Stage 4: "I'm done. This isn't worth it and I don't actually NEED any of it! rm -rf / it all and wander silently off into the woods. Curl up on a mound of moss and watch all the things that bumble."
I'm in this meme and I don't like it
ooo audiobookshelf don't mind if I do
When you spur of the moment decide to turn your gaming pc into a proxmox machine and then miss gaming so you end up down a rabbit hole of iommu groups to pass your Gpu through to a steam os VM to wrestle with Linux virtual display drivers so you can use sunshine to cast your games to your laptop
It eventually worked but you can quickly end up in a niche hell hole with little to no coherent documentation.
Trash guides is a gateway drug
Or you just spin up Games-On-Whales and have the same with almost no work!
Is it worth it after that's all said and done?
I'd love to power gaming in my house from a central server, but I keep imagining that it would be spotty and frustrating as hell.
Game streaming is good, but not perfect. It's useable, but you do get the occasional stutter, dropped frames, connection issues, etc. Not to mention increased input lag.
If you must have your PC in a different room, you'd be better off buying an optical hdmi cord. That's what I do for gaming on my TV after playing a few games through various game streaming apps and getting fed up with it.
Stage 5 - you live in the woods and talk to a rock
Stage 4 clustered servers so k8s can keep the containers up and configured
Stage 5 GitOps
Stage 6 federated clusters on your buddies infrastructure so each of you have off site high availability. Or hardware squirled away at families houses.
Stage 7 OpenStack running on all those clusters, giving a seamless single-cloud experience.
Honestly I prefer the kubevirt, kubeOVN route (ala Harvester).
OpenStack is a decades long labor of love that feels like it was started decades ago, you know?
Me transition from stage 1 to stage 2, nervously.
Just wait till stage 4 - I've got a 12u server rack, separate 6u networking cabinet, 80+ containers running on multiple VMs managed by multiple Proxmox nodes and all my infrastructure is transitioning to OpenTofu and OpenBao so I can spin up new VMs, manage the containers with Komodo, etc and all managed with single sign on. I've got ~$12k sunk into my local AI server alone. I have like 2 active users besides myself...
I won't lie. I've found myself peaking into corners of the house and thinking about where I'd install a proper rack. House just isn't wired properly for it, though.
I had two separate 20 amp circuits ran into a closet and threw an exhaust fan to outside so I save on cooling costs. Where there's a will there's a way!
Fellow stage 4 self-hoster here. Time to start a support group.
lol at 'accidental' beta testers. I tell my family they're testing my shit
Isn't that what they're for?
The thing that I hate about self-hosting is that a lot of apps that could just be a plain offline thing are instead being designed to be super bloated server-docker things. Databases are not reasonably portable data formats.
An sqlite database is a perfectly fine portable data format.
Or, and apparently this is crazy these days - I can just use a file that's in a format appropriate to what I'm trying to do, compatible with the simpler offline app it was made for, and then just use a more general purpose syncing method whether online or sneakernet if I need to do some kind of data transfer - as opposed to accumulating an ever expanding collection of server stacks that are just redundantly doing the same kind of thing anyway while needlessly adding an insane amount of attack surface.
Databases are not reasonably portable data formats.
I mean.. if you stick to standard SQL...
This is why my self created apps all use Markdown files instead if DBs.
I think I have reached stage 4: No hosting, off-site backup is on an external SSD in a locker at work
"Wow these R730/R740 ear destroying rack servers are super cheap on ebay"
Had an R710 in my bedroom for a few years, do not recommend
Stage 4: code your own social network and run it on the ThinkPad under the stairs with a DB server in a wardrobe.. Fight scrapers and spammers incessantly.
4th is writing your own self hosted tools
Only 27 containers? That rookie numbers... You gotta pump those up!
I'm currently sitting at 131 containers across 3 Kubernetes nodes, all bare-metal though, no virtualization.
131 containers seems crazy to me. How many actual services does that translate to? Is it actually closer to 50 services running in parallel on three different nodes for redundancy?
There's probably also a fair amount of repeated servers that aren't redundant. Like postgres servers that are single purpose and multiple containers to provide it for an "actual" service.
I've been pretty happy in #2 for years.
I had my own Nextcloud and Home Assistant (on a raspberry pi) for years and they're awesome, but I really don't have a use case for specialized stuff like jellyfin or vaultwarden. I just slap my media and a keepass file on my Nextcloud and I'm happy!
I just use flash drives to transfer stuff from my computer to the ipad so i can watch in bed lol, keep my music on an mp3 player
It's a peaceful life.
I'm definitely stage 3 but it's still an enjoyable hobby that isn't that time-consuming. I think stage 4 is creating your own services and spamming social media in search of users.
I’m worried I don’t know if I’m 2 or 3
With this sort of thing, I'm always left wondering what I'm missing in terms of the hardware. Like, I've been collecting bits and bobs of old hardware for years, but it feels like if I want anything more than an absolutely basic raspberry-pi-level server, I need to buy dedicated hardware. For example, I want to put together a nas, especially since I do have a collection of spare, old hard drives, but would want raid for that. Unfortunately, its rare to find a mobo that has more than four sata ports, and all the power supplies I have available to harvest from other systems are either too weak, or are proprietary, meaning I'm halfway to buying a new PC anyway. Is there something I'm missing, or do others just have more disposable income?
You can get an PCIe HBA on ebay for $50-60 bucks and will allow you to connect 8 disks to a single system. Look for ones that specifically say they have been flashed to IT mode which will let the host system address the individual drives and enable you to use MDADM for RAID. My "Server" is literally just the old motherboard from my gaming PC with 4x 8TB drives connected to one of those ebay HBAs.
i uhh yeah host abt 10 containers on an i7 laptop currently. in my small office (kids bedroom) closet. I do also have a 3tb storage available but its what I had … an external wd drive. sigh. i am nbr 3 huh?
Level 4 would be using some sort of off-grid decentralized networking instead of the internet?
Nonsense! The old laptop I run proxmox, home assistant, and most of my containers on is mounted to the wall in the garage, not under the stairs.
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