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Nibodhika

@Nibodhika@lemmy.world

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Nibodhika ,

Do you have an alternative to cloudflare tunnels? I'd love to hear it, because I'm also not really happy about relying on them either, but tailscale only works up to an extent because not all devices can connect to it and it's a pain in the ass to get random family members to connect to it as well.

Nibodhika ,

That would be awesome, currently it's 500GB for their cheaper option which starts at 23/year. I didn't find an option to increase the bandwidth before completing the order. Also it needs to be deployed in NY (which would be possibly slow for me in Europe). Finally their isos are somewhat old, the latest Ubuntu they have is 20.04 (which has an EoL next year).

All that being said, 23/year is very cheap for a VPS, and for people in the US that use less than 500GB/month that's the best deal I've ever seen.

Nibodhika ,

Thanks, I'm checking that out, but can't find any "add services" button. Alsp someone mentioned IONOS, which is local to me and doesn't seem to have bandwidth limits... I was trying to find the poop and they require lots of personal info just to get the account setup, still a bit torn there.

Nibodhika ,

For me self-hosted refers to #2. Many of us also have jobs that are either fully or partially related to #1, but I wouldn't expect a #1 answer here. Questions here are usually directed to, and answered with, the #2 mentality.

Nibodhika ,

They are very different things. If all of the places where you want to access the data have storage large enough to accommodate all of it syncthing is probably easier. If however you also want to access the data from your phone, then syncthing won't work, because it will sync the entire folder to your phone, there's no way to use it like you would Nextcloud, i.e. only downloading things as you need them.

Nibodhika ,

That's the one I use exactly because of that. I know compose, not going to learn another program to do the same, just want something that gives me an easier way to edit them than sshing into my box and using an editor.

Nibodhika ,

Why not use Journal from Silverbullet since you already have it https://silverbullet.md/Library/Journal

You can just copy those templates and edit them as you wish, for example I have one for Stand-ups at work

Self-hosted website for posting web novel/fiction

Hey hello, self-hosting noob here. I just want to know if anyone would know a good way to host my writing. Something akin to those webcomic sites, except for writing. Multiple stories with their own "sections" (?) and a chapter selection for each. Maybe a home page or profile page to just briefly detail myself or whatever, I...

Nibodhika ,

Others have suggested Markdown formats, if you're willing to do that you might want to look at Silverbullet.

Nibodhika ,

Not the user you've asked but I'm using Silverbullet and have been loving it, it ticks every box of what I was looking for:

  • Self hosted
  • Stores files in plain markdown text format
  • You can edit those files externally and Silverbullet picks up the changes
  • Allows customization and expansion easily
  • Provides queries that allow you to extend markdown to pull data from other files
  • These use an SQLite db to get these things to work fast, but if you delete them they get regenerated
  • Can be easily synchronized with multiple nodes by using synching to sync the markdown files
Nibodhika ,

just making a docker compose and maybe having ansible deploy that?

that's what I do, why ansible? Because it makes it easier to deploy the same service in different servers with slightly different configurations, for example when migrating from one server to another. Also it helps with having something I can easily backup (e.g. git repo) that can redo my server(s) if needed.

That being said I'm still setting everything up with ansible.

Nibodhika ,

I have been setting it up on my home, still not done but I can already see some benefits from it, e.g. I'm about to build a new server and migrate a lot of stuff to it, with ansible it will be very easy to just move some configs around and setup the server in no time at all. It also is encouraging me to keep a standard on how I do things which is great, and after setting up some initial things now adding new services is quite straightforward.

Overall I think there are a lot of positives about it, especially if you have multiple machines to manage. But even for a single one the fact that you can recreate everything from scratch in just one command is quite awesome considering the amount of times I've redone my server from 0 for different reasons over the past years.

Nibodhika ,

A man of culture I see hahaha. Just like VLC devs.

GNU Terry Pratchett

Nibodhika ,

I always name my PCs with characters from the book I'm currently reading. Here are a few: Teatime, Cthulhu, Dirk, Horus, Binky, Pteppic

Nibodhika ,

I've tried several, but I've had a major incident and lost all of the recipes I had because of a database corruption.

So I decided against keeping recipes in databases. I migrated to Notion, but I kept looking for a replacement since that's not self-hosted. Eventually I ran across Silverbullet, and I've been using it for everything, so far it's been great. Not exactly specifically what you asked but it can be used for it and works great.

