from abeorch@friendica.ginestes.es to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 05 Nov 10:45
https://friendica.ginestes.es/objects/0a49108d-2069-0b2a-c5f1-c59535928775
What if you could buy off the shelf a box based on #opensource software and hardware that you could plug into your internet connection. You could connect to via Wifi and it would allow an average person to fairly easily configure, via a guided setup, a self hosted Cloud Drive, Social Media server, home automation service, VPN end point, email server and other commonly useful software?
What if that box allowed that person’s friends to authenticate and to that box and link a box they own, either close by or remotely. It could extend connectivity and estabilish a chain of trus, provide a level of encrypted backup of content from that box and make assertions about the users on that box such as - This user account is owned by this person, this user account is over 18?
This is a dream. I know I’m rambling. #openwrt, #yunohost, #seflhost, #chainoftrust, #fediverse
threaded - newest
I currently use proxmox with the community scripts. I can’t afford the paid license but it’s working well enough, and as long as what you want is in the community scripts or you know how to use docker (compose for me makes it so simple) it’s really easy IMO, but I’m also willing to tinker. Its not the most user friendly thing as it expects you to be a poweruser.
If I were a younger man, I’ve always wanted to produce a ‘server in a box’. Something small, powerful, capable, came with a plethora of click to deploy apps, in an environment that would be conducive with the average homeowner’s computer savvy or lack there of. I’ve seen a lot of mini-racks made with Lenovo ThinkCenters that really look good, could fit on a shelf in a closet and serve the household with privacy respecting software.
But I’m far from being a younger man, so one of you guys take the lead and make a million $$.
@irmadlad I think this is beyond one person. I certainly think there has been progress.
The FreedomBox project started in 2010, and it’s a Debian-based plug and play device that lets you easily self-host useful network services.
@eleijeep Oh interesting hardware at €69 seems quite reasonable - Extendable with a HDD enclosure.
I feel this in my bones. I was an English major in college. Now I’m in my late 40s and want to create my ow server so that I can OWN the things I used to own: baby pictures and family photos, movies that I bought, music that I bought. I want to send letters to friends without Amazon, JC Penny and Google knowing what I put in my letter.
I’m starting on my home networking journey. I have a beeline on the way to build my own router…pfSense, OpenSense, OpenWRT…still chewing on that but I’m going to do it.
Fuck it. My dad used to work on his car, I think this is my generation’s equivalent.
I’ve got a '75 Ford pickup with 3 on the tree. I can work on that. Hell, I can pop the bonnet and sit on the fender and dangle my legs in the engine compartment. Once the automobile industry moved away from that type of design and started incorporating computer blocks, chips, et al, that you needed a metric and imperial tool set replete with a plethora of specialized tools just to work on them, that was outside my field of expertise. My Ford F450? Nope. I can’t even wedge my hamfists in a few inches. The whole engine compartment is slap full.
DO IT!
How nice is column shift tho? I’ve got an '80 van with it.
I like it…I could change out the tranny and insert a standard 4 on the floor, but I’ve tried to keep it as true to the original as I can. I’d call it a resto-mod. I tell people half joking, that I’m saving it for when our government can turn cars off at will, which pretty much has existed for a while now. It’s not a daily driver. The only real driving I do is on the farm. I have had a TBI which blessed me with a seizure condition and tho I do have a valid license, I just couldn’t live with myself if I were cruising at 70 mph down the road and had a seizure, drifted into oncoming traffic and killed someone. So exterior of the farm, I employ the services of my lady friend.
@zuckey78 Yeah I do feel that self hosting has sort have become part of that DIY/selfbuild/homebaking/homeownership ethos - Do I think everyone would do it - no but I feel like people are realising that their lives are becoming so thin... (Well I'm trying not to speak too much for myself here.. but we want some ownership/connection
I’m definitely getting into self hosting because of the DIY thing. The rise of modern smart homes has led to homeaasistant being a great diy project for those inclined towards fucking around with their home and those who’d rather not have corpo scum surveil them because of it
The closest to your dream is probably hexos.com
It is closed source, but build on top of open source…
They (for now) have a one time purchase license, no subscription.
It has buddy backups. Can run on any normal x86 pc / server (you have to bring your own and install hexos to it). And has a nice and simple GUI for deploying services easily.
I never personally used it. I just have it on my radar. For me, the not so easy but fully free (cost) and open source way works reasonably well. I run my homelab with dokploy.
For a free foss alternative, look at OMV (OpenMediaVault).
Most of what a user might need is fairly simple to set up in the webUI, and if you know what you are doing, you can still go into the underlying debian system and do whatever you like.
lol no. I used this one for a month and no.
It works but it has the most convoluted GUI possible. No backup system at all iirc. And running arbitrary containers was a nightmare that is not even integrated with the GUI.
I settled on dokploy.com
I don’t use either but they aren’t the same thing to suggest one is a substitute for the other. Omv has self hosting services that it installs for you. Dokploy is docker manager.
Dokploy has a web ui with a list of services where you click install and it installs them for you. You can set it up to do the exact same job as OMV but also way less or way more, depending on what you want and need. (by just clicking install on the existing templates, or by entering a custom docker compose if you want to run a nieche service)
<img alt="" src="https://lemy.lol/pictrs/image/e299432b-54e7-49ff-8c9b-c2860e34425f.png">
So I’d argue dokploy is a perfect substitution (or more like superset) for OMV, but OMV could never substitude dokploy.
If doing more makes it better then regular docker desktop does that too. Or apt-get.
