Selfhosted

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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.

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What got you into selfhosting and what was the first thing that you hosted? (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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For me, it was PhotoPrism. I used to be an idiot, and used Google Photos as my gallery. I knew that it was terrible for privacy but was too lazy to do anything about it. When Google limited storage for free accounts, I started looking for alternatives. Tried out a lot of stuff, but ended up settling on PhotoPrism.

It does most things that I need, except for multiple user support (it's there in the sponsored version now). It made me learn a bit about Docker. Eventually, I learned how to access it from outside of my home network over Cloudflare tunnel. I'm happy that I can send pics/albums to folks without sharing it to any third party. It's as easy as sending a link.

Now I have around a dozen containers on a local mini pc, and a couple on a VPS. I still route most things through Cloudflare tunnels (lower latency), only the high bandwidth stuff like Jellyfin are routed through a wireguard tunnel through the VPS.

Anyway, how did you get into selfhosting? (The question is mostly meant for non-professionals. But if you're a professional with something interesting to share, you're welcome as well.)

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

holy crap, that was ........ ... ..... .. 25 years ago???

I don't honestly remember the very first, if I had to bet I'd say it was Samba, likely on my 350MHz K6 (later snagged a K6-III+ for this board, fastest Socket 7 chip ever produced) so I could share files with my laptop, a Dell, 300MHz Celeron. Running all Linux at the time, not sure what flavors, although I first encountered a Debian derivative with Corel LinuxOS believe it or not, and have used Debian on servers about 95% of the time forever after.

My first self-hosting on dedicated hardware was a Samba share and DHCP/DNS server, since at the time routers weren't always a thing, and in fact it was plugged directly into the cable modem ... and for a while accidentally served competing DHCP to my neighborhood cable segment, causing intermittent problems for who knows how many users including myself, because the cable company didn't filter broadcast traffic!!! When I finally found that config mishap, holy shit was it an awkward monkey moment ... fix the typo and walk away slowly ... wild west days!!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Damn. I'm 25 years old lol.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Heh, I did about same but on FreeBDS. Plus proxy server to share dialup connection around home.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Me too. I had a FreeBSD box that routed my dialup and ran a transparent caching squid proxy. Had a cronjob for scheduled downloads.

External? Apache and ftp. Once cable was available had an IPsec wan with a couple friends for file sharing and "lan" gaming. Used samba to span the subnets into a big windows workgroup called "biggroup".

I used to tinker with php alot back then. Made sense to run my own web server.