I can't think of any other use for it besides a VPN.

On my home server (just an older desktop PC)

- qBittorrent for "Linux ISOs"

- Jellyfin so I can watch/read/listen to my "Linux ISOs"

- Tailscale so me, my family and friends can watch/read/listen to my "Linux ISOs" from anywhere in the world

- Self hosting my photo albums. Immich is a handy choice for this. Very useful for personal photos you don't want to trust to strange tech companies.

- Gitea for self-hosting git repos for some personal projects I have not open-sourced.

> - Tailscale so me, my family and friends

If you're privacy conscious, please be aware that Tailscale by default is creating behavioral metadata from all of those computers for the Room 641As of the world about everything you do on your supposedly “private” network: https://tailscale.com/docs/features/logging

“This includes real-time events for open and close events for every inter-machine connection (TCP or UDP) on your network.”

o no, they’re seeing open and close events between my laptop and my vps and database. the fbi will surely bring the hammer down on me

i literally do not care about that metadata

Sad

Why? It's TCP/UDP connection data for troubleshooting you can turn off. No privacy issue there.

> connection data for troubleshooting you can turn off. No privacy issue there.

You can't turn off the centralised element of Tailscale though, i.e. IP tracking etc.

So for the privacy conscious Tailscale remains a poor choice. Especially as they operate under US jurisdiction:

     - "Tailscale US Inc., a Delaware corporation with registered address at 447 Sutter St Ste 405 #543, San Francisco, CA 94108, USA"
     - "For any dispute not subject to arbitration you and Tailscale agree to submit to the personal and exclusive jurisdiction of and venue in the federal and state courts located in New York, NY".

So CLOUD, PATRIOT and friends very much apply to Tailscale.

You may jest "but its only metadata", but you can do a lot with metadata, especially if its all nicely attractively centralised like Tailscale.

I ran Headscale for a while, and now wireguard directly, but never really considered it to be more private.

What is Tailscale getting that my ISP and google/Facebook via their pixels and tracking scripts aren't?

> You may jest "but its only metadata", but you can do a lot with metadata, especially if its all nicely attractively centralised like Tailscale.

Like? What exactly could they plausibly do, that I should care about, if I otherwise have no reason to worry about these institutions?

good alternatives that do near the same thing?

Netbird, been using it for about 6 months now with no complaints. Fully OSS, mobile clients, etc.

self-hosted open source alternative Headscale/Headplane. Uses the Tailscale client without their SaaS being involved.

Same! Although, for Headplane you may need at least 1GB of RAM.

Headscale turns the $5 VPS into the thing that connects my laptop to my other compute resources while I am out and about.

How do you know their client won't send them the metadata anyway?

What's the advantage of Tailscale anyway? I guess ease of use compared to say setting up IPSEC? I haven't played with it yet but from what I read it's just wireguard with a bit of proprietary "one click and sell your soul" magic around it?

Tailscale automates wireguard key distribution and then layers routing, DNS, network ACLs, and other niceties on top.

For example, you can create a token that grants VPN access with inbound SSH as the only allowed traffic. Add that as a secret to GitHub Actions and now you can ad-hoc debug failing CI via `tailscale ssh`.

It's a VPN essentially but just works easily and affordably. We don't stress on managing keys, secrets etc and it's SSO friendly.

Sanctum! Entirely free and open-source and PQ-secure.

https://sanctorum.se

tl;dr

> no mobile clients

You can ask an LLM to set up a wireguard network for you with an idempotent bash script to deploy everything. You'll need a $5 VPS to bounce everything through. Works an absolute treat.

Is that the prompt you would use, or is there more to it?

You could try with that as a prompt. I have a repo set up with all of my sysadmin scripts and so the LLM had that as additional context.

The wireguard docs are pretty good, and it's probably worth it at least a little to actually understand what it does.

https://www.wireguard.com/quickstart/

Actually I wish they would be a lot more verbose and explain the details a little bit better.

