this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Why is starting with Self-hosting so daunting? (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by Ieris19@alien.top to c/main@selfhosted.forum
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I’ve been a Software Engineering Student for 2 years now. I understand networks and whatnot at a theoretical level to some degree.

I’ve developed applications and hosted them through docker on Google Cloud for school projects.

I’ve tinkered with my router, port forwarded video game servers and hosted Discord bots for a few years (familiar with Websockets and IP/NAT/WAN and whatnot)

Yet I’ve been trying to improve my setup now that my old laptop has become my homelab and everything I try to do is so daunting.

Reverse proxy, VPN, Cloudfare bullshit, and so many more things get thrown around so much in this sub and other resources, yet I can barely find info on HOW to set up this things. Most blogs and articles I find are about what they are which I already know. And the few that actually explain how to set it up are just throwing so many more concepts at me that I can’t keep up.

Why is self-hosting so daunting? I feel like even though I understand how many of these things work I can’t get anything actually running!

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[–] NuK3DoOM@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Maybe my path can help you. I don’t have any educational / professional background in tech, but it is my hobby. I started simple, wanting a NAS for my home. I downloaded TrueNAS and reading the docs and using a lot of YouTube videos (from multiple creators) I managed to get it up and running. Then I tried sharing but using permissions. It took me weeks to understand ACL and NFS shares. It took me a week to figure out that I need to share both parent and child dataset to access a child via NFS. I had to goggle a lot, but it was such a stupid mistake that there was no information about, so I resort to try and error. After I had it setup I thought it would cool to install pinhole. Then I had to learn VM on trueNas, Linux server, package managers and so on. I had zero experience in Linux. I managed to install docker and portainer via a tutorial but then I learned docker compose files and it made everything easier. I destroyed and created that vm multiple times. Tried Debian, Ubuntu server, fedora server … The pattern goes on, home lab will be about reading a lot and not afraid to try and break stuff. It is better to try when you don’t have a lot of services. Always backup your vm, if something breaks, nuke it and start from the backup. Keep it a piece each time. Don’t try to setup all at once. Have an idea about the end state but solve a small problem at time. They say the best engineers are the ones that are able to break complex problems in really small ones. Doing that I have a vm on true nas running more than 20 containers, a redundant pinhole on a separated server, everything accessible via VPN.

Now I’m learning about podman and kubernetes, probably I will spin a second vm, try to migrate what I have a nuke docker. It never ends while you are curious.