For me, it was PhotoPrism. I used to be an idiot, and used Google Photos as my gallery. I knew that it was terrible for privacy but was too lazy to do anything about it. When Google limited storage for free accounts, I started looking for alternatives. Tried out a lot of stuff, but ended up settling on PhotoPrism.
It does most things that I need, except for multiple user support (it’s there in the sponsored version now). It made me learn a bit about Docker. Eventually, I learned how to access it from outside of my home network over Cloudflare tunnel. I’m happy that I can send pics/albums to folks without sharing it to any third party. It’s as easy as sending a link.
Now I have around a dozen containers on a local mini pc, and a couple on a VPS. I still route most things through Cloudflare tunnels (lower latency), only the high bandwidth stuff like Jellyfin are routed through a wireguard tunnel through the VPS.
Anyway, how did you get into selfhosting? (The question is mostly meant for non-professionals. But if you’re a professional with something interesting to share, you’re welcome as well.)
Started off with just hosting a permanent Minecraft Server on a Raspberry Pi. Later added stuff like Nextcloud or Calibre Web to it and now it’s just a teensy tiny bit out of control (I’m self-hosting a good 2 dozen services now).
Around the 2000s I hosted a Shoutcast server that played a playlist of about 30 punk rock MP3’s on continuous loop. As far as I can remeber, it was running on a Win2000 machine. Yeah - Pirate Radio 😆
Copyright?
Never heard of him.
1TB hard drives were on sale, and I wanted to digitize all my DVDs and stream them to my Xbox 360. That was 15 years ago.
A little bit of everything, just the constant thought of “this would be more convenient if I hosted it myself” made me finally actually set up a server.
I wanted to host a Minecraft server for some friends, so I got cobbled together a PC out of some spare parts and put Ubuntu server on it. Over time I added an emby server and tools to get media for the emby server and that was good for a few years. Then I moved and had some more space and fell way down the rabbit hole of used enterprise gear.
2006 Our Highschool had “recycled” some of the older machines and it started from there.
A Dell Optiplex GX1 500MHz, with 128mb of ram, and a 80gb IDE HHD. Installed Debian Sarge, This was running a dial-up gateway for our home network as well as samba.
It allowed one machine to be the LANs internet connection, abet slow. Samba was so I could download installers once, and then pull them from the network drive.
2008-2012 that machine was a dedicated WordPress machine. Around 2019 I pulled it out of the closet and powered it up. The whole site was there, still ran without a hiccup. It was actually recycled shortly after that, Dell used to make great hardware.
I like to tinker with things, and I had hardware lying around I wasn’t using. First thing I ever self-hosted was very basic: a Terraria server.
Then a Minecraft server.
And then a fully featured and defederated Matrix server with a fully functional telegram bridge, mostly as a test to see how feasible it was. Ran it for several months before shutting it down, deciding to wait for dendrite, since it’s supposed to be lighter.
Haven’t done anything since, but I’ll be looking to build a few more things in the near future.
Of all the things I have or am self-hosting the Matrix server was the biggest pain in the ass. I seriously hope they streamline that process because as it was it’s too much work for what it does.
I ran a NSLU2 with custom firmware and a mumble server on it. We used it to talk during online gaming without the need for teamspeak etc.
Played BF3 mostly.Those where the days
Edit: clarification
Some friends from high school and I were in an Cisco A+ class together. One night we ordered pizza, and after finishing it - we took the larger of the boxes, cleaned it out, and turned it into a server. We ended up running a few different game servers on there with the first being CS:Source, I believe. When that died, I started a 1&1 VPS that ran a Dark Age of Camelot freeshard for a while.
NAS, backups, matrix, home assistant, gitea, etc
A desire to set up a permanent download station that could extremely securely and very automatically keep track of all the Linux distributions (eg I really want to make sure I try every version of Mint Linux and with various arr programs I could ensure that as soon as a new version of Mint shows up, I automatically download it and get it shown in an interface where I can try the new version of Mint Linux. Linux distributions - I just love them!!
I too am a fan of various Linux distributions, in different languages and genres.
Off topic but could you explain a little on how you use a VPS to access your internal services? There’s a few services I want to open up but I don’t trust cloudflare and I don’t want to port forward.
Basically what the other guy said. I have a wireguard tunnel set up between my home server and the VPS, with persistent keepalive. The public domain name points to the VPS, then I have it set up (simply using iptables) so that any traffic there in port 80 and 443 is sent back to my honeserver and there it’s handled by nginx reverse proxy, and sent to jellyfin.
So, the only ports I need to open are 80 and 443 on my VPS to make this setup work.
Not the OP, but my current solution involves a small instance in AWS with a wireguard server in docker. This is configured with a few peers. One peer is a container on my home server that can access my jellyfin deployment. This container is also running socat to redirect the traffic to jellyfin. Then my phone and laptop are the other peers and I have a DNS record pointed to the IP of the wireguard peer on the server, if that makes sense.
I’ve been using this image pretty painlessly. The only hiccup I had with setup was ensuring persistent keep alive was configured on the peer forwarding traffic to jellyfin.
Nextcloud the snap package. I was starting to get rid of google contacts and calendar
I started off hosting UT2004 servers at LAN parties back in the day then Tremulus? servers, then coubter-strike 1.5/1.6/cz. Started learning VPS with CS:S.
Not quite related to selfhosting but modding routers and then DIYing x86 routers kinda got me into the scene.
Yea modding routers can be a lot of fun. Can be super unstable sometimes too. Are you still practicing? What’s your favorite custom firmware?
No not anymore. I no longer find it necessary now. Things have become much easier. Many routers have out-of-factory OpenWrt support or are outright built with/on OpenWrt. Companies like GL.iNet has made the barrier to entry the lowest ever.
Gone were the days we had to spot the right hardware versions, find ways to access debug ports, tinker with das uboot (or it had to be added…), flush the official firmware, and flash the right OpenWRT image. And this often would set you down on a path to compile the “right” kernel to work with proprietary driver/firmware blob files so hardware acceleration (e.g. NAT or WiFi radio) could work properly… Indeed I have learnt a lot but honestly I don’t really miss those days lol
