of my grumpy-greybeard, but again: if you’re learning, then something like Docker and docker-compose is much simpler and less prone to fuckups than a bunch of K8s.
If you don’t know ANYTHING about what you’re doing, starting with the simplest tools and then deciding if you want to learn the more complicated ones is probably a less insane path than jumping right into the configuration-as-code DevOps pipeline.
And, at that point, you should have your “production” and “testing” environments set up in such a way they won’t eat each other when you do an oops.
Oh ok, we’re talking about two very different things then.
That’s a very strong opinion for a simple question.I understand what you mean a little better now. Docker is better, but Windows has some weirdness going on with Docker Desktop last time I tried using it. WSL + Docker might be even better to avoid the VM stuff altogetherbtrfs with its send/receive (incremental fs-level backups) is already stable enough for mostly everything (just has some issues with raid 5/6), and is much more performant than zfs. And it is also in the linux kernel tree (quite hugely useful). Of course, if more zfs-like functionality is what you look for.
Honestly it’s not; BTRFS has been in my ‘that’s neat, but it’s still got a non-zero chance of deciding to light everything on fire because it’s bored’ list for, uh, a decade now?
The NAS build is old enough to more or less predate BTRFS being usable (closing in on a decade since I did the initial OS install, jeez) and none of the features matter for what I’m storing: if every drive in my NAS died today, I’d be very annoyed for a couple of hours during the rebuild, and would lose terrabytes of linux ISOs that I can just download again, if I wanted to use Jellyfin to install them a 2nd time. (Any data I care about is pulled offsite at least once a day, so I’ve got pretty comprehensive backups minus the ISOs.)
I know EXT4 and mergerfs and snapraid are not cool, or have shiny features, but I’ve also had zero problems with them over the last decade, even between Ubuntu upgrades (16.04, 18.04, 20.04, 22.04) and hardware platform upgrades (6600k, 8700k, 10950k) and the entire replacement of all the system drives (hdd -> ssd -> nvme) and the expansion of and replacement of dead HDDs, of varying sizes (4tb drives to 8tb drives to 16tb drives to some 20tb drives).
It all just… worked, and at no point was I concerned about the filesystem not working if I replaced or upgraded or changed something, which is not something ZFS or BTRFS would have guaranteed during that same time window.
“Already stable enough”
My only experience with btrfs was when trying out Opensuse Tumbleweed. Within a couple days my home partition was busted, next time it was another partition. No idea if the problems could be fixed as these were fairly new installations to give Opensuse a try and I couldn’t be bothered to fix a system that’s troubling me from the very beginning.
Between all the options that just work ™, btrfs is the one I’ve learned to stay away from.
EDIT: that was four or five years ago
And I’ve been using it for
eightsix of those 15 in RAID 5/6 with zero issues, so YMMW I guess. Sorry you experienced problems.IMHO 99% of the time btrfs features are used as a band-aid for things that would be much better done otherwise. Generally by using a stable distro and a decent backup solution (like Debian + Borg). And you get to use a truly stable, proven, boring fs ike ext4 or xfs.
Stable yes, but no protection from bitrot, and the journal of ext4 is the band aid, instead of a cow fs like zfs or btrfs.
You can protect important data with backups, which you should do anyway, and in practice I feel like the added complexity of BTRFS and ZFS is not worth the COW.
BTRFS is cool but they tried to cram way too much too fast into it and it added a ton of complexity and it’s still not 100% done after all these years. A COW mode for ext4 would have been adopted much faster.
Things like changes to TOS or services can be seriously mitigated by hosting it yourself. WHat happens if Spotify changes the music they host or inserts ads into everything. Well for me, nothing. On the flip side, if some of my stuff goes down, kids and wife will bark. But honestly its mostly set it and forget it.
KISS is a thing that applies to many things in life. Anything “smart” in your home should ideally function without your “smart” features working. Ie: light switches should be dumb light switches if something breaks etc etc. Also dont get caught in using rack or enterprise gear. You can learn just as much using smaller, fatter desktops with bigger fans and air cooling over a power hungry rack servers with 80mm fans that blow your eardrums out. My entire lab runs on old dell workstations and raspberry pis’
https://www.servethehome.com/ -
Is there a story attached to no. 2?
