Ah, if all of your email aliases trace back to your personal, locally hosted server, of which you are the only user, on presumably your personally owned domain, it will not be private… well private in the sense that it’s just you I guess… but super duper identifiable - because it’s just you. At which point why bother with the aliases.
URLCheck (available in F-Droid) is a nice tool for inspecting URLs and removing tracking and other nonsense. It includes a lot of nice features such as:
It’s handy for checking/editing links before pasting them into posts/comments, and also for checking links before you open them.
Hahhh… well really, the only way to test backups is to try to restore from them. VMs are extremely helpful for this - you can try to restore a VM mirror of your production system, see if it works as expected, wipe it and start over if it doesn’t.
I second this - virtualization is the easiest way to branch out and try new things. You can keep the working system you already have, and also experiment with other systems.
A further advantage is that you can run services in separate VMs, which helps if you need isolated contexts for security, privacy, or stability reasons. And, if you break something while you’re learning you can just delete that VM and start over without affecting your other working services.
The revolution will not be televised.
- a few git repos (pushed and backup in the important stuff) with all docker compose, keys and such (the 5%)
Um, maybe I’m misunderstanding, but you’re storing keys in git repositories which are where…?
And remember, if you haven’t tested your backups then you don’t have backups!
You jest but… delay line memory
however, i know nothing about self hosting. My knowledge is absolutely zero […] I dont understand nothing
This is going to be a problem, unfortunately. You’ll need to define your use case first:
An old PC might be enough to act as a server, but there’s more involved and the answer to what you need depends on what exactly you want to do. You will not be able to build a personal version of Spotify with just an old PC, for instance.
Never use a spreadsheet to do a database job.
It’s a bad idea to compare Lemmy to Reddit or expect Lemmy to replace Reddit.
Slow growth is not a problem, it’s actually a benefit.
There is no hurry, and no need to push for high user counts.
Rather than trying to attract more people, focus on making your communities an attractive place to be.
Metronet will be supplying an Optical Network Terminal, probably like this one:
This is basically the equivalent of a modem for cable networks. It does not provide routing functions. You’re probably stuck with the ONT they supply, but it shouldn’t matter much, definitely not for anything internal.
It looks like Metronet normally supplies Eero WiFi mesh devices for home networking - are the ones you currently have supplied by Metronet? They might just replace the modem with the ONT and leave the existing Eero gear, or they might upgrade the Eero gear to support the higher speed available on the fiber network.
In any case, if you are using ISP-supplied network devices then you don’t control the router, which means you can’t set up things like port forwarding to access your home network from outside, or configure VLANs to segregate devices on your network, or control things like DHCP.
Technically there’s no reason you have to use the Eero devices from Metronet, you should be able to plug any router into the ONT WAN port and have internet service. If you don’t want to get too deep into network config, then any modern consumer WiFi router will work (but not a modem/router AIO device). If you want to have a bit more control, look for one that supports OpenWRT.
You’re welcome. I tried to do basically the same thing a few years back (run a WordPress site from a RPi on my home network - and also a Minecraft server) and so I tried to write up the problems I ran into - I probably forgot some, but those are the major hurdles. I learned a lot along the way.
I should also point out that if you rent hosting space (from linode or inmotion or digitalocean or many other options) then problems 1 & 4 become much easier, and 2 & 3 go away entirely (most people don’t host public websites on their home networks because of these and other issues).
Happy to help. If you’re interested in learning networking more thoroughly, I want to point you to Professor Messer especially the Network+ content. He has far more complete explanations than I could write (and it’s free!). Even if you’re not interested in getting any certs, the explanations will be helpful.
So your goal is to host a publicly accessible static website from a computer in your home. There are a few problems you need to overcome before even worrying about configuring any software. You need some more basic networking knowledge first.
Basic Networking Theory - you should read a brief explanation of the OSI 7-layer network model. You don’t have to try to memorize this and you won’t really understand it until you start actually doing stuff, but you should read it for some basic terminology and to understand that there are distinct steps through which communication between computers happens.
