I Wish My Web Server Were in the Corner of My Room (2022)
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Self-HostingHome ServersRaspberry Pi
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Self-Hosting
Home Servers
Raspberry Pi
The article discusses the joys of having a personal web server in one's home, and the discussion revolves around the practicalities and benefits of self-hosting.
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This one was: Oct 2022 - 440 comments.
Kinda breaks MX records so don't so it if you wanna receive emails on that domain, too
Is the CNAME on the root of the domain, @?
Just wanted to ask since I’ve been bitten by that.
I do something similar, but I have them all under <service>.home.<example.com>
But that’s because I do have resources outside. Just helps my mental model to name space them.
I also played around with injecting a tiny script into the proxied response to just add a small drop down menu with all services I've got available. .. while that worked, finding a good place to inject that menu was a chore so it's currently disabled again :)
A corn tab you say? I'm all ears!
I assume they meant crontab (TIL that means "cron table", never wondered before)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron
I suppose I would have wondered if I had learned these names now, back when I learned about them I just took them without questions apparently.
[1] https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin
https://www.duckdns.org
[1]: https://takingnames.io/ [2]: https://boringproxy.io/
You guys really need an Academy Anglaise indeed! (I wasn't aware that does not exist before your comment)
Honestly if we (in England) really had an institute of that kind we'd probably just end up formalising the weird spellings and grammar as being "right" instead of what we have now where our grammar rules are descriptive instead of prescriptive. Who knows how the differences with American, Indian, Australian, etc. dialects of English would be handled, but I'm sure we'd make a big mess of it somehow.
Edit: incidentally I now live in Sweden where there is such an institute, and they do seem (to my ignorant understanding) to make sensible updates to the dictionaries etc. to reflect actual modern pronounciation - but I'm still sure my homeland would figure out a way to mess it all up ;)
"It's" is one I've struggled with a lot. I understand "It's" -> "It is" but my brain wants to add an "'s" for possessive-ness. It just feels more right. I'm been able to mostly break that bad habit but I still don't like it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4rrNKu5qp38
It was a major milestone for me when I made my first its/it's mistake in writing :)
Suppose you want to host your own email, or a mastodon server or similar. You download this application to your local computer. You pick what you want to install. It asks you which domain name provider you want to use, and which server host you want to use (eg. local or hetzner). It guides you into creating accounts for these services. Then uses their API, to set up the appropriate server, DNS settings etc.
It might not be fully automated, but something like this can seriously bring down the skill floor needed to host anything.
The most obvious solution would be make a small PC: more powerful and bigger fans means less noise. I've been considering something like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr5MjhgPz_c)... but then how am I supposed to use it? Yes, I can ssh into it, but what if it fails to start? Just last month my Thinkpad server failed to restart properly. This was a trivial fix but it being a laptop whose lid I can just open and use immediately made it an extremely easy fix, which would not be true for a PC.
Thing is, I know that dumb terminals exist, ie, a screen, keyboard, and trackpad that takes the form-factor of a laptop but has no actual internals, it's just a convenient interface when plugged into a server. I've seen them. I've tried searching for them but there doesn't seem to be an agreed-upon search category, and the ones I manage to find are more expensive than the PC itself and are usually designed as a server-rack drawer.
Genuinely, what do people do here? Do they just have their server setup somewhere like a desktop? Or are people keeping spare monitors, keyboards, and mice around that they then need to unpack, plug in, and use awkwardly before putting it all away again?
Around me, most days I can stop at goodwill and get a monitor and keyboard for $30 or less.
The issue isn't cost in this case, it's the storage and effort of having to lug it out and put it back afterwards. Even if someone gave me an old screen and keyboard for free, I'm still not going to build that server PC. I've been looking into PiKVM as advised by another comment and they're pretty pricey at ~£200 but that's genuinely orders of magnitude more preferable. In another conversation on another platform, I was told about nexdock, which is more for docking phones but can be used as a dumb terminal, which is pretty enticing... though their website is pretty dubious, eg: the shop doesn't even tell me what version of the nexdock I'd be buying.
