UPDATE: To everyone who suggested YUNO, thank you so much. This seems like it is about to make my journey much easier. It is basically almost exactly what I was looking for, but I was unaware that it existed.
Thank you ALL for your suggestions, actually. It’s a bit overwhelming for an almost complete noobie but I an going to look into all of the suggestions in time. I just saw that there were several mentions of YUNO so I decided to make that one of the first things I investigated.
So, about two months ago, I had a very eye opening experience. As the result of a single misconfigured security setting on my Android, I was locked out of my Google Account on my phone AND all of my PCs. I had no access whatsoever to Google, or any of the literally hundreds of services that I get through Google.
This is when I realized that I relied entirely on Google/Android because those two days were actually very difficult, being cut off from media, services, passwords, everything, from the past almost twenty years of my life, could be taken away from me in an instant. The decades of my life that were locked away in my Google Account included hundreds of thousands of pictures, almost a hundred thousand audio tracks, several hundred books, several hundred apps, thousands of videos, etc. ad infinitum. Unfortunately, very little of this material was backed up at that point. That is my fault. Also, the misconfigured security setting was my fault as well.
The amount of data, media, memories, services, etc. that would have been lost is actually endless and it would have affected my life in several ridiculously negative ways.
Luckily, in the end, I was able to get my access back and then basically immediately grabbed all of the several terabytes of information and media of mine that they had, and that I was almost locked out of. I have it all in my house now on a drive in my computer, with a backup made on another disconnected disk.
I then decided that no corporation was ever going to have such an insanely high level of influence on and control over my entire life and my media ever again. That experience was actually very scary.
I’ve been trying to get into SelfHosting, but am finding it quite daunting and difficult.
There is a LOT of stuff that I have to learn, and I am mostly unsure of where to even begin. I know basically nothing about networking.
I need to learn the very basic stuff and work my way up from there, but everything that I’ve seen on the Internet assumes that the reader already has a basic to intermediate understanding of networking and the subjects that surround it. I do not, but I am going to learn.
I just need someone to show me where to start.
Thanks in advance for any assistance!
As the result of a single misconfigured security setting on my Android, I was locked out of my Google Account on my phone AND all of my PCs.
Just a heads up on what you are getting yourself into, if you fuck up your self hosted setup badly enough there is no recovery.
That isn’t necessarily intended to scare you off from self hosting, just that the first and most important lesson to learn is to have a good system of backups that are backed up automatically, are easy to recover from, and are separated enough from other copies of the data that if something goes terribly wrong one copy will survive.
Thanks for the advice. Currently, I have a backup of all of my important data on a high capacity HDD that is completely disconnected from any devices. There is no real way to automate backups with that setup, but it’s what I am working with at the moment.
To piggy back off of Arcayne’s comment
I’d recommend setting your sights on the 3-2-1 rule. 3 copies of your data, 2 different mediums, 1 off-site. Hetzner Storage Box is a good cheap offsite option.
I don’t backup everything to a 3-2-1. I at least have everything on a 2-1 backup scheme. Two copies, one offline. My personal photos and videos are on a proper 3-2-1. I can redownload my movies and music. I can’t retake pictures from my childhood. It saves a lot of money doing it that way. My personal media is less than 1 TB, whereas my whole collection is many TB and would be prohibitively expensive to 3-2-1.
Yunohost should be the software you’re looking for. Install stuff by clicking. Much less terminal stuff
How secure is yuno? Is it actually secure plugging into your Ethernet for remote access to something like immich?
It’s super intimidating when the weight of the weight of the global hacking community is attacking you from the moment you expose a port.
Is their progress on a simple sustainable solution to security? Is this the primary roadblock to self hosting becoming more common place? Or am I way off
Oh my god, you were right. Yuno is AMAZINGLY useful for exactly what it is that I am attempting to do!
Glad you like it! If it’s useful to you, don’t forget to donate or at least say thanks to the contributors once everything is up and running and stable.