Well, turns out that when you host a private service that allows others to share files, they might share files that they are not allowed to share. But in return your door gets kicked in in the morning and suddenly no one wants to take credit for the actual upload anymore.
Yeah… Becoming a public-facing file host for others to use seem rather irresponsible.
If/when a user’s given a means of uploading files to my server, there’s no method/permissions for them to share those files with others; it’s really just for them to send files to me. (Filebrowser is pretty good for that)
That and almost nothing is public access; auth or gtfo.
Benefits:
Cheap storage that I can use both locally and as a private cloud. Very convenient for
piracystoring all my legally obtained files.Network wide adblocking. Massive for mobile games/apps.
Pivate VPN. Really useful for using public networks and bypassing network restrictions.
Gives me an excuse to buy really cool, old server and networking hardware.
As for things I wish I knew… Don’t use windows for servers. Just don’t.
SMB sucks, try NFS.
Use docker, managing 5 or 10 different apps without containers is a nightmare.
Bold of you to assume I’m a computer scientist or engineer or that I have a degree lmao. I just hate ads, subscriptions and network restrictions, so I learned how to avoid those things. As for resources to get started… Look up TrueNAS scale. It basically does all of the work for you.
How’s the network wide ad blocking work, that would solve a big issue with my kids.
You either set the DNS settings per device to the system running PiHole / AdGuard Home, or if your router allows, set the DNS there. It’s ideal to set it on the router.
Any time a device makes a DNS request to a domain, it’s checked against the list. If found, it’s stopped. If not found, it gets sent upstream to your choice of a public DNS configured during setup. I use Cloudflare (1.1.1.1, 1.0.0.1).
My reason for self hosting is being in control of my shit, and not the cloud provider.
I run jellyfin, soulseek, freshRSS, audiobookshelf and nextcloud. All of that on a pi 4 with an SSD attached and then accessible via wireguard. Also that sad is accessible as nfs share.
As I had already known Linux very well before I’ve started my own cloud, I didn’t really had to learn much.
The biggest resource I could recommend is that GitHub repository where a huge amount of awesomely selfhosted solutions are linked.
Awesome Self-Hosted
Yes that one, thanks.
For #2 and #3, it’s probably exceedingly obvious, but wish I would have truly understood ssh, remote VS Code, and enough git to put my configs on a git server.
So much easier to manage things now that I’m not trying to edit docker compose files with nano and hoping and praying I find the issue when I mess something up.
I know this is coming up on my radar, but I am not quite sure where to start. Might you have any resources on hand to point me in the right direction?
Especially once I have everything dialed in the way I want, I’d love to be able to pull from my own repo to get stuff running again/spin up a new instance
Honestly, I learned a ton from these guys: https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/
I’ve diverged a good bit since then of the services I’ve added and the specifics of how I configure things (I still use Traefik whereas I think they’ve shifted to Nginx), but they have a great example of a GitHub repo and what it looks like to manage a self-hosted server.
I wish I knew not to trust closed source self-hosted applications, such as Plex. Would have saved a lot of time and money.
Can you elaborate?
Plex is a great example here. I’ve been Hetzner customer for many many years, and bought a lifetime license to Plex. Only to receive few months later a notification from Plex that I am no longer allowed to self-host Plex for myself(and only myself) at Hetzner and that they will block all access to my self-hosted Plex instance. I tried to ask for leniency or a refund, but that was wasted effort as well.
In short, I was caught on a crossfire when for-profit company tried to please hollywood by attempting to reduce piracy, so they could get new VC funding.
…
I am now a happy Jellyfin user and warmly recommend all Plex users to try it, the Jellyfin community is awesome!
(Use your favourite search engine to look up “Hetzner Plex ban” for more details)
@zutto @warlaan Searching about, this was Plex banning the use of Plex on Hetzner’s IP block, right? Not a decision made by Hetzner?
Yes, correct.
I apologize if someone misunderstood my reply, Plex was the bad actor here.
Are you still on Hetzner? How’s their customer support in general?
Still with Hetzner yeah. Haven’t had to deal with Hetzner customer support in the recent years at all, but they have been great in the past.
Caddy. Once you try Caddy there’s no turning back to Nginx or Apache.
That’s what everyone thinks for a while, and then they go back to Nginx.
