this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Why is starting with Self-hosting so daunting? (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Do you have a purpose to host whatever you happened to name here?

There is a reason to host reverse-proxies, however, one can do without them in a self-hosted environments. First, one needs to understand the point behind reverse-proxies (this is an example btw, you might very well know the how and why behind them), and only then would the instructions to set it up start to make sense.

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

I don’t have a need but I do have a goal for the things I want to setup.

I got downvoted to oblivion for saying I didn’t even find what kind of software I could use to make an internal authoritative DNS service for example, where I want to create a custom internal TLD for my VPN.

But apparently people took offense I’d never heard of bind and assumed PiHole was proprietary…

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

assumed PiHole was proprietary

Did it look proprietary on their website?

Personally, I wouldn't even run bind in my homelab. I don't see the point. dnsmasq is good enough for me. But if you'd like to run it, go ahead!

Creating a new TLD for a VPN with an authoritative DNS for your local network isn't the hardest thing, I'm sure you'll find documentation on how to do so BIND's website. If you don't understand something just ask your search engine or ChatGPT/Bing (do not rely on LLMs for factual information, but they're good at summarising information, from Wikipedia for example). Maybe get in the habit to RTFM, it does help.

BTW here's a good list of internal TLDs one might want to use: https://serverfault.com/questions/17255/top-level-domain-domain-suffix-for-private-network