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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • Much better. SSDs and HDDs do monitor the health of the drives (and you can see many parameters through SMART), while pen drives and SD cards don’t.

    Of course, they have their limits which is why raid exists. File systems like ZFS are built on the premise that drives are unreliable. It’s up to you if you want that redundancy. The most important thing to not lose data is to have backups. Ideally at least 3 copies, 1 off site (e.g. on a cloud, or on a disk at some place other than your home).






  • Containers are very useful because they isolate the application from the rest of your server.

    This solves a lot of problems: no dependency conflicts with your operating system, you can upgrade/downgrade any time you want, no state gets stored on your main system which makes resetting the application when it misbehaves as easy as deleting and recreating the container.

    Before containers, changing my host OS (e.g. because ZFS wasn’t properly supported on the distro I was using) meant reinstalling and configuring a lot of shit, which could take days. With docker, I can migrate in 1-2 hours… Just install docker on the new OS, copy over the files, docker compose up a few times and done. The only things left to setup are samba, ssh and a few cron jobs.




  • Self hosting basically means you are running the server application yourself. It doesn’t matter if it’s at home, on a cloud service or anywhere else.

    I wouldn’t recommend hosting a social network like lemmy, because you would be legally responsible for all the content served from your servers. That means a lot of moderation work. Also, these types of applications are very demanding in terms of data storage, you end up with an ever growing dataset of posts, pictures etc.

    But self hosting is very interesting and empowering. There are a lot of applications you can self host, from media servers (Plex, Jellyfin), personal cloud (like Google Drive) with NextCloud, blocking ads with pihole, sync servers for various apps like Obsidian, password manager BitWarden etc. You can even make your own website by coding it, or using a CMS platform like WordPress.

    Check the Awesome Self-hosted list on GitHub, has a ton of great stuff.

    And in terms of hardware, any old computer or laptop can be used, just install your favorite server OS (Linux, FreeBSD/OpenBSD, even Windows Server). You can play with virtualization too if you have enough horsepower and memory with ESXI or Proxmox, so you can run multiple severs at once on the same computer.


  • If you only need nextcloud on your local network, a quick and dirty way of assigning hostnames to machines is the hosts file. Obviously, this has to be done on every computer from which you wish to access nextcloud. Also, nonrooted mobile OSs don’t let you edit the hosts file.

    Alternatively, you can set up a local DNS server. Pihole also has that capability (I personally had mixed results with Pihole, not sure if I did something wrong). Some routers may have that too.

    If you need it public on the internet, yes, you need a domain name. Some providers offer free domains (but it will be a subdomain of the provider). Something to keep in mind is that your IP is probably dynamic. When you connect to the Internet, the ISP assigns you a random IP address from their pool of IPs. To keep the domain up to date, you will need to setup a dynamic DNS solution. This is a simple script/program that periodically checks your IP, and if it changes, updates that domain automatically.