29 ms·

I wish my web server were in the corner of my room

• anthropodie 4y ago
  visit http://i.reddit.com/r/selfhosted http://i.reddit.com/r/selfhosted to join hundreds of thousands of people hosting at home.
  • anderspitman 4y ago
    It's a great community for learning, but I think they focus too much on teaching each other and not enough on lowering the barrier of entry.
• bombcar 4y ago
  For those interested, https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE may be of use. The idea is you'd publish on your own web server, and syndicate to other services that could maintain under pressure, etc. I think that for many people, setting it up at home is "Good enough" and if you get slash dotted, well then you can deal with it at that point.
  • cyberge99 4y ago
    I once took our corporate T1 because I was hosting a site on a work webserver and it got slashdotted. My boss was really cool about it though, he said, “wow, I’ve never known an internet celebrity before!” This was in 2001, so it’s meaning has changed significantly since then.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      My home DSL connection years ago started being slow - so I checked my home server. A single image was the top result for "Japanese robot death cat" or something on Google Images, so I was getting pounded. A quick robots.txt update and a few days later everything was calm again.
      • dylan604 4y ago
        The no-hot-linking option works well too
        • jamiek88 4y ago
          Remember the hot linking wars? Small sites would get pissed when site like the nyt hotlinked and serve them pron instead.
          • dylan604 4y ago
            as well they should. NYT has a budget. Small sites typically don't. F'em if they can't take a joke!
  • digitalsushi 4y ago
    A home web server is the equivalent of running out of toilet paper. You never designed a Service Level Agreement for either, and it's frustrating, but you will survive it.
• ghusto 4y ago
  I remember home hosting fondly too. Every so often I think about doing it again, but security paranoia keeps me from it. What if they broke out somehow? I could DMZ it I guess.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    DMZ or second IP/connection is the way to go. It can be a bit tricky with hairpin routing, but you can make the DMZ seem to be "on the internet" even to the home network. Use tail scale or something similar for actual "access my home network from far away"
  • teekert 4y ago
    Tailscale is nice, you don't even need to open any ports to have your device accessible from anywhere. Works really great, literally (!) takes >10 min to set up (on mobile, dl app, log in with 3rd party identity provider (I choose GitHub), on Server, curl some script (will move to apt or yay or dnf when it detects them), click a link, boom both devices can find each other on unique IP addresses.) I do open ports, for NextCloud (to be able share stuff) and some websites. But Home Assistant is only accessible from the Tailnet for example, as are my ssh servers.
    • 14u2c 4y ago
      Cloudflare has a similar (free) service as well. It's quite useful.
    • ghusto 4y ago
      Excellent, thanks. I've never used Tailscale before.
      • teekert 4y ago
        It's free for the first 20 devices, I guess there is no limit if you want to selfhost the server part (called headscale). They are committed to the free tier though, they wrote a lot about that. I like the company a lot, I hope they don't change. They are very freedom/opensource oriented, for now :) Once you use Tailscale you realize this is how a VPN should be, it's really something.
• superkuh 4y ago
  Mine is. It has been for 20+ years. It works great. As others have said, POSSE. A repository webserver (nginx) serving static files is incomparibly less of a security risk, than say, running a modern web browser with javascript enabled. But if you go .php/whatever yeah, that's risky.
• jstanley 4y ago
  Interestingly, the background colour of this site seems to change over time very subtly, and it's done by CSS with no JavaScript: The "changingbg" parts in https://interconnected.org/home/static/styles/interconnected-2020.css?v=7 https://interconnected.org/home/static/styles/interconnected...
  • _dain_ 4y ago
    it screws up my darkmode extension i tell you hwat
  • innocentoldguy 4y ago
    Both the choice of background colors and the constant shifting thereof, for me, are extremely distracting and make the website hard to read. Like HTML's marquee and blink tags, just because you can do something on your web site doesn't necessarily mean you should.
• FpUser 4y ago
  I have 1gbps symmetric fiber with static IP so I run some of my backends from home. Works fine for years.
  • aidenn0 4y ago
    The upstream on my cable modem is about 1/6th what my college dorm-room[1] upstream was, and I'm not sharing it with 1000s of other people. 1: It was two T3 lines, but only half of the second line was provisioned, so ~67MBps vs today's 12MBps.
  • barelysapient 4y ago
    Ditto. No complaints.
• throwaway22032 4y ago
  Mine is and has been for a few decades. Different machines, but yeah. I run it behind a cheapo VPS for geolocation reasons.
• achairapart 4y ago
  Funnily enough I had the same wish some time ago, so nowadays I do most of my computing in "fatcity": https://fatcity.it https://fatcity.it
  • all2 4y ago
    > most of my computing What does this involve? Are you tunneling a browser through ssh? Are you doing development work? Also, the status page is a rather beautiful bit of text. Did you do that yourself?
    • achairapart 4y ago
      The Raspberry PI is attached at my home router (1Gb fiber connectivity), then I can access it like a local server (so even by SSH) from everywhere with Tailscale[0]. The rest of the world is proxied by a Cloudflare Tunnel[1]. Yes, remote dev work is done mostly with Visual Studio Code Remote SSH[2] (but I wish something similar would exists for Sublime Text). [0]: https://tailscale.com/ https://tailscale.com/ [1]: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-apps/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections... [2]: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh Edit: Yes, I hacked together the status page, something similar welcomes me when I ssh into the machine. Edit 2: Some benchmark here: https://pibenchmarks.com/benchmark/62022 https://pibenchmarks.com/benchmark/62022
  • b1476 4y ago
    I’m intrigued, care to share more?
    • achairapart 4y ago
      Please see the sibling reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33166455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33166455 And feel free to ask me anything.
  • fm2606 4y ago
    >> little Raspberry Pi 4 server that I run from my home ISP, for no reason other than to have some fun This. I run mine on RPi 3B+ with a 4 running the database. I reverse proxy to my site via a cloud VPS instance for $4 a month. I switched to the cloud after years on NO-IP when 1) I noticed my IP never changed and 2) my home IP address was public via a look up of my domain name. On another 3B+ I have a VPN so I can SSH in . Some day I will get around doing a roll-your-own-ngrok [0] so I don't have to open any ports but have yet to do it. I have done it for a project I was working on and I needed to make the local dev server accessible to a 3rd party. Pretty slick and saves a bunch of time and hassle from having to put the code on the server. (As an aside: Does anyone else dislike the term "grok"? For whatever reason it annoys the hell out of me.) I really have nothing important on there and go months or years without doing anything to it then get a burst of creativity or what not and update the site or just tinker with it. [0] https://jerrington.me/posts/2019-01-29-self-hosted-ngrok.html https://jerrington.me/posts/2019-01-29-self-hosted-ngrok.htm...
• yummypaint 4y ago
  This reminds me of setting up a file hosting server at home in high school so i could work on projects from school without constantly burning cds or dealing with terrible thumb drives. Sketchy php, no authentication, no sanitization. Just browse to a file and click upload. In hindsight it's kind of shocking it wasn't taken over
  • bombcar 4y ago
    If you built it yourself, it's highly likely nobody ever found it. Even back then most of the "script kiddies" on the internet were using pre-packaged exploits for known software, not searching every single possible IP for forms with upload buttons.
    • LukeShu 4y ago
      As someone who was a highschooler 2008-2012 who built their own simple PHP apps for things: Script kiddies of the time definitely were scanning for arbitrary forms. Not necessarily trying to exploit the code, but just anything that would allow them to post spam.
      • TOGoS 4y ago
        I had a big data loss event back in 2008ish when someone found out, I'm guessing, that they could upload a PHP file to an upload-anything form on my home server. I thought I was keeping it secure by disallowing ".php" files, but I think some MultiView option I had set in Apache allowed them to upload .php.somethingelse and still have it get executed, blowing away, sadly, all my Subversion repos. Switched everything I could salvage to Git after that and never looked back. Also I no longer trust Apache to directly serve user-uploaded files. :P Long story short, someone apparently went to a non-zero amount of effort to hack my homebrew file-upload form.
