4 ms·

I had fun doing this until I had kids. I have a rack with 10gbe, ups, kubernetes a zfs storage server, multiple vlans, 4 unifi APs & locally hosted controller

I had fun doing this until I had kids. I have a rack with 10gbe, ups, kubernetes a zfs storage server, multiple vlans, 4 unifi APs & locally hosted controller and all sorts of self-hosted stuff. My heart breaks slightly as I watch things slowly degrade and break down due to bit-rot and version creep, I now wish I had a synology, flat network and cloud everything possible. There are days when the kids can't watch a particular movie and I find out it's because a particular kube component failed (after an hour of root-causing) because I haven't touched it in 2 years. I then have regrets about my life choices. Sometimes the rack starts beeping while I'm working and I realise the UPS batteries are due for replacement because it's been 4 years. I silence the alarm and get back to the production issue at work, knowing it'll beep at me again in 30 days. I'll still be too busy to fix it. It doesn't help that in Australia the ambient can get to 45 degrees C pushing disks and cpus to their limits. Just sharing a different perspective...

logifail 4y ago
> I watch things slowly degrade and break down due to bit-rot and version creep [..] > There are days when the kids can't watch a particular movie and I find out it's because a particular kube component failed (after an hour of root-causing) because I haven't touched it in 2 years. I then have regrets about my life choices. [..] > I now wish I had a synology, flat network and cloud everything possible No snark intended, but this sounds as though you chose to include a lot of unnecessary complexity into your self-hosting, then discovered that there's almost always a cost to unnecessary complexity(?)
stonewall 4y ago
Your perspective resonates with me! I have 3 kids under 6 years old, and I can definitely see this easily creeping up in my future. My family situation is partly why I just went with plain old VMs and a Linux Distro with a 10 year support cycle. Its easy to keep all the moving parts in my head, and I figure I can mostly coast for 10 years and then reevaluate. Thanks for reminding me, I also need to replace my UPS battery...
tharkun__ 4y ago
Sounds like a bit of overkill too if you ask me. You can self-host most things that make sense to keep private without going all in on the fun stuff. As in, k8s is cool to play with and understand and all but why would I bring that complexity to a simple home setup that can run on a single machine in a corner somewhere? You don't have to go to a synology box and give up everything but there are simpler options without going "Cloud everything". Of course you will be giving up some features as well, the more you strip things down, but that can beneficial in and of itself if you ask me. Personally I went from being the "Linux from scratch" guy to running Ubuntu LTS. Natural progression and the kids can watch any of their movies at any time they want. Keep the hard drives rotated, do an LTS to LTS upgrade every few years and that's about it. Heck I've been running the exact same Postfix, fetchmail and IMAP setup for probably 20 years now and I don't even remember what all the options I set do any longer. I also don't need to though. It's just rock solid. All the other fun stuff has passed me by and I don't care. Don't get me wrong, it's still fun to play with stuff and we do use k8s at work and it's great. But it's just complete overkill for home.
BLKNSLVR 4y ago
Also in Aus - I've got a not-quite-as-complex setup, but I do have it all in a purpose-built room in the shed which is fitted out with an old box air-conditioner[0] with a thermostat power controller to keep the room below a certain temperature, which should help to extend the working life of "all the shit in there". Damn it's nice visiting the "cool room" in summer, there isn't enough floor space to sleep in there though. Also have kids, and they can be demanding when stuff ain't working. Also second guess my life choices, but then again I also still love playing around with this stuff, knowing that I can maintain the full stack. [0]: Replacing that old air-con with a (far) more modern small split system could possibly have paid for itself by now in power savings. I think I should look into that.
aliasxneo 4y ago
You're not alone :) The only thing I have left at this point is a rather complex network, mostly because it's a pain to undo at this point. Plex went away last year and I just "license" all the kids stuff through Google play now...
hinkley 4y ago
For procrastination you have to set yourself up for success. For instance, what if the alarm sent you the product page for the model of battery you need? You order them, silence the alarm, and when they show up you’re reminded you need to change them. Or if that’s a bad time, when the alarm goes off again. I think we’ve only begun to work out how alarms are the wrong solution to the problem and what we need are prompts.
- ihateolives 4y ago
