4 ms·

> We’d all have our own web server with our own web site, our own mail server for our own email, our own finger sever for our own status messages, our own charg

by titzer 5y ago

> We’d all have our own web server with our own web site, our own mail server for our own email, our own finger sever for our own status messages, our own chargen server for our own character generation. However – and I don’t think this can be emphasized enough – that is not what people want. People do not want to run their own servers. I must be stuck in the past. It's true. No one wants to run an arcane, buggy, insecure, wonky POS that needs constant patching. This is really a failure of software and shoving all that up a level into the cloud is not fixing anything. At least with your own hardware you can nuke it and start over from scratch. With your own hardware (and disks), you at least know where your data resides. We live in a time where you can get a 4 TB NAS for essentially nothing. You can drop a 8 core, 32GB RAM server on top of that for less than $1k. I don't know what other people's scaling needs are--who knows, maybe they need to serve 100 PB?--but it's a mind blowing amount of computation. Most people can probably serve their silly websites off that. If you can't handle your own email load on a server like that, I honestly have no idea what you're up to. I kind of do want to run my own ones of those things...but I know (with today's software) I'd hate it. Because even after all these years, it kind of terrifies me, the metric shitton of stuff I have had no clue how to do, and I know is way over complicated...because everything is way overcomplicated.

alx__ 5y ago
His point is that a majority of people don't want to bother with the cognitive overload of running a server. Just like you could build your own car, very few want to. Often they don't even care what kind of car they have. As long as it can get them from home to work and back again without killing them.
- titzer 5y ago
  I mean, I get that. I have a mailbox on my house. Letters come to it. I don't think about it too much. Bits come to my house all the time but somehow those trillions of computations keep flubbing this basic functionality.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  Yeah and I think the point here is that the cognitive overload is unnecessary. Most people don't want to build their own car but most people would rather own their own car instead of rent one every time they need to go somewhere. In the server world, the options are to build or rent, there's no real option to just buy one that works already. Even having to set your rear view mirrors and seat position is worthwhile, even having to check tire pressure periodically is worthwhile, to continue the car analogy. If we could buy a box that we plug into the wall, and have simple minimal maintenance and setup UX, like a car, or even like a desktop or mobile device, is not impossible. But it doesn't really exist.
elliotbnvl 5y ago
This smells like the classic "you can build your own Dropbox easily" comment. Just because it's technologically feasible doesn't mean people want to do so.
- titzer 5y ago
  Note, I didn't claim that. I'd love to put a box in my house next to the cable modem that did all that stuff in a manageable, understandable way, that wasn't some underhanded subscription service that is going to try to squeeze me in the future or whoops my data amongst its constant, silent upgrading itself. But alas, no such box exists, and the software components that would go in that box seem to need constant babysitting and arcane configuration. Worse, it seems like all those overcomplicated things keep having critically bad security vulnerabilities and I'm just wondering what the actual fuck is wrong with having a damn thing on my computer that receives my email and serves a webpage.
- Pxtl 5y ago
  Yes. Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's easy. I'd love to see appliance-level servers become standard, but you'd need Google or Apple to throw their weight behind such a thing to make it usable, since decades of server software/hardware development has failed to produce things that require less-than-professional-level users. I'd love to buy an off-the-shelf box for my network, have it act as a back-end for all my Google cloud-based apps and email and serve my blog and my photos and automatically encrypt and back it all up to a cloud storage system. But none of the big players are interested in that kind of thing, and the small players can't create replacements for the entire Google or Apple or Microsoft server/client architecture.
vorpalhex 5y ago
I run a homelab, and also run a shared server for a few folks. The hardware is easy. The software can be easy (if you let it). The things that are tricky: 1. Getting different software to all play nicely from the users perspective. I can't even give my users SSO because most software doesn't accept reverse proxy authentication! 2. The gap in average computer skills. Some of my users are engineers, most of them are not. My average user needs help with password resets, remembering URLs and very basic tasks. "Upload a file" is a _difficult_ task for the average user. 3. Feature requests and keeping maintenance reasonable. A lot of my technical users will ask me for feature after feature.. but not put in any time or effort to set things up or maintain. I'm one person and I set a hard cap of how much maintenance I'll do in a week, and that is a big limiter of stuff. I have toyed with just charging my users a bit per month and hiring someone as a basic tech, and honestly more of my users would rather pay a monthly fee than actually work on the servers themselves.
- eatonphil 5y ago
  > 1. Getting different software to all play nicely from the users perspective. I can't even give my users SSO because most software doesn't accept reverse proxy authentication! It sounds like you're referring to something specific here but I'm not understanding. What kind of software doesn't play well with SSO? And what is reverse proxy authentication? Do you mean give users SSO as in give them an account on an SSO system like Google/Okta/LDAP or do you mean use SSO as authentication for a web app you're running? Even if in the latter case I still don't understand what you mean by reverse proxy authentication or what that has to do with SSO. (I've set up SSO on my apps before and I've run SSO auth servers.)
