Ask HN: What do you self-host? - <AUTHOR> I know this is has been posted before but that was a few years ago so I wanted to restart the discussion, as I love hearing about what people host at home.<p>I am currently running an Unraid server with some docker containers, here are a few of them: Plex, Radarr, Sonarr, Ombi, NZBGet, Bitwarden, Storj, Hyrda, Nextcloud, NginxProxyManager, Unifi, Pihole, OpenVPN, InfluxDB, Grafana. <comment><USER7> I reworked my servers a while ago to host literally everything through docker, managed via terraform.

All web-services are reverse-proxied through traefik

At home:

        loki + cadvisor + node-exporter + grafana + prometheus
        syncthing
        tinc vpn server
        jackett + radarr + sonarr + transmission
        jellyfin
        samba server
        calibre server

On a remote server:

        loki + cadvisor + node-exporter + grafana + prometheus
        syncthing
        tinc vpn server
        dokuwiki
        firefox-sync
        firefox-send
        vscode server
        bitwarden
        freshrss
        znc bouncer + lounge irc client + bitlbee
        an httptunnel server (like ngrok)
        firefly iii
        monicahq
        kanboard
        radicale
        syncthing
        wallabag
        tmate-server

<comment><USER8> I see you're using Bitwarden.

Does anyone have recommendations for password+sensitive-data management?

I'm currently using Keepass and git, but I have one big qualm. You cannot choose to not version-control that one big encrypted (un-diff-able) file.

<comment><USER9> You might like Pass [0] or GoPass [1] which had more features the last I looked at it.

They both store passwords/data in gpg-encrypted files in a git repo. I'm not sure what the state of GUIs/browser plugins are for it, but I'm pretty sure there are some out there.

You can also set up your git config to be able to diff encrypted .gpg files so that the files are diff-able even though they're encrypted.

[0]: [https://www.passwordstore.org/](https://www.passwordstore.org/)

[1]: [https://github.com/gopasspw/gopass](https://github.com/gopasspw/gopass)

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I like Pass the most in this space, but it doesn't encrypt the index of logins/items that you're keeping. I.e. it's a folder tree of encrypted files, so you can see the sites, logins and other things that I'm using. That's kind of a deal breaker for me, though I'm pondering if I'm being practical, or just overly cautious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Self-host" is such a weird word. Having your own stuff yourself should be the _default_ , should it not? I mean, you don't "self-drive" your car, nor "self- work" your job. The corresponding words instead exists for the opposites: You can have a chauffeur and you can outsource your job.

I think the problem is entirely caused by the US having absolutely abysmal private internet speeds and capacity. Since you can't then have your own server at home, you are forced to have it elsewhere with sensible internet connections.

It's as if, in an alternate reality, no private residences had parking space for cars; no garages, no street parking. Everyone would be forced to either use public transport, taxis and chauffeur services to get anywhere. Having a private vehicle would be an expensive hobby for the rich and/or enthusiasts, just like having a personal server is in our world.

<comment><USER11> If you take a broader lens, having a private vehicle _is_ an expensive hobby for the rich.

And most people actually do outsource their jobs. They are employees rather than working for themselves…

<comment><USER12> > If you take a broader lens, having a private vehicle is an expensive hobby > for the rich.

That might be true if you are in SF, NY, Toronto, London or some other major metropolitan with a good public transportation network. However for a large number of places in North America including metropolitans like LA, San Diego, Minneapolis, Dallas, having a car is almost as necessary as anything as that is the only way to get around the city without spending half a day in public transit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I self-host the following at home. Everything is running under LXD (and I have all of the scripts to set it up here[1]):

      * nginx to reverse-proxy each of the services.
      * NextCloud.
      * Matrix Homeserver (synapse).
      * My website (dumb Flask webapp).
      * Tor (non-exit) relay.
      * Tor onion service for my website.
      * Wireguard VPN (not running in a container, obviously).

All running on an openSUSE Leap box, with ZFS as the filesystem for my drives (simple stripe over 2-way mirrors of 4TB drives).

It also acts as an NFS server for my media center (Kodi -- though I really am not a huge fan of LibreELEC) to pull videos, music, and audiobooks from. Backups are done using restic (and ZFS snapshots to ensure they're atomic) and are pushed to BackBlaze B2.

I used to run an IRC bouncer but Matrix fills that need these days. I might end up running my own Gitea (or gitweb) server one day though -- I don't really like that I host everything on GitHub. I have considered hosting my own email server, but since this is all done from a home ISP connection that probably isn't such a brilliant idea. I just use Mailbox.org.

[1]: [https://github.com/cyphar/cyphar.com/tree/master/srv](https://github.com/cyphar/cyphar.com/tree/master/srv)

<comment><USER14> > * Wireguard VPN (not running in a container, obviously).

I plan to use Wireguard too, so I shouldn't run on containers? Can you elaborate on that?

<comment><USER15> From the small research I did, I think you need a customized kernel on the host to do that.

I run it on the host.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I host a bunch of docker containers plus Traefik to route everything. It runs on a cheap GCP instance (more on this here: [https://sdan.xyz/sd2](https://sdan.xyz/sd2))

Overleaf: [https://sdan.xyz/latex](https://sdan.xyz/latex)

A URL Shortener: [https://sdan.xyz](https://sdan.xyz)

All my websites ([https://sdan.xyz/drf](https://sdan.xyz/drf), [https://sdan.xyz/surya](https://sdan.xyz/surya), etc.)

My blog(s) ([https://sdan.xyz/blog](https://sdan.xyz/blog), [https://sdan.xyz/essays](https://sdan.xyz/essays))

Commento commenting server (I don't like disqus)

Monitoring ([https://sdan.xyz/monitoring](https://sdan.xyz/monitoring), etc.)

Analytics (using Fathom Analytics) and some more stuff!

<comment><USER17> I run netdata too, but I keep that behind my VPN. I'd suggest the same for you. No reason to have that exposed to the entire world.

I wrote this to setup my web server, mail server and VPN server, and auto- generate all my VPN keys.

[https://github.com/sumdog/bee2](https://github.com/sumdog/bee2)

<comment><USER18> Any reason to have it behind a VPN?

<comment><USER19> Reduces surface area of attack, you never know when a 0day is going to be found. Exposing monitoring/metrics is particularly interesting as it exposes a lot of information to an attacker, if they're trying to starve your machine of a resource or whatever.

<comment><USER16> Exactly. They have direct access to your vitals and can push certain buttons to figure out how your system is running to brute-force that attack, ultimately ruining whatever they intended to do.

I'm probably going to change how publicly accessible my monitoring view is soon, but for now, it seems pretty cool for everyone to see.

<comment><USER20> Indeed it was cool.

Would love to get a link to a screenshot of your system's resource monitoring. The description of each panel & eache metric was quite useful!

<comment><USER21> It's still public as of now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Bums me out when I see people putting so many resources into running/building elaborate piracy machines. Plex, radarr, sonarr, etc... (you note some of these services but /r/homelab is notorious for this)

Here's my home lab: [https://imgur.com/a/aOAmGq8](https://imgur.com/a/aOAmGq8)

I don't self host anything of value. It's not cost effective and network performance isn't the best. Google handles my mail. GitHub can't be beat. I use Trello and Notion for tracking knowledge and work, whether personal or professional. Anything else is on AWS. I do have a VPN though so I can access all of this when I'm not home.

The NAS is for backing up critical data. R720 was bought to experiment with Amazon Firecracker. It's usually off at this point. Was running ESXI, now running Windows Server evaluation.

The desktop on the left is the new toy. I'm learning AD and immersing myself 100% in the Microsoft stack. Currently getting an idiomatic hybrid local/azure/o365 setup going. The worst part about planning a MS deployment is having to account for software licensing that is done on a per-cpu-core basis.

<comment><USER23> Plex can and is often used for hosting content that you own the rights to.

<comment><USER22> Sure, in the same way that BitTorrent can be used to download Linux ISOs :)

<comment><USER24> I pull in about two batches of 5-30 torrents every month or two for content I _paid for_ on Humble Bundle.

People who use bittorrent legally do exist, or at least there's one of us.

<comment><USER25> There's tons of people who use BitTorrent legally. Some companies use it on their servers to keep them in sync.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In colo:

      nginx
      Plex
      Radarr / Sonarr / SABnzbd / qBittorrent / ZeroTier -> online.net server
      FreeNAS x2
      Active Directory

At home:

      nginx
      vCenter
      urbackup
      UniFi SDN, Protect
      Portainer / unms / Bitwarden
      Wordpress (isolated)
      Guacamole
      PiHole
      InfluxDB / grafana
      Active Directory
      Windows 10 VM for Java things
      L2TP on my router

Everything I expose to the world goes through CloudFlare and nginx with Authenticated Origin Pulls [0], firewalled to CF's IPs [1], and forced SSL using CF's self-signed certs. I'm invisible to Shodan / port scans.

Have been meaning to move more to colo, especially my Wordpress install and some Wordpress.com-hosted sites, but inertia.

[0] [https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en- us/articles/204899617-A...](https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en- us/articles/204899617-Authenticated-Origin-Pulls)

[1] [https://www.cloudflare.com/ips/](https://www.cloudflare.com/ips/)

<comment><USER27> Wait. What? Windows VM for Java?

<comment><USER28> It's most likely client-side stuff. Probably some crappy banking client, or an authentication client for some government websites, or something like that.

I use one for the sites below. It is written in Java/Kotlin, but barely works anywhere except Windows.

[https://egov.kz/cms/en](https://egov.kz/cms/en)

[https://cabinet.salyk.kz/](https://cabinet.salyk.kz/)

...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> SSH: for git and tunneling literally everything: VNC, sftp, Emacs server, tmux, ....

Docker running random stuff

Used to run Pihole until I got an Android and rooted it. Used to mess with WebDAV and CalDAV. Nextcloud is a mess; plain SFTP fuse mounts work better for me. My approach has gone from trying to replicate cloud services to straight up remoting over SSH (VNC or terminal/mosh depending connectivity) to my home computer when I want to do something. It's simple and near unexploitable.

This is the way it should always have been done from the start of the internet. When you want to edit your calendar, for example, you should be able to do it on your phone/laptop/whatever as a proxy to your home computer, actually locking the file on your home computer. Instead we got the prolifetation of cloud SaaSes to compensate for this. For every program on your computer, you now need >1 analogous but incompatible program for every other device you use. Your watch needs a different calendar program than your gaming PC than your smart fridge, but you want a calendar on all of them. M×N programs where you could have just N, those on your home computer, if you could remote easily. (Really it's one dimension more than M×N when you consider all the backend services behind every SaaS app. What a waste of human effort and compute.)

