In my experience matrix is a total mess with plenty of bugs, also uses quite a lot server resources. xmpp is lighter, easier to set up and works flawlessly, and seem also easier to proxy or do stuff like that with it. Calls are kinda messy to set up tho.

I couldn’t make it work whatever I did, whichever instance I used it seemed to get rate limited after a while or showing weird results…

Use a reverse proxy to proxy everything through https, then you can install how many services you want. Caddy is super simple, you can reverse proxy with just 1 line.

For calendar and contacts (caldav, cardav) Baikal is extremely easy to install and use. And pretty minimal.

As far as I knew reverse proxies could only reverse proxy stuff coming in from 443 or 80, I didn’t know they could listen other ports as well!

Main reason why I was using a reverse proxy at first is because I had everything behind cloudflare, and cloudflare can only proxy and give you an SSL encryption for stuff that goes through 443, so I could make Caddy listen to 443 and then forward to interested ports.

But this leaves out everything that needs to go in some other places than 443, and requires its own standalone ssl certificate, which is a bit cumbersome. Pheraps these can be proxied with other proxies than cloudflare, hopefully giving SSL to everything…

I’m not sure I understood the upstream ssh thing, what do you actually do?

Self hosting IS hard, don’t beat yourself too much because of it… After all you’re trying to serve services for yourself that are usually served by companies with thousands of employees.

A server requires knowledge, maintainance and time, it’s okay to feel frustrated sometimes.

Yes you’re probably right, I definitely have bias and the time spent tryna fix the bug influenced this…

Thanks

I know some basic Rust (currently at chapter 9) and a little bit of JavaScript.

I’m trying to work with headless CMSs and that requires some understanding on how APIs work…

Even tho I wouldn’t want to stick with JS, I don’t really want to dig into frameworks and dependency hells.

But I like the concept and I need to build a site that grabs some data from an external api, so a headless cms would be my choice to grab the data and structure them there in order to be rendered later in something like a static site generator (I’m quite good at Hugo). Or will learn some basic React and try to build a template on my own there…

How is the user experience compared to matrix? Is it easy to gateway towards matrix or other services? Can I easily join matrix or other communities servers?

I see a lot of people are now using matrix but not so many xmpp, but yeah it hoggs resources on my server too. Also I feel like it’s still pretty buggy…

Didn’t think about the 2 machines thing. But yeah it looks definitely easier than setting a transparent proxy… But I guess all of this has to be on the same network, I cannot use an external server to which I connect to via wan because at that point the connections would be already need to be unproxied going out right?

But can’t your setup be done on the same machine with a firewall?

Yes DNS and pihole were never thought as content filtering tools

I need to block IPs and unauthorized connections that are not http/https as well, I know about DNS filtering but it’s not what I am trying to achieve.

Yes it’s more something like that, making certain type of content a lot less accessible.

I think it’s all a problem of time: if we have more time to carefully think about what we are doing on our devices, we usually make better choices.

We need better tools to give us more time to actually evaluate and decide.

I’ll make an example: I installed an android device manager which let me set a block timer for each new installed app, that means that whenever I install something new I will have some time to reflect on whether I actually need that new app or not, and most often than not, the answer is no.

Enough focus to read documentation.

That’s really it. If your purpose is just self hosting learning bash could also be helpful. And yeah Linux would be a great choice.

But mostly, if you want to self host an instance of Nextcloud correctly and without having to deal with too many unexpected things, you have to read the documentation and do not rush. Most self hosted stuff isn’t “install and use”, because you’ll be your own server manager, and everything requires attention to be managed.

Docker or not docker you will have to deal with configuration, settings, requirements and updates.

So understanding how to read the docs/search and open github issues and taking time to read everything would be the most important skill for me.

Also writing down what you are doing would indeed be helpful too, in order not to lose track of what you’re doing on your server. (Check out Ansible).

Most apps out there simply need you to know about permissions, systemctl services and package managers.

Try to always find a specific package for your distro for everything you install (eg. .deb for Debian), and have strategies when this is not possible (aka using a Python venv when installing python programs).

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer!

