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SSH: for git and tunneling literally everything: VNC, sftp, Emacs server, tmux, .... Docker running random stuff Used to run Pihole until I got an Android and

by zelly 7y ago

SSH: for git and tunneling literally everything: VNC, sftp, Emacs server, tmux, .... Docker running random stuff Used to run Pihole until I got an Android and rooted it. Used to mess with WebDAV and CalDAV. Nextcloud is a mess; plain SFTP fuse mounts work better for me. My approach has gone from trying to replicate cloud services to straight up remoting over SSH (VNC or terminal/mosh depending connectivity) to my home computer when I want to do something. It's simple and near unexploitable. This is the way it should always have been done from the start of the internet. When you want to edit your calendar, for example, you should be able to do it on your phone/laptop/whatever as a proxy to your home computer, actually locking the file on your home computer. Instead we got the prolifetation of cloud SaaSes to compensate for this. For every program on your computer, you now need >1 analogous but incompatible program for every other device you use. Your watch needs a different calendar program than your gaming PC than your smart fridge, but you want a calendar on all of them. M×N programs where you could have just N, those on your home computer, if you could remote easily. (Really it's one dimension more than M×N when you consider all the backend services behind every SaaS app. What a waste of human effort and compute.)

dmos62 7y ago
I sympathize. My meditations about this lead me to thinking about waste as well. Why computer at home though? For someone who moves around a lot and doesn't invest into "a home", this would be bothersome. Not to mention it's more expensive, in terms of energy and money. I think third-party data centers are fine for self-hosting.
- zelly 7y ago
  There's really no difference. Mainly I use a machine at home instead of a data center VM because that's just one less bill to pay. I have two GPUs in there which would be very expensive on public cloud. I guess one reason people might gravitate to home hosting is owning your own disks, the tinfoil hat perspective. You can encrypt volumes on public cloud as well, but it's still on someone else's machine. They could take a snapshot of the heap memory and know everything you are doing.
  - dmos62 7y ago
    I speculate that in the future the trust aspect of using third-party hardware might be solved technologically. And I agree that today the tinfoil sentiment is not baseless.
oarsinsync 7y ago
I like to be able to view and edit my calendar when I’m offline. This is remarkably often, regardless of whether I’m in London (UK), New York (USA), or some other country entirely.

by zelly 7y ago

dmos62 7y ago

I sympathize. My meditations about this lead me to thinking about waste as well. Why computer at home though? For someone who moves around a lot and doesn't invest into "a home", this would be bothersome. Not to mention it's more expensive, in terms of energy and money. I think third-party data centers are fine for self-hosting.

zelly 7y ago
There's really no difference. Mainly I use a machine at home instead of a data center VM because that's just one less bill to pay. I have two GPUs in there which would be very expensive on public cloud. I guess one reason people might gravitate to home hosting is owning your own disks, the tinfoil hat perspective. You can encrypt volumes on public cloud as well, but it's still on someone else's machine. They could take a snapshot of the heap memory and know everything you are doing.
- dmos62 7y ago
  I speculate that in the future the trust aspect of using third-party hardware might be solved technologically. And I agree that today the tinfoil sentiment is not baseless.

oarsinsync 7y ago

I like to be able to view and edit my calendar when I’m offline. This is remarkably often, regardless of whether I’m in London (UK), New York (USA), or some other country entirely.