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    SSO is short for single sign on. It means users have only a single login across all the parts of the system. That can be something like "Login with Google" or it can be they just have a single local user account that works everywhere. A really efficient way to make SSO work is to allow a reverse proxy to do all the work. A reverse proxy is a webserver (such as nginx or traefik) which receives all incoming requests and then hands them off to the correct bit of software, such as Plex or Heimdall. Reverse proxies do lots of things but they help glue different pieces of software together. It allows you to have "http://plex.example.com http://plex.example.com" and "http://heimdall.example.com http://heimdall.example.com" on the same server as a for instance. You can also have the reverse proxy handle authentication. Users get redirected to sign in if they don't have the right cookie and when the proxy forwards their request it includes headers that give the username, email, etc to the underlying software. This way instead of both Plex and Heimdall having to support a bunch of different sign in options, user management, password resets, etc all that is done by the reverse proxy. Your software just has to trust the reverse proxy and get it's data from the headers.
bobobob420 5y ago
Are you talking about physical On-prem systems or just buying a basic ec2 type server and renting some storage space? Because wouldn't the first one require a specific business line to an ISP for networking, which would require an office space and other associated costs? Or are you referring to renting a vanilla server and rolling everything yourself vs using some automated deployment and build pack system?
- chasd00 5y ago
  I just did a speed test and got 175mbs up. That is ridiculously fast and i don't have an out of the ordinary home internet connection. Entire data centers use to run on internet connections slower than that. A mac mini, ups, and that connection is plenty to run any kind of server for personal/family use.
  - bobobob420 5y ago
    U didnt answer my question at all. Also running a public facing server for any commercial out of your house is not recommended and may not even be allowed by your ISP
diegocg 5y ago
I don't want to maintain my own mail server, but I definitely want to run my own server. The irony is that modern internet infrastructure makes decentralisation _more_ feasible, but software lags behind. Why can't I buy some device for 200€ or so where I store all my data and I receive email? (with the cloud being used only for optional encrypted backups). One can even imagine a decentralised social network running in these devices, with my friends getting updates by polling it periodically (or my device sending updates to their devices). The device would be powered 24h/365d, and if it breaks you just replace it. When I'm out of home, my phone apps would just query the device to get new mail and updates. We shouldn't really _need_ the cloud for many things yet we use it for everything.
- astrange 5y ago
  You can't receive email this way because your spam filter wouldn't work; Gmail's works because they can see what's being sent to multiple people at once. You can't send email (reliably) locally because other email servers don't trust you like they do Gmail.
ssss11 5y ago
I think they key is: despite regular people not wanting to RUN their own server, they do want to CONTROL their own server. Current incumbents treat your data like tier asset, not like custody. This is because you pay nothing. The beginning of regular people having empowerment begins by paying some fee to own the product.
- clpm4j 5y ago
  None of the regular people I'm familiar care about their data at all. If you use any of the popular social media apps (Twitter, TikTok, FB/Instagram, Snapchat), then you can't really claim that you care about your data, and most of the people I know use those apps on a weekly if not daily basis.
  - creata 5y ago
    > If you use any of the popular social media apps (Twitter, TikTok, FB/Instagram, Snapchat), then you can't really claim that you care about your data That's not true. I don't use any of those, and I understand the huge toll it has on my ability to participate in stuff. Many conversations happen only on Twitter or Facebook, so it's perfectly possible to "care about your data" and still, as a necessary compromise, use those services.
Uehreka 5y ago
You’re going to run into a problem right off the bat: Your home network is likely behind a NAT and has an IP assigned by your ISP that can change at any time. You’ll need to tunnel through a server in the cloud somewhere (or use a tool like ngrok that tunnels through a server in the cloud). And now that proxy server is “really” the server, because if the business providing the tunnel decides you’re using too much of their bandwidth, they can throttle you, and if you don’t want to get throttled you’ll likely need to pay by the GB/month for a premium tunneling service. You could make your own tunneling service with an EC2 instance, but it’s the same difference: You’re paying AWS, and the EC2 server is now your “real” server. As far as I can tell (and I’ve looked pretty hard) there’s no good way to run a website from your house without tunneling unless you have a very unusual house or a very unusual ISP.
- walterbell 5y ago
  Take a look at Tailscale and open-source alternatives.
  - Uehreka 5y ago
    Just looked it up, this looks like a tool to let you and your friends create a “private internet” using a VPN. Which is cool (I could see a bunch of uses for this, like SSHing into my home computer while I’m on the go), but I’m talking about the ability to expose a device on your home network to the public internet.
    - walterbell 5y ago
      One approach is to use a public proxy + tailscale VPN, https://init8.lol/expose-web-services-at-home-via-tailscale-for-fun/ https://init8.lol/expose-web-services-at-home-via-tailscale-...
      - Uehreka 5y ago
        Yeah, but the public proxy is exactly the thing I’m trying to avoid. If we’re talking about hosting a static site like your personal portfolio, then once you put a proxy in front of it, you might as well just host the site where you’re hosting the proxy. My complaint is that there’s no way to host a website from home without either paying for a cloud VM to proxy traffic or paying a company who uses a cloud VM to proxy traffic.

