this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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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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[–] FierceDeity_@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Because it's a complicated topic, you're just feeling the actual responsibilities of doing it right that many are ignoring now.

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

I got hooked by Youtube videos from TechnoTim Christian Lempa and others. Videos include screen capture what they are doing so it bridges some things that may be missing from text guide because it may be 'obvious' if you are doing it all the time.

I keep to principal that I have two 'sections' in my lab 'production' and 'testing' Testing I am mucking about testing stuff it works and production has some stuff that I rely on.

[–] l0c0dantes@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

On a certain level, most of those things don't matter.

Yes, reverse proxying and being able to point a domain is nice

A VPN more secure

Cloudflare (either tunnels, DNS, or DDoS protection) is also good

You can always do better with more "best practices" but if you want to stream a movie to some friends? Throwing up a server, opening a port and providing an IP just works as well. The better you get the more fancy you will be.

Its very much a tinkering hobby. Find a reason you want to tinker, and if you enjoy the tinkering you will keep up with it. My current dashboard points to a direct IP. Most of my services are reverse proxied but for some reason I can't get CORS to work well with dashy. At some point I'll get around to fixing it, but it gets the job done now.

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

As a computer science student you should know: just break it down into small chunks.

  1. Get service to run locally (IP / port)
  2. port forwarding, access remotely
  3. Set up a free DuckDNS domain, Lets Encrypt, use for a bit
  4. Buy a cloudflare domain, set up dynamic dns, Lets Encrypt (again), swap away from DuckDNS
  5. Set up Nginx reverse proxy, port forward to that instead, proxy to service’s internal IP + port
  6. Run more things!

That’s generally what I did.. I’ve been self hosting for about a year now and I’ve got 6 services going now.. once you get going, it’s quite easy!

[–] xh43k_@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Senior DevOps Engineer here with 15+ years of experience in system engineering now, even with my skillset and experience I am improving my setup piece by piece.

When I look at my old docker-compose versions and general setup, I sometimes laugh how I could've been so dumb.

You don't have to and won't learn and set everything up at once, ever.

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

Well, I can somehow understand you, but I didn't have so many problems until now. Especially reverse proxy is in my opinion pretty well documented. I got everything running what I wanted, except LDAP. I can't seem to understand this shit and there aren't any good guides either :D.

[–] offspec@lemmy.nicknakin.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For VPN home labbing you should check out wireguard, it's stupid simple and very powerful. Reverse proxy stuff I handle through nginx, mostly because I'm using it for web hosting anyways and I'm comfortable with the workflow. I don't bother with cloudflare much because I host a jellyfin instance and I believe that's against their TOS, but just take it one step at a time and you'll figure it out in no time.

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[–] edthesmokebeard@alien.top 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Begging the question.

Also, "Reverse proxy, VPN, Cloudfare bullshit" - you don't need these things.

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[–] Deses@alien.top 0 points 1 year ago

Skill issue.

It was pretty easy for me.

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