Nibodhika ,

Correction, Raspberry pi zero can run lxd, been there done that. So if that's all OP wants a $10 computer should do it, he really needs to be more specific.

Nibodhika ,

O was going to make a weak suggestion, but the more I read the stronger my suggestion becomes. I strongly recommend you look at Silverbullet. It's similar to Obsidian in that everything is a markdown file, but has an excellent query language. For example in a random file I add a task with a tag, e.g.

* [ ] Do something [priority: 30]

Then on my homepage I have this block of code:

\```query
task where done = false and
priority > 0
order by priority desc
render [[Library/Core/Query/Task]]
\```

Which renders as a list of all my tasks on all my files ordered by priority, you can see how this becomes extremely customizable, e.g. using where page = Some/Page will only render tasks from that page.

It's not a kanban board like you asked, but it's great for all those stuff, and it's highly customizable to whatever you need.

You can keep track of problems each on their own page and have a frontmatter with general information that can be queried as if it were a database.

For example I keep one page for each tool I use at my work, and on the index of my work I have a table that shows these tools and links or cli examples.

Nibodhika ,

O think you meant to reply that to OP

Nibodhika ,

Not OP, but AFAIK that doesn't work for Whatsapp or other in-app calls, and since my family lives in another continent if there's an emergency they'll call via WhatsApp.

An argument could be made that because I live far away I don't need to be informed of emergencies right away, but there are cases in which I would like that, even if just to buy a same day ticket to go back as soon as possible.

Nibodhika ,

Yes, but any person calling on WhatsApp would get through. Granted, that's better than not using DnD, but still it's not perfect like people are making it out to be.

what will be my next server operating system (Fedora Server, Fedora CoreOS, NixOS), your experience and opinion

I want to reset my server soon and I'm toying with the idea of using a different operating system. I am currently using Ubuntu Server LTS. However, I have been toying with the idea of using Fedora Server (I use Fedora on my laptop and made good experiences with it) or even Fedora CoreOS. I also recently installed NixOS on my...

Nibodhika ,

And by now you mean for the past decade at least.

Nibodhika ,

My home server also runs arch, mostly because it's a computer I was using for myself before and I'm lazy and just left what was already there.

Nibodhika ,

Portage has supported binary packages since forever, back in 2012 I had some binary packages on my system, I clearly remember because it was a pain in the ass to compile certain things, for those I installed the binary version. It's like Debian supporting source packages, it's been there since forever but people don't know about it.

Nibodhika ,

I use diun and rss feeds. So far I've had different levels of success with different services.

For example for Immich the RSS is a lot more useful because it lets you know when you need to run manual steps.

Nibodhika ,

If you're going to start from the default Nextcloud instead of AIO you might as well try it on docker. Setting it up is easy regardless, but if you don't install it using docker keeping it up to date is a pain in the ass.

Looking for Cloud Storage Replacement, but I don't like NextCloud

I'm looking for something to replace cloud storage for myself and family. I've tried to use/like NextCloud but honestly I despise it. The UI/UX really bothers me, and administering it is a pain. It also just does way more that I want or need....

Nibodhika ,

I have a Nextcloud running in docker for years, the update has always been just docker pull. After years of suffering with the native installation, and upgrade processes that never worked, I migrated to docker and it couldn't be simpler.

This is one of the reasons every time someone says "you don't need docker to run your server" I'm like "yes, but that's like saying you don't need a vehicle to travel 100km".

Nibodhika ,

If the docker update doesn't update things you might not be using docker at all. Docker is like having a VM that you destroy after every run, so it's not that it updates the version, it is as if you were spinning up a new machine with the new version, a machine running the new version can't be running the old version by definition, unless you did something like telling that machine to overwrite the installation folder with a local one, e.g. by having something like - /var/www/nextcloud:/var/www/nextcloud (or whatever the path is where you have next cloud installed locally) in your volumes for the docker, which would be akin to buying a new PC because your GPU is old, immediately swapping out the new GPU for the old one, and wondering why the new GPU is so slow.

Nibodhika ,

Yeah, if you have a volume mounted on the folder where next cloud is installed it would be the same as what I mentioned. Look for anything mounting on /app that should be used from the image.

That being said be careful, if you haven't upgraded in a long time it's possible the automatic upgrade won't work or might break stuff.

Should I learn Docker or Podman?