Don’t forget backups! Restic is in yunohost and should be useful for that. Yunohost has a guide.
+1 for YunoHost from the POV of a total self-hosting newbie (I’m now self-hosting my own GoToSocial, Pixelfed, PeerTube and NextCloud thanks to it… upgrades and backups are super easy, too)
Can I ask where you host your backup service without paying another cloud provider?
Sevral people have mentioned Yuno and I’m going to look into it shortly. Thanks for the input!
There’s Yuno, CasaOS is ridiculously easy to setup, manage and maintain as well. There’s UnRaid (not free, but very good), Proxmox is extremely versatile.
I am currently running light services (caldav, carddav, PW manager, and some other lighter stuff) on an N150 mini PC, and have a hefty server for heavier services running on Proxmox.
Of course, I follow the 3-2-1 backup rule, but only for data I could never get again. Movies, Series, music, I never back up.
I have a big super micro server i was given a while back but have yet to set it up. I was going to put proxmox on it. Would you recommend yuno over that?
Depends on what you want to do. For a small server, if you want to host multiple things, hosting them straight on the metal without putting a VM in between would be more performant. If your server doesn’t have much RAM and CPU to give, then getting rid of the emulation layer makes sense.
Can you tell me why you want to use proxmox and what for?
It has 256gb of ram. I don’t remember to CPU power but it has 2.
I want to do self hosted storage, currently have 12-16tb (I’ve forgotten which). I’ll also want to have other services running. Like game servers or things like immich and jellyfin. I’ll also want to have something for git and probably Jenkins (or similar), then also a place to host anything I create that needs hosting.
When i asked where to begin with such a server, pretty much all of the responses were to go with proxmox. I’m not a fan that it’s nagware though so I’m open to other suggestions.
While YUNO is a great way to get started, I strongly encourage you to understand basic concepts, like docker, and maybe try to run something outside of it for fun. While not even remotely the same thing since YUNO is just the OS and “app store”, you would be very similarly tied to that ecosystem the same way you are to Google now. Not to mean that YUNO would have any control over your stuff, but you would be dependent on them for what you can self host.
Yes, I’m definitely trying to understand the “why” of what it is that I am doing. I’m just going to be using YUNO as a starting point.
I’m 100% self taught & was in exactly the same place. I’d never used Linux before I got my first Pi. I spent a bit of time trying to familiarise myself with & made some notes regarding command line (notes I still rely on).
There’a so many ways to achieve the goal, you’ll eventually find a way that works for you. My personal preference was Docker/Docker Compose deployed via Portainer.
Even that was confusing. Until I found this excellent video on how to read Docker requirements & apply them step by step into Portainer. He explains slowly & methodically exactly what he is doing & why.
Portainer is a method of handling Docker stacks/containers via a web UI. Both Docker & Portainer are simple to install.
It’s easier to use Docker Compose files and/or .env (environment variable) files (both are even simpler to deploy through Portainer) but this video taught me what was going on & gave me confidence to have a go. What attracted me to Docker is you can easily remove stacks/containers if/when you make a mess rather than wiping the drive & start again, which is how I went about things initially.
This gave me the tools to set up Nginx Proxy Manager & I never looked back.
As you’ve realised, a robust backup solution is essential (plus off site backup for particularly important stuff) as things will inevitably go wrong along the way (I see Borg, Restic mentioned often, I went for Kopia).
I can’t recommend highly enough making detailed notes along the way, I rely on Joplin.
If you start using Docker, dont fall into the trap of using the “latest” tag. If you know the version number you’re running its far easier to re-deploy if an update is bad.
Enjoy your new time consuming, teeth gnashingly frustrating …and yet rewarding hobby 👍
The FUTO guide is meant for total beginners.
Thank you! I will begin to look over it tomorrow!
I am a sysadmin with over 30 years of experience managing servers and networks for businesses of all sizes as well as for myself, friends, and family.
