You can absolutely run your own CA and even get your friends to trust it.

My fear is, that if i don’t document well or not use ansible, I will be hating my life once my server dies and I have to restore my data and also set um my services again in a few years.

I’ve been there plenty of times, you’re not alone. There are two solutions to that problem, really, and it boils down to the classic pet vs cattle.

1. Everything is a pet

Pets mean you care about every server. If it breaks, it’s cheaper for you to fix it than redeploy. The overwhelming majority of your setup will be pets. Why? It’s simpler. Things don’t break that often, and when they do, it’s okay to be low-effort in fixing them.

Write docs for yourself, even if it’s just notes on the sequences of commands to run to redeploy things. You will thank yourself when the server finally dies in two years and you have notes on how to bring everything back.

2. Everything is a cattle

Cattle means there’s no difference between server A and B. Everything is replaceable. Ultimately, whatever you run can run to the same extent in AWS, your basement NAS, or on your desk PC.

Cattle is also a lot of work. You will learn an excruciating amount of things about storage, networking, visualisation, workload scheduling, and such. And it’s easy to be demotivated because of how much there is to learn.

So take it easy. Concur that your hobby world is full of pets, but learn how to do the cattle approach at your leisure. You’ll realise that in every practical cattle setup, there are still pets, and that automating yourself from complexity only means you add layers of it somewhere else.

I don’t think that’s plausible.

I’m in a same boat, honestly.

Matrix has decent clients but managing a matrix instance is a world of pain, especially if you federate. And its resource use is really bad then: a single user instance can easily demand 4gb ram if you are in a couple popular chatrooms. Key propagation is oftentimes broken. Clients all have mixed support of features.

Xmpp is a joy to host, but there are no decent clients for iOS.

IRC is easy to host, but the IRCv3 coverage for clients is also meh.

I was looking for something that I could throw at casual people with relative ease and there’s just not a thing. Even the “techy” chat is in discord nowadays.

I’ll chime in: simplicity. It’s much easier to keep a few patches that apply to local OS builds: I use Nix, so my Mastodon microVM config just has an extra patch line. If there’s a new Mastodon update, the patch most probably will work for it too.

Yes, I could build my own Docker container, but you can’t easily build it with a patch (for Mastodon specifically, you need to patch js pre-minification). It’s doable, but it’s quite annoying. And then you need to keep track of upstream and update your Dockerfile with new versions.

That’s not the best example, because CP2077 has its own launcher (at least the steam one)

One thing about grafana, though, is that you get logs, metrics and monitoring in the same package. You can use loki as the actual log store and it’s easy to integrate it with the likes of journald and docker.

Yes, you will have to spend more time learning LogQL, but it can be very handy where you don’t have metrics (or don’t want to implement them) and still want some useful data from logs.

After all, text logs are just very raw, unstructured events in time. You may think that you only look into them very occasionally when things break and you would be correct. But if you want to alert on them, oftentimes that means you’re going from raw logs to structured data. Loki’s LogQL does that, and it’s still ten times easier to manage than the elastic stack.

VictoriaMetrics has its own logging product too, now, and while I didn’t try it yet, VM for metrics is probably the best thing ever happened since Prometheus. Especially for resource constrained homelabs.

Storage box networking can be hit and miss. It’s ok for incremental uploads, but I went through hell and back to get the initial backup finish, which makes me wonder what it would take to download it in case I have to.

Scp breaks off once in a while, and WebDAV terminates the session. I didn’t try smb as I feel it’s a rather weird protocol for the public internet. In the end, I figured it’s not the networking per se, it’s something with the timeouts on the remote, and I was able to finish the backup using a Hetzner-hosted server as a jumpbox.

But it’s cheap, yeah.

Isn’t kagi’s point that they store very little about you to the point there no search history and you have to pay for the service provided?

That’s not exactly true, synology doesn’t do anything you can’t access from an off the shelf linux (it’s your usual mdraid and btrfs). But you better know what you’re doing if you go that route.

What’s going to pay for the search part, then?

Conduit is in no way compact either. I tuned its caches because two gigs of ram seemed ridiculous for a single-user instance but I only got the mobile client sync lag as a result.

XMPP used to be so much nicer…

I think the point here is moving away from long-lived ssh keys and using whatever IdP you have (enterprise cloud or local oidc) to provide short-term ssh keys. It generally improves the security posture as it’s similar to ssh with certs but less painful to set up.

This is the best answer. Your router protects you from the outside, but a local firewall can protect you from someone prodding your lan from a hacked camera or some other IoT device. By having a firewall locally you just minimize the attack surface further.

Unfortunately, matrix doesn’t have a viable plan for federation, meaning that you’d better onboard on matrix.org or else.

People saying self-hosting mastodon is hard never had to touch matrix. It’s not hard, the protocol is literally broken to the point where starting again is not an option.

I’m all in for ditching discord, but matrix is at most mediocre in almost every aspect. It’s wild how much easier it used to be with xmpp.

First party app, yes. Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll give swiftfin a try.

Jellyfin looks pretty bad on an iPad. Subtitles setting keep getting reset on their own, it doesn’t understand basic keyboard controls (spacebar to pause), the UI is overall tiny. Oftentimes it will forget to save the spot where I finished watching and on the next launch will happily play the movie from beginning.

Matrix is spectacularly cursed to the point of being unusable if you self-host it. The protocol is dumb enough to lock you out of rooms hosted on another server forever if anything goes wrong with the key rotation.

I just made a mirror out of two NVMes―they got cheap enough not to bother too much with the loss of capacity. Of course, that limits what I can put there, so I use a bit of a tiered storage between my NVMe and HDD pools.

Just think in terms of data loss: are you going to be ok if you lost the data between backups? If the answer is yes, one NVMe is enough.

Another alternative: https://pushover.net