Yep same. Amazing what you can pull out of the skip these days and run for nothing. I lifted a couple of dead Lenovo P720 workstations out and managed to get a working dual Xeon silver 32 core machine with 64Gb of ECC RAM.

Uses a bunch of power but two orders of magnitude less in cash than buying another ECC ram desktop over 3 years.

If it blows up it cost me nothing other than an hour of part swapping.

  > If it blows up it cost me nothing other than an hour of part swapping.

I'm not sure if that a sign of the coming apocalypse.

I hope it reflects the fact that most people don't have a great understanding of IT and cyber security rather than a sign of a sick world ;)

same here, using the old laptops until they are physically so damaged that they can't be used anymore and the cost to repair exceeds the cost to replace them. got one in it's last breaths. working fine mostly, but the keyboard is badly damaged, so needs an external keyboard to be useful. for work of course i need something stronger, but when i need to replace my work laptop my kids get an "upgrade" :-)

> I bet Framework laptops would take this dynamic into overdrive

It’s in my (long-term) TODO list to build my own enclosure for a Framework motherboard, to make a portable server to carry around during long trips. Something compact that carries the punch of an i7. One day…

what are the specs ? I use a 10yo thinkpad with a core i3 and arch based desktop, sometimes the web is too heavy (discord or similar webapps) but it's mostly fine.

it's true that with a bit of education, you can get pretty far with old machines

There would be some sort of internal ‘switch’ that can be bypassed I believe

Yep. I have bought 3 or 4 for different uses. So perfect as servers. I run plex and lots of docker containers. Development. Etc. all of those machines are so useful for console Linux and containers.

Macbooks do this as well automatically if kept plugged in for a certain period of time.

Yeah I would recommend this too. I've only used Dell Optiplex Micro series, no issues so far. They use external PSU similar to those in laptops, which helps with power efficiency.

Something with 8th gen i5 can be had for about 100-150 USD from ebay, and that's more than powerful enough for nearly all self-hosting needs. Supports 32-64gb of RAM and two SSD.

> M910 with an i5

These are great and the M920q is also nice.

At 100 to 160 used these are a steal, just test the disks before you commit to long term projects with them (some have a fair bit of wear). Its newer cousins quickly climb in price to the $300+ range (still refurb/used)

The bleeding edge of this form factor is the Minisforum MS-01. At almost 500 bucks for the no ram/storage part it's a big performance jump for a large price jump. This isnt a terrible deal if you need dual SFP+ ports (and you might) and a free PCIE slot but it is a large price jump.

I have a 2009 MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo) which I wanted to give a similar fate, but unfortunately it idles at 18W on Debian.

I hope Asahi for Mac Mini M4 becomes a thing. That machine will be an amazing little server 10 years from now.

To be honest I never understood the purpose of RAID for personal use cases. RAID is not a backup, so you need frequent, incremental backups anyway. It only makes sense for things where you need that 99.99% uptime. OK, maybe if you're hosting a service that many people depend on then I could see it (although I suspect downtime would still be dominated by other causes) but then I go over to r/DataHoarder and I see people using RAID for their media vaults which just blows my mind.

Absolutely!

> if you want the resilience offered by RAID

IMHO, at that stage, you are knowledgeable enough to not listed to me anymore :P

My argument is more on the lines of using an old laptop as a gateway drug to the self-hosting world. Given enough time everyone will have a 42U rack in their basements.

> Most laptops cannot do parity of any sort because of a lack of SATA/M.2 ports

raid is NOT media or connection dependent and will happily do parity over mixed media and even remote blockdevs

Nodes don't need to store data, and they can be PXE booted if they have a little RAM, so they only need redundant devices for their system partitions if you want to boot them locally (how often will they really be rebooted, though?). A hard drive plus a flash / USB drive would be plenty.

Consumer NASes have been around for 20 years, now, though, so I think most people would just mount or map their storage.

And: they have a crash cart (keyboard, mouse and display) and battery backup built-in. An old laptop is perfect for starting a homelab. The only major downside I can think of, and as another commenter already mentioned, is the limited storage (RAID) options.

> free and power efficient

Free yes. Power efficient no. Unless you switch your laptops every two years, it's unlikely to be more efficient.

Not the guy you’re asking, but I’d say risk of fire, yes. The laptop will be safer without a battery than it is with one, regardless of safeguards.

As said by others, mostly the fire risk. They can catch on fire, although rare, and a bad contact or flaky power source could make it go into many charge/discharge cycles in a short period of time. Batteries also degrade faster if it is too warm, cheap laptops often have terrible thermals and you could also shove it in a closet. A combination of those will increase the fire risk.