The FUTO guide is extremely detailed, accurate, and accessible. It does not always follow best practices, and it’s not a comprehensive guide to all of the possibilities for self-hosting. It’s not trying to be. It is a guide for someone with no technical expertise (but with basic technical ability) to degoogle/deapple themselves at a reasonable level of cost and effort.
You do not have to do everything in the list, you can pick and choose the parts you’re interested in. That said, I would recommend reading through the whole article as you have time, because it does a very good job of explaining the concepts involved in building a self-hosted setup, and understanding how everything works is the biggest step toward being able to effectively troubleshoot problems when they inevitably crop up.
If you have specific questions about things that aren’t answered in the guide or via a quick web search, post them here.
Thanks for the detailed explanation! I will definitely begin studying the document tomorrow!
Love the explanation. I’ve had a homelab for 20 years now and have never heard of FUTO. You’re explainer has made me bookmark the site now for future skimming.
I didn’t know I needed this. Thanks!
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If you have systems or services you’re dependant so strongly, always have an backup / emergency access. 3rd party or self hosted.
My 5c but I think you agree.
Point being as a decades old it professional I see design more important as the detail implementation.
Goddamned inflation. It used to be just 2 cents worth!
Ah crap that’s what I get for not being native English. But still, correct somehow.
I don’t believe inflation is a serious problem. But that is just my 9 cents.
Indeed, I do agree but I’ve never done anything close to this magnitude so it is kind of intimidating for me. It is a learning process though!
I’d recommend not to go containerized but that can start a flame war. I would think it easier. But best to stick to the recommended beginner tutorial that someone else posted and go along from there.
Then ask questions on the way.
I hard agree with this. I would NEVER have wanted to start with containerized setups. I know how I am, I would have given up before I made it past the second LXC. Starting as a generalized 1 server does everything and then learning as you go is so much better for beginnings. Worst case scenario is they can run docker as the later on containerized setup and migrate to it. Or they can do what I did, start with a single server setup, moved everything onto a few drives a few years later once I was comfortable with how it is, nuked the main server and installed proxmox, and hate life learning how it works for 2 or 3 weeks.
Do i regret that change? No way in hell, but theres also no way I would recommend a fully compartmentalized or containerized setup to someone just starting out. It adds so many layers of complexity.
Thanks, you put it better than I can.
You seem to imply you also want to selfhost some email service. But that’s sadly one of the few things that will always be better at a trusted third party email provider.
Besides that it seems the most important thing you want is pure data storage, and that kind of selfhosting is not hard. In many cases one would not even consider it as part of “selfhosting” as it can be as simple as a local NAS or external HDD.
So my question is what do you actually want to accomplish? Because I think for a lot of your concerns you don’t even need to go and host something.
I don’t want to replace email, per se. More so, the services that come along with it. Stuff like photo storage and sync, notes and reminder sync, calendar sync, and a lot of the hundreds of other small things that I have just been leaving up to Google that would cause a huge problem for me if I lost access.
I have the password situation handled with KeePassXC on my PCs and KeePassDX on my phone, but that’s about as far as I have come as of yet.
Keepass is a great way of password management, I use keepass as well. I also use syncthing to sync my password database across all devices and then I have the server acting as the “always on” device so I have access to all passwords at all times. Works amazing because syncthing can also be setup so when a file is modified by another device, it makes a backup of the original file and moves it to a dedicated folder (with retention settings so you can have them cleaned every so often). Life is so much easier.
For photo access you can look into immich, its a little more of an advanced setup but, I have immich looking at my photos folder in syncthing on the server, and using that location as the source. This allows me to use one directory for both photo hosting and backup/sync
Note taking? Joplin. It’s been amazing for me and replaced Evernote after they started with their BS.
Photo storage. Been using Photo prism but I’m open to a better one.
If you want to start cheap, I can recommend you to use an old notebook. In my opinion it’s the perfect home server for beginners.
- It’s cheap (most people have an unused laying around anyway)
- If it’s old enough to still have a dvd drive, you can replace it with a second sata ssd. There are cheap frames for this available.