by titzer 5y ago

alx__ 5y ago

His point is that a majority of people don't want to bother with the cognitive overload of running a server. Just like you could build your own car, very few want to. Often they don't even care what kind of car they have. As long as it can get them from home to work and back again without killing them.

titzer 5y ago
I mean, I get that. I have a mailbox on my house. Letters come to it. I don't think about it too much. Bits come to my house all the time but somehow those trillions of computations keep flubbing this basic functionality.
betwixthewires 5y ago
Yeah and I think the point here is that the cognitive overload is unnecessary. Most people don't want to build their own car but most people would rather own their own car instead of rent one every time they need to go somewhere. In the server world, the options are to build or rent, there's no real option to just buy one that works already. Even having to set your rear view mirrors and seat position is worthwhile, even having to check tire pressure periodically is worthwhile, to continue the car analogy. If we could buy a box that we plug into the wall, and have simple minimal maintenance and setup UX, like a car, or even like a desktop or mobile device, is not impossible. But it doesn't really exist.

elliotbnvl 5y ago

This smells like the classic "you can build your own Dropbox easily" comment. Just because it's technologically feasible doesn't mean people want to do so.

titzer 5y ago
Note, I didn't claim that. I'd love to put a box in my house next to the cable modem that did all that stuff in a manageable, understandable way, that wasn't some underhanded subscription service that is going to try to squeeze me in the future or whoops my data amongst its constant, silent upgrading itself. But alas, no such box exists, and the software components that would go in that box seem to need constant babysitting and arcane configuration. Worse, it seems like all those overcomplicated things keep having critically bad security vulnerabilities and I'm just wondering what the actual fuck is wrong with having a damn thing on my computer that receives my email and serves a webpage.
Pxtl 5y ago
Yes. Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's easy. I'd love to see appliance-level servers become standard, but you'd need Google or Apple to throw their weight behind such a thing to make it usable, since decades of server software/hardware development has failed to produce things that require less-than-professional-level users. I'd love to buy an off-the-shelf box for my network, have it act as a back-end for all my Google cloud-based apps and email and serve my blog and my photos and automatically encrypt and back it all up to a cloud storage system. But none of the big players are interested in that kind of thing, and the small players can't create replacements for the entire Google or Apple or Microsoft server/client architecture.

vorpalhex 5y ago

I run a homelab, and also run a shared server for a few folks. The hardware is easy. The software can be easy (if you let it). The things that are tricky: 1. Getting different software to all play nicely from the users perspective. I can't even give my users SSO because most software doesn't accept reverse proxy authentication! 2. The gap in average computer skills. Some of my users are engineers, most of them are not. My average user needs help with password resets, remembering URLs and very basic tasks. "Upload a file" is a _difficult_ task for the average user. 3. Feature requests and keeping maintenance reasonable. A lot of my technical users will ask me for feature after feature.. but not put in any time or effort to set things up or maintain. I'm one person and I set a hard cap of how much maintenance I'll do in a week, and that is a big limiter of stuff. I have toyed with just charging my users a bit per month and hiring someone as a basic tech, and honestly more of my users would rather pay a monthly fee than actually work on the servers themselves.

eatonphil 5y ago
> 1. Getting different software to all play nicely from the users perspective. I can't even give my users SSO because most software doesn't accept reverse proxy authentication! It sounds like you're referring to something specific here but I'm not understanding. What kind of software doesn't play well with SSO? And what is reverse proxy authentication? Do you mean give users SSO as in give them an account on an SSO system like Google/Okta/LDAP or do you mean use SSO as authentication for a web app you're running? Even if in the latter case I still don't understand what you mean by reverse proxy authentication or what that has to do with SSO. (I've set up SSO on my apps before and I've run SSO auth servers.)
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  SSO is short for single sign on. It means users have only a single login across all the parts of the system. That can be something like "Login with Google" or it can be they just have a single local user account that works everywhere. A really efficient way to make SSO work is to allow a reverse proxy to do all the work. A reverse proxy is a webserver (such as nginx or traefik) which receives all incoming requests and then hands them off to the correct bit of software, such as Plex or Heimdall. Reverse proxies do lots of things but they help glue different pieces of software together. It allows you to have "http://plex.example.com http://plex.example.com" and "http://heimdall.example.com http://heimdall.example.com" on the same server as a for instance. You can also have the reverse proxy handle authentication. Users get redirected to sign in if they don't have the right cookie and when the proxy forwards their request it includes headers that give the username, email, etc to the underlying software. This way instead of both Plex and Heimdall having to support a bunch of different sign in options, user management, password resets, etc all that is done by the reverse proxy. Your software just has to trust the reverse proxy and get it's data from the headers.