<comment><USER8> I sympathize. My meditations about this lead me to thinking about waste as well.

Why computer at home though? For someone who moves around a lot and doesn't invest into "a home", this would be bothersome. Not to mention it's more expensive, in terms of energy and money. I think third-party data centers are fine for self-hosting.

<comment><USER29> There's really no difference. Mainly I use a machine at home instead of a data center VM because that's just one less bill to pay. I have two GPUs in there which would be very expensive on public cloud.

I guess one reason people might gravitate to home hosting is owning your own disks, the tinfoil hat perspective. You can encrypt volumes on public cloud as well, but it's still on someone else's machine. They could take a snapshot of the heap memory and know everything you are doing.

<comment><USER8> I speculate that in the future the trust aspect of using third-party hardware might be solved technologically. And I agree that today the tinfoil sentiment is not baseless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> On my home server (refurbished ThinkPad X201 with a Core i5-520M, 8GB of memory, 1TB internal SSD sync'd nightly to an external 1TB HDD) I run a single-node Kubernetes cluster with the following stuff:

* MinIO: for access to my storage over the S3 API, I use it with restic for device backups and to share files with friends and family

* CoreDNS: DNS cache with blacklisted domains (like Pihole), gives DNS-over-TLS to the home network and to my phone when I'm outside

* A backup of my S3-hosted sites, just in case (bejarano.io, blog.bejarano.io, mta-sts.bejarano.io and prefers-color-scheme.bejarano.io)

* [https://ideas.bejarano.io](https://ideas.bejarano.io), a simple "pick-one-at-random" site for 20,000 startup ideas ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21112345](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21112345))

* MediaWiki instance for systems administration stuff

* An internal (only accessible from my home network) picture gallery for family pictures

* TeamSpeak server

* Cron jobs: dynamic DNS, updating the domain blacklist nightly, recursively checking my websites for broken links, keeping an eye on any new release of a bunch of software packages I use

* Prometheus stack + a bunch of exporters for all the stuff above

* IPsec/L2TP VPN for remote access to internal services (picture gallery and Prometheus)

* And a bunch of internal Kubernetes stuff for monitoring and such

I still have to figure out log aggregation (probably going to use fluentd), I want to add some web-based automation framework like NodeRED or n8n.io for random stuff. I'd also like to host some password manager but I still have to study that.

I also plan on rewriting wormhol.org into supporting any S3 backend, so that I can bind it's storage with MinIO.

And finally, I'd like to move off single-disk storage and get a decent RAID solution to provide NFS for my cluster, as well as a couple more nodes to add redundancy and more compute.

Edit: formatting.

<comment><USER31> nice to see somebody using a thinkpad as a homeserver.

I remember comparing low power homeservers, consumer NAS and a refurb Thinkpad and the latter won when considering the price/performance and idle power consumption (<5W). You also get a built screen & keyboard for debugging and a efficient DC-UPS if you're brave enough to leave the batteries in. That's of course assuming you don't need multiple terabytes of storage or run programs that load the CPU 24/7, which I don't. These days a rPi 4 would probably suffice for my needs but I still think the refurb thinkpad is a smart idea.

<comment><USER30> I don't overload the CPU and my storage requirements are low. 95% of my used storage is stuff I wouldn't care if it got lost, but just nice to have around. I only have around 2GB of data I don't want to lose.

I do leave the batteries in. Is it dangerous? I read some time ago that it is not dangerous, but the capacity of the battery drops significantly, I don't care about capacity, and safe shutdowns are important to me.

In the past I used an HP DL380 Gen. 7 (which I still own, and wouldn't mind selling as I don't use it), but I had to find a solution for the noise. And power consumption was at around 18EUR for my EUR/kWh.

Cramming down what ran on 12 cores and 48GiB of RAM on a 2-core, 4GiB (I only upgraded the memory 2 months ago) machine was a real challenge.

The ThinkPad cost me 90EUR (IBM refurbished), we bought two of them, the other one burnt. The recent upgrades (8GiB kit + Samsung Evo 1TB) cost me around 150EUR. Overall a really nice value both in compute per EUR spent and in compute per Wh spent. Really happy with it, I just feel it is not very reliable as it is old.

<comment><USER31> >I do leave the batteries in. Is it dangerous? I read some time ago that it is not dangerous, but the capacity of the battery drops significantly, I don't care about capacity, and safe shutdowns are important to me.

It's not necessarily dangerous but lithium batteries have a chance to fail and in very rare cases even explode, making them a potential fire hazard. I'm not an expert, maybe someone else can expand on this. If I were to run an old laptop of unknown provenance with a LiIon battery 24/7 completely unattended I'd at least want to make sure that it is on a non-flammable surface without any flammable items nearby.

>In the past I used an HP DL380 Gen. 7 (which I still own, and wouldn't mind selling as I don't use it), but I had to find a solution for the noise. And power consumption was at around 18EUR for my EUR/kWh.

Yes, I am surprised how many people leave power consumption out of the equation. These days you can rent a decent VPS for the power cost of an old refurb server alone.

<comment><USER30> > It's not necessarily dangerous but lithium batteries have a chance to fail > and in very rare cases even explode, making them a potential fire hazard.

Well, I'm removing the battery and the pseudo-UPS logic right now. The battery looks fine, but I'm not taking any risks, since it's on top of the DL380 but under a wooden TV stand.

Thanks for the heads up! You might have prevented a fire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I eat my own food:

[https://github.com/epoupon/lms](https://github.com/epoupon/lms) for music

[https://github.com/epoupon/fileshelter](https://github.com/epoupon/fileshelter) to share files

Eveything is packaged on debian buster (amd64 and armhf) and run behind a reverse proxy.

<comment><USER17> Huh, interesting. I usually have full copies of my music collection where I need them (512gb microsd in my phone and on the work laptop) but it would be nice to just have a web interface if I'm at someone's house or so they can play off their phone. I think I was using subsonic until they changed all their licensing.

One UI question? Is there a reason you left off volume controls? That's something that always annoys me still about Bandcamp and I had submitted a patch to Mastodon to create a volume control for their video component.

<comment><USER32> This is a good question. On mobile, I just use phone buttons to control volume. On desktop, I just use the media keys since I don't listen to something else. But since you are not the first to ask, I can add a volume slider on large devices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Everything I run is in a deterministic, rebuildable LXC container or KVM virtual machine.

I have around 10 desktops that run in containers in various places for various common tasks I do. Each one has a backed up homedir, and then I have a ZFS- backed fileserver for centralized data. I connect to them using chrome remote desktop or x2go. I've had my work machine die one time too many, so with these scripts I can go from a blank work machine to exactly where I left off before the old one died, in a little over an hour. None of my files are stuck to a particular machine, so I can run on a home server, and then when I need to travel, transfer the desktop to a laptop, then transfer it back again when I get home. Takes about 10 minutes to transfer it.

[https://github.com/kstenerud/virtual- builders](https://github.com/kstenerud/virtual-builders)

I also run most of my server apps this way:

[https://github.com/kstenerud/virtual- builders/tree/master/ma...](https://github.com/kstenerud/virtual- builders/tree/master/machine-builders)

</comment><comment><USER34> I have a cheap dedicated server with outgoing Postfix mail forwarding with sasl auth, nsd for the domains, a few web services over tls. Git server via gitolite + git-daemon. Mailman.

Incoming mail points directly to an RPi at home on dsl... Postfix + Dovecot IMAP. It's externally accessible, my dedicated server does the dynamic dns to point to the RPi; the domain MX points to that. Outgoing mail forwards through the dedicated server, which has an IP with good reputation and DKIM.

This gets me a nice result that my current and historical email is delivered directly to, and stays at, home, and my outgoing mail is still universally accepted. There's no dependency on google or github. There's no virtualization, no docker, no containers, just Linux on the server and on the rpi to keep up to date. It uses OS packages for everything so it stays up to date with security updates.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm pretty vanilla compared to most people here, I just host my own email and I have a Synology box that provides a few utilities like an Evernote replacement.

I also host Aether P2P ([https://getaether.net](https://getaether.net)) on a Raspberry Pi-like device, so it helps the P2P network. But I'm biased on that last one, it's my own software.

</comment><comment><USER36> I changed my hardware around recently, I used to have 5u colo that I've now downsized for financial reasons, I migrated all into one box called Poof, on poof I'm running:

        - matrix home server
        - xmpp server
        - websites for wife and I (Cloudlinux, Plesk, Imunify360)
        - <USER6>
        - jellyfin + jackett + sonarr + radarr
        - <USER3>
        - CDN origin server (bunnycdn pulls files from this)
        - znc bouncer
        - freeipa server
        - Portainer with pihole, Prometheus, grafana and some microservices on them
        - Gitea server
        - spare web server I use as staging environment

All of this is behind a firewall, I've been fortunate enough I've got /27 assigned to me, so more than enough IP addresses available to me, I'm using all but about 5 or 6 of them, but plan to change that soon. I'm going to be assigning dedicated IPs to every site I host (3 total), put my XMPP server on its own vm instead of sharing it with Matrix and giving it its own IP.

I blog about this stuff if anyone's interested: [https://thegeekbin.com/](https://thegeekbin.com/)

</comment><comment><USER37> I used to have things in a colo but now I have fiber at home, just about everything is on a single giant machine, complete with graphics card for a gaming VM:

      VM management: libvirt (used to host gaming PC and financial applications)
      Container management: Docker (used to be k8s but gave up)
      Photo gallery: Koken, Piwigo, Lychee
      Media acquisition: Radarr, Sonarr, NZBGet, NZBHydra
      Media access: Plex
      Monitoring: InfluxDB, Grafana, cAdvisor, Piwik, SmartD, SmokePing, Prometheus
      Remote data access: Nextcloud
      Local data access: Samba, NFS
      Data sync: Syncthing
      WireGuard
      Unifi server
      IRC: irssi, WeeChat, Glowing Bear, Sopel (runs a few bots)
      Finance: beancount-import, fava
      Chat: Riot, Synapse (both Matrix)
      Databases: Postgres, MariaDB, Redis
      Speed test: IPerf3

I also have a seedbox for high-bandwidth applications.

</comment><comment><USER38> Just an advice but I suggest you host publicly facing services and privately hosted services on different instances.

You don't want less tested web app to expose some security hole for someone to start snooping on your traffic toward BitWarden after SSL termination.

If you don't want an extra box at home, you can always get a $5/mo cloud instance for public stuff, where you don't have to worry about increased electricity bill from DDoS having CPU spiked or choking your home network.

</comment><comment><USER39> I self-host a fairly big Plex and several personal websites along with a NextCloud instance to sync calendars/reminders/etc across devices. Pretty much everything forward-facing is behind CloudFlare.

