A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil.
No spam.
Posts are to be related to self-hosting.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.
Submission headline should match the article title.
No trolling.
Promotion posts require active participation, with an account that is at least 30 days old. F/LOSS without a paywall has exceptions, with requirements. See the rules link for details. Tags [CBH] or [AIP] are required, see the links in Rule 8 for details.
AI-related discussions and AI-involved promotional posts have additional requirements for tagging, as noted in Rule 7 and the AI & Promotional Post Expanded Rules post, and find example disclosures here.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
The mouse did not survive interrogation.
Also mouse not pictured.
it is frying here during summer in Australia. I have to buy a seperate airconditioner for the server room and pipe it into the intake of my home lab/nas so it would not shut down on me
mouse not pictured
Got my hopes up for nothing!
It’s OK I gotchu
Fun fact - he's called that because this same thing happened to him with a dead mouse in the pc case.
I got a little fanless atom PC from work that was being tossed because it "didn't work." It did work you would just have to apply pressure to it before boot because the CPU must have been coming unsoldered. I just stuck it on the bottom of like 30 pounds of gear and never had a problem.
How on earth did you diagnose that one?
Optical or roller ball?
I have a strong suspicion that the answer is mammilion
That sounds like a lot. Is it more than a bajillion, or less?
Many cells
Back in the day of BBS’ my buddy had a wonky modem. If I picked up phone , pursed my lips and did a squeaky sound the modem worked and I could log into BBS.
Not exactly self-hosting, but I've worked at two different academic labs that had unique issues and small budgets.
The first was on top of a mountain at 3km elevation. The low air pressure meant that all hard drives had a lifespan of no more than a year before starting to have issues. This was in the pre-SSD days. The "solution" was to boot from a floppy, never compress data, and have a student return the drives to a low elevation and swap them for the prior ones every six months.
The second was at a place that was using old Datacube MaxVideo hardware that we would never have the budget to replace. It would crash if the room temperature got above about 18C, so we set the thermostat to 15C. Which doesn't sound too bad until you've tried sitting at a desk for 8 hours where everything is 15C and the heat is just slowly leaving your body into the chair, the desk, and the keyboard. And then you walk outside where it is 32C and instantly start sweating because you're still in several layers and fingerless gloves.
I had a screen get burn in (forgot to turn it off, oops) removed it from the laptop, waited 3 days, put it back in and it was flawless again.
I had a laptop that refused ethernet and would only ever use wifi... When the ethernet was connected. No wifi unless that cord was connected. Confirmed it was, indeed, wifi by using a dummy connector.
Bought a 10tb hdd that refused to read anything at all, opened it for giggles/curiosity and found a piece of scotch tape stuck to one of the disks and one of 4 disks completely shattered. The disk was still factory sealed (by appearance, anyways; they still had the antitamper stickers)
No mouse problem, but I've had to take measures to prevent cat-related downtime. Cats and power-button at the top is not a good combination.
I have a small piece of acrylic sheet taped over the power and reset buttons on my server for that reason. At least I don't have to worry about mice.
They make sprung flip-top covers specifically for this reason. It’s just a little adhesive square/circle that you stick over the power/reset button, and it has a flip-top that automatically springs closed again.
Then you tell people about it on IRC and become known as "the dead mouse guy".
But the maximum nickname length on the IRC server is limited, so you settle for "deadmau5" as your nick.
Goddamn I hate mice. I just had to tear out the entire contents of a combine cab to get rid of their piss and shit, and fix the wiring they chewed off.
I had to modify the wiring in a - fairly new - tractor once.
I opened up an inspection panel and found a pair of pliers in there, used them to fix the wiring and took them out.
I gained a tool and fixed an annoying rattle too.
You wouldn't believe how many rusty old vicegrips I own because of this sort of thing. Hell, I held a seeder meterbox on with vicegrips this spring, I'm one to talk. Couldn't get a new holder clip for it, and the meterbox was cracked so I ordered a new one and limped by with the vicegrips until we were done.