• davegauer 4y ago
  I'm a huge fan of running web servers in the house - but they don't have to be connected to the Internet to be useful and fun! An Apache instance on my always-on box in the basement [0] serves an incredible number of uses and can be connected to from any computer-like thing on my home network. Old-school CGI scripts can be written almost as quickly as terminal scripts and HTML forms make super quick interfaces. A home web server is probably STILL the easiest way to get files to heterogeneous computers and phones and tablets and... [0] https://ratfactor.com/setup2 https://ratfactor.com/setup2
  • zh3 4y ago
    Our (decades old) house web server has a home page with useful links, and in particular to a simple wiki on the same box. Without any pushing (that never works) the rest of the house has slowly learnt to use it, so the calendar, the wish lists, the pet histories, holiday ideas, all sorts of stuff are on it. The server also hosts simple apps like JS clocks, calculators and of course the [0] pewpew attack map (maybe a little less funny these days, but hey). Edit: ref CGI, there's a few apps on there that do that as well (e.g. fish tank temperature monitor). Nice thing about a small private network is being able to do CGI scripts in bash/whatever without having to worry too much). [0] https://github.com/hrbrmstr/pewpew https://github.com/hrbrmstr/pewpew
    • protonfish 4y ago
      How do you give your intranet site an internal domain? Or do you make the family use the IP address?
      • tomcam 4y ago
        I am asking this out of ignorance, not knowledge. Isn’t that why the Lord gave us a hosts file?
        • dylan604 4y ago
          you'd have to edit the hosts file on every single device you want to access that domain. personally, i wouldn't even know how to do that on any of my mobile devices.
• agrippanux 4y ago
  A few weeks ago I set up a Stable Diffusion webui on my home linux box and used a Cloudflare tunnel to host it on a url and gate access to just my company's email domain. I started a slack channel for AI Art and we started holding a daily contest, it's been really fun. Shout out to Cloudflare, setting up an access protected tunnel took like 10 minutes.
• mftb 4y ago
  I've wanted to do this for years, but just can't stand the security hassle. One solution I've often thought about, is renting a small office in the neighborhood and setting up there, obviously that adds a lot of expense.
• lucb1e 4y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20221011170702/https://interconnected.org/home/2022/10/10/servers https://web.archive.org/web/20221011170702/https://interconn... because it takes 25 seconds to load at the moment (not that archive.org couldn't use a speed boost)
• kkfx 4y ago
  I'm not much interested in a personal webserver than having as a NORMAL service an ipv6 global per any connection, all ISP crappy router deniable or configurable in bridge mode, anyone normally owning a personal domain name or more than one. Some subdomains dedicated to personal services etc. Web server just a part of the game, not them specifically. Technically there are NO reasons to justify "cloud computing" despite claims, the only real justifications are business of some against others interests. There are no reasons despite all ipv6 issue to not offer global addresses etc. The real issue is that most people simply have next to no ideal about IT nor how to benefit from in in their own lives. Those who know have not much choice...
• lucb1e 4y ago
  Speaking as someone who hosts multiple websites, email, etc. in the corner of a room > [it should] be reliable if I kick a cable out of the wall Right, if you want it to be reliable but also be able to cut its cables, then you will need a secondary host outside the home. > or in the unlikely event that I get a bunch of traffic. Are you serving media (music or video of more than a few seconds)? If not: DSL or mobile data (if your data cap allows) is fine for HN front page. Judging by the current page weighing 100KB, you can have 10 visitors every second at 1 MiB/s upload. (HN reaches that rate only in spikes, even at a top three position.) > I’d also like it to be quick! It's currently not quick at DigitalOcean (2 seconds for TLS setup, 12 seconds for HTML, 8 seconds for JavaScript, etc... 27 seconds total). It can only get better! I can recommend something beefier than a raspberry pi, though, or at least than than the pi 1-3 speeds that I'm used to. I personally use an old laptop which is plenty fast for, well, anything you'd also ask of a daily driver, except it now doesn't need to render a GUI which speeds things up a lot. They can peak up to 100W depending on the model, but are usually very low power when nothing is being asked of them. > Oh, and I don’t want to have my home network hacked. Then install unattended-upgrades, put admin panels (phpmyadmin, wp-admin) behind basic authentication, don't host things you don't trust (random code written by 'someone on the internet' that has never been tested by anyone), put it in a VLAN if you want to be extra cautious, and you'll be fine. It never hurts to keep your phone and other systems on the LAN up-to-date anyhow so they should be secure as well, even if someone does get in.
  • adhoc_slime 4y ago
    Pretty much! As engineers we all sweat sleepless nights mulling over five 9's and we conflate these valid business needs with our hobbies and personal art/projects. It doesn't have to be this way! Put it on a pi and have fun, if not for your sanity at the very least do it for your second most valuable resource, your time. If all a person wants to do is have a website that plays a piezo buzzer when someone visits on your RPi, just write that damned code, they shouldn't feel the need to worry about all the nitty gritty when all that they wanted to do is have fun!
    • marginalia_nu 4y ago
• digitalsushi 4y ago
  In 2003 I had my web server in my college apartment bedroom. This is back when AOL Instant Messenger was popular. I had a URL on my website called moo.html that wasn't indexed. My friends had it bookmarked, and when they visited it they got a picture of a cow, but it played a cow mooing in my bedroom. It was a nudge to come online and be social. The End.
  • jrootabega 4y ago
    I enjoyed the (brief?) times when the client would do string interpolation on the URL and tell you the screen name of the person viewing it.
    • jaywalk 4y ago
      You had to put a link in your profile that contained "%n", and the client would replace %n with the screen name of the person clicking the link. They never took that away as long as I was using AIM, but there was no way to see anyone simply viewing your profile without clicking a link as far as I can remember.
      • jrootabega 4y ago
        Ah that's right. I remember when it was still not widely known you could catch some people, but I think people caught on eventually.
      • knome 4y ago
        Could you have added an <img src="http://tracking.example.com/pixel.gif?name=%n http://tracking.example.com/pixel.gif?name=%n"> to the profile, tracking them via the weblogs, or having a era-appropriate CGI script sitting there that kept track of them?
        • jaywalk 4y ago
          I'm pretty sure you couldn't embed images in your profile.
• baluguy 4y ago
  Disclaimer: Running Umbrel since a year and I think personal servers on the cusp of a revolution. Pretty much like how google, mail and social networking websites served as the gateway drug for client server apps and cloud server, Bitcoin/Lightning/Ethereum are increasingly looking like the gateway drug for home server apps and home servers itself. And Umbrel has completely convinced me of this.
• amelius 4y ago
  Is it scalable and how do you deal with the noise and cooling/power requirements?
  • kixiQu 4y ago
    Isn't it kind of explicitly about not being scalable?
    • amelius 4y ago
      You could automatically scale it into the cloud in case of being hugged by HN, for example.
  • louwrentius 4y ago
    If those are your requirements for the websites you host, the point of this article is not relevant for you in that context.
  • camtarn 4y ago
    From experience, if you're a heavy-sleeping teenager like I used to be, the noise is less of an issue ;) I don't think I could cope with the sound of two fans and three HDs spinning nowadays, but back then it was a tiny price to pay for the coolness of having a real server in my bedroom. Nowadays I just run an RPi3, which is silent and takes very little power.
  • ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    I find an Intel NUC is more than capable of good selfhosting, and is nearly silent and uses very little power.
• MH15 4y ago
  In college we'd run a Plex/backups/Minecraft server in an old HP box on the floor. It survived a very hostile environment and was very educational to work with.
• naillo 4y ago
  It's interesting how people used to do this back in ~2005 but now don't, however nowdays computers are much much faster and stronger than they were in 2005 so it aught to have become more feasible since a normal laptop should be akin to a small cluster back in those days.
  • jonas21 4y ago
    It's also easier and faster to make your own butter today than it was 100 years ago, but most people don't because it's even easier to just buy some at the store.
    • dylan604 4y ago
      oh, but that handmade butter tastes soooooo much better!