I went from NGinx to HAProxy for 5 years, now on Caddy for 2 and loving it. So much simpler and efficient.
Eh, my main reason for switching is that Caddy builds in LetsEncrypt. My Caddyfile is really simple, it’s just a reverse proxy that handles TLS and proxies regular HTTP to my services. I don’t have it serving any files or really knowing anything about the services. Here’s my setup:
Each of these are separate Docker containers, which makes it really easy to manage and diagnose problems. The syntax for Nginx is more complex for 1&2, and the performance benefit of managing it all in one service just isn’t relevant for a self-hosted system, so I use this layered approach that makes each level as simple as possible.
As someone who just learned about Caddy, could you elaborate?
You usually want less integration, not more. Simple self-contained things. Nginx is good at that. That’s also why you don’t want to use Nginx Proxy Manager or Certbot’s Nginx integration etc. It first looks like they make it easier, but there is too much hidden complexity under the hood.
Also, sooner or later you will run into some software that you would really like to try, which is only documented for Nginx and uses some sort of image caching or so, that is hard to replicate with Caddy etc.
How do you obtain ssl certs then?
I switched to Dehydrated (with dns-01 challenge), but Certbot itself is fine, the problem is the Nginx integration that tries to automatically change your Nginx config files.
Do you manually update the config every 3 months?
??? The location and the file name of the certificates don’t change, so why would I have to do that?
On the contrary, before I disabled the certbot’s Nginx integration, every three months certbot would “manage” to break my Nginx and I had to manually repair it.
I think we are not talking about the same thing. I mean the Certbot extension that automatically modifies the Nginx config files. A telltale sign are usually the comments "#managed by certbot” that it likes to leave behind all over your config files.
Not sure I agree about proxy manager. Anything you need to access is in the gui. You can easily add advanced configs to the entries. Been using it for 5 or so years, and there hasnt been anything I was missing from using straight nginx before that.
The benefit of using config files is easy version management via git.
Makes it easy to rebuild from scratch and easy to rollback a change that breaks something
Fair enough. I manage the same by backing up the vm its on.
I’m currently in the process of separating the certificate renewal service from the reverse proxy completely.
But if you’re just starting out Nginx Proxy Manager makes it so easy.
Out of curiosity, what’s the benefit of splitting those?
It lets you change reverse proxy or run a website with TLS completely independently of the certbot. The certbot deals with obtaining certs and leaves them in a dir, and the proxies or webservers just take them from that dir. If the proxy container breaks the certbot still does its thing etc.
It also makes it easier to do stuff like run different proxies in paralel for different things, chain proxies (for instance if you need to use a VPS because you can’t forward ports) and so on.
But it’s all for advanced setups, for basic stuff I’d still go with NPM.
Cool makes sense, thanks for the reply! And yeah, I don’t think I’m quite there yet.
I’ve been meaning to try Caddy, but I just can’t even imagine something simpler than NginxProxyManager.
Apparently traefik might be better if you run docker compose and such, as it does auto-discovery, which reduces the amount of manual configuration required.
Silly question how safe are caddy plugins? (especially dns challenge modules like cloudflare, duckdns, etc).
https://github.com/caddy-dns https://github.com/caddy-dns/cloudflare/tree/master
Not sure if those plugins are covered by caddy’s security disclosure policy
https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/security
I maintain the DNS plugin for Vultr and I can say that it’s “safe”, but if you’re worried you should check their source code.
I believe it’s easier to have a vulnerability in the external provider’s API (for example, caddy-dns/vultr uses govultr) than Caddy. But I wouldn’t take things for granted if I was skeptical about these plugins.
LOL, as a noob I went with caddy, then traefik before settling on NPM. Ironically, all the “QoL” features people brag about just made base configs harder and lead to shit randomly failing.
NPM has been solid as a rock, even if I have to do slightly more work, it’s more reliable and does what I want quicker and easier than the alternative.
For 2.: use dns-01 challenge to generate wildcard SSL certs. Saves so much time and nerves.
My open-source, zero dependency JS library for requesting and generating certs with dns01: https://github.com/clshortfuse/acmejs
I only coded for name.com but it is compatible with anything really. Also can run in the browser, which could be useful in a pinch.