Yep and the LLM can help explain, but it is actually super straightforward. Public key cryptography and the text file configs are tiny.

Netbird has a self hosted option

Netbird!

I saw all the Netbird recs here so looked into it briefly. Depends I guess on what you use Tailscale for. Tailscale Funnel is easy and stable. Self-hosted on Netbird is ... a bit more involved.

Definitely a place for both services, IMO.

I picked up a new hobby of buying Linux ISOs from thrift stores. I usually get them for $1/each. Up to 300 now - all mine. Jellyfin is great to organize them

I have some Linux ISOs I ripped myself, but it can be especially hard to find older ISOs from other countries - you usually can't find them on normal websites. It's really nice to have them on my own server and not worry about them disappearing someday.

I’ve been collecting a lot of post-war Italian neorealism Linux ISOs and running a DHT indexer has made it pretty easy to find distros that may be out of print.

It’s so hard to find drivers for those

$1 won't get you Linux ISOs up to modern display standards. Great if that works for you but the high end is more like $20+ (emphasis on the +, taxes and shipping not included) per Linux ISO so its understanding why many might prefer sharing them digitally. And that's before getting into cases where the Linux ISO vendors don't even want to give you the specific version you want.

Did you see the 'thrift store' part of his comment? I do the same thing as him, and depending on the location around town, an ISO on a DVD can be as little as 50 cents, and a modern Linux ISO on bluray, including 4K (though rare I see those) are rarely over maybe $3.

Problem is the resolution. I don't want to experience paid 480p in a world of free 4k.

Blu rays aren't bad either. The glory days were back when Netflix was cheap and there was an oversupply (in that era I built up a library of hundreds), but even today you can get most things in 1080p for $10 or less.

If you don't think 2 hours of professionally produced content is worth $10, well that's why AI isn't the only thing destroying art and culture.

The issue with Blu-rays is they are costly to rip. Basically, the only software that let you do it right now is MakeMKV, and it's proprietary. I believe that the VLC team is working on some open-source solutions, but last time I checked, it was only able to read old Blu-ray (which is understandable, they have to care about potential copyright and drm issue, unlike the people behind makemkv).

So if you want to rip recent Blu-ray, you will need to buy makemkv (they do have a 1-month trial tho). But worse, if you want to rip 4k Blu-ray, you will need a specific br-drive that makemkv support (as I understand, they make custom / modified firmware for some drives, allowing to read the protected data). The issue is that there is barely anyone still making br drives and whenever makemkv support one it goes out of stock and/or become extremely expensive on the second hand market.

This is really annoying me because I know this is the end of the physical market for movie. I fully expect Blu-ray to completely die off in a few years. Movie will probably only be available through streaming services, which means it will be harder and harder to get a good quality encoding. With recent codecs (av1, h265, will see how av2 does), the quality that streaming services is okay, but we are far from what a full Blu-ray dump allows today.

MakeMKV has an effectively perpetual free trial right now. It's not like old shareware were you have to pay after a month but rahter that you have to feed it a new free activation key every month and maybe wait a couple of days for one to be posted.

That can change (and the official communication is that its only free while in beta) but my guess is that the free beta is the main thing holding back alternatives. MakeMKV does solid work but it's not rocket science and a lot of parts (like all the complementary LibreDrive / UHD firmware work) doesn't even have a paid license check at all.

> I fully expect Blu-ray to completely die off in a few years.

I don't. It might continue to shrink and thereby get more expensive but the distributor market is still very healthy and has more active competition than movie production itself. The biggest danger is disc production but I don't think its impossible to shift that over to a BD-on-USBFlash or whatever else is convenient if needed.

1080p doesn't really say much when that could be an old DVD-era master with questionable color correction crammed onto a BD25 disc with other features/extras vs a modern archival-quality master professionally encoded to 40+ GB.