I lost a raspberry pi for a couple months. Just couldn't find the darn thing. It was working fine serving away.
Turns out it was in the basement. I forgot I moved it to be closer to my tilt Hydrometer.
Oh, good thing you wrote this. I'm about to give one of my printers away and there's still a pi inside
I hosted shit for about ten years before really understanding how local dns worked.
Imagine a primitive society that discovered literally every major modern scientific achievement, but somehow missed the wheel. That's basically how my first setup went lol.
I do not self host. I just wandered in here. Do you have suggested resources to learn more about DNS? I feel like generally searching shit sucks to get an answer like that lately.
A dns server knows what and where things are. That's its only real job, to tell who's asking where say, http://eff.org/ is.
"Ay homie, where's https://eff.org/?"
over here - 173.239.79.200
"thanks, bud!"
The issue is, the dns server you use by default is under the control of whoever your provider is, and as a result, they get all of your dns lookups like the example above as well as every porn site, every piracy site, everywhere.
Installing your own, or simply moving to one your provider has no business with like 9.9.9.9 can help keep your dns queries more private, go a step further and use encrypted dns, as many providers supply, and you'll be even further covered.
Installing your own, however, comes with the added perk of being able to apply your own dns entries. Suddenly local addresses can have custom names without ever touching a hosts file. Neat! Use DNS certs and you've got local SSL!
I would go find something applicable to feed you for a dns 101, but my old resources don't exist. I just know stuff from years of doing it and failing over and over until things work.
I have a feeling there's a point in time where most non-it self-hosters got fed up with ads and installed pihole, then learned about DNS. I have a feeling that started about five years ago.
Now it's probably hand in hand with how necessary a pihole is.
Fail2ban crashing on 3 seperate days i tried setting it up then one day i did the exact same thing an it worked
One time when I was 10 my PS2 wouldn't work so I threatened to punch it if it didn't work again. It didn't work so I punched it. Then it worked.
Ahh yes, the "Impact Fix" works everytime til it doesn't. Had a monitor with a loose wire to the power button. For almost a year a forceful tap in the correct spot would make it work, til one day
For a while, the windows machine I was using kept randomly becoming unresponsive (both via network, as well as the keyboard+mouse) and I just could not figure out why. Everytime it did, I'd have to force a shutdown by holding the power button until it shutoff, then press it again to start back up. Sometimes this happened while I wasn't home, so it had to just stay offline until I was.
I got sick of having to do this; so I replaced the power button with a transistor and a RPI. The PI would ping the server every 5min; if it failed to get a response 3 times in a row, it would trigger the transistor for 10sec, release for 3sec, then press and release again; forcing a poweroff then starting the machine again. It'd also write these events to a log file. I think it was around twice a week ish.
Never did figure out what the cause of the lockup was; but it stopped when I replaced windows with Debian.
Yeah getting rid of windows solves many issues, LOL. I have always refused to run any server with windows, outside of being forced to at work. 😁
Note to any future lemmings who find this thread troubleshooting the same symptom…
Not selfhosting, but I remember standing in a server room with a hands' width of water on the ground (and rising), and hastily shutting down servers where the water was already in the case. It were big towers (Compaq Proliant, if anyone remembers), and luckily the board, drives, and PSU were in the top part of the big tower cases, the drive bays at the bottom were empty.
We got all equipment out safely, and we did not get electrocuted, either. We left with the last equipment when the water level was approaching the knees.
Reminds me of a time at my old job. It was a small office and this was before "the cloud" was a buzzword, so we had a little server room running a few boxes for AD, Exchange, and the thick end of our thin clients.
This "server room" was basically a large closet behind my office, retrofitted with its own AC.
We had residential units on the higher floors of our building. Residents occasionally thought to themselves "you know what makes a great hanging rack? Sprinkler pipes!" Hijinks ensued.
That was a fun call to get at 10PM.
Shoutout to the facilities guy who immediately thought to run a makeshift tarp over the server rack, fashioned from trash bags. No permanent damage.
Also mouse not pictures
I was frantically searching for it, then i opended the post to See if the comments found it ...