Also when using an old laptop, the battery could be pretty beaten up (too many cycles or prolonged exposure to heat) or it could have been replaced by a cheap non-compliant alternative, making it harder to trust wrt fire risk. And if you have to buy a brand-new one to reduce that risk, it immediately changes all the economic incentives to use an old laptop (if you are gonna spend money, might as well buy something more suitable).

> many won't have an easily removable battery

That’s true, although I’d guess majority can still have the battery disconnected once you get access to the motherboard.

I wish I took a picture of my MacBook pro mid-2015, which happens to be my home hosted stuff server, before I changed it's battery. As it was just sitting in a corner, almost forgotten, I noticed the problem when cleaning, one day, and it started wobbling when I moved the piece of furniture it was sitting on. Once I gave it to a guy who disposes of such things, he told me I was lucky it didn't explode.

Also interested in the answer to this.

As a counterpoint my Lenovo X1 that was fresh from the factory had a battery swell so bad it cracked the case. So I think the risk being addressed was that, unless you're looking at the device every single day, the battery poses a fire/explosion risk that isn't worth it to some people

A handy mostly straightforward UI with built in backup/restore and other useful tools.

It's hardly a requirement but if someone is just starting to learn, proxmox has lots of documentation on how to do things and the UI keeps you from footgunning yourself copy/pasting config code off websites/LLM too much.

Personally, I didn't want to manage my management/virtualization layer. I wanted something that was an all-in iso that wouldn't tempt me to configure at all. I wanted to be able to restore just my container backups to a new PM install without worrying about anything missing at the host (to the extent possible).

I also like that Proxmox can be fully managed from the web UI. I'm sure most of this is possible with LCD on some distro, but Proxmox was the standard at the time I set it up (LXD wasn't as polished then)

Maybe. There are pros and cons. Docker means you can run two+ different things on the same machine and update them separately. This is sometimes important when one project releases a feature you really want, while a different one just did a major update that broke something you care about. Running on the OS often means you have to update both.

Single binary sometimes works, but means you need more memory and disk space. (granted much less a concern today than it was back in 1996 when I first started self hosting, but it still can be an issue)

I would agree with that.

Docker has a lot of use cases but self hosting is not one of them.

When self-hosting you wanna think long term and the fact you will loose interest in the fiddling after a while. So sticking with software packaged in a good distribution is probably the way to go. This is the forgotten added value of a Linux or BSD distribution, a coherent system with maintenance and an easy upgrade path.

The exception are things like Umbrel which I would say use docker as their package manager and maintain everything, so it is ok.

  - limited impact on host systems: uninstalling things doesn't leave behind trash, limited stability risks to host OS when running containers, plus you can run a separate MariaDB/MySQL/PostgreSQL/etc. instance for each of your software package, which can be updated or changed independently when you want
  - obvious configuration around persistent storage: I can specify which folders I care about backing up and where the data that the program operates on is stored, vs all of the runtime stuff it actually needs to work (which is also separate for each instance of the program, instead of shared dependencies where some versions might break other packages)
  - internal DNS which makes networking simpler: I can refer to containers by name and route traffic to them, running my own web server in front of everything as an ingress (IMO simpler than the Kubernetes ingress)... or just expose a port directly if I want to do that instead, or maybe expose it on a particular IP address such as only 127.0.0.1, which in combination with port forwarding can be really nice to have
  - clear resource limits: I can prevent a single software package from acting up and bringing the whole server to a standstill, for example, by allowing it to only spike up to 3/4 CPU cores under load, so some heavyweight Java or Ruby software starting up doesn't mean everything else on the server freezing for the duration of that, same for RAM which JVM based software also loves to waste and where -Xmx isn't even a hard limit and lies to you somewhat
  - clear configuration (mostly): environment variables work exceedingly well, especially when everything can be contained within a YAML file, or maybe some .env files or secrets mechanism if you're feeling fancy, but it's really nice to see that 12 Factor principles are living on, instead of me always needing to mess around with separate bind mounted configuration files

Oh my god no, docker is so damn useful I will never return to package managers/manual installation.

    services.postgres.enable = true;
    services.nginx.enable = true;
    services.keycloak.enable = true;

    containers.backend = {
        config = { config, pkgs, lib, ... }: {
            services.postgres.enable = true;
            services.keycloak.enable = true;
        };
    };

I run Debian on my machine, so package are not really up to date and I would be stuck, not being able to update my self hosted software because some dependencies were too old.

And then, some software would require older one and break when you update the dependencies for another package.

Docker is a godsend when you are hosting multiple tools.

For the limited stuff I host, navidrome, firefly, nginx, .. I have yet to see single binary package. It doesn’t seem very common in my experience.

> There's your problem. Docker adds indirection on storage, networking, etc., and also makes upgrades difficult as you have to either rebuild the container, or rely on others to do so to get security and other updates.

