I’m an English teacher who wanted to “cut the cord” wherever I could, so I started learning about domain hosts, containerization, .yaml files, etc.
Since then, I’ve been hosting several pods for file sharing and streaming for many years, and I’m currently thinking about learning kubernetes for home deployment. But why?
If you aren’t in development, IT, cyber security, or in a related profession, what made you want to learn this on your own? What made you want to pick this up as a hobby?
I’ve always been kinda technically motivated. The only reason I didn’t actually study computer science is that I had a great math teacher who made me fall in love with math. But I had it for a minor, and like to read stuff up from time to time. So, I guess I’m kinda in the grey area in regards to being a person in tech.
Anyway, I love tinkering with stuff, so I inevitably got into self hosting. Nowadays, I’ve even started maintaining some self hosted software.
I got laid off and needed something to do.
R/buyfromeurope brought me here. Already got a NAS and discovered that it can run docker.
-Cable is insanity. It’s companies are corrupt and awful.
-Watching sports is a maze of what channel/TV package/subscription service did I need again?
-Far fewer means of owning the media today means they can jack up the price as much as they want. Fuck that.
Because I hate big tech and I want control of my media.
I reached a breaking point with the number of SaaS that I was having to pay for monthly, so I started taking steps to eliminate my subscriptions one by one
That’s interesting. Can you elaborate?
I was paying for netflix, spotify, cloud storage, shared calendar software, the works. I’ve since moved my media watching to jellyfin, music to navidrome, storage to my server w/ offsite backups of critical files, baikal + open source calendar solutions. Anything I can replace with something I run myself, I do. And I’m always adding more. If you don’t count the fact that I keep expanding the scope of my setup and buying hardware, I save lots per month in subs of various kinds
Aah, I did not consider Netflix & Spotify. yeah that makes sense. I never paid for those either. But of course you can only self-host media if you first get it from somewhere*.
I do wonder who takes money separately/only for calendar hosting.
But yeah, all in all that amounts to a lot, and considering you can have a VPS with decent storage for under €10/mo. - it’s really the best solution.
I went for the full meal deal after getting some practice in, home server + raid array
The diversity represented here is interesting to me. Surgeon, teachers, musicians, mechanics, etc. Fascinating.
I currently grow weed, train dogs, and build custom computers. The last one has become all but impossible though. Dunno what you’d call me.
I currently grow weed
Cannabis will grow just about anywhere. However, to make it do magic, it takes skill.
It’s just fancy/finicky tomatoes, when you get down to it. Lol. The “skill” is owning a moisture and pH meter, and reading the soil/ hydroponic pH a couple times a day. I’ve all but automated the process at this point, at least from clone to bud stages. Getting clones to root, and trimming the buds is basically all I have to monitor any more, but that did take like 3 years of tweaking to setup.
Oh, and I grow indoors. My grow rooms could easily be used as electronics clean rooms without much modification. I set them up that way to keep out insects. Specifically spider mites. Needless to say, I can also control the temperature, humidity, and lighting of those rooms.
I grow a few tomatoes myself. Not quite the operation you have going tho. After doing a significant amount of research, I have found that is does great for my seizure condition. One of the terpines of cannabis is Linalool, and it is an effective anti-seizure med. So, I grow strains that are high in Linalool. After a seizure, it makes for a better rescue med than Ativan. In all honesty, tho I think cannabis gets over hyped a lot, it has made a demonstrable positive difference in my life. It isn’t a panacea drug, but is definitely has many medical use cases. It’s a shame here in the US that rich, white, racist, capitalist’s legislation from 100 years ago, still bogs down it’s legalization.
I’m a bum!
A 21st century bum with a bindle full of salvaged ram?
Now Playing: Bad Religion - 21st Century Digital Bum
Piracy, basically.
Self-hosting wasn’t my intention, I just wanted a media server. Then a media server that downloaded all my stuff easily. Then a server that was more accessible. Then a server that had better Wife-Approval-Factor.
Piracy, basically.
Lol, you don’t say? Do you use something like Jellyseerr for requests?
Nah.
Piracy was just my gateway.
I dont have a media server anymore.
I started with Raspberry Pi and Arduino for a scientific project that later became a published paper. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0278752
Now I have a couple Pis and ESP32s around the house doing all sorts of jobs, and am managing Docker-hosted shiny dashboards at work
The question is not why to start, but when do you stop, lol
I’m working in pharmaceutical production industry and I have started selfhosting few months ago.
I wanted to replace google photos with immich, cause my photo collection approached 200gb and I didn’t want to upgrade to 2tb version. My gf also had same problem
Bought second hand mini pc for 100€ to test to see how it goes and if I had decided to go back, i would have sold it.
Initially I was following FUTO guide, but quickly noticed it was too extensive and complex for my setup. I managed to set up immich with reverse proxy, did few mistakes here and there, but when it finally worked, I got hooked. I now have:
- local backups to external drive (borg-web-ui docker)
- ntfy. To send noticiation to my phone after backup had finished
- diun. To notify when docker update is available
- dockgee. docker management
- tailscale. Remote access
All of it comes gradually, I’m tinkering with home assistant vm now.
Immich is fantastic. I’d been using Nextcloud for photos, but, like many monolithic software suites, it lacks many features. I’d also been using Spotify for notifications, but I’ve abandoned it and ran to Matrix. I’ll have to try ntfy.
HomeAssistant can be great, though it does require some yaml-fu for notifications and such. At one point I had it use TTS for notifications.
Out of all services I run, my wife has as registered user on 3 of them, which are Immich, Nextcloud and Jellyfin. She basically uses only Immich cause it fucking rocks and she loves it!
Linux initially, giving way for me to see that the best alternatives to me are generally the ones I control.
And considering geopolitics, where I can see how dangerous a well-positioned spy/saboteur/paid actor can be, my next self host project is some ActivityPub social media, at least as an one-user instance since I don’t want to act as a company yet, so I have control of where I’m posting from too.
I didn’t want to pay for cable TV. I started with torrents. Then I found utorrent could automate via rss and search terms, then sickbeard could automate it even further, usenet made it safer, etc… And that’s also how I ended up with a career in IT.
By diploma, I am a musician. By job, i am a simple electronics production worker.
I got into self-hosting after buying a TV and a car. I really didn’t want to connect TV to the internet, so I decided to use a N100 based miniPC. And I live in a place where car thefts are very common, so I been searching a tool to self-host GPS tracker so I don’t have to pay monthly fee to some Chinese company to know where my car is. That is how I got into self-hosting Traccar. And then Pandora’s box was open.
Android phone and Own tracks.
Ooh, that is very cool! Do you think an rPi Zero could run Traccar? Mine is just collecting dust after I pulled it off my network because it couldn’t handle pihole traffic.
With a zero specifically I think you’d need extra bits to get it on a network, but Traccar itself is pretty lightweight.
I wanted more Dropbox space. Self hosted Nextcloud when Docker became a thing.
Ended up getting a job in tech as I got better with containerization and better at programming from scripting and reading Data Structures books
I fucking hate tech companies