It's rare that the latter goes for < $10.

I'm back in to collecting physical media as well. I get my wife to use her Facebook account to find stuff on marketplace. Lightly used bundles can get movies down to like a dollar per.

I hate blueray. At least for having physical copies. Too many times I've tried watching something I own only to have it fail due to my player not having current decryption keys. Perhaps it's more of a player issue and less of a disc issue, but it's still a problem with the overall format.

MakeMKV hasn't failed me yet. As always, only people fully abiding by corporate rules suffer.

In France many public libraries let you rent them for free (or a ridiculously low annual subscription); you take them home, copy them, return them, and it costs nothing.

And it is legal to do so ! We pay the "copie privé" tax for that reason.

Same with USA. I was surprised at the variety of platforms supported.

Hmm, public DVDs I know often have read errors.

ISOs of what, music or video?

What kind of thrift store sells these? In what country?

I suspect "Linux ISOs" are not actual Linux .iso images but ~pirated~ movies, music, and digital books ;)

Joking aside, a few early commercial Linux distro (Red Hat, Yellow Dog, SuSe, Corel Linux) had really nice packaging and media artworks. I'd love to collect them.

Yes, seriously, my intro to linux as a kid was seeing the slick Red Hat boxed media on the shelves at CompUSA.

ding ding ding

No way!

Thrift stores? Really?

Yes there’s usually a good cache for very cheap though most are scratched up

is this an internet secret code I am missing ?

It's even in the Urban Dictionary [1]:

> Linux ISO: A codeword for copyrighted material shared without permission, usually over P2P networks.

[1] http://linux-iso.urbanup.com/2782626

Many Linux ISOs are distributed via torrents.

Ask yourself what other types of media can be had on popular torrent sites.

The two things that torrents are best at are downloading Linux ISOs and pirating content. So using qbittorrent to download Linux ISOs is usually code for piracy, since torrenting Linux ISOs is legal and piracy is not :)

Piracy is legal if you're big enough

GitHub also has free private repositories, but I guess your server has a much better uptime than them.

why not use just usbx for your "iso" needs - it costs $5-$15/month and might be cheaper than your home kwh usage and is less headache

In my neck of the woods "Linux ISOs" is a euphemism for porn.

It is generous of you to share your "Linux ISOs" with your family and friends.

"Linux ISOs" is just anything pirated in general.

I’ve usually heard it as a euphemism for torrents specifically, since these would be one of the main legal uses of torrents.

All my Linux ISOs are actually FreeBSD.

Mine are temple OS

First time I heard this. When did it start? It's pretty funny.

Very common on Slashdot fifteen or twenty years ago. The Pirate Bay trial was a big story back then, for instance, and there was advocacy from the copyright cartels to ban the bittorrent protocol. Another hot story was when Comcast dropped customers for using too much data despite being on “unlimited” plans, justified because only a pirate would download so much. Hence, “You can’t do that, I use bittorrent to download my Linux ISOs!”

It really was common in the early 2000s for Linux distros to provide torrent downloads. Internet speeds were such that downloading peer‐to‐peer could be significantly faster, and (probably more importantly) it saved the distro mirrors a lot of bandwidth. I think this practice has mostly died out among newer distros, but distros from the era such as Ubuntu or Arch still provide them.

Thanks!

> Self hosting my photo albums

I used to do this, until I learned the value of offsite backups.

Learn from my mistake (if you aren't already :) ).

I use backblaze with restic. Got about 300GB up there, fully encrypted, keys in 1Password.

That's why you always practice 3-2-1 with important data.

My photos are on: Captured devices(phones, camera). Immich on my homelab, and google photo(which is lossy, but better than nothing).

Proton Drive may work better here?

I am honestly not sure. I use GG photo because that what i use first and i was too lazy to investigate better deal. Also, i know Google does really well at keeping my data available, which is what you want for backup.

One mistake with your google account and poof, everything is gone.