None of your points make any sense. Docker works beautifully well as an abstraction layer. It makes trivially simple to upgrade anything and everything running on it, to the point you do not even consider it as a concern. Your assertions are so far off that you managed to.l get all your points entirely backwards.

To top things off, you get clustering for free with Docker swarm mode.

> If you stick to things that can be deployed as an upstream OS vendor package, or as a single binary (go-based projects frequently do this), you'll likely have a better time in the long run.

I have news for you. In fact, you should be surprised to learn that nowadays that today you even get full blown Kubernetes distributions up and running in Linux distributions after a quick snap package install.

I completely disagree.

> Docker adds indirection on storage, networking, etc.,

What do you mean by "indirection"? It adds OS level isolation. It's not an overhead or a bad thing.

> makes upgrades difficult as you have to either rebuild the container, or rely on others to do so to get security and other updates.

Literally the entire selfhost stack could be updated and redeployed in a matter of:

      docker compose pull
      docker compose build .
      docker compose up -d

Self hosting with something like docker compose means that your server is entirely describable in 1 docker-compose.yml file (or a set of files if you like to break things apart) + storage.

You have clean separation between your applications/services and their versions/configurations (docker-compose.yml), and yous state/storage (usually a NAS share or a drive mount somewhere).

Not only are you no longer depended on a particular OS vendor (wanna move your setup to a cheap instance on a random VPS provider but they only have CentOS for some reason?), but also the clean seperation of all the parts allows to very easily scale individual components as needed.

There is 1 place where everything goes. With the OS vendor package everytime you need to check is it in systemd unit? is it a config file in /etc/? wth?

Then next time you're trying to move the host, you forget the random /etc/foo.d/conf change you made. With docker-compose, that change has to be stored somewhere for the docker-compose to mount or rebuild, so moving is trivial.

It's not Nixos, sure. but it's much much better than a list of APT or dnf or yum packages and scripts to copy files around

It doesn't matter if you upgrade Docker or not. All tech, self hosted or not, fails for three reasons:

1) You did something to it (changed a setting, upgraded software, etc.)

2) You didn't do something to it (change a setting, upgrade a software, etc.)

3) Just because.

When it does you get the wonderful "work-like" experience, frantically trying to troubleshoot while the things around your house are failing and your family is giving you looks for it.

Self host but be aware that there's a tradeoff. The work that used to be done by someone else, somewhere else, before issues hit you is now done by you alone.

> if the company is respecting privacy It's very rare to see companies doing it, and moreover it is hard to trust them to even maintain a unique stance as years pass by.

Indeed, no one can predict the future but there are companies with bigger and stronger reputation than other. I pay for instance for iCloud because it’s e2e in my country and pricing is fair, it’s been like that for years and so I don’t have to set up baikal server for calendar, something for file archieving, something else for photo and so on.

I’d be surprised apple did willingly something damaging to user privacy, for the simple reason that they paid so much ads on privacy, they would instantly loose a lot of credibility.

And even stuff you self host, yes you can let it be, not update it for a year but I wouldn’t do that because of security issue. Somethings like navidrome (music player), it’s accessible from the web, no one want to launch a vpn each time you listen to music and so it got to be updated or you may get hacked. And no one can say that the navidrome maintainer will still be there in the coming years, could stop the project, be sick, die… it’s not a guarantee that others take back on the project and provide security update.

> Why do you need to update docker?

For starters, addressing security vulnerabilities.

https://docs.docker.com/security/security-announcements/

> I kept my box running for more than 1 year without upgrading docker.

You inadvertently raised the primary point against self-hosting: security vulnerabilities. Apparently you might have been running software with known CVEs for over a year.

For offline documentation, I use these in order of preference:

• Info¹ documentation, which I read directly in Emacs. (If you have ever used the terminal-based standalone “info” program, please try to forget all about it. Use Emacs to read Info documentation, and preferably use a graphical Emacs instead of a terminal-based one; Info documentation occasionally has images.)

• Gnome Devhelp².

• Zeal³

• RFC archive⁴ dumps provided by the Debian “doc-rfc“ package⁵.

1. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/info/

2. https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Devhelp

3. https://zealdocs.org/

4. https://www.rfc-editor.org/

5. https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/doc-rfc

Could you share the bash alias? I would love this too.

When my rental was damaged by a neighbouring house fire, we were kicked out of the house the next day. This was a contingency I hadn't planned well for.

I have long thought that I need my homelab/tools to have hardcases and a low power, modularity to them. Now I am certain of it. Not that I need first world technology hosting in emergency situations, but I am now staying with family for at least a few weeks, maybe months, and it would be amazing to just plonk a few hardcases down and be back in business.