This is my dream as well, but for security I feel like you need multiple independent systems. I’m doing mine with power-hungry recycled 2012-vintage server hardware (Xeon E5-1620s and 2620s and Opteron 6276s, bought for $100 each several years ago, plus a few hundred more to their maximum amounts of DDR3 ECC) but this hypothetical box could easily have raspberry pis or something similar. Public services can become compromised and you’ll only want certain hardware to be trusted to do certain things.
My plan is a terrible one and I’m taking way too long to do it. I really want someone else to build this better and faster, but if my crappy plan ends up being the first usable version of this, that will suck but at least it’s available.
I had a dumb personal domain from June of 2000, tried to make it a public internet site, offered services to people on IRC for internet social points, but after a few years it got ahead of me and I let it die. (I’ve been paying for the same business internet ever since, though, and I still have the same static IPs as from back then.) Time passed, got married, got a computer science degree and a development job with a billion dollar SAAS company.
I can see how they do big public internet hosting. I want everyone to be able to do this, too. Been trying to build the same kinds of architecture with open source tools at home. Struggling, I keep over designing it and getting stuck and frustrated. It takes me a month to do what a competent ops person from work does in a couple days.
OnceI have this working for me, I can share it, because it’s my own work product. It’ll be a guide, a recipe to follow, for creating the kind of secure and isolated web application and general VM hosting environment I see us use at work. This stuff is the difference between “I’m hosting one thing and if it gets hacked, everything is owned” and “I’m hosting a hundred things, all different, and if one gets hacked that will suck - but the other 99 things will stay safe.”
Biggest problem I think with creating this with open-source is just picking a direction for everything and getting the internet to not pitch a fit. “Why did you use postfix?” “I hate Greenbone / GSA and refuse to use it.” “Hardware is expensive, you say I need a jump box for this AND for this, and dedicated hardware for a firewall here AND here? Each of those could clearly be a VM. Your project wastes hardware and I’m not doing it this way.”
Sure, once this is done these decisions are pretty much baked in and I won’t have the energy to redo them yet again. But getting the architecture perfectly designed for your exact scenario … that takes a ton of work. Big companies pay a ton of money in just payroll hours to build this kind of thing bespoke for their needs. I’ll be giving away my version, and I’m afraid the internet won’t care.
But I think we need to keep this ability alive, that private citizens can set up their own DIY hosting that can stand up to hostile internet actors decently well. They can pay (I’ll grant) exploitative rates for business internet connections so they can have static IPs at home as well. If we all stop, we all just decide all hosting should be done by big cloud service companies or big enterprises, we lose a crucial bit of internet freedom. Someone needs to say “yeah this is kinda dumb but I’m doing it anyway.”
And if they could do it with a box you just plug in, instead of my (likely) month-long two hundred step recipe, and still have it stand up to attacks and “Internet background radiation” and stuff, that would be epic. I kind of don’t want my thing to be the way that self-hosting-public-web-services is done.
@mspencer712 On your point regarding a single device - I don't think that separate hardware necessarily provides security - Though I take your point - perhaps it could be about a compatible - modular architecture - a home server, a router, a home automation hub - that are linked together easily and well.
Agree on the issue with Open source be of the "let a thousand flowers bloom" ( i just saw someone post they have a new "templated based home server" lemmy.world/post/38362941 ) - but I think thats a strength - people try stuff out - things are more loosely coupled and rely on open standards - perhaps that's a whole philispophical discussion but I think open source and open standards would attract hardware vendors - (I'm seeing plently more Openwrt based routers on chinese marketplaces than I used to - they just don't want the overhead of having to provide their own fully featured software.
I also get the - at the moment doing it yourself requires knitting together alot of stuff - that's my point - the components are all there - its more about bringing them together and smoothing the surfaces - something that I think #Homeassistant seem to be quite good at - Perhaps what is required is that kind of organisation - where there is the prospect of picking up some funding and selling some hardware that comes with all the branding.
Separate devices provide reliability and supportability.
If your all-in-one device has issues, you can’t remote in to maintain it.
Take a look at what enterprises do: redundant external interfaces, redundant services internally. You don’t necessarily need all this, but it’s worth considering "how do I ensure uptime and enable supportability and reliability? ".
Also, we always ask “what happens if the lone SME (Subject Matter Expert) is hit by a bus?” (You are that Lone SME).
Regarding the Lone SME thing, my wife has already told me if something happens to me, all my server stuff is getting donated. I should not expect her to maintain it after I’m gone. And I don’t. That’s entirely reasonable. If it lives on after I’m gone it’ll be because the recipe thing was useful enough for others to maintain. My specific server and domain kinda don’t matter.
To add to Onomatopoeia’s excellent post, separate devices also limit the blast radius of any compromise. Attackers pivot when they compromise a system. They use one system to talk to others and attack them from inside your network. So you don’t want everything on the same OS kernel.
Unfortunately I don’t feel like I’m qualified to say what works well yet, not until I have the pieces of my site put together and working, and vetted by whatever security professionals I can get to look at it and tell me what I did wrong.
But right now I think that looks like every service VM on its own VLAN on a /30 net, and ideally the service VM and firewall/router VM serving it on different physical hardware joined by a managed switch. That managed switch shouldn’t let either VM host touch its management VLAN, and (I think, I don’t do this yet) should send monitor traffic to yet another physical host for analysis.
(“I can see why you’re not done yet” - yeah I know.)
@mspencer712 Yeah .. though I suspect that perfect could be the enemy of the good enough. I can't really comment - but whether its a single pyhsical device or modular - for me an integrated solution available to regular people is the key.
Given that #cloudflare is down today - it seems to me that the idea of networks of selfhosted CDN / DDOS prevention nodes running on such boxes would be a away of avoiding single points of failure.