Hi, I've been thinking for a few days whether I should learn Docker or Podman. I know that Podman is more FOSS and I like it more in theory, but maybe it's better to start with docker, for which there is a lot more tutorials. On the other hand, maybe it's better to straight up learn podman when I don't know any of the two and...

Nibodhika ,

Maybe they're having issues with his answer of "using an OS" which implies other people are not? IDK.

But as to you if you're running just one or two services from a machine you also use for other stuff using packages and systems services is perfectly fine. If you have dedicated hardware for it (or plan on having it), it starts to make sense to look at ways of making things easier for yourself in the long run. Docker solves lots of issues no one's talking about (because no one is facing them anymore), e.g.:

  • Different services requiring different versions of the same library/database/etc
  • Moving your service from one computer to another
  • Service requiring specific steps for updates (this is not entirely gone, but it's much better and it's prevents you from breaking your services by doing a random operation like updating your system)
  • Pinning versions of services until you decide to update without needing to sacrifice system updates for it (I know you can pin a version of a package, but if you don't upgrade it it will break when you upgrade it's dependencies)
  • Easily map ports or block access in a generic way, no need to discover how each service config file allows that, you can just do it at the container level. e.g. databases that can't be accessed from the network or even from within the host machine (I mean, they can obviously be accessed from the host system, just not in the traditional way, so a user who gains access to your machine on a user that's not allowed to use docker can't)
  • Isolation between services
  • Isolation from host machine
  • Reproducibility of services (i.e. one small docker compose file guarantees a reproducible host of services)
  • Endurance that no service is running as root (even if they only work as root)
  • Spin services in minutes to test stuff up and clean them out thoroughly in seconds.

There's probably many more reasons to use docker. Plus once you've learned it it's very easy for small self-hosted stuff so there's really no reason not to use it. Every time I see someone saying they don't use docker and don't understand why people use it I'm a bit baffled, it's like someone claiming he doesn't understand why people use knifes to cut bread when the two-handed axe he uses for chopping wood works (like, yes, it does work, but it's obviously not the best tool for the job)

Nibodhika ,

Docker, there are more resources for it and once you know it Podman should be an easy migration if you want to. Also I'm not sure about your claim that Podman is more FOSS than docker, it's "better" because it doesn't run as root, but other than that I don't know of any advantages to it that are not a derivation of "it runs as a regular user".

Nibodhika ,

So if someone made a non-foss frontend for Podman that would somehow make Podman less FOSS? Or of they started working with Podman? You don't need to use any of those other products, and it's not correct to say that docker is less FOSS because people have written proprietary software that uses it.

Nibodhika ,

Yes I'm aware of that, having written several systemd units for my own services in the past. But you're not likely to get any of that by default when you just install from the package manager as it's the discussion here, and most people will just use the default systemd unit provided, and in the vast majority of cases they don't provide the same level of isolation the default docker compose file does.

We're talking about ease of setting things up, anything you can do in docker you can do without, it's just a matter of how easy it is to get good standards. A similar argument to what you made would be that you can also install multiple versions of databases directly on your OS.

For example I'm 99% sure the person I replied to has this file for service:

[Unit]
Description=Plex Media Server
After=network.target network-online.target

[Service]
# In this file, set LANG and LC_ALL to en_US.UTF-8 on non-English systems to avoid mystery crashes.
EnvironmentFile=/etc/conf.d/plexmediaserver
ExecStart=/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex\x20Media\x20Server
SyslogIdentifier=plexmediaserver
Type=simple
User=plex
Group=plex
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=5
StartLimitInterval=60s
StartLimitBurst=3

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Some good user isolation, but almost nothing else, and I doubt that someone who argued that installing from the package manager is easier will run systemctl edit on what he just installed to add extra security features.

Nibodhika ,

You're not forced to use dockerhub or kubernetes, in fact I use neither. Also if a team chooses to host their images on dockerhub that's their choice, it's like saying git is bad because Microsoft owns GitHub, or that installing software X from the repos is better than compiling because you need to use GitHub to get the code.

Also docker images can also be easily mirrored, archived offline etc, and they will keep working after the packages you archived stop because the base version of some library got updated.

Nibodhika ,

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Most people self-hosting don't need anything special, just a docker compose file. What proprietary software do you think is needed that's not needed for Podman?

