What can the 'average Joe' start hosting, that will change their life?
I’m already hosting pihole, but i know there’s so much great stuff out there! I want to find some useful things that I can get my hands on. Thanks!
Edit: Thanks all! I’ve got a lil homelab setup going now with Pihole, Jellyfin, Paperless ngx, Yacht and YT-DL. Going to be looking into it more tomorrow, this is so much fun!
@jaackf
SyncThing. It's the best sort of selfhosted program. You set it up once and then never think about it because it just keeps quietly doing what you wanted.
Wikis can be great if you've got a few folks that need to coordinate information.
You can self host a local chatgpt like ai known as a local large language model. Searx and Searxbg are great customizable meta search engines that you can customize to scrape whatever you want
Docker I can’t wrap my head around. I keep trying to spend a night and sit down and play around with it. But I hit a block, get distracted and never get anywhere.
Use chatgpt to help you keep going, it’s very helpful
edit: Thought I’d expand on this more. Treat ChatGPT like a fellow engineer who never gets annoyed at answering your questions, and will never tell you that you’re dumb (haha). Tell it what yo’ure trying to do, copy paste your commands into it, copy paste the error messages if you have any. Literally, inundate it with questions and info and it’ll help you understand what you’re doing and help you unblock yourself. It’s a great tool.
I think the thing that’s really stopping me from using that is that every time I get curious and go poking around to see what the fuss is, I run into some sort of paywall situation, or maybe it’s just a long queue that you need to join to get access, something like that. All I know is that you can’t just casually fire it up and take it for a spin.
Either I’m finding the wrong thing, or the people who already swear by it paid some fee or got an early access code ages ago. It also doesn’t know when it’s lying, and already got a lawyer in trouble for trying to let ChatGPT do his job, apparently it slapped together a brief, an argument before the court, that referenced a bunch of case law that didn’t actually exist.
No matter what, it’s not so casually accessible as people make it out to be, I don’t know what’s up with that.
I’m assuming you’re referring to ChatGPT not being casually accessible. If you’re signed up on a free account, you get access to GPT-3.5 which is pretty decent. If you pay the $20 a month you get access to GPT-4 which is even better, and I prefer to use this - but the free model is also fine for learning podman/docker.
Sign up, if you gotta be on the waitlist, get on it. You can also use Google Bard or Microsoft’s Bing chat AI as well. The MS Bing one is GPT-4 backed. Either way, they will help you learn stuff. Don’t be discouraged, push through and embrace these awesome generative AI tools, they unlock superpowers for you :)
Try phind.com, it’s free for now, and uses gpt-3.5 unlimited or gpt-4 limited to 25 requests per… 4 hours I think. Never ran out. It’s specialised for devs. So far the output is the best of bing AI, and Copilot chat that I’m testing.
Instead of nesting a computer (VM’s) the operating system makes the program think it’s on its own dedicated computer (isolated file system space, cpu, and memory shares). A Dockerfile is just a basic script to construct one of these computers by commands and files.
The real reason people get excited is because they can ship a Docker “image”. It’s a layered filesystem which really is just like saying there’s a system tracking who puts what files in what place and so it’s easier to just send the whole setup to someone then try to document how you should set all that stuff up to run their software.
This is “dummier” proof than the pre-existing convention of just using a package manager to do this for you.
I have a PiHole, my own EdgeRouter that is behind the Verizon router, a UPS, a wired switch, a SiliconDust HD HomeRun to convert my cable to a stream, my Hue controller, my Camera DVR, and a Pi4 hosting network storage.
It all fits neatly in a 6U closet rack. I use the EdgeRouter to host a VPN I can connect into to manage things for the house, and also use it to dial out to a VPN, so I can connect the TVs in the house to a VPN abroad.
I also have a Smart Garden powered by a raspberry pi, connected to a rain barrel, a water pump, some solenoids, and some moisture sensors.
Yes I actually have two of them. My backyard has three outdoor moisture sensors, so it can know if it’s moist enough. It has a drop irrigation system connected to regular plastic pressure for tubing. It has two zones that can be controlled with two solenoids. It also has a 12V pump. All of that is powered by a 12V power supply and controlled by a four zone relay board. Remember to turn the power off to your outdoor sensors so that they don’t destroy themselves when you’re not sensing. You can also add a flow sensor to measure your water consumption.
Hey that sounds amazing, may I ask what moisture sensors you are using?
Edit: also automating sensor power draw sounds like something fun to work on. I’d love to test if having them power on just before or shortly before taking a reading and power off is feasible. Or if they need more time to get an accurate reading, finding the most optimal power cycle schedule to prolong sensor life while being able to take measurements at sensible times.
They’re just resistive electrodes with an analog sense of the conductivity of the soil, which is linearly correlated with moisture. It does this by applying a voltage to one side and sensing the current load to the other probe. This is exactly the same as electroplating, so if you keep them on 100% of the time, one will essentially dissolve in the dirt.