On the front end I have two 1Gbit circuits (AT&T and Google) going into an OPNSense instance doing load-balancing and IPS running on a Dell R320 with a 12-thread Xeon and 24GB of RAM

Services are hosted on a Dell R520 with 48GB RAM and two 12-thread Xeons running Ubuntu and an up-to-date ZFS on Linux build.

Media storage handled by two Dell PowerVault 1200 SAS arrays.

Back-end is handled by a Cisco 5548UP and my whole apartment is plumbed for 10Gbit.

<comment><USER40> >On the front end I have two 1Gbit circuits (AT&T and Google)

Holy hell. How did that come about?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Nothing. I self-host nothing. My entire home networking infrastructure consists of a more powerful WiFi router than the one built into the modem that the cable company provides so that it reaches to the back of my apartment. I pay money for GitHub, Dropbox, iCloud, Apple Music, Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Amazon Prime, a VPN to spoof my location occasionally, and Google Apps (or I would, if I were not grandfathered into the free tier). When I want to spin up a personal project, I do it on Heroku.

I live in a stable first-world democracy. Or, since it seems to be getting less stable recently, maybe a better way to put it is: I participate in a stable global economy. If "the cloud" catastrophically fails to the point where I lose all of the above without warning, I will likely have bigger problems than never being able to watch a favorite tv show again.

I wonder if this exposes two kinds of people: those who value mobility, and are more comfortable limiting the things that are important to them to a laptop and a bug-out bag, and those who value stability, and are inclined to build self-sufficient infrastructure in their castles.

<comment><USER42> There's a third kind of person - one who doesn't want their personal data beholden to a bunch of faceless for-profit companies who have proven they care less about security and privacy than they do about money.

I don't self host a lot of services (and the ones that do could go away tomorrow without hurting me much) but I only have one cloud resource - email. It kind of has to be that way for various reasons; I'd self host if I could reasonably do so. I also think I value my $75/mo more than I value an endless stream of entertainment.

(edit: just wanted to say, thanks for posting this. It is a valuable discussion point.)

<comment><USER43> Not to mention a fourth kind of person - one who just wants services that work better than what the cloud offers.

By definition, self-hosting means the service is under _my_ control, doing what _I_ need, customized for _my_ use cases. And because I use only open source stacks, I can (and have) even modify the code to customize even further.

And that's ignoring the fact that free, self-hosted options can often provide features that third party services cannot for legal, technical, or supports reasons.

For example, my TT-RSS feed setup uses a scraper to pull full article content right into the feed. A service would probably land in legal trouble if they did this. And while it works incredibly well, like, 90% of the time (thank you Henry Wang, author of mercury-parser-api!), if it was a service, that 10% could result in thousands of support emails or an exodus of subscribers.

<comment><USER44> Could you elaborate on how you got TTRSS to scrape?

<comment><USER43> I installed the Mercury parser plugin:

[https://github.com/HenryQW/mercury_fulltext](https://github.com/HenryQW/mercury_fulltext)

The directions there are pretty clear. You've gotta set up the mercury parser API service (I used docker) and then enable the plugin for the feeds you want to apply it to.

Alternatively you could use the Readability plugin that ships with tt-rss, but I have no idea how effective it is as I never tried it.

Finally, you could stand up the RSS full text proxy:

[https://github.com/Kombustor/rss-fulltext- proxy](https://github.com/Kombustor/rss-fulltext-proxy)

That service standa between your RSS feed reader of choice and the RSS feed supplier and does the scraping and embedding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I recently installed docker-simple-mail-forwarder[0] to use a custom domain name email with Gmail. It's a one line install.

[0] [https://github.com/huan/docker-simple-mail- forwarder](https://github.com/huan/docker-simple-mail-forwarder)

</comment><comment><USER46> I'll bite because I love threads like this! I run an Intel NUC with an i5, 8G RAM, a OS SSD, and an external USB3 4TB RAID attached. OS is Debian 9. I've always ran a "general utility" Debian server at home due to projects and SSH tunneling (yeah yeah I should setup a proper VPN I know ha).

* It's a target for my rsync backups for all my client systems (most critical use); Docker TIG stack (Telegraf, InfluxDB, Grafana) which monitors my rackmount APC UPS, my Ubiquiti network hardware, Docker, and just general system stats; Docker Plex; Docker Transmission w/VPN; Docker Unifi; A custom network monitor I built that just pings/netcats certain internal and external hosts (not used too seriously but it comes in handy); and finally a neglected Minecraft server.

I went for low power consumption since it's an always-on device and power comes at a premium here + fanless. I highly suggest the NUC as it's a highly capable device and with plenty of power if upgraded a bit!

<comment><USER47> I guess this is a recent i5? In case you want a low consumption alternative, an older Celeron-based NUC is also a very capable machine (much better than a Raspberry Pi 4 for about the same price used nowadays) and remains idle at a few dozens of watts.

<comment><USER46> Not sure on how recent but I picked it up about a year ago. Looked into the Celeron ones and although they're impressive I decided to go with something that's a bit beefier due to how many containers I planned to run/experiment with =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Wallabag! It changed my reading habits: [https://wallabag.org/en](https://wallabag.org/en)

<comment><USER49> ive been eyeing that up for quite a while now. being able to it run on an eink reader seems like a great idea. ive set up the email-an-article-to-your-kindle thing a few years ago but it's still too much effort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> In colo (a former nuclear bunker, no less!) I have a small OpenStack 'cloud' deployment cobbled together from spare hardware, pieced together in partnership with a friend of mine. I wrote a bit about it here if anyone's interested:

[https://dischord.org/2019/07/23/inside-the-sausage- factory/](https://dischord.org/2019/07/23/inside-the-sausage-factory/)

At home I have:

      A Synology DS412+ with 4 x 4TB drives
      An ancient HP Microserver N36L with 16GB RAM and 4 x 4TB drives running FreeBSD
      Ubiqiuti UniFi SG + CloudKey + AP
      An OG Pi running PiHole

The DS412+ is my main network storage device, with various things backed up to the Microserver. Aside from the OEM services it also runs Minio (I use this for local backups from Arq), nzbget, and Syncthing in Docker containers.

</comment><comment><USER51> At home I have:

FreeBSD server running various things:

* Home Assistant, Node-RED, and some other home automation utilities running in a FreeBSD Jail.

* UniFi controller in a Debian VM.

* Pi-Hole in a CentOS VM.

* StrongSwan in a FreeBSD VM.

* ElasticSearch, Kibana, Logstash, and Grafana running in a Debian VM.

* PostgreSQL on bare metal.

* Nginx on bare metal, this acts as a front-end to all of my applications.

I also have:

* Blue Iris on a dedicated Windows box. This was a refurbished business desktop and works well, but my needs are starting to outgrow it.

* A QNAP NAS for general storage needs.

Future plans are always interesting, so in that vein here are my future plans:

Short term:

* Move my home automation stuff out of the FreeBSD Jail into a Linux VM. The entire Home Assistant ecosystem is fairly Linux-centric and even though it works on FreeBSD, it's more pain than I'd really like. Managing VMs is also somewhat easier than managing Jails, though I'm sure part of this is that I'm using ezjail instead of something more modern like iocage.

* Get Mayan-EDMS up and running. I hate paper files, this will be a good way to wrangle all of them. I've used it before, but didn't get too deep into it. This time I'm going all-in.

Medium term:

* Replace my older cameras with newer models.

* Possibly upgrade my Blue Iris machine to a more powerful refurbished one.

* Create a 'container VM', which will basically be a Linux VM used for me to learn about containers.

Long term:

* Replace my FreeBSD server with new hardware running a proper hypervisor (e.g., Proxmox, VMware ESXi). This plan is nebulous as what I have meets my needs, this is more about learning new tools and ways of doing things.

</comment><comment><USER52> Currently not much. On the home server:

• Apache: hosting a few websites and a personal (private) wiki.

• Transmission: well, as an always-on torrent client. Usually I add a torrent here, wait for it to download and then transfer it via SFTP to my laptop.

• Gitea: mostly to mirror third party repos I need or find useful.

• Wireguard: as a VPN server for all my devices and VPS, mostly so I don't need to expose SSH to the internet. Was really easy to setup and it's been painless so far.

</comment><comment><USER53> Why are so many folks here running media servers? Are you really streaming your own video / audio libraries, or is there something else it is useful for? I'd be rather shocked to learn people still store digitally media locally.

<comment><USER54> I use it for my boat (offgrid) & for travels, so we're not stuck behind regional content filters, like mid-way a series and we arrive in a new country and it's not on Netflix here.

<comment><USER53> This is the coolest response. :)

(You didn't by any chance sail around Cape horn in 2016? I met this really cool older couple in Central America who had been living at sea for 17 years.)

Reading all of the replies I realize that sometime between 2007 and 2012 I just gave up entirely on storing media locally. I don't watch movies (e.g. no cable or netflix), but I've been using spotify for a decade maybe? One response makes a good point: it is a waste of overall bandwidth to stream content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I am a bit old school but this fills all my needs.

\- httpd

\- nextcloud (mostly for android syncing, for normal file operations I prefer sftp). Nextcloud is great but the whole js/html/browser is clumsy.

\- roundcube (again mostly imap but just to have alternative when phone isnt available - I havent used it for ages)

\- postfix

\- dovecot

\- squid on separate fib with paid vpn (mitming all the traffic, removing all internet "junk" from my connections, all my devices, including android are using it over ssh tunnel).

\- transmission, donating my bandwidth to some OSS projects

\- gitolite, all my code goes there

I think this is it.

Everything is running on mitx board, with 16gb of ram, 3x 3tb toshiba hdds in zraid and additional 10tb hitachi disk. FreeBSD. 33 watts.

</comment><comment><USER56> S3stat, Twiddla, Unwaffle, the Expat site, and a dozen other old projects all still run on a single box in a Colo.

it costs about $800/month for the half cage and all the hardware in it, when you amortise it out. And there's plenty of performance overhead for when one project gets a lot of attention or I want to ad something new.

Pretty much the only thing I use cloud computing for is the nightly job for S3stat, because it fits the workload pattern that EC2 was designed for. Namely, it needs to run 70 odd hours of computing every day, and gets 3 hours to do it in.

For SaaS sized web stuff, self hosting still makes the most sense.

</comment><comment><USER57> I like self hosting, but I want it to work without having to do sysadmin work. Especially the upgrades–most hosting providers will have one-click tools to install self hosted instances of something; but very few have working upgrade scripts to keep up with the new versions.

So I set up Yunohost [0] on a small box, and now I install self hosted services whenever I need them. Installing a new service is a breeze–but more importantly, upgrading them is a breeze to.

For now I self host Mattermost, Nextcloud, Transmission.