  • adrian_b 4y ago
    Not all have given up. I have a web server in the corner of my room since the beginning of 2004. Besides being a firewall/router/switch and hosting a web server, it hosts more than a dozen other services, including an e-mail server, NTP server, DNS servers, DHCP & TFTP servers, etc. In 18 years it did not have any down time, except for a few minutes every 3 to 5 years, when I have upgraded the hardware. I could have upgraded the hardware less frequently, but I have replaced it whenever I could reduce the power consumption without decreasing the performance. Now it is at the 6th hardware version. It has started as a big Pentium 4 pedestal server consuming over 200 W, but until now it has been reduced to an Intel NUC with a 4.5 GHz 4-core Coffee Lake U CPU, together with 4 USB to Ethernet adapters used to increase the number of Ethernet ports to 5, consuming not much above 10 W, while being much faster than the oldest servers. A laptop has the advantage of incorporating an UPS, but I would not trust most of them with working 24/7 for years, like an Intel NUC, or preferably some fanless small computer (with an external UPS).
    • dylan604 4y ago
      >In 18 years it did not have any down time, except for a few minutes every 3 to 5 years, when I have upgraded the hardware. I wish I had that reliable of a power source. Even with a UPS, I've had tornados, snowpocalypse, etc where the power loss has lasted longer than any UPS I have.
• deleted 4y ago
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• alx__ 4y ago
  Is there a way to run a little web server on our phones? It's a device that's always on, and usually on Wi-Fi
  • tandav 4y ago
    termux (android) can run python, node, docker and more, but you should have static IP or some tunneling like cloudflare/tailscale/zerotier
  • flobosg 4y ago
    See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31841051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31841051 – Repurposing an old Android phone as a web server
  • WorldMaker 4y ago
    Most modern phone OSes today try to limit background services to squeeze battery life out of idle states. Even though "always on", some of the idle states are extreme battery misers. For instance, even the iPhone 14 with its "always on display" is doing some really interesting idle stuff, the "always on display" itself refreshes as 1 frame per second or slower (sometimes one frame per minute! as the clock is the only guaranteed to update, once a minute). It seems like the device is always responsive due to how "instant" it wakes from idle states. All of which are a lot of very interesting reasons why you can't just run a web server on your current phone with its current modern OS and expect it to have 24/7 up time even though it feels to you like your phone has 24/7 responsiveness uptime. It's a solvable problem if there were enough interest: light web hosting is something that could be added to the list of system services that can wake the device from idle states (in similar ways to how notification services get prioritized, or trickle data feeds like Find My Services). It's not likely a problem that current phone OSes are incentivized to support, though, because there's currently no reason for millions of people to want websites served from their pockets. Maybe one day there will be an interesting P2P data "hosting" protocol that would be useful for modern OSes to prioritize in that way.
  • mpd 4y ago
    I have an old phone set up here, running Octo4a. It's working great. https://github.com/feelfreelinux/octo4a https://github.com/feelfreelinux/octo4a
• marginalia_nu 4y ago
  I host all of marginalia.nu out of my living room. Very little hazzle. UPS is kinda important though.
• rcarmo 4y ago
  My web site (taoofmac.com) used to be hosted at home behind a DSL line. I ran it on anything from an NSLU2 (look it up, it was one of the first easy-to procure, easily hackable ARM machines) to PHP+MySQL on Windows Server (don't ask), and after a while I had Snort and all sorts of stuff running alongside to secure it. Whenever I was linked from Slashdot I would pretty much lose connectivity, so I started using Coral CDN, moved it to a colo, then to Linode, and on and on through some 6 or 7 providers as technology changed and I tried new things. It's been 20 years now (just wrote about that last week), and I sort of miss those days, but on the other hand I really don't--keeping the server alive and secure (even in Linode) was a bit of a chore, so the writing was pretty much on the wall that it would eventually become just a set of static pages on an Azure storage account. Zero worry about keeping the site secure, no runtime issues, and plenty of opportunities to be creative (like this: https://taoofmac.com/static/graph https://taoofmac.com/static/graph) And boy, do I have plenty of in-house web servers and Raspberry Pis to make up for it--but none are public, and I just have a couple of cores spinning on each major provider for toy projects.
• rozap 4y ago
  I hosted a phpbb board out of my room during high school. Our school board had just done the "one laptop per kid" thing, and the machines were all locked down and most of the fun sites were blocked, but not my site, because IT didn't know about it. So everyone went there to chat. We had an IRC server. People became friends that otherwise were in different cliques irl. One time we were supposed to be doing work during class, but everyone was on IRC chatting. The classroom was completely silent. Somebody wrote "somebody say penis" in the channel and the whole classroom started laughing at the same time, for seemingly no reason. The teacher was confused, it was a good time to be a 15 year old dorking around with computers.
  • unity1001 4y ago
    > "somebody say penis" Edgy...
    • yaddaor 4y ago
      Nothing "edgy" about kids finding words that describe genitals funny. It is like that everywhere on the planet and it always has been.
    • rozap 4y ago
      we were like 14 my friend
      • darknavi 4y ago
        The "who can say penis the loudest without getting in trouble" game was very much a thing with my friends in middle school.
        • yurishimo 4y ago
          I graduated HS in 2012. There were a few guys who would literally yell the word "penis" at the top of their lungs in class. I now recall a time when one kid was working in a group with one of these troublemakers, and the problematic one raised his voice to say, "Why are you drawing a picture of a penis 'John'?" when in fact John was merely working on his own part of the project. Bunch of clowns :P
• bakugo 4y ago
  I host a website with 20k daily visitors from my living room. If you want something that feels as small and convenient as a pi but with a little more muscle to it, mini PCs are your best friends.
• fletchowns 4y ago
  I have Comcast Gigabit Pro which comes with a 6 Gbps symmetrical fiber connection and a separate 1 Gbps symmetrical ethernet connection, each connection having their own block of 5 IP addresses. I've been considering moving my colocated server back home and putting it on the 1 Gbps line, my only hesitation is that the IP addresses between the two connections are so similar. If I was only serving https traffic to the public that wouldn't be too much of a concern, since I could just stick Cloudflare in front of it. However, I'm also hosting game servers on there, and those don't seem as straightforward in masking my IP address. Should I be this paranoid about that? They would be completely separate networks, there's no route from the publicly accessible server into my home network.
  • zhala 4y ago
    You could use something like cloudflare tunnels which wouldn't expose your IP, but would still route the traffic back to you machine.
    • fletchowns 4y ago
      Ooo that looks promising! I will look into it, thank you for the suggestion.
      • ectospheno 4y ago
        Or stick a level 4 haproxy at a cheap no bandwidth fee vps provider.
      • anderspitman 4y ago
        Cloudflare Tunnel is a solid service. Self-hosted options are also available: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
• geek_at 4y ago
  This takes me back. My dad worked for IBM and had access to many broken thinkpads (mostly broken displays) so he would bring them home for me to tinker but in the end I installed debian on them, installed ISPconfig and rented out webspace from the laptops running under my bed. Laptops are awesome for servers since they have built in UPS's and are not very power hungry It was a fun experience and got me started on my road to becoming a MSP
  • rambambram 4y ago
    Sounds like a post on it's own! Do you have a blog somewhere?
    • geek_at 4y ago
      yes I even wrote about the laptop servers here https://blog.haschek.at/2015-my-company-just-turned-10.html https://blog.haschek.at/2015-my-company-just-turned-10.html
      • neilparikh 4y ago
        I liked this article, what a nice story :) Did you get into your "hobby teaching" through your school sysadmin job?
        • geek_at 4y ago
          funny enough yes I did. A school was looking for an IT admin and I got the job and after a year the headmaster asked me to teach too
      • rambambram 4y ago
        Good read, thanks! I follow your RSS feed now.
  • don-code 4y ago
    Yes! This was actually my first shot at home servers as well - same rationale and all. Old Pentium laptops seemed to get thrown out every few weeks, easily ran Windows Server 2003 (I hadn't seen the light yet), were reasonably easy to repair, used very little power, and were practically silent in operation. Someday I'd like to chronicle how my homelab evolved, but at the end of the "laptops" generation and immediately prior to the "VMware on a desktop" generation, I had an old DEC (Intel), an AST, and a Gateway laptop, all running under my parents' couch.
