I saw this post today on Reddit and was curious to see if views are similar here as they are there.
- What are the best benefits of self-hosting?
- What do you wish you would have known as a beginner starting out?
- What resources do you know of to help a non-computer-scientist/engineer get started in self-hosting?
Same here. Sometimes I get carried away, but overall, a very basic setup is more than fine. Nearly all of my devices run Ubuntu/Debian, and only the work-related stuff gets over-engineered.
It’s helpful for me to have something like a home lab where I can get hands-on experience with many different technologies. I’ve worn many hats, from developer to sysadmin, so a certain segment of my network tends to be built like Fort Knox. However, overall, 90% of my installs are minimalist with common best practices applied.
IMO a homelab for learning and a server that you’re self-hosting services on really aren’t the same thing and maybe shouldn’t be treated that way, if you can swing it.
I’d rather my password manager or jellyfin or my peertube instance or whatever not be relying on a tech stack I don’t entirely understand and might not be able to easily fix if it breaks.
I guess a lot of it is new to doing this vs greybeard split, since the longer I’ve done sysadmin work the less I care about the cool new thing and have a preference for the old, stable, documented, bugfixed, supported, and with a clear roadmap software.
I should probably get a job doing sysadmin work for a bank, lmao.
If they’re a beginner, what better way is there to learn? My home lab and their Windows laptop running VirtualBox are two different things. The topic of security is too deep to cover now, but if they don’t open it up to the world, there shouldn’t be much risk. Local access only should be safe enough, and they might try a dozen different services before settling on one—or none at all.
Edit: Sysadmin is boring, I need to create. DevOps or some other automation role would be perfect IMO
This is going to be a bit of my grumpy-greybeard, but again: if you’re learning, then something like Docker and docker-compose is much simpler and less prone to fuckups than a bunch of K8s.
If you don’t know ANYTHING about what you’re doing, starting with the simplest tools and then deciding if you want to learn the more complicated ones is probably a less insane path than jumping right into the configuration-as-code DevOps pipeline.
And, at that point, you should have your “production” and “testing” environments set up in such a way they won’t eat each other when you do an oops.
Oh ok, we’re talking about two very different things then.
That’s a very strong opinion for a simple question.I understand what you mean a little better now. Docker is better, but Windows has some weirdness going on with Docker Desktop last time I tried using it. WSL + Docker might be even better to avoid the VM stuff altogether