[0] [https://yunohost.org](https://yunohost.org)

<comment><USER58> For a paid alternative look into cloudron or unraid

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> FreeNAS + voidlinux nuc running grafana + prometheus.

Tbh I run hot and cold about self hosting since after work, I really really want to be able relax at home.

Not wonder why the hell my nuc hasn't come up after a reboot. Or why is it so hard to increase the disk space on my FreeNAS [https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/upgrading- storag...](https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/upgrading- storage.79357/#post-551026)

</comment><comment><USER60> A household wiki. Contains all kinds of information about our house and lives. We used to track stuff like this in a google doc but it was getting unwieldy.

I wasn't happy with any of the free wiki hosting solutions available so I ended up self-hosting a mediawiki site. It's been...challenging...to convince my wife and family to adapt and use wiki markup.

I've been considering switching to something that uses standard markdown instead since it's easier to write with.

<comment><USER61> I also had issues with the mediawiki/wiki editors and their clumsy nature.

For me I'm just after a simple pure text knowledge-base.

Currently I use vuepress [https://vuepress.vuejs.org/](https://vuepress.vuejs.org/)

The positives with vuepress for me were:

* Plain Markdown (With a little bit of metadata)

* Auto generated search (Just titles by default)

* Auto Generated sidebar menus

The negatives:

* No automatic site contents, I mostly use the search to move around docs

* Search is exact not fuzzy

* The menu settings are in a hidden folder

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Hyper-V host:

        Active Directory (x2)
        Exchange Server 2013
        MS SQL
        Various Single Purpose VMs providing automation
        Debian for SpamAssassion
        Debian for my web domains
        Custom SMTP MTA thats in front of SpamAssassin and Exchange

Raspberry Pis:

        TVHeadEnd
        Remote Cameras

Plus a Windows Server hosting all my files/media.

I used to self-host a lot more, but have been paring back recently.

</comment><comment><USER63> Calendar: ([https://radicale.org](https://radicale.org))

Home automation/security system + 'Alexa': completely home grown using python + android + arduino + rpi + esp32

</comment><comment><USER64> I self host a flask app on my raspberry pi, soldered to the garage door opener.

I have hosted media folders/streaming applications for friends and family, but this has been by far my most used and most useful hack.

</comment><comment><USER65> So far I have a home server with:

* Unbound for dns-over-tls and single point of config hostnames for my home network

* Syncthing for file sync

* offlineimap to backup my email accounts

* Samba for a home media library

* cron jobs to backup my shares

* Unifi controller

On my todo list:

* Scheduled offsite backup (borg + rsync.net being the top contender currently)

* Something a bit more dedicated to media streaming than smb. some clients like vlc handle it fine, others do not.

* Pull logs for my various websites locally

</comment><comment><USER66> On a bit of a tangent, hopefully not an inappropriate question:

What do you all spend on this sort of thing? Whether hosting remotely or on local hardware, what would you say is the rough monthly/annual cost to move your Netflix/Spotify/etc equiv to a self-hosted setup (excluding own labor)?

<comment><USER40> Home server - nothing recurring. Repurposed an old gaming laptop. Only cost was some USB3 HDD bays. Plus probably extra electricity since I run BOINC on it.

Websites - nothing. Using GCP free server. About to move it to Oracle's free VMs though thanks to GCP's IPV4 shenanigans and Oracle's free offering being better (higher IO & you get two VMs).

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> At home, I run:

\- A weather station that lives on a pole on the yard. Powered by GopherWX [https://github.com/chrissnell/gopherwx](https://github.com/chrissnell/gopherwx)

\- InfluxDB for weather station

\- Heatermeter Barbecue controller

\- oauth2_proxy, fronted by Okta, to securely access the BBQ controller while I'm away. This proxy is something that everyone with applications hosted on their home network should look into. Combined with Okta, it's much easier than running VPN.

In the public cloud, I host nginx, which runs a gRPC proxy to the gopherwx at home. I wrote an app to stream live weather from my home station to my desktops and laptops and show it in a toolbar.

nginx in the cloud also hosts a public website displaying my live weather, pulled as JSON over HTTPS from gopherwx at home.

</comment><comment><USER68> I'm testing some self hosted apps including Nginx reverse proxy with letsencrypt, nextcloud with either onlyoffice document server or collabora, onlyoffice community server with mail, gitea, lychee, osclass, guacamole, wireguard vpn, searx, and a few others.

</comment><comment><USER69> Boring and predictable, but openvpn and pihole on a raspberry pi.

I have a second raspberry pi running a version of Kali Linux. I only hack my own stuff for learning.

Once upon a time I ran a public facing website and quake server, and published player stats. No time these days for much play.

</comment><comment><USER70> On my computer I host HTTP (with Apache), SMTP (with Exim), NNTP (with sqlnetnews), QOTD (TCP only, no UDP), and Gopher. I might add others later, too (e.g. IRC, Viewdata, Telnet, Finger, etc). And on the HTTP server I host several Fossil repositories.

<comment><USER71> > On my computer I host HTTP (with Apache), SMTP (with Exim), NNTP (with > sqlnetnews), QOTD (TCP only, no UDP), and Gopher. I might add others later, > too (e.g. IRC, Viewdata, Telnet, Finger, etc). And on the HTTP server I host > several Fossil repositories.

Man, at my last job in a large enterprise, I WISH they were running fingerd. Would have made for some pretty cool, lightweight integrations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Open Trashmail so I can use throwaway emails with my own (sub)domains and keep my data private

[https://github.com/HaschekSolutions/opentrashmail](https://github.com/HaschekSolutions/opentrashmail)

</comment><comment><USER73> \- raspi running pi-hole \- synology NAS for storage and backups, and it runs an Ubuntu VM for a wireguard vpn server \- for music, Volumio on a raspi as a server with snapcast; 4 other amped raspi's with speakers in other parts of the house as clients, synced up via snapcast (check out hifiberry amp if you're interested in this sort of thing) \- an older Mac mini now running an Ubuntu server with hassio virtualized. Lights, hvac, music controls, etc, controlled through hassio front end \- print server on a pi zero

(I guess these may not really be "self-hosted" since I don't make them publically accessible through ports ... just vpn in to my home network)

</comment><comment><USER74> On a scaleway (about 20€/month):

\- my websites with nginx

\- IRC (ngircd)

\- ZNC

\- espial for bookmarks and notes

\- node-red to automate RSS -> twitter and espial -> pinboard

\- transmission

\- some reddit bots manager I've written in Haskell+Purescript.

\- some private file upload system mostly to share images in IRC in our team

\- goaccess to self host privacy respecting analytics

At home, Plex.

</comment><comment><USER75> Raspberry PI 3: OpenVPN Dell Poweredge R720 running VMware ESXi With \- Ubuntu Docker Host \- - Plex \- - Blog Site \- - TeamCity \- - Minecraft Servers (Java and Bedrock) \- - Gitlab \- - ElasticSearch \- - Kibana \- - <USER4> Sync \- - PostgreSql \- Manjaro Linux VM \- Windows Server 2019 VM \- 3 Node Kubernetes Cluster \- - Couple of Side Projects Running on It

Basically all the stuff I don't want to pay a cloud provider to host.

Overall the R720 with 48GB of ram has been one of my best buys hands down. down the road I plan on grabbing a second server and a proper NAS or unraid setup.

</comment><comment><USER76> \- Syncthing (folders across devices)

\- docker (just dev env with a lot of images, almost everything I can is tested in there, and maybe used there too. Just on VM if is a desktop gadget or app)

      - generic web

      - some stacks, Rails, nodejs, php.

     - ...

\- Calibre

\- Windows Media share feature for remote videos on devices and TV (, don't like it really, mess with subtitles and really will look for a docker oss alternative)

Wish list:

\- wallabag

\- firefox-sync (stuck on Chrome yet, no alternative on this found)

\- email sync

It's not so great for now. Looking on this thread for contacts and calendar (currently used from the cloud classic providers)

</comment><comment><USER77> Edit: sorry, I misunderstood the question. The below is referring to software development.

Everything. I keep infrastructure simple as I found as a developer, infrastructure configuration, dependency issues and updates took an extraordinary amount of time while providing zero benefit for products of a small to medium size. I do have a plan in place should I need to scale, but it is not worth maintaining an entirely different stack full of dependencies for the off chance I get a burst in traffic I can't handle.

</comment><comment><USER78> # 2GB linode instance ($10/month)

      nginx
      mailinabox (email, nextcloud)
      gogs
      6 static websites
      3 (dumb) little personal web-projects
      selfoss
      mumble
      openvpn

# rpi-3 at home

      osmc (kodi) + 8TB of raided HDDs
      nginx
      chorus-2 in kodi publicly available (behind htpasswd) updated w/ dynamic DNS
      a nightly cron job rsyncs the from the linode instance

# another rpi-3 in garden shed

      8TB of raided HDDs
      nightly cron of the other rpi-3

<comment><USER79> Curious, why the other rpi-3 in the garden shed? Is that for "off-site" backups?

<comment><USER80> Probably in case the house burns down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> On a Linode instance (OS being Ubuntu Server 18.04):

\- mail server in Docker container

\- ZNC in Docker container

\- Shadowsocks server

\- Wekan as a Snap

\- My blog, statically generated using Pelican, served from nginx

At home, I only have a Synology NAS that is exposed to the internet.

</comment><comment><USER82> On my FreeNAS server: gitea, plex, openvpn (w/ ExpressVpn), Mayan EDMS

I am unhappy with the complexity of Mayan EDMS. I'm debating moving to Paperless. All I want is a digital file system that 1) looks at directories and automatically handles files 2) has user permissions/personal files so I can let my family use it 3) has a web form for uploads.

I am planning to change gitea to sourcehut- the git service as well as builds.

Any ideas for things a raspberry pi 3 & 4 could be useful for?

<comment><USER25> Do you have a link for paperless? I've been looking for years for something like this.

<comment><USER82> [https://github.com/the-paperless-project/paperless](https://github.com/the- paperless-project/paperless)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> Like most folks here, I'm running the pihole/media/torrent suite. Hardware is a Rock64 soon to be colocated with a few Raspberry pi 4. Everything is dockerized and scheduled on k3s. Using kubernetes is a real life changer. I can unplug one of the SBCs and things are automatically balanced and rescheduled. It also makes the whole setup completely portable.

I use NFS on the NAS for the storage unit. It's the only thing I need to backup.

</comment><comment><USER84> Nothing right now, but I am looking at spinning my own stack back up either "on-prem" (aka at home), and/or in some bare-metal hosting provider.