bobobob420 5y ago

Are you talking about physical On-prem systems or just buying a basic ec2 type server and renting some storage space? Because wouldn't the first one require a specific business line to an ISP for networking, which would require an office space and other associated costs? Or are you referring to renting a vanilla server and rolling everything yourself vs using some automated deployment and build pack system?

chasd00 5y ago
I just did a speed test and got 175mbs up. That is ridiculously fast and i don't have an out of the ordinary home internet connection. Entire data centers use to run on internet connections slower than that. A mac mini, ups, and that connection is plenty to run any kind of server for personal/family use.
- bobobob420 5y ago
  U didnt answer my question at all. Also running a public facing server for any commercial out of your house is not recommended and may not even be allowed by your ISP

diegocg 5y ago

I don't want to maintain my own mail server, but I definitely want to run my own server. The irony is that modern internet infrastructure makes decentralisation _more_ feasible, but software lags behind. Why can't I buy some device for 200€ or so where I store all my data and I receive email? (with the cloud being used only for optional encrypted backups). One can even imagine a decentralised social network running in these devices, with my friends getting updates by polling it periodically (or my device sending updates to their devices). The device would be powered 24h/365d, and if it breaks you just replace it. When I'm out of home, my phone apps would just query the device to get new mail and updates. We shouldn't really _need_ the cloud for many things yet we use it for everything.

astrange 5y ago
You can't receive email this way because your spam filter wouldn't work; Gmail's works because they can see what's being sent to multiple people at once. You can't send email (reliably) locally because other email servers don't trust you like they do Gmail.

ssss11 5y ago

I think they key is: despite regular people not wanting to RUN their own server, they do want to CONTROL their own server. Current incumbents treat your data like tier asset, not like custody. This is because you pay nothing. The beginning of regular people having empowerment begins by paying some fee to own the product.

clpm4j 5y ago
None of the regular people I'm familiar care about their data at all. If you use any of the popular social media apps (Twitter, TikTok, FB/Instagram, Snapchat), then you can't really claim that you care about your data, and most of the people I know use those apps on a weekly if not daily basis.
- creata 5y ago
  > If you use any of the popular social media apps (Twitter, TikTok, FB/Instagram, Snapchat), then you can't really claim that you care about your data That's not true. I don't use any of those, and I understand the huge toll it has on my ability to participate in stuff. Many conversations happen only on Twitter or Facebook, so it's perfectly possible to "care about your data" and still, as a necessary compromise, use those services.

Uehreka 5y ago

You’re going to run into a problem right off the bat: Your home network is likely behind a NAT and has an IP assigned by your ISP that can change at any time. You’ll need to tunnel through a server in the cloud somewhere (or use a tool like ngrok that tunnels through a server in the cloud). And now that proxy server is “really” the server, because if the business providing the tunnel decides you’re using too much of their bandwidth, they can throttle you, and if you don’t want to get throttled you’ll likely need to pay by the GB/month for a premium tunneling service. You could make your own tunneling service with an EC2 instance, but it’s the same difference: You’re paying AWS, and the EC2 server is now your “real” server. As far as I can tell (and I’ve looked pretty hard) there’s no good way to run a website from your house without tunneling unless you have a very unusual house or a very unusual ISP.

walterbell 5y ago
Take a look at Tailscale and open-source alternatives.
- Uehreka 5y ago
  Just looked it up, this looks like a tool to let you and your friends create a “private internet” using a VPN. Which is cool (I could see a bunch of uses for this, like SSHing into my home computer while I’m on the go), but I’m talking about the ability to expose a device on your home network to the public internet.
  - walterbell 5y ago
    One approach is to use a public proxy + tailscale VPN, https://init8.lol/expose-web-services-at-home-via-tailscale-for-fun/ https://init8.lol/expose-web-services-at-home-via-tailscale-...
    - Uehreka 5y ago
      Yeah, but the public proxy is exactly the thing I’m trying to avoid. If we’re talking about hosting a static site like your personal portfolio, then once you put a proxy in front of it, you might as well just host the site where you’re hosting the proxy. My complaint is that there’s no way to host a website from home without either paying for a cloud VM to proxy traffic or paying a company who uses a cloud VM to proxy traffic.