Granted, an average person most likely will never mess up, but in google-land the surface area where to make that mistake is quite large.

Luckily i have 321 back up, don't i ?

I didn't check ToS of proton drive, but in my experience, every cloud storage has requirement about what kind of data is allowed to store(after all, they dont want to accidentally store illegal stuff).

I have an encrypted offsite backup. A lot of people I know with home servers work out a deal with a family member to have cross-backups with each other.

What ist your plan if you die? Do you have a spouse that will be able to read your-and-your-spouses data?

Sadly I don’t have a family member that I can trust with that, but I do put an encrypted copy on AWS glacier and I have an encrypted volume in Dropbox.

Yeah I do something similar, a local backup on an external drive that mostly lives in a different place and a last resort backup in glacier

I just purchased a hetzner storage box and used claude to configure kopia to backup to it.

I then tested restore vis kopia desktop onto my desktop to validate restore works.

13 eur for 5tb is more than enough for immich backups for my personal use.

That’s sad :( Where do You backup offsite now?

What happened?? As someone who is currently doing this without backups…

I moved homes and damaged both drives because they traveled together.

I have mine in a RAID 5 setup rn because I was scared about that, but I definitely should set up offsite backups, it’s just so expensive

Raid is not a backup :( For the really important data (photos, documents, ecc) a small 1GB raspberry pi + USB external HDD works great as a Borg server for daily backup, there is no need for a full NAS when you can store all important data in less the a handful of terabytes

A raid is one layer and one copy in a backup.

Inherently to inner copy it provides some redundancy.

Backups need more than one copy.

RAID is not a backup because anything happening within that file system happens to both drives immediately.

ZFS snapshots can help, but this is one layer of a comprehensive backup strategy.

both drives? Only 2 mirrored drives isn't really what a RAID can be.

Constructing a RAID5 with 4 drives provides failover and recovery if one of the drives dies.

You can have as much redundancy as you like on your RAID, but if you fat finger an rm -r it's all gone.

A real backup protects both against hardware faults and accidental deletion.

I use RAID1 so that each disk can be pulled and used as standalone.

HDD failure probably

Or a house fire, or flood...

Yeah. Which is why I use Ente.com. But I should have a offsite backup of ente.com copy self-hosted as well maybe.

So not a $5 VPS

read the OP, they mentioned home servers too

I have a seedbox for Linux ISOs and then sync to my home NAS with Syncthing. That way I can use private trackers and get a healthy ratio.

How are you sharing tailscale with your family and friends? do you run the server yourself?

Tailscale is free for home use and lets you invite people to your network by email

If your server is 100W that's 72kWh a month. If your electricity average is more than 7 cents an hour then it's cheaper to run a $5 server.

N100/N95 idling at <5W and ~20W on full load while also quite performant

While it's probably the case for a desktop PC, a new mac-mini has an idle power draw of < 5W.

~10W is what my socket reports for regular use on the M2 Pro.

They are not cheap anymore, unfortunately, but at least you get much more performance out of them than you would from some $5 VPS.

Good luck finding a $5 server with enough storage for a decent Linux ISO collection.

usbx gives you 1tb for that which is enough unlike you're an archivist

intriguing list

How many Linux ISOs are stored on your $5 VPS? One?

Like I said, this is on an old desktop PC that I shoved some spare SSDs into. I have a few thousand Linux ISOs on there. I have an rclone job running regular encrypted offsite backups as well, so that my Linux ISOs are safe from hardware issues.

How are you adding new Linux ISOs? Do you prune the ISOs you've already installed somewhere, or are they kept around to be re-installed?

> How are you adding new Linux ISOs?

With qBittorrent.

> Do you prune the ISOs you've already installed somewhere, or are they kept around to be re-installed?

I keep them all. Compression algorithms are pretty good these days, as is storage density.