Relying on streaming providers, cloud email services, etc., has left me in a very foul mood lately and I feel like I need to take back control. My biggest trigger was when I purchased an actual physical audio CD (this year; because NONE of the popular streaming providers offer the album), ripped it to FLAC, and then realized I had no reliable/convenient way to expose this to my personal devices. I used to have a very elaborate setup with subsonic doing music hosting duty, and all of my personal devices were looped in on it. This was vastly superior to Spotify, et. al., but the time it takes to maintain the collection and services was perceived to be not worth it. From where I am sitting now, its looking like its worth it again.

How long until media we used to enjoy is squeezed completely out of existence because a handful of incumbent providers feel its no longer "appropriate" for whatever money-grabbing reasons?

<comment><USER85> It may rub you the wrong way but Google Music allows you to upload your own music.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> I selfhost stuff for fun! Which I'm counting my EC2 instance as.

* Pleroma/Mastodon - I had been using Pleroma, but I'm not happy about a few things, so I bit the bullet to upgrade to a t3.small and am now running Mastodon. I love all the concepts of the fediverse, though the social norms are still being ironed out.

* Write Freely ([https://writefreely.org/](https://writefreely.org/)) at [https://lesser.occult.institute](https://lesser.occult.institute) for my blog (right now mostly holds hidden drafts)

* Matrix (Synapse) and the Riot.im frontend for a group chat. I'm a little conflicted, because right now the experience around enabling E2EE is very alarming for low-tech users and a pain for anyone who signs in from many places, and if it isn't enabled I have better security just messaging my friends with LINE. That said, I really want to write some bots for it. Group chats are the future of social networking, they all say...

</comment><comment><USER87> I'm just starting out with building a virtual workstation system for myself with Eclipse Che. My home desktop has always been much more powerful than my laptop so I've always thought it would be ideal to have mainframe style development. I learned about Che 7 this week and figured that it was worth a shot. Using containers for everything sounds like an interesting idea to try out too!

Surprisingly (at least to me), there are some really big companies like Microsoft, IBM/RedHat, and others pushing this workflow. The editor is supposed to basically be VSCode in browser and compatible with most extensions.

I'm using my RPi as a jump box and have some commands to turn on my home desktop + mount the file system and that kind of stuff when connecting. I've used it in the past and it's worked nicely.

I got k8s running but got blocked by some bugs when installing Che. Looks neat though. It would be cool to have a 2007 macbook with the computing power of a 2990WX workstation :).

</comment><comment><USER88> I wrote my own orchestrator that I deploy my personal projects (pixmap, watch.ly, etc) with.

The orchestrator can now deploy itself! All declarative service configuration with autoscaling etc. It manages the infra and service deployment for me. Thinking about open sourcing.

Nginx/nchan, NodeJS, static sites (vanilla/angular/react deployments), nfs, MongoDB, Redis

</comment><comment><USER89> I used to host email and a blog. I even had a server in a rack on which I let people have shell accounts.

I still have the email domain, because it's easier to run it forever than migrate all the things you signed up for. But actually running my own email is too much of an obligation and need to keep up on all the anti spam measures.

</comment><comment><USER90> Freedombox, Apache, Exim4, prosody (XMPP), rsync, rsnapshot, ssh all on 2 identical, redundant, interchangeable Olimex A20 Mini Server with ssd (1 at home, 1 colo) and one more powerful x86 separate X2Go (Desktop usage) & File (sftp) Server at home. Everything on pure, plain Debian stable and unattended- upgrades.

</comment><comment><USER91> I bought a used Lenovo P50 for $450, added another SSD, it has 48GB and an i7 so it's overkill.

VMware ESXi, with VM's for Squid, DNS, MySQL, Nginx, Apache, basic file server, Gitlab, and one that's basically for IRSSI

Strongly considering just moving everything to Debian with containers for everything, easier to manage than VM's.

</comment><comment><USER92> As much as I can, currently:

On colo'd hardware:

\- off-site backup server (Borg backup on top of zfs) - this is a dedicated box

\- a mix of VMs and docker containers - mostly custom web apps

\- email (it's easier than you think)

At home:

\- file server using zfs

\- Nextcloud

\- more custom web apps

\- tvheadend

\- VPN for remote access (IKEv2)

\- gitlab

\- gitlab ci

Also run an IPSec mesh between sites for secure remote access to servers etc

While my workplace uses AWS a massive amount, I still prefer to run my own hardware and software. Cloud services are not for me.

</comment><comment><USER93> Gitea for an easy gui git access to repos with personal/sensitive data and Resilio for backing up my phone

</comment><comment><USER94> I built a setup called TinyDataCenter on a RasPi and run it hybrid with AWS and S3FS for unlimited media storage. On it I built iSpooge Live to host and syndicate my livestreams to YouTube and Twitch, and built some ffmpeg scripts to turn videos into HLS and playback with adaptive rate via VidroJS. Also on it is my portfolio site and in progress are imported copies of all my social media archives like Twitter and IG. Auth happens via JWTs from Auth0 but I've an email magic link system to bolt in soon. There's an xmpp server that isn't integrated yet. Email is hosted 3rd party but I may try email in a box. The theme is decentralized with syndication. This has been going on and live streamed to regularly for about 2 years. All mybdcripts are open source, same username on GitHub.

</comment><comment><USER95> Besides some self-hosted applications, this is some stuff that is very useful to me:

* Nextcloud - your own Dropbox! Amazing stuff.

* VPN - simple Docker service that is super reliable and easy to set up (docker-ipsec-vpn-server)

* Ghost - a very nice lean and mean blogging CMS

* MQTT broker for temperature sensors

* Samba server

* Deluge - Torrent client for local use

* Sabnzbd - NZB client

* Gitea - my own Git server

* Mail forwarder - very handy if you just want to be able to receive email on certain addresses without setting up a mailbox

* Pihole - DNS ad-blocking

* Jellyfin - self-hosted Netflix

It's become sort of my hobby to self-host these kind of things. I use all of these services almost daily and it's very rewarding to be able to fully self- host it. I also really love Docker, self-hosting truly entered a new era thanks to readily avaibable Docker images that make it very easy to experiment and run things in production without having to worry about breaking stuff.

</comment><comment><USER96> I actually self-host a Phoenix LiveView silly game at work on my MacBook Pro, I'm not sure you can self-host more than that ;) For the anecdote the devops tried to ddos it but the app was working like it wasn't flooded by requests.

Of course you can't even tell Macos to not suspend wifi or whatever if you close the lid while on battery so now I'm trying to move it to a Raspberry Pi 4 but I've got an obscure ssl error with OTP22 on it while querying an api, so I'm trying to debug that instead ... oh the joy.

All my side projects and some clients are hosted old school style in a dedicated servers. I do overpay because that's the same price and machine since 2013 and yet it's still way cheaper than any cloud offering, especially because of the hosted databases pricings.

</comment><comment><USER43> At home:

TT-RSS + mercury-parser + rss-bridge + Wallabag to replace Feedly and Pocket.

Syncthing + restic + rclone and some home grown scripting for backups.

Motion + MotionEye for home security.

Deluge + flexget + OpenVPN + Transdroid.

Huginn + Gotify for automation and push notifications.

Apache for hosting content and reverse proxying.

Running on a NUC using a mix of qemu/kvm and docker containers.

<comment><USER97> What sort of things do you use Huginn and Gotify for?

<comment><USER43> I'm using Gotify for receiving push notifications on my phone for things where, in the bad old days, I might've used email. So things like: when my offsite backups complete, if my VPN goes down, on torrent add/complete events, and when motion is detected on my security cameras.

Huginn came into being because I wanted a way to republish some of my emails as an RSS feed that I could subscribe to with TT-RSS (e.g. Matt Levine's newsletter), and for that purpose alone it's justified its existence.

I've also used it as the plumbing that connects my various services to Gotify (Huginn makes a Webhook available and the event gets routed to Gotify). This is, admittedly, entirely unnecessary; I could just hit Gotify directly. But putting Huginn in the middle could give me some flexibility later... and it's there, so, why not use it? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> many things:

\- Nginx

\- Nextcloud (with Calendar/Contacts on it)

\- IRC client (thelounge)

\- IRC server

\- DLNA server

\- Ampache server

\- video and photo library thru NFS (locally only)

\- OpenVPN

\- Shiori for bookmarks

\- Gitea for private projects

\- Syncthing (to keep a folder synchronized across my devices)

\- Jenkins

<comment><USER98> Glad to see another Ampache user!

<comment><USER47> Yeah after trying many other options it is the one that works the best so far!

<comment><USER98> Agreed! There's not much it can't do!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> Plex, Bitwarden, Nextcloud, Unifi, Pihole, OpenVPN, IPSec VPN, Gitea, OpenLDAP, Portainer, My Personal Site, Cloud Torrent, TTRSS, Grafana, Loki, FreeRADIUS, Kanboard, Dokuwiki, SMTP, Goitfy, php*Admin, Container Registry, Python registry, Matomo, PXE Server.

<comment><USER38> Is IPSec VPN a IKEv2 on either LibreSwan or StrongSwan connected to FreeRadius for authentication? What are the clients you connect from? Is it stable?

</comment></comment><comment><USER100>
      * Email (postfix + dovecot)
      * XMPP (prosody + biboumi for IRC gateway)
      * Static websites
      * Mercurial code hosting (mercurial-server + hgweb)
      * File storage (sftp, mostly accessed via sshfs)

Some on a HP microserver somewhere, some on a VPS.

</comment><comment><USER101> I don't host anything at home, but I think it still counts as self-hosting if you run an independent service. In that sense, I self-host Mastodon: [https://mastodon.social](https://mastodon.social)

</comment><comment><USER102> For my bookmarks, I self-host Espial, an open-source, web-based bookmarking server. [https://github.com/jonschoning/espial](https://github.com/jonschoning/espial)

</comment><comment><USER103> Fastmail handles my mail, Newsblur for RSS, iCloud for calendar. My blog is hosted on Netlify.

The only things I host are either just hobbies or non-essentials:

At home: \- Node-red for home automation \- PiHole for ad filtering on the local network \- Plex on my NAS for videos \- A Raspi for reading my Ruuvitags and pushing the info to MQTT On Upcloud and DigitalOcean and a third place: \- Unifi NVR (remote storage for security cameras) \- Flexget + Deluge for torrents \- InfluxDB + Grafana for visualizing all kinds of stuff I measure \- Mosquitto for MQTT

</comment><comment><USER104> Online:

\- Nextcloud

\- Mailu.io

\- Huginn

\- Gotify

\- Airsonic

\- Gitea

All on a dedicated box. Planning to add password sync, wallabag, syncthing a VPN and a few other features. Other boxes I have run various things from DNS to backup MXes and a WriteFreely instance on OpenBSD.

Internally I host a ton of stuff, mostly linked to a Plex instance.