When you start running into problems (“why can’t I access the server? I did all the tutorial steps”), figuring out which layer the problem is in will help guide you to the solution:
Privacy/Security/Safety - don’t host a publicly accessible website from your personal computer. Just don’t. To make this happen you will have to open a hole in your network security that makes your computer accessible from the public internet. Don’t do this on your daily driver computer. Don’t do this with any device that has any files on it that you care about or any access to any personal information. Don’t.
Set up your web server/learning environment on a clean, dedicated system. This could be an old laptop or a Raspberry Pi (an older 3B model will work just fine for this) or whatever cheap computer hardware you have, as long as it can run Linux and has a physical network port (using WiFi will give you extra headaches for getting this working). If you think you might want to expand your projects in the future, you can get a used Dell server for very little money, and add more hard drives as needed. Wipe the hard drive and install Debian or Ubuntu server as a base, there’s lots of resources out there for setting up web services on either.
Restricted Ports - you are most likely on a residential internet connection. Most residential ISPs close ports for security reasons, especially 80. For example, here is Cox’s list of restricted ports. You will need to find your ISP’s equivalent list and understand what you can and can’t do with your connection.
There are workarounds, primarily through port forwarding. You will need admin access to your router to set this up. I recommend that you read that entire article because it probably applies directly to your situation.
Dynamic IP Address - most people still find it easier to work with IPv4 addresses - I won’t go into IPv6 right now, but you should read a little about it just for awareness. Your residential internet most likely has a dynamic IPv4 address, which means you can’t rely on that address staying the same forever (or even until next week), which means that you can’t configure your Cloudflare domain name to point to a single IPv4 address.
Dynamic DNS is the solution for this, and again you’ll need admin access to your router to set it up.
HTTPS/TLS/SSL - if you get through all those issues then you probably have a working website, but now you’re seeing something like this when you try to view it in your browser:
This doesn’t mean that you can’t get to your website - it just means that you can only do it via HTTP and not HTTPS, which the browser is warning you (and anyone else trying to view your website) is not secure. You can either just accept that this alert will always come up, and that you have to click through it, or you can learn about TLS and getting an SSL/TLS certificate. This is a later topic - it doesn’t matter and probably won’t make sense until after you’ve got your web server online.
Depends. Is this for an Apple device?
I plan to RAID1 them and use them as boot drives
This will not work unless the mainboard is handling the RAID control in firmware. If you are doing software RAID then the OS must boot before the array can be accessed.
If you just want to set up a NAS, you can get a used PowerEdge tower for very little money, and it will work a lot better than what you have planned.
You will own nothing and like it have no recourse.
OK, but I’m not arguing for the sake of argument. What I take issue with is the overly negative point of view that isn’t justified by the reality of the current technology market. It’s limited, depressive and ultimately self-destructive.
Perspective matters. Money isn’t the only measure of success. Internet infrastructure is basically Linux, nginx and Apache - seriously, apart from user endpoints it’s pretty much all open source - and the most common endpoint OS is Android so also open source. The idea that open systems aren’t as successful as proprietary ones doesn’t reflect reality, it’s a projection of a limited point of view onto reality (it only seems true if large portions of the current technology market are ignored).
The economic model we’re in has been around for hundreds, arguably thousands of years in most ways. What about it?
And open source came into being inside of that model, and has grown and thrived since. So obviously, it’s not impossible.
The norms we are discussing here is that under capitalism, the norm tends to be trending away from free and open systems.
Right, this isn’t true. While certainly there are some businesses that try to restrict it, open systems grow and spread anyway. Open source is bigger and stronger than ever today. Open source software is so widespread that it’s a security concern for governments (look at the log4j fiasco). You interact with open platforms every day, even if you don’t see their names in commercials or on billboards (many of them don’t have to advertise).
IBM tried that in the 60s, 70s and 80s with their business mainframe systems, along with HP and several other manufacturers. Before IP gained prominence every major manufacturer had its own proprietary connection system they tried to sell, and the competition in the market was just as fierce then as it is now.
It didn’t work, the open model made all of the proprietary network systems obsolete.
yet