So this is what I thought for a long time and tested several time sucessfully.

But surprisingly the day I needed to change a simple network setting without the internet I got stuck ! I still can't explain why.

So I now feel we are rolling the dices a bit with an offline NixOS

I'm not too familiar with NixOS, but I've been running Gentoo for ages and don't know why you'd need constant internet. Would you mind elaborating?

You can reverse resolve Nix back down to just the source code links though, which should be enough to build everything if those URLs are available on your local network.

If by doomsday you mean “power out for a few hours”, sure.

Is there any difference here from running a normal DNS server?

Any of your special domains will be ones your server claims as authoritative, so I don't understand why you need a root server?

You should write something about this…

This sounds like a wonderful project, do you have any documentation of the process you wouldn't mind sharing? Would love to play around with something similar to what you did, almost like a mini-internet.

Host the wrong content, you are out, get sued because of someone elses trademark on your domain, you are out, registrar actually dissolved or has weird stuff? out.

crudely. apache2 logs are parsed every 5 minutes. if the IP address exists already in post-processed database, ignore the entry; if they didn't exist in database, a script parses user agent strings and checks against a list of known "consumer" browsers; a whitelist. If they match, we assume they're human. we then delete the detailed apache2 logs and put just the IP address, when we first saw them (date, not datetime), and whether they were deemed human or bot into database. faking user agent strings or using something like playwright would confuse the script; but the browser list will also inherently not have all entries of existing "consumer browsers".

every day, a script checks all IP addresses in the post-processed database to see if there are "clusters" on the same subnet. I think it's if we see 3 visitors on the same subnet, we consider it a likely bot and retroactively switch those entries to being a bot in the database. Without taking in millions of visitors, I think this is reasonable, but it can introduce errors, too.

Hello, I'm "I use gentoo btw"

> But running it is different issue. Notably, I have no idea, and have not seen a resource talking about troubleshooting and problem solving for a self hosted service. Particularly in regards with interoperability with other providers.

It's nearly impossible to get 100% email deliverability if you self host and don't use a SMTP relay. It might work if all your contacts are with a major provider like google, but otherwise you'll get 97% deliverability but then that one person using sbcglobal/att won't ever get your email for a 4 week period or that company using barracuda puts your email in a black hole. You put in effort to get your email server whitelisted but many email providers don't respond or only give you a temporary fix.

However, you can still self host most of the email stack, including most importantly storage of your email, by using an SMTP relay, like AWS, postmark, or mailgun. It's quick and easy to switch SMTP relays if the one you're using doesn't work out. In postfix you can choose to use a relay only for certain domains.

IME the communities around packaged open-source solutions like mailinabox, mailco, mailu tend to help each other out with stuff like this and the shared bases help. Maybe camp a few chatrooms and forums and see if any fits your vibe.

Most services, including email providers, spam databases, and "ip-ban sites" have clear documentation, in terms of how to get on their good side, if needed, and it is often surprisingly straightforward to do so. Often it's as simple as filling out a relatively form.

This is my plan.

I will lose some email history, but at least I don’t lose my email future.

However, you can’t own a domain, you are just borrowing it. There is still a risk that gets shut down too, but I don’t think it is super common.

If doing so id also recommend not using the same email or domain for the registrar and for your email host…. If you are locked out of one you’d want to be able to access the other to change things.

Agreed. I’ve had the same email address for a decade now but cycled through the registrar’s email, Gmail, and M365 in that time. Makes it easy to switch.

Different strokes for different folks. Motivation for me has been a combination of independence and mistrust. Every single one of the larger tech companies have shown their priority to growth above making good products and services, and not being directly user hostile. Google search is worse now than it was 10 years ago. Netflix has ads with a paid subscription, so does YouTube. Windows is absolute joke, more and more we see user hostile software. Incentives aren’t aligned at all. As people who work in software, I get not wanting to do this stuff at home as well. But honestly I’m hoping for a future where a lot of these services can legit be self hosted by technical people for their local communities. Mastodon is doing this really well IMO. Self hosted software is also getting a lot easier to manage, so I’m quite optimistic that things will keep heading this way.

Note, I’ve got all the things you mentioned down to the UPSes setup in my garage, as well as multiple levels of backups. It’s not perfect, but works for me without much time input vs utility it provides. Each to their own.

I have seen much more stories about people losing access to their Gmail because of a comment flagged somewhere else (i.e YouTube) than people losing access to their domains (it is hard to miss all these reminders about renewal and you shouldn't wait until then anyway so that's something under you control).

And good luck getting anyone from Google to solve your problem assuming you get to a human.

Isn't depending on Claude to administer your systems rather divergent from the theme of "Self-Host and Tech Independence?"