</comment><comment><USER105> File server and plex, that's about it. I have another server I'll occasionally run a Kubernetes cluster on, otherwise I don't really bother with self hosting - I hate dev ops shit for a reason...

<comment><USER106> > I hate dev ops shit for a reason...

I notice I was a lot more keen on hosting a bunch of crap myself before I knew how to do it "right", and before devops, orchestration ("you mean running scripts in remote shells?"), cloud, or containers or any of that were things. And yet it all worked just fine back then—time spent fixing problems from my naïve "apt-get install" or "emerge" set-up process wasn't _actually_ that bad, compared with the up-front cost of doing it all "right" these days. A couple lightly-customized "pet" servers were fine, in practice. Hm.

<comment><USER97> As a beginner programmer this is something I wonder about. Having worked with many amazing engineers, I have some sense of the effort that goes into "doing it right" and the fear of god put into me for the consequences of not doing it right.

So then look at home projects and I wonder if I know enough to self host things, or host them on GCP in a manner that won't just invite getting hacked, running up a ridiculous bill, or leaking my private sensitive data out.

Any guidance to offer?

<comment><USER106> 1) Just pay a flat fee for a VPS, unless you're _trying_ to learn how to use a "true" cloud provider. Their web interfaces usually make recovery from the worst failure modes ("I can't even ping the box...") trivial and they'll cut you off if usage goes too high (which is what you want if you're trying to avoid insane bills). They may also have DNS and such in one place, again in an easy pointy-clicky interface, which is nice.

2) A lot of what people do is chasing nines that you don't need (and a lot of the time they don't either, but "best practices" don't you know, and no-one wants to have _not_ been following best practices, even if doing so was more expense and complexity than it was worth for the company & project, right?) so just forget about failover load balancers and rolling deploys and clustered databases and crap like that. _All_ of that stuff can be ignored if you just accept that you may have trouble achieving more than three nines.

3) If it's just for you, consider forgetting any active monitoring too. That can _really_ kill your nines of reliability, but if it's mostly just you using it, that may be fine, and you won't get alerts at 3:00AM because some router somewhere got misconfigured and your site was unreachable for two minutes for reasons beyond your control. Otherwise use the simplest thing that'll work. You can get your servers to email you resource warnings pretty easily. A ping test that messages you when it can't reach your service for the last X of Y minutes (do not make it send immediately the first time it fails, the public Internet is too unreliable for that to be a good idea) is probably the fanciest thing you need. Maybe you can find some free tier of a monitoring service to do that for you and forget about it, even.

4) If you can mostly restrict yourself to official packages from a major distro, and maybe a few static binaries, it's _really_ easy to just write a bash script that builds your server from scratch with very high reliability. Maybe use docker if you're already comfortable with it but otherwise, frankly, avoid if you can and just use an official distro packages instead, as it'll complicate things a lot (now you have a virtual network to route to/from/among, probably need a reverse proxy, you may have a harder time tracking down logs, and so on). Test it locally in Vagrant or just plain ol' Virtual Box or whatever, then let it loose on a fresh VPS. If you change anything on the VPS, put it in the script and make sure it still works. If you're feeling _very_ fancy learn Ansible, but you'll probably be fine without it.

5) For security, use an SSH key, not a password, and change your SSH port to something non-default (put that in your setup script) just to cut down on failed login noise, if you feel like it. You could add fail2ban but if you've changed the port and are using a key it's probably overkill.

6) Forget centralized logging or any of that crap. If you have a single digit count of VPSen then your logging's already centralized enough. If one becomes unreachable _and_ can't be booted again _and_ you can't find any way at all to read its disk, and that happens more than once, consider forwarding logs from _just that one_ to another that's more reliable if you wanna troubleshoot it. You can do this with basic logging packages available on any Linux distro worth mentioning, no need to involve any SaaS crap.

7) Backups. The one ops-type thing you actually _have to_ to do if your data's not throwaway junk is backups. Backups and strictly-used build-the-server- from-scratch + restore-from-backup scripts are kinda sorta all _most_ places actually _need_ , despite all the k8s and docker chatter and such.

8) Cloudflare exists, if you have any public-facing web services.

[EDIT] mind none of this will help you get a job anymore since everyone wants a k8s wizard AWS-certified ninja whether they need 'em or not, so don't bother if your goal is to learn lucrative job-seeking skills, but it's entirely, completely fine for personal hosting and... hate to burst anyone's bubble... an awful lot of business hosting, too. Warning: if you learn how to run servers like this you may need to invest in some sort of _eye clamp_ to prevent unwanted eye-rolling in server-ops-related meetings at work, depending on how silly the place you work is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> In DO:

4 Ubuntu 16.04 servers:

\- Nginx/PHP for Wordpress \- MySQL \- Redis \- Mail

Planning to expand the the Nginx/PHP servers to at least two, and add load balancers. All certs are provided by an Ansible script using Lets Encrypt (yuck).

At home:

Proxmox running on two homebuilt AMD FX 8320 servers with 32GB each, with drives provided by FreeNAS on a homebuilt Supermicro server with about 10TB of usable space (on both HDDs and SSDs)

Ubuntu 16.04 Servers:

\- 2x DNS \- 2x DHCP \- GitLab \- Nagios \- Grafana \- InfluxDB \- Redmine \- Reposado \- MySQL

Other:

\- Sipecs

All set up via Ansible.

Next will set up a Kubernetes cluster (probably as far as I'll get with containers).

</comment><comment><USER108> I host everything internal where if I need the resource I VPN in from outside. They all run on Raspberry Pis.

> Resilio Sync for iPhone pictures backups and "drop box" file access

> Transmission server

> SMB share of NAS to supply OSMC boxes on every TV

> Nighthawk N7000 running dd-wrt with a 500gb flash drive attached as storage > for my Amcrest wifi cameras

> Edgerouter Lite running VPN server

> Hassbian for my zwave home automation stuff

> A pi with cheap speakers that I can log into and play a phone ringing sound > so my wife will look at her phone!

</comment><comment><USER109> I wasn't going to post mine until I realized that I'm hosting some stuff that I haven't seen mentioned yet.

        Appveyor
        Gitea
        Graylog + Elastic Search
        Minecraft/Pixelmon
        Nodered
        ruTorrent
        Taiga
        Tiny Tiny RSS
        Ubooquity*
        WikiJS
        Zulip (chat/IM)

*I hate it, but haven't found something better

Also, kudos to those brave souls who are running Tor exit nodes!

Edit: Forgot a bunch

</comment><comment><USER110> Intel NUC7i5BNK with coreos running the following in a single node docker swarm:

      - Traefik (reverse proxy)
      - Git Annex
      - <USER5>
      - Drone (CI)
      - Docker Registry
      - Clair (security scanning for docker images)
      - Selfoss (RSS reader)
      - Grafana / Prometheus / Alertmanager (overkill really)
      - A few custom applications...

Turris Omnia running transmission under lxc

</comment><comment><USER111> I tried to host OwnCloud, but could not figure out how to make fully automatic updates to function (including host OS - e.g. Ubuntu).

Now I only host my own project: [http://billion.dev.losttech.software:2095/](http://billion.dev.losttech.software:2095/)

Also regular Windows file sharing which I use for media server and backups.

Though I'd like to expand that. Maybe a hosted GitLab.

<comment><USER93> Try Gitea instead og Gitlab if all you need is just a simple online gui for git. Its like a lightweight version of github, super sweet

</comment></comment><comment><USER112> I run a small sever with node-red. Right now I use it to scrap university websites looking for PhD paid scholarships.

Also, I use it to find flats when I need ro.

<comment><USER113> That flats thing sounds cool. Do you have anything written up or available somehow where I can read up on it? Or would you care to elaborate here?

</comment></comment><comment><USER114> I have one OpenBSD VM running on vultr with:

\- Mail server (OpenSMTPD)

\- IMAP (Dovecot)

\- CVS server for my projects.

\- httpd(8) for my website.

I still need to add rspamd for spam check. But insofar, I received just one spam E-mail.

<comment><USER115> > \- CVS server for my projects.

Out of curiosity, do you genuinely prefer CVS or just haven't migrated from a historical repo?

</comment></comment><comment><USER116> Email, using mailinabox.email. Highly recommend it.

Also NextCloud (files, contacts and calendar), few WordPress websites and Fathom for website analytics.

</comment><comment><USER117> Currently nothing but Hass.io on a raspberry pi with an assortment of z-wave and zigbee sensors and a few wifi enabled light bulbs.

</comment><comment><USER118> Synology NAS:

      Unifi controller
      Miniflux
      CouchPotato
      DSMR Reader (software that logs smart electricity meter data)
      Gitea
      Deluge
      MySQL
      PostgreSQL
      Cloud Storage mirror (for Google Drive backup)

Intel NUC:

      Full Bitcoin node
      Bitcoin lightning node

Remote (Digital Ocean):

      Trading Software
      Various PHP websites

</comment><comment><USER119> OpenSuse Leap, that acts as a NAS for my other computers. At home: Borg backups jellyfin x2go

cloud (time4vps 1TB storage node) borg calibre AdGuard

\-- home server data drive rsyncs to an internal data drive (XFS to btrfs), btrfs drive takes a snapshot and unmounts when not in use, then important stuff is rsynced to my VPS. \--- home drives backed up with borg for encryption

</comment><comment><USER120> Syncthing as a Dropbox alternative

I keep looking at hosting my own mail server, but get scared off by tales of config/maintenance dramas.

<comment><USER121> For gmail to accept mail and not end up in spam folders, add domain verification TXT records [https://support.google.com/a/answer/2716802](https://support.google.com/a/answer/2716802)

</comment></comment><comment><USER122> I self-host the following services:

        syncthing
        nfs server
        UPnP server, connected to my media NAS
        gitea server, for my personal projects
        droneci, linked to my gitea server, for building websites and releases I publish
        A few locally hosted services, such as DevDocs, draw.io or Asciiflow, for convenience.

</comment><comment><USER123> On cheap cloud instances at Hetzner:

      - postfix/dovecot for mailing
      - searx instance
      - synapse for matrix
      - unbound for DoT
      - nginx for my blog
      - gophernicus for old times sake

At home:

      - <USER6>
      - monero full node
      - unbound backup instance
      - fhem for home automation
      - restic for backup

</comment><comment><USER124> Pretty much everything I develop (excluding most databases) are hosted on my cloud server. Best $5/mo I ever spent!

</comment><comment><USER125> I run test environments for my saas products, gitlab and nextcloud on a dual core box, hp dc7900, in my roofspace. The os is running of an ssd and there are two old metal disks in software raid.

All my business backups go to the same box. I have a pi and enrypted usb drive copying my backups to my shed from my house.