  Do you have kids? It doesn't work that way. It will never be urgent enough to waste time even for setting up the alarm or prompt. People vastly overestimate free time when you have kids. They somehow manage to eat up every single minute.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    Kids and a partner with health issues. My days are all chopped to hell. If there's a 5 hour window, everyone wants to put an event smack in the middle of it so I have an hour here and an hour there and any time I have 3 hours it's probably going to yard work. If it weren't for reminders or having tasks queued up things would be much, much worse. It does get better in highschool, sometimes middle school. Once the idea of autonomy occurs to them they don't need or want you every fifteen minutes. Plus as another responder said, sometimes they want to see you doing things, and once in a while they want to help. Though it's cool when they do and then sad when they change their minds. There was a two week period where mixing compost was the most fun in the world and then they were no longer interested.
  - thr717272 4y ago
    As a dad with more kids than the average around here I feel you. For me it has improved slightly lately: I have recently started giving my kids bonus allowance if they let me work the hours I need. And lately I have also played more card games and board games with them in the evenings. That said, I am up at around 0400 to start the day and I have already spent 15 minutes on HN so I need to leave now :-)
Helmut10001 4y ago
This is of course very context dependent and no critique whatsoever. I also have kids and my self-hosting became ever more important since. No Youtube commercials or auto-continuation for kid-videos thanks to invidious, reduced costs due to a lot of cancelled software plans (because everything runs on my rust), I can care better for my parents, e.g. helping with technology, monitoring, burglars (my homelab sits at my parents house, remotely connected via IPSEC), data backup is solid and under my control (ZFS Rz2, & offsite backup with borgmatic & rsync), and most important I have reduced my life dependencies and lock-in effects to worldwide companies. Maintenance is 1-2 hours a month: Proxmox, various Docker nested in unprivileged LXC, everything automated (cronjobs, Watchtower, Backups etc.). I also built a pretty big PV-plant to safe energy costs (30wkp). My main strategy was a "minimal" approach, going slowly, thinking carefully _what I really need_ and preferring robustness over new features or software. I usually take 1-2 months of review before deciding to install any new software, most often longer. I am against the "All in One" mentality (e.g. prefer custom bash scripts over third-party automation; or selectively install needed parts instead of the all-in-one alternatives, e.g. nextcloud/all-in-one).
8fingerlouie 4y ago
> I had fun doing this until I had kids. As i keep telling people, self hosting is fun as long as your user count is 1. When it grows beyond that, you suddenly have a SLA. I self hosted almost everything (e-mail is pointless from privay concerns), and when we had kids i moved to a dual Synology setup with a single proxmox server for running services. Fast forward some years and electricity suddenly costs about an arm and a leg, so i had to do "something". I completely stopped self hosting anything "publicly" available. Everything moved to the cloud including most file storage, using Cryptomator for privacy where applicable. The server got reduced to a small ARM device with the prime task of synchronizing our cloud content locally, and making backups of it, both remote and local. As a side bonus it also runs a Plex server off of a large USB hard drive. All redundancy has been removed, and my 10G network has been switched off, leaving only a single 16 port POE switch for Access Points and cameras. The Synology boxes now only comes online a couple of times every week to take a snapshot of all shares, pull a copy from the ARM device, after which it powers down again. In the process i reduced my network rack power consumption from just below 300W to 67W, and with electricity prices for the past year averaging around €0.6/kWh that means i save around 2050 kWh/year, which adds up to €1225/year, or just over €100/month. Subtract from those savings the €25/month i pay for cloud services and i still come out ahead. On top of that i literally have zero maintenance now. My home network is only accessible from the outside through a VPN. The only critical part is backups, but i use healthchecks.io to alert me if those fail. I still kept the network seggregation, so everything "IoT" is on it's separate VLAN, as well as the kids. The only major change was that the "adults" VLAN is now the management VLAN. I have no wired computers, so maintaining a management VLAN over WiFi was more trouble than i could be bothered with :) Why are the kids on their own VLAN/WiFi ? Because kids wants to play games with their friends, something the normal Guest network does not support. Kids also brings all sorts of devices with new and exiting exploits/vira, and i didn't feel like doing the maintenance on that. So instead my kids have their very own VLAN with access to just printers, AirPlay devices and the Plex server.
- grepfru_it 4y ago
  I hosted email until my email to a college student was rejected with no way of contacting either him or the admins of his school. That was the straw on the camels back. I still self host apps today but my hardware is old enough that it costs more in power and cooling than what I get out of it, and the roi on new hardware doesn’t justify the means