- it has a battery, so it can shutdown if there is a power outage
- It’s slim. You can just throw it on your closet and forget about it
Most services don’t need much. So it’s just fine if your “server” is like 10 years old. My first notebook server had 2 cores and 4 GB ram and it run Proxmox with like 10 lxc containers just fine.
Awesome suggestion! Thank you.
A single misconfigured thing can suck real bad as you’ve seen.
Selfhosting involves lots of things that can be misconfigured or go bad.That’s not to scare you out of it out anything, merely to congratulate you in seeking knowledge first.
Disclaimer: I’m biased towards networks because I’m a network engineer, opinions may differ.
I would say… having at least a vague grasp of layers 1-4 of the traditional network model is a decent start.
You don’t need to understand everything, but knowing a minimum will help a lot imho.It’s hard to point you in the right direction without knowing what you already know or not.
Plus, if you end up accidentally locking yourself out of your own system: boot access means root access (Secure your IPMI/iDRAC, folks!)
Yeah. I guess that is true. The part about not being able to point me in the right direction. I have a shaky grasp of several network protocols and things of that nature. Nothing deeper than surface level at this point.
Use DietPi, it’s a great OS
I’m fairly technical but I honestly don’t know where to begin either. Also trying to improve our personal security to an extent.
Hope you get some answers
I’m about 90% decoupled from Google, it’s been a journey.
I’m at the difficult stage of contemplating how to decom my gmail email, and the Google account itself.
I’ll throw my hat in the ring and offer any help if you need it. Similar to others here, I suggest you start with something discrete like photos.
I will probably get flogged by this answer but here it goes:
I’d throw you right into the deep end: get a spare machine (an old laptop or PC) and install proxmox on it. Play around, breaks shit, delete the container/VM and start over.
Grab stuff from the Community Helper Scripts and see new stuff, try alternatives, see what works for you and don’t be afraid of breaking stuff.
It takes a bit longer and some basic concepts might fly over your head, but the stuff you learn like this, you learn by heart.
It’s been a few years since I started tinkering with a laptop with a busted video output circuit. Now I serve NextCloud and Immich to my family, keep receipts and documents neatly organised on Paperless, have a decent arr stack and a bunch of extra goodies. All from “a PC without video? Might as well make a server” now with a proper machine with several drives on ZFS pools, health checks and redundancy.
Its a helluva rabbit hole.
I was unaware that those Community Helper Scripts existed! They should definitely be helpful at some point down the road!
Good luck!
I really wish people would realize the level of dependency, and thus leverage, these companies have encouraged us to give them, before they learn it first hand.
Yeah, it was dumb. I should have thought about it long before what occured, but I didn’t. But, in the end, I definitely learned my lesson.
You’re not dumb, we are all being brainwashed into sticking our asses in the air and convinced we won’t get fucked.
if it seems daunting, which it is!, maybe it would be a good piont to ask yourself if you really need to run a server and these self hosted web apps in the first place. i did for about 10 years but i realised at some point i didnt need half of it.
if youre planning on having multiple users or want to share one of the services (like real time editing of files or passwords etc) then thats where self hosted stuff makes sense to me, but if not then syncthing can do a lot without needing any complicated setup
keepass is a good example. or note taking apps like jopin or obsidian where the data is store in plain text and where you can choose where the data is stored works great with syncthing
for about a year before i did any self hosted stuff i was running only syncthing on my laptop and phone without any server so its do-able and you can get started right now and worry about getting a server later.
tailscale is a huge help as well and is very easy to setup. say you repurpose an old laptop as a server for now and install whatever services on it, jellyfin for example, you will only be able to access that when you are on your home network but not when you are away, and thats where tailscale comes in. as long as its installed on each device you should be able to connect to your apps/services from anywhere.
basically you can start small and then over the coming months and years as you learn more you will get more confident about moving onto more complicated setups
I have set up KeePassXC and KeepassDX, but that’s about as far as I have gotten thus far. I’m currently trying to figure out Obsidian for notes and a general knowledge base.