</comment><comment><USER126> Plex on raspberry Pi2 with deluge remote client/server. I don't think it can handle more than that.

<comment><USER126> I do plan to upgrade the pi or get another one for a pihole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER127> Everything.

PiHole, HRCloud2, HRScan2, HRConvert2, my wordpress blog, a KB, and a few other nick knacks. Currently working on a noSQL share tool (for auth-less large file sharing) and then maybe this idea that's been floating around my head for a Linux update server. Like WSUS for linux.

</comment><comment><USER128> nodejs nginx apache2 postgresql mysql nextcloud jvm/rhino/ringojs mattermost wekan wikimedia nextERP nodejs WebRTC signaling server, nodejs pushing notification server, STUN server, mumble Asterisk git Haraka etherpad

</comment><comment><USER129> Zulip, archivebox, codimd, mailu, plex, radarr, sonarr, jackett, transmission, matomo, kiwix, minecraft, nextcloud, unifi controller, unifi CRM, pihole, wireguard, zfs, glusterfs, freenas, autossh, swarmpit, netdata, syncthing, duplicati, elk stack, nomad, a bunch of static sites, a bunch of wordpress sites, a bunch of assorted django apps (including a large consumer-facing one), custom dyndns and tls renewal cron jobs, and many many more that have come and gone over the years.

All on a few Vultr + Digitalocean droplets, 2 raspis + 1 atomic pi, a couple HP i5 mini desktop machines, and a Dell r610 rack server with 24 cores and 48GB of ram (with about 36TB of assorted shucked and unshucked USB hard drives attached in a few GlusterFS / ZFS pools). I have a home-built UPS with about 1.5kwh worth of lead-acid batteries powering everything, and it's on cheap Montreal power anyway so I only pay $0.06¢/kwh + $80/mo for Gigabit fiber. It's a mix of stuff for work and personal because I'm CTO at our ~9 person startup and I enjoy tinkering with devops setups to learn what works.

All organized neatly in this type of structure: [https://docs.sweeting.me/s/an-intro-to-the-opt- directory](https://docs.sweeting.me/s/an-intro-to-the-opt-directory)

Some examples: [https://github.com/Monadical- SAS/zervice.elk](https://github.com/Monadical-SAS/zervice.elk) [https://github.com/Monadical- SAS/zervice.minecraft](https://github.com/Monadical-SAS/zervice.minecraft) [https://github.com/Monadical- SAS/ubuntu.autossh](https://github.com/Monadical-SAS/ubuntu.autossh)

Ingress is all via CloudFlare Argo tunnels or nginx + wireguard via bastion host, and it's all managed via SSH, bash, docker-compose, and supervisord right now.

It's all built on a few well-designed "LEGO block" components that I've grown to trust deeply over time: ZFS for local storage, GlusterFS for distributed storage, WireGuard for networking, Nginx & CloudFlare for ingress, Supervisord for process management, and Docker-Compose for container orchestration. It's allowed me to be able to quickly set up, test, reconfigure, backup, and teardown complex services in hours instead of days, and has allowed me to try out hundreds of different pieces of self-hosted software over the last ~8 years. It's not perfect, and who knows, maybe I'll throw it all away in favor of Kubernetes some day, but for now it works really well for me and has been surprisingly reliable given how much I poke around with stuff.

TODOs: find a good solution for centralized config/secrets management that's less excruciatingly painful than running Vault+Consul or using Kubernetes secrets.

</comment><comment><USER130> What do people use to provision their Raspberries? Ansible or something?

</comment><comment><USER131> On my VPS

      * My Website
      * Seafile
      * FreshRSS
      * RSSBridge for making rss feed for websites that don't have one
      * Dokuwiki
      * A Proxy
      * Multiple Telegram and Reddit bots

</comment><comment><USER132> On this note, I've got a few services I'd like to setup locally. I'm curious if I could set them up in a Docker-like fashion, where it's super easy to manage the individual container image - and then run it on some type of home "cloud". I debated reaching for Docker Swarm, but I'm curious:

What might be the easiest way to achieve this? Running a Kube cluster is insane for my needs, I imagine I'd be perfectly happy with a few Pi's running various Docker Containers. However I'm unsure what the easiest way to manage this semi-cloud environment.

 _edit_ : Oh yea, forgot Docker Compose existed. That may be the easiest way to manage this, though I've never used it.

<comment><USER133> You can run a single node k8s setup.

<comment><USER134> Is k8s worth it on just a single node if you aren't prototyping or learning for a larger setup?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER135> For folks that are reverse proxying I have a few questions...

1) Do you identify the reverse proxy by host or by path?

e.g. <service>.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com/<service>

2) Do you still run everything over a VPN?

<comment><USER43> Subdomain as well.

External services I need are directly accessible via a local reverse proxy that's publicly visible over IPv6.

For IPv4-only scenarios I proxy through a linode instance (that also hosts a few things, including my blog) which sends the traffic in over v6.

Obviously this is all fronted by a traditional firewall.

And before you ask: it's surprising how often v6 connectivity is available these days. Mobile phone providers have moved to v6 en masse, and even terrestrial internet providers are starting to get religion.

It's still not available in my workplace (surprise surprise), but other than that, much to my surprise, v6 is my primary mode of connectivity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER136> Self hosting Balsa Knowledgebae ([https://getbalsa.com](https://getbalsa.com)), an alternative to Notion and Evernote.

</comment><comment><USER137> I host my blog on a raspberry under my desk. At some point I'll Get around to moving my gitea instance there too, which is currently on digital ocean

</comment><comment><USER138> Running a few different containers in Docker at home.

\- Hand-rolled Go reverse proxy with TLS from LE.

\- Several Pg DBs for development.

\- VPN server.

\- Chisel for hosting things "from home" while running on my laptop remotely.

\- Etcd

\- Jenkins

\- Gitea

\- Pi-hole

\- A few different development projects

</comment><comment><USER139> Postfix, Dovecot, Amavis/Spamassassin, Bind, NGINX.

So, mail, DNS, and a few web sites. I've been running something like this for more than 15 years now.

</comment><comment><USER140> powerdns, wireguard, gitlab, nginx, pgsql, mariadb, zabbix, nextcloud, Grafana, graphite, prometheus, haproxy, postfix, and a lot more

<comment><USER141> Curious what made you choose powerdns over bind, I've never tried it out before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER142> Tiny Tiny RSS - [https://tt-rss.org/](https://tt-rss.org/)

</comment><comment><USER143> I have home server to host samba share for my needs, also hosting videofiles so I can watch them on my TV.

</comment><comment><USER144> I self host Talkyard, a cross between StackOverflow, Slack, HackerNews. [https://github.com/debiki/talkyard](https://github.com/debiki/talkyard) (I'm developing it)

And SyncThing, [https://syncthing.net/](https://syncthing.net/)

</comment><comment> johnx123-up Restyaboard (for trello alternative), GitLab (for GitHub alternative)

</comment><comment><USER145> Ethereum archival node

</comment><comment><USER146> Not much: Plex server, and Pi-Hole in a docker.

</comment><comment><USER147> Bitwarden, Unifi, PiHole

It all started with hosting subsonic

</comment><comment><USER148> Windows 2000 ISS 5 FTP SQL server 2000

</comment><comment><USER149> plex gitea deluge + VPN nzbget radar sickchill jackett grafana pihole openvpn server unify controller

</comment><comment><USER150> \- Nextcloud

\- Ampache

\- Shaarli

\- Dokuwiki

\- Deluge

\- Hugo blog

Everything running on a cheap server from kimsufi.

</comment><comment><USER151> I self-host using Cloudron (obviously). My list is:

* Gogs

* WordPress

* Wallabag

* Ghost

* Minio

* Email (yes, this is my primarily and only email)

* TinyTinyRSS

* NextCloud

* Meemo

* MediaWiki

</comment><comment><USER152> Calibre web

</comment><comment><USER153> Blog

</comment><comment><USER154> bitcoin full node</comment>


Microsoft's new Modern Keyboard has a hidden fingerprint reader - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/16/15815642/microsoft-modern-keyboard-fingerprint-reader-price-availability <comment><USER2> I really like this. I wonder if the ergonomic sculpt keyboard will come with a new version with such a fingerprint reader.</comment>


Kristallnacht, 79 Years Later - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@AakashJapi/kristallnacht-79-years-later-e6b1be282813 <comment><USER2> "Reichskristallnacht" is the old, common name, but in Germany you won't find this name in newspapers and official statements anymore. People started to think that it trivializes the events ("Kristall" because of shattered windows) and so "Reichspogromnacht" is the newer name. But people still argur about it.</comment>


Python 3 is now used in 36% commercial projects - <AUTHOR> https://semaphoreci.com/blog/2017/10/18/python-versions-used-in-commercial-projects-in-2017.html <comment><USER2> I think Python made a bit of a bad move with Python 3. I mean, for how many years have it been released without even reaching 50% of usage?

Look at many other languages, php, ruby etc. They make breaking changes and give the users a choice. If you want the new features, you'll have to upgrade. PHP7 for example, has been out for about 2 years now and almost have 10% usage already. It's not great, but I think the upgrades will go a lot faster than in the Python community as libraries and frameworks move to the new version and completely stops supporting the old.

I think that is a better path for tools like programming languages instead of making new stuff for two different versions. People are lazy, companies even more so. If there is no reason to update they won't.</comment>


The Lisp approach to AI (Part 1) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/ai-society/the-lisp-approach-to-ai-part-1-a48c7385a913#.ce2c5mk5a <comment><USER2> Hinton (now of Google Brain) and DS Touretzsky (yeah, the anti-scientology guy) published a thing in 1985 claiming inferential symbol production a la lisp from connectionist (neural) models ([http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/symbolsIJCAI.pdf](http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/symbolsIJCAI.pdf)). It only had the disadvantage of being a researchy piece of crap.

<comment><AUTHOR> Jmm, thanks for the fact, I would never imagine such a paper, but why are you saying that it's a piece of crap?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I enjoyed reading this.</comment>


Now you can almost genetically engineer your baby - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2009/02/25/designer-babies-like-it-or-not-here-they-come/

<comment><USER2> don't fuck with nature</comment>


Digging into Apple's new file system – APFS - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/06/digging-into-the-dev-documentation-for-apfs-apples-new-file-system/ <comment><AUTHOR> I kind of wish, they would instead implement ZFS for mac os. That would be awesome. Sending snapshots from your osx to your server as backups on filesystem level, leveraging all the existing tools etc.</comment>


Sam Harris and the ideology of reason - <AUTHOR> http://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/30/sam-harris-and-the-ideology-of-reason/ <comment> wu-ikkyu >There's something peculiarly thick-headed about the New Atheism – the parallels between its idolatry of reason and the faith of more conventional religion have become an argumentative cliche.

