from Hacker News

Tech Independence

by jjude on 9/17/23, 3:41 PM with 71 comments

• by apitman on 9/17/23, 8:46 PM

  The author talked about this a few months ago on Tim Ferriss' podcast[0]. One of my favorite episodes.

  I'm passionate[1] about the concept but articles like this are a reminder to me that we need to make self hosting an order of magnitude simpler and accessible to more people. It shouldn't need to involve any CLI, DNS, TLS certs, port forwarding/NAT traversal, IP addresses, etc etc.

  Self hosting shouldn't be any more difficult or less secure than installing an app on your phone. The flow should be 1) install the "self hosting app" on an old laptop or phone. 2) Go through a quick OAuth2 flow to connect your app to a tunnel that enables inbound traffic. 3) Use the self hosting app to install other apps like Jellyfin, Calendar, Nextcloud, etc. Everything should be sandboxed (containers work pretty well on Linux and Windows 10/11 via WSL2) and secure by default. Automatic backups (ideally an OAuth2 flow to your friends' self hosted installations) and auto app updates are table stakes.

  There's no technical reason this can't all be done, but lots of technical challenges, and it's unclear whether anyone will pay for tunnels. I'm currently trying to figure out how to do reliable auto backups without filesystem snapshots.

  [0]: https://youtu.be/0BaDQCjqUHU?si=0wDf-2RH-u9vdm3g&t=1380

  [1]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

• by akavel on 9/17/23, 9:02 PM

  FWIW, I recently found a VPS offering for $1.41/month (!) @ 1.5GB RAM & 30GB HDD via https://lowendbox.com/, at https://my.racknerd.com/index.php?rp=/store/black-friday-202... (please note I have no idea how reliable it is though!). I managed to deploy NixOS there through nixos-infect (https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect), and then further configure it with NixOps. That said, using NixOps does currently require a Linux (or Mac, probably) box as the managing one, and some Nix-fu, which is definitely non-trivial. A draft (WIP) writeup on that, if you're interested: https://github.com/akavel/scribbles/blob/main/_drafts/202308...

• by johnea on 9/17/23, 5:47 PM

  I do agree that it's not exactly "self hosting" when you use vultr.com

  Once you've gone to all the other trouble, pay a little extra to the ISP for a static IP, and then any computer is your own "cloud"...

• by alabhyajindal on 9/17/23, 6:47 PM

  I love this article.

  The section 'More Indie Tips' is great, especially if you don't plan to follow the guide: https://sive.rs/ti#indie

• by baz00 on 9/17/23, 6:19 PM

  Relying on your cloud provider's backup / restore solution is not a backup.

• by kartoshechka on 9/18/23, 6:44 AM

  great post! I'd like to mention one more "indie" tip - physical security key is nice to have (2 even better) if you plan to lose/break your phone, or travel frequently. Add the most important auth keys (bank, email, etc) directly to the physical key, back them up on the second one, and now you're less "working smartphone with an active sim" dependent :)

• by 0pteron on 9/19/23, 6:56 PM

  All good until Vultr or any of the services you rely on have to do maintenance (guaranteed to happen at least once in my 10+ years of VPS hosting) or even worse, one of the services loses data (Never happened to me, but I've seen it).

  I just want to throw out buyvm.net as a block storage alternative. Not as big as vultr but super reliable and affordable, they have a discord and the owner is great

• by nyanpasu64 on 9/18/23, 6:39 AM

  Would it be practical to use mesh networking (eg. Hyperboria, https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10478-easily-accessi...) to access your machines from remotely using their public key rather than a domain name you have to pay for and renew?

• by ojbyrne on 9/17/23, 7:24 PM

  Minor quibble/correction request - the FreeFileSync section (Windows specific) includes some Mac-specific instructions in Step 8.

• by chillbill on 9/17/23, 6:43 PM

  I'm all for tech independence. But if you need to be spoon-fed the instructions like this and you don't get what most of it is doing, YOU DON'T WANT TO DO THIS. Best case scenario you'll get locked out of your own stuff or important information.

  Yes, you should strive for that, and you start by learning. Contrary to popular belief, you don't need to be a linux ninja to be able to host your own website and calendar.

  The stuff mentioned in this article are the bare minimum, and you should want to do it yourself without being spoon fed the steps.

  With that aside, this is exactly the kind of guide I would expect a three-letter agency contractor or worker to spread in order to "help you" stay off the grid, then unceremoniously drop a disaster on your head.

• by december456 on 9/17/23, 5:40 PM

  Teaching newbies 'independence' by downloading random untrusted files off the internet and running them as system admin...not a cool guide i would say.

• by koch on 9/17/23, 7:22 PM

  I really can't believe there doesn't exist a good "home box."

  There should be a product that you can buy (a computer) that you bring home, plug in, set up via your phone or computer that:

  - can host websites

  - can store your files and sync them to other devices

  - control your home automation

  - host your email

  - anything else you might otherwise put on a server

  And does it all EASILY with a simple phone or web UI.

  Yes I know you can actually buy a computer or server or raspberry pi and put something like NextCloud or Home Assistant et al. on it, but the real barrier imo is the setup and configuration. Even I don't do all this because it seems daunting to configure all of it, and I consider myself a pretty technical person. I really just want to buy a box, plug it in, and like select which apps I want to use, and then it starts working for me.

• by harryvederci on 9/17/23, 6:43 PM

  Ignore the snarky comments, this is a good initiative. Respect.

• by znpy on 9/17/23, 5:15 PM

  Tech independence… then uses a third party service for outgoing email. Smh.

• by ChrisArchitect on 9/18/23, 1:19 AM

  This is posted every month for months and months --- anything new here?

• by dusted on 9/18/23, 8:43 AM

  I upvoted this before realizing it's a just a plug for some stuff, "porkbun", "vultr", "freefilesync" and some app called "davx" yeah, no, just by the amount of stuff you need to sign up to outside of the base BSD system, this is not tech independence.