Hi there! This is a video that I made that I’m hoping can act as a beginner friendly entry level point to the world of self hosting and running a homelab. Just thought I’d share in case anyone is interested, and I hope it can be a resource to share with noobies. I don’t claim to be an expert at all so I’d also love some feedback. Thanks!
Well that was one idea mentioned by one of the other posters: better security by having the server off the network.
I think my luddite tastes in software are part of it, but if I have a server on the network, it might as well be in a data center where I don’t have to worry about space, power, noise, ICE raids (my servers are in several countries so they’d at least have more work to do), etc. I can add or delete new hardware with a few clicks. I actually do have an old Supermicro 1U server in my kitchen but it’s just sitting there unpowered. I had intended to colo it but it’s just not worth doing that. I had forgotten about it.
Even if I have a server at home, I probably want to back it up over the network, so then what? There are remote copies of the files then either way.
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Yeah that is kind of vague though. I don’t really have other stuff on my LAN (https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthusiasts-everything-in-my-house-is-wired) right now unless you count my phone.
I’m in another thread right now where a guy is running a simple encrypted chat server on his phone under tmux. That is pretty cool and using an old phone is an interesting alternative to a razzleberry pi if you don’t mind running Android and don’t need much compute or storage.
I think I see, you’re suggesting using a local server as sort of a jump box to the internet, with otherwise disconnected clients. I guess that has some attractions, though in practice I use web browsers all the time, with the usual bug-ridden software stack that surrounds such things. If I were doing anything really sensitive I wouldn’t use that approach.
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Home Assistant is kind of interesting for solar power I guess, though I haven’t looked into it much. Otherwise it’s a smart home thing right? See the biggaybunny link I posted ;). I had to look up NZBGET and so on, but yeah, if I was trying to keep it private I certainly wouldn’t want to connect to it from home internet. I used to have a server in Romania that would have been a good candidate for stuff like that if I were into it. Download to that and then scp to home.
Nothing stops me from upgrading/downgrading VPS software any way I want afaik. Although it might less secure than a dedicated server. I have had dedis in various places at different times though my main beater machine is a VPS. I tend to think hosted servers are more secure against physical intrusions than a home server is, though who knows. The software is basically the same, and the DC’s have good DDOS protection.
Yeah you’re probably right about using a phone as a server. It’s a cool re-use though.