I've always found the parallels and hubris of militant evangelical atheists/religionists comically ironic. Especially since hubris is the antithesis of _real_ science.

This point reminds me of a Sagan quote:

"An atheist has to know a lot more than I know. An atheist is someone who knows there is no god. By some definitions atheism is very stupid."</comment>


Unlimited Electric Guitar on Kickstarter - <AUTHOR> http://kck.st/MfsNq2 We designed a new electric guitar with all the functionality of amps and effects pedals but none of the hassle. The Unlimited uses smartphone technology for effects pedals and a built-in amplifier so you can rock out wherever you go. <comment><USER2> I had a Sears version of this when I was a kid in the 80s. It was a "synsonics terminator", I think. I hacked it to look like this one because I thought it would be awesome if the speaker blasted the strings directly for feedback. It wasn't. The pick shredded the soft doughnut of the speaker after very little playing.

Protip: It looks lame, but you need a steel grille guarding the speaker.</comment>


Constructivism is a theory of learning, not a theory of pedagogy - <AUTHOR> https://npjscilearncommunity.nature.com/users/33200-mike-hobbiss/posts/41828-constructivism-is-a-theory-of-learning-not-a-theory-of-pedagogy-neuroscience-explains-why-this-is-important <comment><USER2> Can't say I found this article particularly valuable. It spends most of its time trying to explain what constructivism is, and then does a poor job demonstrating how it's being misused as a theory of pedagogy.

Mostly the point seems to be that constructivism would promote teaching multiple representations of something... but then teachers end up doing something else:

> Teachers are therefore encouraged to design learning environments through > which students are able to learn for themselves, sometimes facilitating the > learning, but generally providing limited explicit guidance.

I'm not even sure how this follows.</comment>


Hijacked Asus software updates installed backdoor on at least 0.5M PCS - T-A https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/03/hijacked-asus-software-updates-installed-backdoor-on-at-least-0-5-million-pcs/ <comment><AUTHOR> dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19482191](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19482191)</comment>


Show HN: Won 1st  RailsRumble with an app that detects voicemail sentiment. - <AUTHOR> https://www.callerkey.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Feedback would be much appreciated!</comment>


Ask HN: CS grad wanting to travel with remote work opportunities - <AUTHOR>

alright so I know some of you guys are already in the industry, so hopefully someone can fill me in.
I'm graduating at the end of the summmer with my CS degree. I know I could go out and get a well paid job at a company and work a 9-5 but I don't want to do that yet, at this point in my life. I don't want to be stapled down, I want to travel, whether it be freely or for work purposes. I just want to do this for a few years, until I'm ready to settle down.
So my question, where do I look to find job opportunities for remote positions or something similar that would alllow me to do this? I go to the job fairs here at FSU, but they are all positions for specific locations and not the type of job I'm ready for yet.
Maybe some side work or something, just to live off and travel expenses.
Thanks <comment><USER2> Honestly I don't think there will be many opportunities to work remotely for someone right out of school. I think most companies would want you to work in the office until you have proven yourself. You might be able to find some contract work here and there but it will be tough without some real world experience.

</comment><comment><USER3> plenty of people freelance right out of school - or with no school.

One route is building up a profile on Odesk, Elance or Freelancer.com. It's a hard grind but it guarantees freedom.

Another angle is a remote job, check out weworkremotely.com or build a relationship with the company you want to work for. eventually it could turn into a remote contract gig.

I also recommend TropicalMBA podcast and their membership community, the Dynamite Circle. We are location independent entrepreneurs traveling the world, doing our thing. Tons of folks in Chang Mai, Thailand and Saigon, Vietnam.

Currently I am a freelancer living in Chile, about to relocate to San Pedro Guatemela.

p.s. read the Four Hour Work Week ASAP

<comment><AUTHOR> That all sounds interesting, I appreciate the resources!</comment></comment>


Angola's Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nz7eyg/wikipedia-zero-facebook-free-basics-angola-pirates-zero-rating <comment><USER2> Capping uploads for Wikipedia Zero to a reasonable limit per user wouldn't work?</comment>


Chipmachine – a Spotify-like audio player for demoscene/chip/game music - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sasq64/chipmachine/ <comment><AUTHOR> seen on pouët: [http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=67259](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=67259)

previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10593196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10593196)</comment>


WebGL Smoke Demo - <AUTHOR> http://www.senchalabs.org/philogl/PhiloGL/examples/smoke/ <comment><USER2> Jos Stam has an excellent selection of papers related to modeling fluids for graphics:

[http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/people/stam/reality/Research/pub....](http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/people/stam/reality/Research/pub.html)</comment>


An Update on AMD Processor Security 1/11/2018 - <AUTHOR> https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/speculative%2Dexecution <comment><USER2> The gist is:

Google Project Zero Variant 1 (Bounds Check Bypass or Spectre) can be contained with an operating system patch.

Google Project Zero Variant 2 (Branch Target Injection or Spectre): it's complicated.

Google Project Zero Variant 3 (Rogue Data Cache Load or Meltdown) is not applicable to AMD processors.

All of this does not apply to AMD GPUs as they don't use speculative execution.

Further down they say about Variant 2:

> Differences in AMD architecture mean there is a near zero risk of > exploitation of this variant. Vulnerability to Variant 2 has not been > demonstrated on AMD processors to date.</comment>


Trov adds $45M for the global expansion of its on-demand insurance - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/06/trov-adds-45-million-for-the-global-expansion-of-its-on-demand-insurance/ <comment><USER2> When will this be available in Canada?</comment>


Hearts of Iron IV – A Realistic WWII Wargame - <AUTHOR> http://www.heartsofirongame.com/ <comment><USER2> Always makes me laugh when WWII games are trumpeted as being 'authentic', 'realistic', 'true to life', etc. yet never seem to know which insignia or flag the Germans used.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean? They seem to properly use the German flag during the WWII era (in particular the Nazi Germany war flag): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_flags](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_flags)

In addition, depending on ideologies you choose in the game, they dynamically add/remove symbols/variations to your flag (for example I saw a Poland player's flag acquire a hammer and sickle icon as his country turned communist).

<comment><USER2> Go to the wiki section of that site and look under "Germany'. The flag is depicted as being an iron cross on a red background.

Not unique to this game, unfortunately. I think Wolfenstein 3D was the last game I saw which actually used authentic swastika flags. Everything since has been given the politically correct "won't someone think of the children!" historical rewrite. Ironic really, given that Nazism was 'kinda sorta' what WWII was all about and the swastika is [to use the current vernacular] probably the most instantly recognisable 'meme' from that war.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Exciting. I loved the second one, hated the third :)</comment>


Ask HN: What's the most effective way you have found to get Facebook fans? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> The question you should be asking is, why do you want Facebook fans?

Is it to retarget visitors to your site through Facebook ads? In that case, a Like button on your site would work well.

Is it because your app has a viral element that requires appearance on profiles/News Feed to grow? Then you should be incentivizing users to friend you by offering them something of high perceived value in return.

Or do you simply want a high number of fans as a growth metric to show off? For that, there are numerous enterprises online that will sell you as many fans as you want at a reasonable price.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's a hard question to answer without providing some information on your product/service. Il raises a good question in his post, 'why do you want Facebook fans?.' That answer will help determine how you want to gather those FB fans, because there are a lot of ways to do so and some are not so legit.

But, my short answer would be to leverage your existing product/service to convert your active community into FB fans. Those will most likely be your most engaging FB fan audience and easiest to become fans with the right incentive. From there, your networks of fans will only start to grow.

Sorry I couldn't give you a specific answer, but without knowing your business I couldn't provide a suggestion. In my own community, we encourage the players of our games to become facebook fans through virtual currency, bragging rights, and other incentives.

<comment><AUTHOR> How often do you send updates to your fans?

<comment><USER3> We update our fans through multiple mediums. Our community posts about us to their walls and news stream, but we hardly contact our players through facebook directly. We communicate with them through our FB fan page, provide coupons, competitions, and other marketing strategies.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi flignates,

I just released a website to manage updates to your fan pages. Would you check it out and tell me what you think?

<http://www.statusscheduler.com>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would like to know if Facebook fanpages are useful for marketing. If you use a Facebook fanpage, does it drive new users to your website?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think facebook fan pages are useful in re-engaging users. I equate it to an email list. You can gather fans like you gather emails for your email list. When you push a message to your fans it is similar to pushing an email to your email lists. Both don't drive more users to your site unless the user chooses to share the email or the status message.</comment></comment>


AndOTP Removed from the Google Play Store Due to Donation Link - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/andOTP/andOTP/issues/396 <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21268389](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21268389).

</comment><comment><USER3> Given the other story this morning[1], does that mean Google's cracking down on donation links?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21268389](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21268389)

<comment><USER2> Although about different apps, the story is basically the same, so we'll merge the two threads.</comment></comment>


The Invisible Sculpture [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFh6P9f4G9w <comment><AUTHOR> And here's a blog post about when she had it installed in SF MOMA [http://elevr.com/would-you-like-to-see-an-invisible- sculptur...](http://elevr.com/would-you-like-to-see-an-invisible-sculpture/)</comment>


Meteor gets SQL support - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/drorm/meteor-sql Initial implementation of SQL support (MySQL only atm) for Meteor <comment><USER2> Can the readme file please include information about what this software does and what its goals are? I realize many in this community have probably been following the project, and I vaguely recall seeing it here before, but with all the projects that appear on this web site it's really hard to remember what each one does.

<comment><USER3> Meteor is a javascript stack of technologies for building web apps that are reactive.

What is a reactive app? Basically, for a web application, this means the client maintains a connection to the server, allowing the server to push data to the client whenever the data changes on the server. No browser reload. No need to submit. It looks more like a fat client app than a traditional web application, because there is full two-way communication between the client and server whenever needed.

Meteor then takes this concept and marries it with a simple client-side key/value store. This makes it seem fast, as a client application can make changes to its local data store and refresh the web page very quickly, updating the server asynchronously. If the server rejects the change (due to security reasons, or any other reason), the client then restores the local data copy to its original state.

The Meteor application framework is built around a "single page application" framework. This means that all of the HTML and Javascript for the entire application are downloaded to the client on the first web page load. When you go from one "page" to another "page", the page doesn't reload; instead Javascript is used to re-render the replace the HTML on the page.

All of this gives Meteor-based web applications a feel that I find to be more similar to that found in IOS/Android native applications. Data still comes from the web, but the rest is handled in JS on the client. I have found that web applications built this way feel faster and more responsive, and behave more like what I expect from traditional apps (i.e. non-web-apps).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not quite, it got MySQL support.</comment>