• rr888 4y ago
  Anyone have a simple idiot proof way to make sure a hacked webserver can't hit your internal network? I have two routers (effectively a DMZ) but there must be a better way than two levels of NAT.
  • louwrentius 4y ago
    That DMZ is fine already, assuming they can't start hacking your routers. What you ideally want is network segmentation, use VLANS and put devices in their isolated network, only allowed to talk to the router/firewall, which only allows incomming traffic and doesn't allow the web server to initiate connections to the internet, except for NTP, software updates and DNS (fixed ips).
    • rr888 4y ago
      Yeah I actually had a Ubiquiti Edgerouter doing this but I was never confident enough it was set up properly, hence the other solution.
  • upofadown 4y ago
    I have the router for the internal network (a Linux box) do a bridge. So it is all the same network and no extra NATing is required. That router blocks connections into the internal network.
• robust-cactus 4y ago
  At this point I now host my small projects (less than 10k users) exclusively on boxes in the corner of my room ha. AWS and heroku are quite expensive for small projects and performance isn't great. Dynamic IP is not a problem these days either (it's also quite surprising how infrequently your IP changes fwiw). If you're looking for heroku like interfaces check out Dokku (or other open source PaaS platforms). After this tier of usage I think I'd consider moving many things to cloudflare workers.
• louwrentius 4y ago
  I not only run my blog on a computer in the corner of the room, it's solar-powered as well. At night it is supported by a bunch of lead acid batteries[0]. If you can you should host your own blog/website on your own physical computer at home. Especially for blogs, availability and redundancy is just not critical. And if you do a little bit of preparation you can recover quickly from any failure. It is fun, you may learn a few things and it makes things more tangible. (Maybe dig into VLANs or a firewall with multiple interfaces that allows you to separate your home network from the server) My blog is a static HTML site and it has survived many HN visits of 20k+ visits on a Raspberry Pi3b+. It has since been upgraded to a Pi4 but it doesn't really matter. My 50Mbit upload capacity was never really taxed at all. I'm currently working for a customer fighting the Azure cloud and it's abysmal in every way possible. The simplest tasks of provisioning resources take forever to complete. It makes me fond of my 8-10 year old 20-core DL380 server that allows me to spin up a huge infrastructure in the same time Azure can spin up a small web app. [0] https://louwrentius.com/this-blog-is-now-running-on-solar-power.html https://louwrentius.com/this-blog-is-now-running-on-solar-po...
• throwaway894345 4y ago
  At the moment it's offline because I'm between homes, but normally I have a cluster of Raspberry Pis running Kubernetes to host my blog and a few other services. Unfortunately, the Pis need static IP addresses which requires admin access to the router, which I lack as I'm staying at an AirBnB, so in the meanwhile my site is running on an EC2 spot instance.
  • MayeulC 4y ago
    Get a VPN from a reputable ISP, or to a VPS. As a bonus, it's much easier to host mail as you can customize reverse DNS. You also get a "clean" IP, IPv6 regardless of your current ISP, and a static IP. It's also possible to host a static website on IPFS and point DNS records to cloudfare or another public gateway to let them handle the web server part.
    • throwaway894345 4y ago
      Yeah, there are a lot of options for static site hosting. I’m not doing in on a Kubernetes Raspberry Pi cluster because it’s easy! To be clear, the static IPs for my Raspberry Pis aren’t public addresses—I already proxy tunnel through a VPS, but Kubernetes gets cranky if a node’s private IP address changes, so I need static private addresses (and in the interim, I’ve just put the whole blog into the VPS). There’s probably a better solution, but I haven’t struck upon it yet.
• ianbutler 4y ago
  I have a full server rack in the corner of my apartment. I’m doing a rebuild right now, but I’ve had that rack for the last 7 years. It’s definitely possible.
• dusted 4y ago
  Mine still is. I wish my mailserver still was, it was for more than 20 years.. but these days, getting to send mail out onto the net from a normal internet connection is pretty much impossible. Self-hosting is dead.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• yellsatclouds 4y ago
  so do I, but my ISP after getting eaten by another larger ISP made it impossible to access remotely. long live the free market. free for institutional-entities to step on individual humans.
• catern 4y ago
  I do this, I host my website on my desktop. It's nice to have just a single computer instead of many. http://catern.com/computers.html http://catern.com/computers.html
• hiidrew 4y ago
  This is one of my favorite blogs that I read consistently. Some of my favorites: Micromorts: units to measure risk of death— https://interconnected.org/home/2020/09/01/microcovids https://interconnected.org/home/2020/09/01/microcovids First words— https://interconnected.org/home/2020/10/12/first_words https://interconnected.org/home/2020/10/12/first_words State sponsored fashion— https://interconnected.org/home/2022/08/16/fashion https://interconnected.org/home/2022/08/16/fashion Speaking with dolphains— https://interconnected.org/home/2020/07/20/dolphins https://interconnected.org/home/2020/07/20/dolphins Bottling the overview effect— https://interconnected.org/home/2021/07/20/overview_effect https://interconnected.org/home/2021/07/20/overview_effect
• 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  Sounds like the people visiting the website are reduced to a form of entertainment for the author, like a reverse-zoo, where the animals are watching the people that come visit. I imagine an evolved version of this, where the computer speaks the location of every visitor, their OS, browser, etc. Maybe tied into an Ad Network you could get the visitor's name and address spoken aloud, maybe even their picture. Voyeuristically watching the people coming to your website, from your bedroom. Hmm, that one was cute, let's send them a message.
• ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  I was just about to write that "today" is the best time to run servers in your room, due to raspberrpis and low power usage... then I remembered that it's practically impossible to buy one, and that the media is already preparing us (here in the EU) for power restrictions.. so yeah.. :/
  • yrgulation 4y ago
    Sorry i have to comment on this cheezy as it may sound. Dont give into the fear. See if there are alternative power sources you can play with for your raspberry pi and see if there are creative ways to buy them (used, other countries, etc). Re power sources, what can you do with a solar powere battery? Is there a diy system of power you can build? One that takes in mainline power when available, and solar or battery when not? talking about small hobby panels that can charge a battery during the day and discharge at night. I used power banks for that purpose. In this context if my life style is under threat i want to life style even harder. I sold a car and instead of buying a replacement i will install solar panels. I know its a fortunate case but even if i can life style a little bit harder and lay less in energy then i will do so (not waste energy but say if it gets cut because of actions if a certain dictator then i can still plug my phone in to criticise said dictator … even harder). tl;dr; i’d look for creative solutions just so i can stick my two fingers up to the current situation.
  • irusensei 4y ago
    RockPro64s are easily available. I have 2 running on a closet. It’s not as generally supported as RPis but if you just stick to the supported OS you wont have any issues.
    • ajsnigrutin 4y ago
      The problem with non-raspberrypi SBCs is, that after a few year, they become unsupported, and it's hard to get a recent OS with a recent kernel and packages available... I can still get newest OS for raspberrypi 1 (which is ancient by now), while RockPro64 has this: > The ROCKPro64 4GB board designated as LTS (long Term Supply) model, PINE64 committed to supply at least for 5 years until year 2023 and beyond. 2023 is almost here :)
• VincentEvans 4y ago
  Perhaps a good opportunity to ask - for a long while now I’ve been hoping that some manufacturer took on a task of producing a good server suitable for this / homelab purpose? Something that allows a ton of ram (512gb at least?) to run VMs, middle of the road cpu with a ton of cores but energy-heat-noise friendly frequency, ssd, and all in a tiny, quiet, and attractive shell the size of a router that sits on a bookshelf? One can dream. But point me kindly to something that isn’t a rack mount pizzabox that sounds like a jet?
  • anderspitman 4y ago
    Maybe take a look at https://privaterouter.com/ https://privaterouter.com/ and https://kubesail.com https://kubesail.com.
  • mitjam 4y ago
    SuperMicro has Xeon-D 1700/2700 boards and matching Mini tower cases for up to 20 Cores, 512 GB ECC RAM and redundant 25 or 10 gbe and 1gbe ports on board - Not cheap, though: https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/embedded/servers https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/embedded/servers the prebuilt servers have smaller cases with noisy small fans but you can combine some boards with the mini tower with larger fan.
