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I disagree that they should try setting up these things manually. Provided the automated installation is good enough, it's easier to pick apart a ready-made ins

I disagree that they should try setting up these things manually. Provided the automated installation is good enough, it's easier to pick apart a ready-made install to find out how it works, than to deal with the learning curve of learning how to troubleshoot the pieces that don't quite work together yet and learning their role in the overall stack. I would have never gotten into email self-hosting if someone hadn't done the hard work of creating an all-in-one solution, because it would have taken more time than I would be willing to invest.

kd913 6y ago
This software simply isn't a simple set it and forget like microsoft office, skype or other consumer apps. It is more important than a basic mail server because it is resposible for networking and if things like DHCP/DNS goes down then access to the internet is at risk. For 99.9% of people out there, that is just going to be an unpleasant experience when things go wrong. That reasonably could take down people's security, automation, VOIP phones etc.. I have seen pihole alone go down because one of the gravity sources goes down or because of a dhcp misconfiguration. It involves setting up a VPN and that by itself needs some monitoring/debugging to understand what to do when things necessarily go wrong, especially in regards to routing, setting up splitVPNs etc.. Speaking as someone who has all of this setup manually, there is a bunch of fine tuning and fiddling that makes a set and forget not particularly ideal. On my setup I have to work with a custom cloudflare script to enable DNS records to update. I need a custom lighthttpd config to enable https with letsencrypt. My setup uses DNSCryptProxy instead of unbound (to enable ESNI + DoH for Firefox through my pihole) and as such caching needs to be disabled.... Just a bunch of random tweaks here and there that need to be thought out. Take an example of simply adding multiple other peers to wireguard. Something that people would reasonably want to do with a pihole/VPN. There are no instructions how to do it with this.

kd913 6y ago

This software simply isn't a simple set it and forget like microsoft office, skype or other consumer apps. It is more important than a basic mail server because it is resposible for networking and if things like DHCP/DNS goes down then access to the internet is at risk. For 99.9% of people out there, that is just going to be an unpleasant experience when things go wrong. That reasonably could take down people's security, automation, VOIP phones etc.. I have seen pihole alone go down because one of the gravity sources goes down or because of a dhcp misconfiguration. It involves setting up a VPN and that by itself needs some monitoring/debugging to understand what to do when things necessarily go wrong, especially in regards to routing, setting up splitVPNs etc.. Speaking as someone who has all of this setup manually, there is a bunch of fine tuning and fiddling that makes a set and forget not particularly ideal. On my setup I have to work with a custom cloudflare script to enable DNS records to update. I need a custom lighthttpd config to enable https with letsencrypt. My setup uses DNSCryptProxy instead of unbound (to enable ESNI + DoH for Firefox through my pihole) and as such caching needs to be disabled.... Just a bunch of random tweaks here and there that need to be thought out. Take an example of simply adding multiple other peers to wireguard. Something that people would reasonably want to do with a pihole/VPN. There are no instructions how to do it with this.