Nibodhika ,

It's definitely much easier to do that on docker than with apt packages, and docker was designed for thst. Just do a save/load, https://docs.docker.com/reference/cli/docker/image/save/ and like I mentioned before this is much more stable than saving some .deb files which will break the moment one of the dependencies gets updated.

Most people will use whatever docker compose file a project shows as default, if the project hosts the images on dockerhub that's their choice. Plus I don't understand what's the problem, GitHub is also proprietary and no one cares that a project is hosted there.

Nibodhika ,

Btw I don't mean any of that as an insult or anything of the sort, I do the same with the services I install from the package manager even though I'm aware of those security flags, what they do and how to add them.

Nibodhika ,

Got it, no one should use software hosted on GitHub, you're either a teenager who just discovered Linux a couple of years ago or a FOSS fundamentalist, in any case I've had the personal policy of not to waste time with either for over 20 years.

Nibodhika ,

He specifically mentioned huge storage, I'm guessing that you have less than 100GB for that price. Also he mentioned ARR stack, I wouldn't host that on a VPS.

Nibodhika ,

I wouldn't perform illegal actions on a VPS, I know people do it, but it's like the difference from smoking pot inside your house or in a hotel (it's just as illegal in either, but one of them has a manager and staff whose job is to monitor the place and that can report you)

Nibodhika ,

You can try a mini PC, you mentioned Germany so for example this https://amzn.eu/d/0Evab2M I think that should be a bit more powerful than a Pi, but not sure by how much.

Nibodhika ,

If that's not powerful enough a raspberry pi isn't either, that CPU ranks slightly higher than the one on a pi 5 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/5743vs2633/ARM-Cortex-A76-4-Core-2400-MHz-vs-Intel-Pentium-G4400T

Also I don't know how I forgot about this (since it's what I do a lot of the times), but you can buy from other Amazon's in Europe, for example in Spain you can get this CPU https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-6500T+%40+2.50GHz&id=2627 which is almost double the benchmark of a Pi for 127 https://amzn.eu/d/6UwsUqf

Those mini PCs are awesome, the only reason my home server isn't one of them is because I have a 3.5" HDD which doesn't fit in them, but I'm looking to switch to some other alternative because the franken-desktop I have now uses too much power for what it's doing.

Nibodhika ,

Not sure if that much, their CPU benchmark is pretty close.

Nibodhika ,

Login is a dangerous and difficult thing to implement, are you sure that all of your services:

  • Store passwords hashed and salted
  • Have brute-force prevention
  • Etc

It's safer to have one service focused on that and other services can rely on that one to implement it correctly.

Nibodhika ,

I needed this comment a few weeks ago. Updated it and everything broke, still haven't been able to recover from it. I'm considering moving to a different software just because it's absurd that it breaks so completely if you don't thread very carefully, most software I have ever worked with has migration protocols for when there's db changes to avoid this sort of thing.

Nibodhika ,

Because it's easier to tell someone "use this docker image" than it is to tell them "go through all of these thousands of steps to get this service working".

The main reason I use containers for my personal things is easy to setup and to migrate, those are huge points, and the added complexity is not that much, in fact I would argue it's less complicated to figure out why a docker image is not running than figure out why a service stopped responding.

Nibodhika ,

You should learn docker if you care about self hosting stuff though. You might lose 1 day learning the basics of docker, but the practicity of being able to spin up services just to test them it's well worth it.

Personally I use Immich for photo management, but not sure it it's packaged as an RPM, and even if it is you'll need to setup the database yourself. Nextcloud also possibly works but again setting Nextcloud without containers is a PitA.

Someone asking for a service to self host that refuses to use docker is similar to a person who wants to run a server but refuses to learn CLI, yes it can be done, but you're making your life hard for no purpose and everyone else will just give you the simple solution.

Nibodhika ,

NixOS packages only work with NixOS system. They're harder to setup than just copying a docker-compose file over and they do use container technology. If the idea is to remove complexity from the setup, NixOS goes in the opposite direction.

Also without containers you don't solve the biggest problems such as incompatible database versions between multiple services.

I stand by what I said, I can give a 2 step tutorial on setting up any docker system (copy this compose file, run up on it), anything simpler than that wouldn't be as robust in terms of configurations.

Nibodhika ,

Only things served via https can be installed on Android.

Nibodhika ,

I use tailscale, that allows me to access it remotely securely and gets https. If you don't want to do that it's hard but doable to emit your own certificates, but the tailscale approach is a lot more simple.

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