  • numpad0 4y ago
    Do you really need more than … 128GB of RAM? Most desktops can do 64GB, some ITX and most ATX board can be populated for 128GB, beyond that require server platforms with >2 DIMM channels or LR/RDIMM. Most people should be fine with an office mini-desktop like ThinkCenter Tiny line, sketchy(sorry!) Docker features on a NAS kit, or even an Amazonian Celeron mystery boxes.
• the-printer 4y ago
  The comments seem to be in conflict with the content of the blog post. The author seems to be lamenting what is feasible more or less, but seems uninterested in putting in the extra effort to keep up or anticipate the expectations or demands of the modern web. It almost as if his nostalgia is at war with whatever tastes he has acquired technologically since his college days. Maybe he can compromise by caring less about the demands or expectations about the modern web.
  • helpfulclippy 4y ago
    This. I don't think anyone expected high availability from their living room web servers; if they did, they either discovered that was not feasible, or moved their web server somewhere else. And that was FINE. Sometimes, a server with a forum or a website you really liked would go down. Then there'd be an update with a quickly-written note in HTML announcing that the server had some failure and restoration was in process. Then it'd come back when the owner had the time and cash to get it back up and running, maybe along with a story about what happened.
• anderspitman 4y ago
  > So… practically: how to achieve this in 2022? I'll paraphrase myself from a few days ago[0]: The reality is that we've let you down. Self-hosting shouldn't be any more complicated or less secure than installing an app on your phone. You shouldn't need to understand DNS, TLS, NAT, HTTP, TCP, UDP, etc, etc. Domain names shouldn't be any more difficult to buy or use than phone numbers. Apps should be sandboxed in KVM/WHPX/HVP-accelerated virtual machines that run on Windows, Mac, and Linux and are secure-by-default. Tunneling out to the public internet should be a quick OAuth flow that lets you connect a given app to a specific subdomain, with TLS certs automatically obtained from Let's Encrypt and stored locally for end-to-end encryption. The technology exists to do all of these things, but no one has taken the time to glue it all together in a truly good UX (we're working on it). Pretty much every solution in this space is targeted at the developer market, not self-hosters. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33098471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33098471
  • sneak 4y ago
    Almost no individual user has an internet connection that allows self-hosting.
    • anderspitman 4y ago
      Are you referring to reachability or bandwidth? Reachability is solved by tunneling[0] and SNI routing. 1Mbps upload is plenty for many self-hosting uses. Or are you talking about something else? [0]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
      • Rebelgecko 4y ago
        Probably TOS. My ISP provider technically bans running any type of server, but it hasn't been an issue for me.
        • anderspitman 4y ago
          Ah that makes more sense. Also very sad. Hopefully as fiber becomes more prevalent that will become less common.
• sneak 4y ago
  Running servers on home connections can get your broadband disconnected now for ToS violation. Cox now blocks port 80, making LE certs harder to get. The monopoly situation (enabled by regulators) means if you lose your connection you are probably offline completely. There are no alternatives or competition. Even if you tunnel/VPN, uploading too much, even on a pay-extra “unlimited” plan, they will accuse you of running a server and threaten disconnection. This happened to me when I rsynced a few TB of photos offsite for backup.
• pak9rabid 4y ago
  Hmm, I don't have a problem self-hosting from home. Here's my setup: 1.) Cable (DOCSIS 3.0) Internet connection with a dynamic IPv4 address. 2.) Registered domain(s) 3.) Domain hosted via Dyn.org (for quick updates in the event my IP changes) 4.) Linux-based firewall/router that runs ddclient (to update the public DNS records should my IP change, which is very rarely) 5.) All port 80/443 traffic is forwarded to an LXD container running nginx as a reverse-proxy, where TLS encryption/decryption is handled 6.) Unencrypted HTTP traffic is then forwarded off to whichever LXD container is hosting the actual site Unless my Internet connection actually goes down (which is rare thanks to a good provider and everything being on a UPS), the site stays up. Hope this helps!
  • mft_ 4y ago
    It sounds wonderful, but doesn’t sound (to borrow the author’s phrase) ‘turnkey’. And certainly not on a Raspberry Pi running Linux - it sounds like a day of frustration, trial-and-error, and many many google searches! I would pay good money for (let’s say) a Pi with all of the hard work done - just plug it in to your router and it’s already serving pages online. Edit: also, dyn.org doesn’t seem to exist?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• irq-1 4y ago
  Cloudflare already does this: https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared It works with all NATs/CGNATs by connecting from the pi over a bidirectional WS connection. PI <-> WS <-> Cloudflare. SSL is done on the cloud, not on the pi. Install any web server on the pi and "cloudflared" to proxy it. https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-apps/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections...
  • spaniard89277 4y ago
    Looks good. I guess that doesn't put much workload into home routers, which I assume is the real bottleneck with FTTH connections.
    • Havoc 4y ago
      You can stick the cloudflared tunnel exit on the machine doing the hosting then the router performance is largely irrelevant
  • Melatonic 4y ago
    Yea this works great!
  • doublerabbit 4y ago
    You shouldn't need "cloudflared". You could setup a 486 on a ISDN line, serve traffic without worry of needing SSL, being DDoS'd and all the rest. The WWW has become so unsettled that it's now become a basic requirement of needing SSL & Cloudflare for a static webserver. Not dissing the tech but it all makes the overhead so much more complicated. I used to run an IRCd on 56k where it would disconnect you after three hours. With two modems timed just right you could dial-back in to the ISP on the second modem just as the other disconnected and have about a near second of downtime with no connection loss. Some of the best Quake 3 servers I played on were on 56K; truely a magical expirence now lost.
    • don-code 4y ago
      I run my home site off a 3-node Kubernetes cluster with 16-core CPUs and some tens of GBs of RAM each, off a business-class Internet connection with a static IP, and I'm still under no pretense that some arbitrary new restriction on behalf of Internet vendors won't render my setup useless one day.
• jll29 4y ago
  Festival TTS (Text-to-Speech synthesis), which the article mentions, is part of many Linux distros nowadays, and it was originally developed at the University of Edinburgh by Alan Black and team (Black et al., 1999; Taylor et al., 1998). http://src.gnu-darwin.org/ports/audio/festdoc/work/festdoc-1.4.0.1/festival/festival.ps http://src.gnu-darwin.org/ports/audio/festdoc/work/festdoc-1... https://era.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/1032/Taylor_1998_d.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://era.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/1032/Taylor_1998_...
• redler 4y ago
  Way back in the mists of time, we set up our first corporate website. We were using Website Pro, and the box was under a desk. There was an option to make the machine beep with each hit, and for a while it was thrilling to hear those beeps — once an hour or so, maybe a cluster of a few in a row. The physicality!
• NonNefarious 4y ago
• mvanbaak 4y ago
  You want to host my plex server there? ;P
• suzzer99 4y ago
  I worked for a major satellite TV provider. In the early days the website was just information and directions to the nearest installers - no bill pay or buy flows. The website ran from under the boss' desk.
• rstat1 4y ago
  I've done this for 10+yrs. Started with a single core Intel Atom powered netbook when those were still a thing, then moved to a quad core Atom desktop, to now where I have a 2nd Gen Core i3 desktop that will soon be combined with a similarly old 2nd gen i5 laptop. Runs half-a-dozen VMs, and like 10 or so different services, probably half of which are custom. At one point when I was still in school it even had a 5 person heavily modded Minecraft server (barely) running on it. I'm basically the only user now. Its been a great learning tool. Public access used to be through exposing the proper ports to the Internet, but now its through a Cloudflare tunnel and Tailscale.
• childintime 4y ago
  These days the ESP32 could be good enough. It could host a decent website, which could be a portal to do fancy intercom stuff and make photo's on the press of a button.
• torpid 4y ago
  I have the same feelings. When I ran a single-line BBS from my bedroom as a kid, I would get excited every time someone would dial in and I'd see activity.
• H1Supreme 4y ago
  I run a webserver (a k3s cluster, actually) from home, but considering how generous the free tiers of cloud providers are (Google Cloud in my case), why waste your home internet bandwidth for a personal site? In terms of my home server, I mostly point subdomains at it to test projects running on my laptop (via an nginx proxy_pass), or share photos/music with friends. I used to use it a lot more when I why working away from home. Outside of web facing uses, it's nice to have a central place to store and retrieve files from multiple devices. I'm using a an older i5 Intel NUC, and it works great.
  • ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
    > considering how generous the free tiers of cloud providers are (Google Cloud in my case), why waste your home internet bandwidth for a personal site? Because arbitrary ToS "violations" are a thing, and good luck getting that fixed with them.
    • MarioMan 4y ago
      In the case of static sites, it can be as simple as copying the latest version to a new server and updating your DNS records. I would try to avoid lock-in not only for the reasons you stated but also to be able to freely shop around for better options at any point.
• lee101 4y ago
  I'm running https://text-generator.io https://text-generator.io from my house, two 3090s right now powering it. It allows the service to undercut OpenAI around 10x on Text/code generation and Google over 8x on speech to text. A Cloudflare tunnel is pointing to it running locally. It makes development very fast too. Its a bit tricky to keep purchasing new hardware to spin up new instances but that's getting easier with practice and autoscaling cloud providers doesn't necessarily work that well either. I think co's should seriously consider this or at least adding everyones development machines to the prod cluster during when they sleep, which is what we did to render movies when i was at Weta Digital. 1000's of developer machines are pretty valuable if put to good use.
  • robmsmt 4y ago
    curious what Speech to text you're running on it
• llaolleh 4y ago
  My ideal state of the internet is companies sell powerful all in one servers. Each household will have that server for their daily needs - email, messaging, social network, gaming, etc.
• bovermyer 4y ago
  This line from the article sums up my feelings pretty well: > I’m pretty technically capable but I’m not sure I can be bothered. All this sounds fun and a cool throwback, but it's also rather more work than I'm willing to put up with right now.
• _osorin_ 4y ago
  The optimal setup (I can think of) that I'm planning to do is to separate a Raspberry Pi on a VLAN and combine it with a cheap hosted reverse proxy from a third party. The reverse proxy part might be a luxury but it's just in case you don't want to expose your home network.
• mro_name 4y ago
  wonderful. That spirit is what we aim for at our youth centre http://jugendhacktlab.qdrei.info/ http://jugendhacktlab.qdrei.info/. Raspis all the way down.
• eduction 4y ago
  Mine is in the corner of the room I’m in right now. It’s a little NUC under an armchair. I have a tiny ec2 instance which provides my permanent IP and forwards web and certain ssh requests using a VPN connection and iptables. This allows me to have a beefier machine here, keep logs etc local, run alternative OS (smartos), and just generally tinker. The ec2 fronting technique I stole from the Helm home email appliance/service. Paying three years up front it worked out to less than $3/month.
  • picture 4y ago
    Would you happen to have time to provide some more details about using EC2 to get permanent IP? I've been thinking of using wireguard to connect an old PC to my VPS to run video game servers, so this is very interesting to me!
    • eduction 4y ago
      Happy to help although it was ~3 years ago I set this up and it uses openVPN as I have not switched over to Wireguard yet (been meaning to). I do recall that setting up port forwarding and NAT and both sides was the biggest pain (I do not regularly do network admin!), exacerbated by the fact that the client side is smartOS which uses a different system (ipfilter) than linux (iptables) so there were two cryptic network filtering DSLs to learn. The VPN part was relatively easy as it's just a point to point connection with the local machine as the client, configured to reconnect when the connection is lost and on boot. On the ec2 side this is (approximately) my iptables setup (1234 and 5678 are stand-ins for ports I use to ssh into the local machine from anywhere on the internet, I have two because there are multiple (smartOS/Solaris) zones on the machine): sudo iptables -L Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination ACCEPT tcp -- anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:http ACCEPT tcp -- anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:https ACCEPT tcp -- anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:1234 ACCEPT tcp -- anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:5678 Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination ACCEPT tcp -- anywhere ip-10-4-0-2.ec2.internal tcp dpt:http ACCEPT tcp -- anywhere ip-10-4-0-2.ec2.internal tcp dpt:https ACCEPT tcp -- anywhere ip-10-4-0-2.ec2.internal tcp dpt:1234 ACCEPT tcp -- anywhere ip-10-4-0-2.ec2.internal tcp dpt:5678 Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination ACCEPT tcp -- anywhere anywhere tcp spt:http On the ec2 side, openvpn conf: dev tun1 ifconfig 10.4.0.1 10.4.0.2 verb 5 secret local.key cipher AES-256-CBC keepalive 10 60 persist-tun persist-key On the local side, openvpn: remote [ec2 ip adr here] dev tun1 ifconfig 10.4.0.2 10.4.0.1 verb 5 secret ec2.key cipher AES-256-CBC keepalive 10 60 persist-tun persist-key On the local side, ipf conf in ipnat.conf. This is abbreviated as most of the stuff in there is just forwarding amid the zones which is not relevant to a simple linux setup without zones. In addition to figuring out the iptables equivalent I believed you'd want to replace the 102 adr (which in this case is a zone) with your local machine (like 0.0.0.0/0 or whatever): map net0 10.0.0.102/32 -> 0/32 map tun1 10.0.0.102/32 -> 10.4.0.2 (not sure if the first line is even relevant or not, it's been a while)
• ottoflux 4y ago
  I still host some things from home, but Linode, Scaleway, etc. are so cheap for tiny machines it might make more sense to build some APIs that the webserver can call on a machine running from your house.
• kornhole 4y ago
  Need to mention here that yunohost.org is a great easy solution for your RPI or any other hardware or VPS. It is maintained by a great community that takes care of most of the essentials and provides a great webUI for installation and maintenance. Some of the built in features: Domain management with NGINX reverse proxy and Lets Encrypt certs. Fail2Ban brute force protection. Easy install and upgrade of many free server apps. I love looking over at my little RPI in the corner serving my friends and family.
• caseysoftware 4y ago
  Through most of the 2000s, I had an ever-growing server sitting in my apartment closet. I upgraded it from IDE (a couple gigs) to SCSI drives (25gigs!!!) and spent a lot of time learning Linux throughout. It was ugly to navigate NATing, etc at that point but I ran eGroupware for a long time. Now I have a couple of small devices for monitoring, logging, and sharing and run them behind ngrok. They're quick and easy and I don't have to set up anything else. Disclosure: I work for ngrok (as of last year) but used it since ~2014 already.
• no_time 4y ago
  >But what I remember feeling most magical was the idea that there was somebody visiting that server on my desk. There was somebody coming from a long way away and going inside. An electronic homunculus. You can relive this feeling by seeding a few torrents. I sometimes check up on my torrents and try to imagine the person behind the Moroccan IP address grabbing my Drop Dead, Gorgeus discography.
• Melatonic 4y ago
  I meet more and more people these days who are so used to working with Big Cloud they have no idea how easy is actually is to run your own hardware. AWS never raises their prices but hardware keeps getting cheaper, faster, smaller, and more energy efficient. You could probably host a simple site that did not have crazy traffic on a pair of old android phones with full HA and keep it in a shoebox!
  • fomine3 4y ago
    AWS virtually raises their prices for some non-US users because they price in USD regardless of region. It's significant now but not due to AWS.
• ourmandave 4y ago
  I recently had mine in my bedroom corner along with all the network gear. With all the leds and flashing lights I couldn't sleep.