logifail 4y ago

> I watch things slowly degrade and break down due to bit-rot and version creep [..] > There are days when the kids can't watch a particular movie and I find out it's because a particular kube component failed (after an hour of root-causing) because I haven't touched it in 2 years. I then have regrets about my life choices. [..] > I now wish I had a synology, flat network and cloud everything possible No snark intended, but this sounds as though you chose to include a lot of unnecessary complexity into your self-hosting, then discovered that there's almost always a cost to unnecessary complexity(?)

stonewall 4y ago

Your perspective resonates with me! I have 3 kids under 6 years old, and I can definitely see this easily creeping up in my future. My family situation is partly why I just went with plain old VMs and a Linux Distro with a 10 year support cycle. Its easy to keep all the moving parts in my head, and I figure I can mostly coast for 10 years and then reevaluate. Thanks for reminding me, I also need to replace my UPS battery...

tharkun__ 4y ago

Sounds like a bit of overkill too if you ask me. You can self-host most things that make sense to keep private without going all in on the fun stuff. As in, k8s is cool to play with and understand and all but why would I bring that complexity to a simple home setup that can run on a single machine in a corner somewhere? You don't have to go to a synology box and give up everything but there are simpler options without going "Cloud everything". Of course you will be giving up some features as well, the more you strip things down, but that can beneficial in and of itself if you ask me. Personally I went from being the "Linux from scratch" guy to running Ubuntu LTS. Natural progression and the kids can watch any of their movies at any time they want. Keep the hard drives rotated, do an LTS to LTS upgrade every few years and that's about it. Heck I've been running the exact same Postfix, fetchmail and IMAP setup for probably 20 years now and I don't even remember what all the options I set do any longer. I also don't need to though. It's just rock solid. All the other fun stuff has passed me by and I don't care. Don't get me wrong, it's still fun to play with stuff and we do use k8s at work and it's great. But it's just complete overkill for home.

BLKNSLVR 4y ago

Also in Aus - I've got a not-quite-as-complex setup, but I do have it all in a purpose-built room in the shed which is fitted out with an old box air-conditioner[0] with a thermostat power controller to keep the room below a certain temperature, which should help to extend the working life of "all the shit in there". Damn it's nice visiting the "cool room" in summer, there isn't enough floor space to sleep in there though. Also have kids, and they can be demanding when stuff ain't working. Also second guess my life choices, but then again I also still love playing around with this stuff, knowing that I can maintain the full stack. [0]: Replacing that old air-con with a (far) more modern small split system could possibly have paid for itself by now in power savings. I think I should look into that.

aliasxneo 4y ago

You're not alone :) The only thing I have left at this point is a rather complex network, mostly because it's a pain to undo at this point. Plex went away last year and I just "license" all the kids stuff through Google play now...

hinkley 4y ago

For procrastination you have to set yourself up for success. For instance, what if the alarm sent you the product page for the model of battery you need? You order them, silence the alarm, and when they show up you’re reminded you need to change them. Or if that’s a bad time, when the alarm goes off again. I think we’ve only begun to work out how alarms are the wrong solution to the problem and what we need are prompts.