Then connect it once and leave it. :p
Since you're mentioning opening laptop's lid I assume you mean literally failing to start, as after power cycling. For that, wouldn't simple hitting the power button be enough? It certainly doesn't require keyboard. If you plan to place it somewhere not easily accessible, there is Wake on LAN, which most modern PC motherboards are going to support.
If some maintenance task cannot be done with ssh/tmux, you can always use remote desktop software, in local network even RDP will do. And if something went wrong enough for you to not be able to connect to the server remotely then there is indeed no way around bringing and connecting a spare keyboard and monitor, but events like that should be quite rare normally.
I'd say it's needed about once a year at most though. Servers don't just fail to start, normally.
They're stored together in a small box with all needed cables, so they're easy to take with me to whichever computer is having issues. In practice I only use them a few times per year.
In the performance window of "old Thinkpad", why not go fanless? Those lovely little Intel N150 mini-pc boxes are mostly fanless and completely silent - I have on my desk running Jellyfin/web server/etc, and it's inaudible under load.
> but what if it fails to start?
In ~15 years of running headless linux boxes, I've never had one crippled to the point it wouldn't boot as far as ssh.
or really any cheap IP based KVM is what you’re looking for
Upstream is usually awful.
(At least in the USA.)
Where in the USA are you?
And for some reason, nowadays over 5G you get pretty much the exact same speed/price combos as for DSL or cable, only with less guarantees.
I can get gigabit for about €32,50 a month. 2gbps for about €40. Unfortunately, the cheap ISP that offers these rates doesn't have IPv6 so I'll stay with my current one. €70/mo would get me 4gbps symmetrical with another ISP. All of those include a WiFi 7 capable router, of course.
Prices have increased, but high prices are a local problem. The €35 price for cheap gigabit would equate to about €20 in 2000, so I think prices have stagnated alright, but speeds have evolved a lot since then.
I could get up to 2 Gbit by making a phone call to my curent ISP but why?
Trying to host from wireless would probably not work so well. Do they even give you a real ipv4? And even if so, you're round trip time is inherently randomized which leads to tcp backoff and slowdowns in this context.
(No matter how personal a Web site, the occasional prospective employer will go look at it. If you're a techbro, you normally don't want this site sometimes acting like it's running on a potato and wet string. Even if you still keep your 2002 visual design, ahem.)
If that's not a concern, you can run a nonessential Web server from home, and it's fun and concrete, like the author suggests. You might want to forward/proxy the traffic through some external cloud server (even if you don't use CDN/caching features), to shield your home pipe a bit.
The few times I ran one (was a sysop on a few, but remotely), I was always a little creeped out that I could see people typing messages, etc. Felt like invading their privacy.
Of course, the physical side still needs some work. Ideally one needs a battery backup and a small solar panel, so that you can weather the odd power cut. And constant connectivity is trivial (but a cheap cellphone as a backup for when your line drops probably gets you 99% of the way there)
Backup power is easily achieved with a UPS, and backup internet connection with an LTE router (or two).
But the feeling of being able to tinker with something physically in your own space? Cannot be beat. You can do so much that isn't possible over SSH, just because it is there.
If someone connects with a request, is that metered as ingress/downloading, and if your server responds, it is metered as an egress/uploading?
If so, that means an unlimited plan is a must, and even then, might ISPs flag you for abuse if large frequent requests/responses are being received/sent by the server?
If it’s just a personal site, you can just let it go unavailable during an outage (and maybe rely on a CDN to keep it partially functioning).
https://cyfuture.cloud/kb/howto/how-to-create-a-cache-server
You can actually view the interface statistics publicly here: https://collectd.levitati.ng/archpi/interface/end0
But in the age of scrapers, APT bots and whatnot, I don't want that kind of whirlwind in my home network, even though I can isolate it to its DMZ.
I sit in front of a fat pipe at work and can witness what a single, lone server has to stand against even with best practices applied to minimize its attack surface.
This is why all my personal servers are out there. I don't want my network to become a defense point.
It's made _so_ much easier simply by installing a free cloudflare tunnel in front of it.