Instead, I run their power through a relay. I turn one relay on, it turns on all three of my sensors, I wait a few seconds, take three reads off each, one second apart, take the avg of each sensor, and record that. You can the save that to a timeseries database and host that locally too. Then plot that with Graphana.
Now that you have logs, you can check moisture levels before activating your irrigation.
The next step is I have a set of float sensors in the rain barrel, towards the bottom. If the bottom one indicates empty it activates a solenoid to refill from the tap until the top one indicates full. They’re about two inches apart.
I was considering a smart garden setup as well. I ended up going with a dumb version that has no dependency on any electrical power: Blumat. They’re from Austria, if i recall correctly. They feed water as the plants consume it.
The Blumat “carrots” are porous and as the soil dries, pressure becomes negative and opens up the switch that controls the feed water line, which then drips water onto the soil until its reached the calibrated moisture level which closes the switch.
Not “self-hosted” in the traditional sense but definitely hosted in the primitive sense.
If you can do python and you can wire one part to one part, one part at a time, it’s not hard, at least to me. Get the analog sensor, connect it to the analog to digital converter, connect all of their power to a relay, connect the relay and the converter to the pi, connect that to power. Then use Python to check the value in a loop, forever.
Home Assistant is nice! Have it integrated with some smart lights and smart plugs. Makes it easy to monitor and control everything locally.
We have it set up in our room so that one widget controls the lights, one controls the fans, one controls the monitors, then there’s a master button that we use to turn off everything that doesn’t need to be always on whenever we leave the room.
Want to play with some fancier stuff with it too, but that alone is incredibly convenient.
I’m far from a security expert, but if you use them with a generic ZigBee USB dongle rather than the IKEA hub they should be pretty secure as they don’t have internet access.
Honestly? I just grabbed the cheapest stuff I could find online, hah. Everything I use is basically a mishmash of whatever was on sale at the time. Home Assistant has worked with every device I’ve hooked up so far, and even when they’re different brands I’ve been able to group them up nicely in Home Assistant’s interface.
Can’t speak to security, unfortunately. While it’s certainly an important concern, my budget has been pretty limited to whatever I can find in multipacks for under $30 ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I wish Home assistant was more conducive to running on Kubernetes. I tried it but so much of the local discovery doesn’t work without being in the same LAN as all your IoT devices.
I’ll have to take another crack at it sometime. You can do all kinds of container privilege modification in Kubernetes and maybe I just missed the one I need to set. I’ll try to find the analog for the one you shared here. Thanks!
Since no one else has mentioned it, I’ll give a shout out to documentation engine Outline. Definitely on the trickier side to set up (requires three auxiliary services to be configured) but creates great looking docs that share easily, allows for collaboration and is super fast.
This looks pretty cool, but I’m assuming the “audit trail” being limited to enterprise users means I can’t see version history on the free version. I’d consider paying the $4/user/month, but the 100 user minimum kinda kills that option for me. If I’m wrong and “audit trail” means something else, I’d strongly consider spinning up an instance!
Bookstack is also a good one. Haven’t set it up on the home server yet but when I was playing around with it on localhost it was pretty decent for my uses.
ActualBudget. If you don’t already budget, ActualBudget is a remarkably nice budgeting tool that will change your financial life for the better. actualbudget.com/
Nextcloud-snap is surprisingly easy to setup. snap install nextcloud is all you need to have a functioning setup. Then run a second command to setup HTTPS and you’re good to go :D
I’m hosting syncthing on my server to sync obsidian notes between my pc and phone, even when one of the devices is offline. I find it very useful. Also, nextcloud, jellyfin, qbittorrent, monero node and netdata for monitoring my server
I’m hosting syncthing on my server to sync obsidian notes between my pc and phone, even when one of the devices is offline. I find it very useful. Also, nextcloud, jellyfin, qbittorrent, monero node and netdata for monitoring my server
While Vaultwarden is great I would not suggest selfhosting your password manager unless you do regular backups. Losing all your password cause your server went down is a great way to ruin your day.
I don’t think that’s true. Even when Bitwarden server is down you can still access your Bitwarden vault, use and export all passwords. You can’t save new passwords but using existing ones should work perfectly fine. So, when your server is down/broken, export your vault, fix server and get new Vaulwarden instance up and import your vault again. Thats it. I still find it safer to selfhost it than getting my passwords leaked.
It’s very easy to back up and encrypted vault to the cloud. Also all bitwarden clients save your info locally, so you wouldn’t lose your vault unless everything you had logged into it with was destroyed simultaneously.
Shame NPM is so easy to use compared to Traefik. I just bash my head against the wall if I try to use Traefik for anything but local docker containers. Point it at an external service? I would rather shoot myself
I actually find traefik rather nice to work with. I have a few Middleware chains set up, expose service using labels and add the chains to make sure I get the appropriate settings.
PhotoPrism is a really big one for me. You will need some computing power and storage, but being able to run your own Google Photos is amazing. Including AI features like object and face detection (if you want).
Add comment