this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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Selfhosted

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What’s up, what’s down and what are you not sure about?

Let us know what you set up lately, what kind of problems you currently think about or are running into, what new device you added to your homelab or what interesting service or article you found.

I finally finished my first iteration of my Minilab including a very smooth migration from the old server yesterday so I can go to the service side of things again. I plan to get some kind of selfhosters VPN for external access to stuff that's not exposed to the internet, I'll have to investigate which one.

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[–] Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I know next to nothing about using the command line, so I’ve been relying pretty heavily on ChatGPT to set my stuff up and so far it has reliably helped me overcome every issue. The problem is, of course, that I often don’t even understand what the issue was in the first place so I don’t even know if the fix that the ai spits out is, let’s say, correct. I don’t really want to become an It expert, I just want to be able to host some services on my own to depend less on corps, is it alright if I continue to rely on the AI? Or do you guys think that I just have to learn this stuff or else I might mess up?

I don’t have great security concerns btw, my ISP doesn’t allow port forwarding, so I access my server exclusively though Tailscale.

[–] gonzo-rand19@moist.catsweat.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What you can probably do to build some knowledge if you're going to be using AI anyway is ask it to explain some of the concepts to you. You also have the ability to ask clarifying questions about anything you don't understand.

[–] Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yes I do that, and it does help me a lot to understand what I’m doing it’s just I’m a top down type of guy. Like I don’t like messing with anything unless I fully understand it, which often makes me very unproductive. I decided to not be that way with this self hosting thing because I realized I would never get around to it with that mentality. Better to break shit as I go.

Yeah, I'm the same way. I learned mostly through making Docker containers and bumbling through tutorials/documentation until things worked, just deleting them and starting over when I fucked up irreparably (except the compose file, of course).

There are a lot more comprehensive written and video tutorials than there used to be so those are very helpful too.

[–] milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've had some amusing mixed experience with ChatGPT for this. When I asked about iptables rules to restrict podman, it was great. About podaman quadlets, though, which I first misspelled 'quartlets', it completely made it up, and even sent me a fake link to nonexistent documentation when I challenged it!

  • it's more helpful if you ask the right questions
  • and its answers often give you ideas of what to google
  • Old stuff that has been written about many times over is more likely to get a proper answer
  • sometimes the gist of a wrong command/answer could still help me understand what to do with the right one

Try to understand whatever you use from AI. At least understanding the general picture of what it means, and a basic idea of "this flag is for this; this option is for that". AI can also help you with that understanding, but again beware of it completely making up something logically coherent but wrong.

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[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago (4 children)

My problem is that I'm moving in the not so far future and I don't know where to put my server. Physical security is important and if someone gets into my house, takes the computer and leaves, it'll be worthless due to encryption. But if it's in somebody's datacenter (co-location or whatever), they could be forced to monitor my traffic, tamper with my system, and I'd have to entrust the key to somebody in order to boot the system and decrypt the drives should it restart for an update or for any other reason.

I'm considering asking a friend to host the homeserver and reimburse them for a better internet connection (fiber) + electricity costs. But I'm not sure they'd be up for it.

How would you solve the problem?

Anti Commercial-AI license

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