• kypro 4y ago
  Oh man. I relate so much to this. When I was 15 me and my friends really liked playing online MMOs. We used to enjoy chatting on VoIP program, but this software required a server which all clients would need to connect to. We always thought it would be cool to host our own servers for this VoIP software instead of paying someone else to host one for us so I decided to dig out an old computer and set it up in the corner of my bedroom to use as a server. We got the server software installed and then realised we could probably sell these online if we knew how to build a website. To cut a long story short, we ended up teaching ourselves how to create a website with HTML, which eventually lead to learning how to program in PHP so we communicate with the VoIP software programmatically via Telnet and send emails, then eventually how take payments. It took us a few months in total, but we did it. And this back before YouTube tutorials or useful programming blogs. You were mostly trying to work things out on your own so it felt like a real achievement. One of the best moments of my life was receiving our first paid subscriber. I'll never forget the night my friend called me to tell me the news. And this was back when us teens had pay as you go phones so it was odd to get a call - especially that late at night. Funnily enough we probably used that old computer in the corner of my room as our server for about a year until one night someone hacked into it. Never really worked out what they were trying to do but they managed to install some remote desktop software on their because because I got woke up one night by the computer restarting then someone remotely controlling the computer. It was kinda spookey at the time. As you can image we paid for a dedicated server in the end, but it was such a fun adventure and that's why I'm here on HN today. The idea a couple of 15 year olds could set up a server in their bedroom and make some money was really inspiring. Things are different now I think. We were one of just a handful of VoIP hosts back then. Today we would be buried by Google and people would probably complain about the server taking 50ms too long to respond. You'd need to spend $1,000 on adwords and have EC2 instances around the world just to be in for a chance.
• georgeoliver 4y ago
  > Perhaps there’s a way to host my website at home, but have the static bits served by Cloudflare if the Raspberry Pi isn’t available (using a global CDN as a UPS), and the dynamic bits always visit my home – but there’s a graceful “come back later” message if the Pi is down? I feel like this is what IPFS and similar are made for. I could see a home user appliance configured with something like that, plug it in and your site is up, unplug it and it was replicated to other opt-in hosts.
• nixpulvis 4y ago
  Funny, I just spun back up my kaaik.local the other night. Still working through some things, but everything basically works the way it should. Firewalls might not be a bad idea to update though.
• finneganscat 4y ago
• incanus77 4y ago
  In 1999 I wrote a piece of PHP trouble ticket tracking software called Ticketsmith which eventually morphed into the foundations of ubersmith.com. I put the first tarball on my home PC (running Linux) and linked that URL to Freshmeat.net. It was so thrilling to sit there that evening, watching TV but looking over to see the Apache log tail process stream out as each person downloaded it to check it out. Very visceral.
• efxhoy 4y ago
  My first server was my windows xp desktop. I had a free subdomain at servepics.com and a dynamic dns client and we had a 0.25 mbit dsl connection. Being 12 I couldn’t figure out how to get an http server running though so I just hosted pictures with caesarFTP. I had to ask people to visit ftp://whateveritwas.servepics.com . I took a lot of party pictures with the digital camera my brother lent me. 2003 I think. This was a big deal at the time because there were no sites we knew of that allowed uploading images for free, that was a premium feature of the social network everyone was using back then called lunarstorm.
• ehnto 4y ago
  My first server was some racks I pilfered from school and put in my closet. The 15000 rpm SCSI drives and 90db fans did not make for easy sleeping. I still think you can go a long way with bare metal you might have laying around. I find hosted VMs to be woefully underpowered for their specs.
• mansilladev 4y ago
  It is a nice feeling having a local Linux server running in your house. One that you not only fully control, but one that is on 24/7/365 that you can run services /scripts on, or just screw around in general, and not pay monthly fees for compute and storage.
• EvanAnderson 4y ago
  Piling-on to the "my old web server back in the day" comments: Back in 2000-01 I had a box at home hosting a webcam pointed at my cats' food bowls. I was working a lot so I liked to see them. I could also make sure they still had food when I had an extended 36 hour work session. It just pulled still frames. I never did work out streaming. I installed an X10 module and wired it up to a CGI so I could turn on the lamp by the bowls when it was dark. The click of the relay would reliably bring the cats to investigate. Hit the page, see blackness. Press the "Turn on light" button. Refresh the page and see the light on. Count to 30, refresh again, and one or two cats would be in the frame sniffing around the relay and food bowls. Going back to BBS days: I wrote a BBS "door" for a friend's board that captured a 320x200 frame from a composite video feed, stored it as a 16 color grayscale GIF, and sent it to the caller via Zmodem. The frame grabber had some a crappy command-line program that required a keypress to initiate capture. I hacked the program to NOP out the loop and just immediately capture. At 9600 baud or higher the download time for the GIF was pretty tolerable-- 30 seconds or less. If I recall properly GIF89 had better compression and sped things up a bit too. The composite video feed came a surveillance camera in gym my friend ran downstairs. I added a call to a command-line VOC file player to play a chime out the speakers in the gym couple seconds before the capture began. Later we added an option to allow the caller to upload a VOC file to be played in the gym and optionally receive 5 seconds of recorded audio from the gym along with their video frame. Fun times.
  • don-code 4y ago
    > I hacked the program to NOP out the loop and just immediately capture. This is a level of freedom that I wish we still had today. I'm not talking so much about the open source, "free as in speech" freedom, but more so about the "free as in simplicity" type. Nowadays it feels like I need valid TLS and a PGP signature just to host some service in my own home, the ecosystems around them having decided that the ability to tinker was (perhaps justly) a far second to security and correctness. (For reference, I tried building and inheriting my own Terraform providers a few months ago. It's not possible to host them off plaintext HTTP, nor is it possible to skip TLS validity checks when downloading them, nor is it possible to install them without checking for a valid signature.)
• empressplay 4y ago
  When I was a teenager, I ran a BBS in my bedroom on an Atari 130XE with 6 disk drives hooked up to it (mostly containing single-file cracked games). I used a 64K ram disk to make the BBS not glacially slow. I would get so excited when people called up, I got to spy on what they were doing and if they were from far afield I chatted with them :) Those were the days...
• girvo 4y ago
  My web server still is! It's a super cheap old Dell desktop that draws precious little power :) I really want to get an IPv6 block assigned from my ISP, I've been meaning to, and really kick the tyres on using IPv6 public addresses for it, but I keep putting it off because I still don't really understand how it all works (and my router's port forwarding gives me some small measure of comfort that I haven't accidentally exposed everything)
  • arjvik 4y ago
    Not sure how your router is configured, but mine (Netgear Orbi, so not a niche router with one-off software) still has terrible IPv6 support. The only options are to allow public routing to each of my devices, or to block it entirely. No port forwarding or firewalling all but a single port. So confirm your router works the way you expect before you try migrating from IPv4.
    • girvo 4y ago
      Yeah that's exactly what makes it complicated. It's an Asus RT-AX86U which does have some support for IPv6 handling, but I still don't understand it fully which is why I keep putting it off, but I also don't want to keep paying $5 AUD a month for a static IPv4 address
• enw 4y ago
  1. Start web server 2. Add AAAA record from domain to RPi IPv6 address 3. Profit
• rsyn 4y ago
  >This is way back in 2000 so before smartphones, and before texting, I remember sending my first text on the first widely available Nokia GSM handset in the fall of 1994. SMS wasn't advertised as a feature until the turn of this century when networks figured out how to charge for the service largely due to base station logging disk constraints of space and latency.
• klysm 4y ago
  The fans are rather loud i wouldn’t advise it
• RockingGoodNite 4y ago
  2 key words, Wireguard and a cheap VPS.
• boxmonster 4y ago
  I like the prose poetry of this article. It flows in a nice way. Well done.
• chrismcb 4y ago
  Back on my day we ran BBSes...
• vedant_ag 4y ago
  I'm running a server in my house. Its a ethereum PoS node. It is oddly satisfying to look at it in the flesh. It's another pet to me: I have to make sure it has a constant supply of electricity and internet. And requires maintenance from time to time. Some photos here: https://vedantsopinions.medium.com/eth2-node-at-home-without-a-monitor-12ae3ee861fb https://vedantsopinions.medium.com/eth2-node-at-home-without...
• gigel82 4y ago
  Not necessarily a "web server", but selfhosting is getting very popular nowadays, and -yes- you can get started with just a Raspberry Pi. Recommend looking over r/selfhosted
• mikewarot 4y ago
  >Seeing your website’s actual server is the virtual equiv of the Overview Effect and I want to have that feeling the whole time! That's a perception shift I've never really had. Servers have always just been computers with dial up modems, then networks, then the internet, for me. I've always known that I can, if I want, have a node on the internet that I fully control. It's just not been a priority for me in decades now. I bet it really is a bit of a rush for someone the first time they make it work.