I’m not sure how to get the N from session history, nor how to check my session history…

but this might be some relevant output I’ve found with journalctl -k -b

Nov 21 16:08:18 rpi kernel: usb 2-2.1-port2: cannot reset (err = -110)
Nov 21 16:08:19 rpi kernel: usb 2-2.1-port2: cannot reset (err = -110)
Nov 21 16:08:19 rpi kernel: usb 2-2.1-port2: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?

Nov 21 16:41:57 rpi kernel: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 2466347032 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x3000 phys_seg 1 prio class 2
Nov 21 16:41:57 rpi kernel: EXT4-fs warning (device sdb1): ext4_dx_find_entry:1796: inode #75497968: lblock 42: comm apache2: error -5 reading directory block
Nov 21 16:41:57 rpi kernel: EXT4-fs error (device sdb1): ext4_journal_check_start:83: comm apache2: Detected aborted journal
Nov 21 16:41:57 rpi kernel: Buffer I/O error on dev sdb1, logical block 0, lost sync page write
Nov 21 16:41:57 rpi kernel: EXT4-fs (sdb1): I/O error while writing superblock
Nov 21 16:41:57 rpi kernel: EXT4-fs (sdb1): Remounting filesystem read-only

The output is from yesterday, when the device stopped working correctly.

I’m not familiar with linux kernel, but I can see there is definitely something wrong…

The HDD (old) is attached to a USB hub (new), I tried switching port of the hub but the same issue happened again, if I try to mount it with sudo mount /mnt/2tb, it says it is already mounted:

mount: /mnt/2tb: /dev/sdb1 already mounted on /mnt/2tb.
       dmesg(1) may have more information after failed mount system call.

sudo dmesg | grep sdb gives back:

[147776.801028] I/O error, dev sdb, sector 77904 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x3000 phys_seg 1 prio class 2
[147776.815452] EXT4-fs warning (device sdb1): htree_dirblock_to_tree:1083: inode #2: lblock 0: comm ls: error -5 reading directory block
[147796.731734] sdb1: Can't mount, would change RO state

I wonder why we don’t have AI browser extensions that can recognise and obscure possible ads / unwanted content yet

I’m actually curious on Rust, i don’t like how dispersive can be JavaScript, i prefer to build smaller, maybe uglier things, but that work and are nicely stable, scalable and can be integrated on multiple different platforms. Also i love that almost everything runs on Cargo and i don’t have to choose between 100 things that essentially cover the same target. I also think the Discord idea is quite good, i just want to find someone who is on my same level to grow / build cool things toghether, or small projects on which i can actively partecipate, there’s also an association near me that promotes opensource projects and give free code lessons, i might give it a try as well and see if i meet someone there. I’m gonna give it another try before deciding of giving up, i think it is deserved.

And how you deal with that, how do you choose what to do and what not to do?

Honestly when i first got into coding i liked the fact it could give me jobs i could do from every part of the world, that is still on demand and that gave a certain freedom on how you approach technology and customize it to make it your own, i always liked to tinker around with computer and i even have a small home server i use for several stuff. I loved how useful internet was to find informations otherwise unreachable and share stuff without censorship woth everyone, as i said i love the story of the cypherpunk movement, i see bitcoin as a real solution to our obsolete economy, and i thought i would have liked to have a role into changing this shitty system paradigms, my target was to work with lightining network or similar protocols maybe one day. However i feel like i’m changing lately and i’m lacking human interactions so much, there’s no point in building something toghether if there’s no emotions to share with others before, during and after the process. Maybe it’s just how i’m made, but i cannot stick to it, i just get super depressed and i see no point in doing it. Maybe i’m just lazy i don’t know, but it is like that.

Adding the fact that sometimes i feel like technology controls me, and not the opposite despite all the efforts i make, feels just super wrong and not how i want to live.

I’m studying webdevelopment so i’ve had the opportunity to work only on simple stuff so far, but it already feels super overwhelming, sometimes i get lost just in setting up my coding environment, just to realize it will only be one of many i’ll need to learn how to work with.

That looks way more than a home server, it looks like something i would expect to see for a small business!

What machine is it?