um... did my bio get deleted?
Go with used & refurb business PCs right out of the gate instead of fucking around with SBCs like the Pi.
Go with "1-liter" aka Ultra Small Form Factor right away instead of starting with SFF. (I don't have a permanent residence at the moment so this makes sense for me)
Check out ServeTheHome's "Project TinyMiniMicro" on Youtube for a great overview of ultra-small form factor ("1 liter") business PCs.
The big three PC makers each have standardized products in this form factor with (relatively speaking, compared to smaller manufacturers) tons of spare parts available.
holy crap, that was ........ ... ..... .. 25 years ago???
I don't honestly remember the very first, if I had to bet I'd say it was Samba, likely on my 350MHz K6 (later snagged a K6-III+ for this board, fastest Socket 7 chip ever produced) so I could share files with my laptop, a Dell, 300MHz Celeron. Running all Linux at the time, not sure what flavors, although I first encountered a Debian derivative with Corel LinuxOS believe it or not, and have used Debian on servers about 95% of the time forever after.
My first self-hosting on dedicated hardware was a Samba share and DHCP/DNS server, since at the time routers weren't always a thing, and in fact it was plugged directly into the cable modem ... and for a while accidentally served competing DHCP to my neighborhood cable segment, causing intermittent problems for who knows how many users including myself, because the cable company didn't filter broadcast traffic!!! When I finally found that config mishap, holy shit was it an awkward monkey moment ... fix the typo and walk away slowly ... wild west days!!
I thought this was about physical hardware, lol.
FWIW I have been upgrading my stack on a very tight budget and there are some incredible deals on used/refurb PCs out there... just wait & watch for a couple weeks if need be, and you can get yourself a secondhand business PC for dirt cheap.
As others have pointed out,
They are simply outright incompetent and driven by standard corporate middle managers chasing the next KPI.
Recent comments from the CEO confirm it. Bloodless money-grubbing techbro shitbag.
I’ve set up a Discord server
:facepalm_picard:
You might also check out rathole as it is very easy to use: https://github.com/rapiz1/rathole
Basically, subs with anti-corpo principles but refuses to leave corpo Reddit.
See also: Discord
That sounds rough, good thing I'm no longer a participant in that whole mess
Thanks for posting this. It’s nice that people are working on more accessible ways to do this, every way I’ve done it so far has been pure command line. And while that’s fine, it takes longer to understand and set up for simple installs.
Just wanna put in a good word about GL-iNet routers ... they are more travel- and pro-sumer focused than a lot of what's been mentioned here. They run a proprietary front end on top of OpenWRT, but if you don't like that, most of them have full support in vanilla OpenWRT.
These are definitely more for the tinkerer market, their documentation and firmware can have quirks, but that being said (and as somebody who wouldbe wary at that caveat) I have been using GLi routers with manufacturer firmware as a daily driver for 3+ years and once you get them set up they are very solid.
Might be a good option for the digital nomads among us who need a smaller device which can connect to a host network and then send all traffic over a VPN with very easy setup.
I have a background (in the distant past) as a PHP dev, and currently make my income doing mostly Wordpress work.
For a very long time I took a jaundiced eye towards big PHP apps for the exact same reasons. That being said, I just two days ago finally installed Nextcloud in my homelab and exposed it to the world.
It's worth noting that a lot of PHP's bad rep comes from Wordpress, which is terrible in security terms in large part due to a huge and very poorly vetted ecosystem of plugins written by coders of all skill levels.
PHP itself had a number of anti-features which made security difficult in the past. A lot of those issues have been worked on. As somebody who was up to my eyeballs in PHP for years during the bad old days, I'm now confident installing big PHP apps if I think the dev team and dev process are reasonably mature.
I use NoMachine, but that's in a Linux-to-Linux environment.
Did a test last weekend sitting in a department store parking lot on the store's public wifi, wifi bitrate about 50Mbps both ways, 50ms between me and my homelab ... very very usable experience with quality set at 6/10.
The one advantage of using megacorp "1-liter" business PCs from Dell/HP/Lenovo over brands like Minisforum is that parts commonality / availability is likely to be a lot better for the big brand boxes.
This will make little or no difference to a lot of people of course :) in my case it's a big factor because I'm trying to do everything on a shoestring budget and I want the hardware to be physically small but still as repairable/upgradable as possible, and to last as long as possible. So I ended up going with used 1L PCs even though you get a bit less CPU capability per dollar spent, as right now these PCs are the smallest platform that I know of that tends to be upgradable (no soldered RAM etc) and have lots of parts available.
The EliteDesks are nice, but beware top venting if you're planning to stack them vertically
Personally I'd go for as big a UPS as I could afford, but I serve some public-facing stuff from my homelab and I live in an area with outdated infrastructure and occasional ice storms. I currently have a small UPS and have been too tired/overwhelmed to set up automated shutdown yet. It's not too hard though, I've done it before. And even without that in place, my small UPS has kept things going thru a bunch of <10 minute outages.
or change it in /etc/hosts!