ihateolives 4y ago
Do you have kids? It doesn't work that way. It will never be urgent enough to waste time even for setting up the alarm or prompt. People vastly overestimate free time when you have kids. They somehow manage to eat up every single minute.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Kids and a partner with health issues. My days are all chopped to hell. If there's a 5 hour window, everyone wants to put an event smack in the middle of it so I have an hour here and an hour there and any time I have 3 hours it's probably going to yard work. If it weren't for reminders or having tasks queued up things would be much, much worse. It does get better in highschool, sometimes middle school. Once the idea of autonomy occurs to them they don't need or want you every fifteen minutes. Plus as another responder said, sometimes they want to see you doing things, and once in a while they want to help. Though it's cool when they do and then sad when they change their minds. There was a two week period where mixing compost was the most fun in the world and then they were no longer interested.
- thr717272 4y ago
  As a dad with more kids than the average around here I feel you. For me it has improved slightly lately: I have recently started giving my kids bonus allowance if they let me work the hours I need. And lately I have also played more card games and board games with them in the evenings. That said, I am up at around 0400 to start the day and I have already spent 15 minutes on HN so I need to leave now :-)

Helmut10001 4y ago

This is of course very context dependent and no critique whatsoever. I also have kids and my self-hosting became ever more important since. No Youtube commercials or auto-continuation for kid-videos thanks to invidious, reduced costs due to a lot of cancelled software plans (because everything runs on my rust), I can care better for my parents, e.g. helping with technology, monitoring, burglars (my homelab sits at my parents house, remotely connected via IPSEC), data backup is solid and under my control (ZFS Rz2, & offsite backup with borgmatic & rsync), and most important I have reduced my life dependencies and lock-in effects to worldwide companies. Maintenance is 1-2 hours a month: Proxmox, various Docker nested in unprivileged LXC, everything automated (cronjobs, Watchtower, Backups etc.). I also built a pretty big PV-plant to safe energy costs (30wkp). My main strategy was a "minimal" approach, going slowly, thinking carefully _what I really need_ and preferring robustness over new features or software. I usually take 1-2 months of review before deciding to install any new software, most often longer. I am against the "All in One" mentality (e.g. prefer custom bash scripts over third-party automation; or selectively install needed parts instead of the all-in-one alternatives, e.g. nextcloud/all-in-one).

8fingerlouie 4y ago

> I had fun doing this until I had kids. As i keep telling people, self hosting is fun as long as your user count is 1. When it grows beyond that, you suddenly have a SLA. I self hosted almost everything (e-mail is pointless from privay concerns), and when we had kids i moved to a dual Synology setup with a single proxmox server for running services. Fast forward some years and electricity suddenly costs about an arm and a leg, so i had to do "something". I completely stopped self hosting anything "publicly" available. Everything moved to the cloud including most file storage, using Cryptomator for privacy where applicable. The server got reduced to a small ARM device with the prime task of synchronizing our cloud content locally, and making backups of it, both remote and local. As a side bonus it also runs a Plex server off of a large USB hard drive. All redundancy has been removed, and my 10G network has been switched off, leaving only a single 16 port POE switch for Access Points and cameras. The Synology boxes now only comes online a couple of times every week to take a snapshot of all shares, pull a copy from the ARM device, after which it powers down again. In the process i reduced my network rack power consumption from just below 300W to 67W, and with electricity prices for the past year averaging around €0.6/kWh that means i save around 2050 kWh/year, which adds up to €1225/year, or just over €100/month. Subtract from those savings the €25/month i pay for cloud services and i still come out ahead. On top of that i literally have zero maintenance now. My home network is only accessible from the outside through a VPN. The only critical part is backups, but i use healthchecks.io to alert me if those fail. I still kept the network seggregation, so everything "IoT" is on it's separate VLAN, as well as the kids. The only major change was that the "adults" VLAN is now the management VLAN. I have no wired computers, so maintaining a management VLAN over WiFi was more trouble than i could be bothered with :) Why are the kids on their own VLAN/WiFi ? Because kids wants to play games with their friends, something the normal Guest network does not support. Kids also brings all sorts of devices with new and exiting exploits/vira, and i didn't feel like doing the maintenance on that. So instead my kids have their very own VLAN with access to just printers, AirPlay devices and the Plex server.

grepfru_it 4y ago
I hosted email until my email to a college student was rejected with no way of contacting either him or the admins of his school. That was the straw on the camels back. I still self host apps today but my hardware is old enough that it costs more in power and cooling than what I get out of it, and the roi on new hardware doesn’t justify the means