• rsanheim 4y ago
  I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Unraid here yet (https://unraid.net https://unraid.net). You install it to a USB, put the USB into whatever you want as a server, and boot it up from the USB. The OS and config gets loaded into a ram drive. You now have a linux server ready to go, with access to thousands of apps and add-ons (which are basically just open source things you already know on various docker containers). So you can install postgres, redis, whatever, and you are off to the races if you want to host your own side projects. Or you can install Tailscale, plex, and whatever OSS dropbox / media server clones to have access to your media anywhere. The magic is that it all 'just works' and has a nice web GUI to install and configure things, and you don't even need to know that Docker is handling all the things running under the hood if you don't want to. The only tricky bit can be mounting volumes from the various containers to get things working together, for which there are many many guides and youtube videos. You can always bring your own docker compose config if you you want to keep it in code. The uptime for one of my servers was up to well over half a year, and only storm & power outage brought the server down...now I've got it on a UPS with automated safe shutoff (again configured in the web GUI, took about 5-10 mins) if power drops again. Unraid just runs and is rock solid and stays out of your way for whatever things you want to run.
  • doublerabbit 4y ago
    That's cool. Thanks for the shout.
• asim 4y ago
  Self hosting has to evolve. It's that simple. All the devices we now seamlessly use in our house were once kits and DIY. I built my own PCs as a teenager, servers in my first job and then software after. My gut says running stuff in your house has to be absolutely dead simple, plug and play with a set of purpose built services that anyone can use from a web or mobile app. Do we have this already? No I think most superior experiences are saas and cloud hosted e.g Apple/Google. They own the hardware and the software stack. The current state of open source + raspberry pi is not appealing to consumers. It might be the right way forward but only if totally packaged together in a box you just plug in. Huge undertaking. Entirely doable. Just requires the right motivation. Oh and websites don't have to be on the public internet, using a tailscale like VPN with shared keys is a good way since they do magic DNS.
• nottorp 4y ago
  Hmm. I have a web server in the corner of my home office. It's still doable. Stick an Atom board or a hobby ARM board in a case with a fan, add some storage, done. Said server is mostly private use for me and a few other people. If I had need for a public one I'd probably rent something for $5/month first. Oh wait. I am renting something for $5/month. It runs backup DNS and MX.
• Neil44 4y ago
  I remember back in the 2000's I had a Debian box running some stuff next to me by my desk. One day my ears picked up on a regular little click-clack from the drive which on investigation turned out to be my first experience of being SSH brute forced. I guess it was the log entries being written for each attempt. That was early in my Linux days... these days I would just pipe it to /dev/null (joking)
• lormayna 4y ago
  I was an huge fan of newsgroups in the past, but unfortunately NNTP was blocked from my university campus network. Then I setup a NNTP server in parents house running as OpenVZ VM in an old PC and I was able to access through SSH. I never understood why SSH was permitted and NNTP forbidden.
  • AdamN 4y ago
    The general issue is that some protocols have a hundred uses and if only one of them is mission critical, then it can't be blocked. SSH surely fits that description. NNTP only has one purpose, sharing information (human to human). It's doubtful that any mission critical application needed it. Once IT saw that NNTP traffic had significant traffic and was throttling other traffic (or just expensive), they knew they could shut it down easily and therefore they did.
    • lormayna 4y ago
      They should restrict SSH only to the permitted sources and destination then. Leaving SSH open is a big security risk, because you are barely permitting any kind of traffic. I think that people managing the university network at that time was not so great: for couple of years, the DHCP assigned you a public, unfiltered IP address and the password policy for accessing Internet was very easy to infer (take the last digit of your student ID, remove it and sum to the first digit). And you can easily find online a student ID of someone else. I remember people putting desktop PC in the lockers with ton of warez and P2P to the world with the ID of someone studying architecture or medicine.
• torh 4y ago
  I have my own webserver in the spare bedroom. Earlier it was a tower computer, but now it's just an old laptop. I've been using VMware ESXi for years now, so moving the server is just a matter of moving a few image files. Work like a charm. I pay a (very) small amount extra per year to get a static IP address.
• blacklight 4y ago
  I started, like many others, around 2003, with an old Pentium 1 that my uncle was about to throw away. I put it under my bed, I installed Slackware on it (it was still the time when it took about 11 floppy disks to get it installed), started playing with Apache+PHP, I used to run a quite popular software development forum on it, later expanded it with a wiki, links to my projects (Github wasn't around yet) and a small hack game. Two decades later, I still run my own web server in my room. I wouldn't put big publicly-accessible websites on it (I don't want my bandwidth at home to drop because somebody is downloading a lot of images or videos), a couple of Linode instances do a better work handling that use case. But I do use it to run my personal blog, my Nextcloud instance, my mopidy-iris frontend for playing music in the house, my Jellyfin server to stream my media wherever I am, my Miniflux server to keep track of the RSS feeds and podcasts I follow, Ubooquity to keep a collection of my ebooks, and much more. It used to run on a RPi, now I've upgraded it to a mini pc with 8 GB of RAM and 10 TB of physical storage attached. It does really feel like it's your own space, in your own house, accessible from anywhere, with no storage limits and with nobody who can show you a bill for the storage, bandwidth or CPU that you consumed.
• Tepix 4y ago
  Nowadays with SSDs you no longer hear if a PC is working, especially if its fans are quiet. Products like the DreamCheeky USB gadgets (looks like they went out of business in 2017 https://web.archive.org/web/20170821050810/http://www.dreamcheeky.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170821050810/http://www.dreamc... ) or the more recent Diwoom Pixel Art gadgets could be used to signal activity. There are probably a lot more solutions to this problem if you have a server sitting on or below your desk ;-)
• lbayes 4y ago
  I bought a $300, quite old, but many-core workstation from eBay a few years ago. Plugged it in, installed a Linux and gave it a static IP. We're building out our bootstrapped startup on that box for $0 per month. It's the fastest CI service I've seen in years, admin takes a couple hours every couple months, and the minimal webapp that no one visits yet is crazy fast. He's named Blue. We love you Blue! The good: No monthly fees, extremely fast compared to small/medium/large instances, full control and we retain local access when the internet goes down. The bad: I live in an (un)developing country (FL) without reliable power or internet, so I had to buy a UPS and still get occasional external outages. Everything on it (that I care about) is backed up in Git or S3. It's been a real pleasure to spend a few hours setting up my own thing and not having to chase a bunch of service deprecations, API changes and general bullshit that still seems to plague cloud environments. Obviously, I wouldn't scale up anything huge with this "stack," but I have every intention of running it until we absolutely must migrate and I suspect we'll go a lot further than expected with Old Blue.
• ericlnu 4y ago
  Mine is, on my ODroid; though something beefier would be nice :)
• leobean101 4y ago
• neurostimulant 4y ago
  > I could hear the hard drive spin up if somebody accessed the machine, and a little chug-chug-chug while Festival (the open source text-to-speech engine I’d installed) generated the voice. Like footsteps approaching before the door opens. I recently put a 4TB 7200RPM Seagate hard drive into my dev box, split it into multiple partitions and mount them on /var/lib/docker, /var/lib/rancher/rke2 and a local nfs server (that used as an nfs persistent volume in my local rke2 kubernetes installation), and it's loud! It's like I'm going back to the 2000s. Accessing any services hosted in the local kubernetes platform or building a docker image would trigger a storm of clicking noises. Heck, even during idle, kubernetes is pretty chatty and would trigger clicking noises every so often. I also had an instance of home assistant accessible from internet, but it's on raspberry pi so it's silent. My ISP has cgnat though, so I had to route all connections via my vps through zero-tier.
• poopsmithe 4y ago
  I want the same thing but for different reasons. I want 1TB of HDD storage for a one time payment of $50, instead of having to shell out $80/mo. for the same thing in a datacenter.
• bullen 4y ago
  I have hosted my own web server both physically and codevise (open-source) since 2014. It's on a Raspberry 2 cluster: http://host.rupy.se http://host.rupy.se Since 2016 i have my own database also hosted on the same cluster and coded from scratch: http://root.rupy.se http://root.rupy.se We need to implement HTTP/1.1 with less bloat, a C non-blocking web server that can share memory between threads is probably the most interesting project for humans right now, is anyone working on that?