I would never open those types of services to the Internet. Wrap it in a VPN first yeah?
I have this exact model machine as a web app server running Proxmox btw. Works great. I did need to get a genuine power supply for it as it refused to run above 800MHz with a generic!
I've had good luck running more intensive loads on more recent models of these systems, say 3 to 5 gens old ... multiple desktop OSes running concurrently on Proxmox, etc. The "1 liter" class of PCs is really quite capable these days!
It's not (yet) a good solution, but I suffer with voip.ms, and it is slowly improving.
The lower you go in price, in general the more problems you'll have with overselling, poor management, poor support, etc.
After coming back to this thread and reading some more comments, it sure looks like I could save up to $3 a month over what I pay for cheap VPS at Ramnode, but in all my years of being a Ramnode customer, they haven't pissed me off, and their support has always been excellent. I have no desire to move, and I'm somebody who has very little money, so cheaper hosting would make a difference.
Just a data point, good luck in your search!
one of the achievements of lemmy might be as a nice platform for simply running a forum for whatever community you want all without needing to worry about federation.
I'm interested in this question for the inverse reason: being able to run a federated community on a Lemmy server which is not open-invite
People in the Lemmyverse would be able to use the community as normal, but running the community on its own server would not involve opening the door to registration by randos on that server.
For people who don't like cloudflare, it's also possible to self-host your reverse proxy, using e.g. nginx on the front end, and rathole or frp for the reverse tunnel. I use ssh if I need a forward proxy too (so outbound requests don't come from my "real" IP) and that's not super ideal, but it works.
This is of course considerably more difficult than something that's point-and-click, but for me, using Cloudflare defeats the purpose of self-hosting.
I have built & rebuilt such a setup several times now and it gets better documented every time, soon I'll release a step by step HOWTO.
No regrets, I haven't fully broken the habit of reading a couple subs tho
oh nice. somebody else who's done internet radio!
It's also worth considering that the existing influx is probably more than enough to keep the devs busy fixing bugs and improving the software for months to come.
Thank you! This is helpful.
I will probably be installing it bare metal atop Debian (no Docker), but this is still quite useful.
BTW I think if you indent your list of commands by 4 spaces, it will render better:
su
/sbin/usermod -aG sudo <user>
groups <user>
apt-get install sudo
cd /opt
mkdir npm
cd npm
(copy or create docker-compose.yml)
apt-get install docker-compose
docker-compose up -d
cd /opt
mkdir lemmy
cd lemmy
(copy or create docker-compose.yml and lemmy.hjson)
mkdir -p volumes/pictrs
chown -R 991:991 volumes/pictrs
docker-compose up -d
docker ps (verify containers are all running, grab ip address for lemmy container)
just make sure to post some too! getting porn and/or meme communities off the ground ain't easy without a lil help
You're absolutely right - many of them aren't going to realize and never were. Most people just eat what they're served.
Personally, I've wasted far too much of my life fucking around with such people, and I don't want them in my social media. They can stay over there and like it.
Used "1-liter" business PCs which come with a modest amount of RAM+storage (assuming you're likely to replace/upgrade after buying anyway) and an 8th gen Intel CPU should run between ehhh like $125 to $250 depending on which model CPU, how much RAM etc. Totally worth it IMO, I use one with an i5-8500T as a Proxmox host for my web services and so far I'm quite happy with it. Snagged a deal on it a couple months ago, $110, shipped with 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD which I immediately replaced.
oh man. super valuable. I would love to have that, as setting up Lemmy on Debian 12 is in my near future.
The confusion and poor UX generated by asymmetrical federation is itself sufficient reason for the 2 instances affected to drop beehaw, IMO.
4 CPU sd and 8G for 8 eur per month
holy crap, that's cheap!
Ramnode is a good smaller US provider, they don't oversell as much as many providers do, and their shit is fast.
It really kind of depends on your luck with the hardware. I've used laptops as servers for durations of several months at various points in the past and had no particular problems, just make sure cooling is adequate.
You might consider setting up a Proxmox node if you're interested in virtualization at the machine level (i.e. having several virtual machines running on one physical machine, which can reduce maintenance headaches and make experimentation easier as VMs can be snapshotted, cloned, and easily replaced)
not the one you were replying to, but I'm 2/3 thru switching my servers over to the 1L form factor and am liking it. it's amazing how much compute can be crammed into a tiny space these days.
I've definitely also had the experience of dodgy hardware support (in Armbian, which is all volunteer) with weird Chinese SBCs.
The greater fediverse is the only phenomenon that's ever held a candle to the BBS years
Just get a used ultra-small form factor PC a la the Tiny, Mini, or Micro series. A higher-end one which is 7 generations old will still absolutely destroy the Pi in terms of performance.
Once I gave up (for now) on doing all this on ARM and switched back to x86, everything got way easier to actually accomplish.