I'm surprised you save much space since ISOs are usually stored in already compressed formats

Weirdly, my "Linux ISOs" are compressed in x265 :)

Which is only marginally more effecient than the H.264 encoding that many of them are delivered in. And the biggest shiniest Linux ISOs already use H.265 out of the box.

No he means a full length Linux ISO can be as small as 700 MB, I personally prefer 1.4 GB

I prefer my Linux ISOs to one or two orders of magnitude more fully featured than that.

Does this mean you have to decompress your "ISOs" when you want to watch them ? Does jellyfin support this ?

They're compressed in x265, most web browsers can decompress that natively ;) Heck, when you watch something on YouTube you are decompressing the content ont he fly

But yes, Jellyfin can also natively transcode formats on the fly if you stick a GPU in there: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/transcoding/

Oh i thought you went 1 step further, compress all those "ISO" into 1 single blob.

Since Linux ISOs demand random access for a good user experience most of the relevant compression formats support that and so compressing as a blob wouldnt't really get you much but also not prevent individual access.

Whaaaaaat? That's illegal! I'm just an OS enthusiast!

We all enjoy a bit of sailing on the OS (Open Sea)

Especially using Sailfish OS

Boomers like to prove they can still have fun

As a gen-x'er, it's my birthright

Going to ask this here, but not sure there's a great answer. My 'homelab' runs mullvad over which I download my Linux ISOs. I tried to set up tailscale, with headscale on a $5 VPS, but the multiple VPN interfaces seemed like a challenge. Is this doable?

I have so much personal automation and small web apps running on my VPS, laptop, and on my phone it's hard to know where to start.

- laptop, phone (termux), Linux VPS, and home inference machine can all see each other on the same Wireguard network via the VPS.

- Todo list web app for our family shopping list. Used daily for many years now.

- Personal daily updating dashboard with important numbers I care about, life metrics, weather, etc.

- Projects priority list which tells me what to do each day based on last update for each project (each project has a desired frequency of work and it prioritises by "lateness"). Checks git activity and RSS feeds to see what I'm neglecting.

- "Note to self" app and voice automation which transcribes and adds to my Joplin notebook on my laptop.

- AI agent on my phone I can long-press power button and give spoken commands ("add milk to the shopping list"). Uses private home inference machine, see below.

- Social media POSSE syndication scripts. Mastodon posts are syndicated to other networks.

- Blog posting pipeline from my Joplin notebook out to the web.

- Home inference machine (mostly solar powered) I use for personal finance, automation, note search, and other sensitive AI tasks.

- Self-hosted calendar and contacts (separate VPS but same idea).

I don't log in to Google at all. With LLMs now it's very little work to build and maintain these things. Absolutely wild time to be a home tinkerer.

What do you use for you self-hosted calendar and contracts? I'm mostly de-googled but contacts especially have been problematic.

Also, what inference hardware are you using that's so efficient you can do it solar powered?

Anyone have ACLs or tips on them for securing their tailscale? I'm concerned at the ability for lateral without wanting to sacrifice convenience.

ACLs are super simple and work well, just dig into them. I use groups as rbac (one group per role), and share parts of my network with friends/family (game servers), and colleagues (work collab stuff, such as live coding).

Toggling users on/off also works great, and disabled users don't count towards the limit.

I use tags. For example, anything with a server tag can accept ingress ssh connections but not egress.

> "Absolutely wild time to be a home tinkerer."

This!! There is no end to the side projects and idea lists, and all of them feel possible

What stack do you use for that home inference? I’m rolling my own with gemma4, but even with Claude helping with the implementation it’s a lot of moving pieces to figure out.

Ollama running Meta's Glimmer model at the moment. I find it really capable for what I'm doing and it doesn't suffer censorship problems.

Are you using the API or is it self hosted as well?

(sorry if this question doesn't make sense)

Vps:

  * kubernetes for learning and a lot of followup just because it enable easy deployment t9 play around witg things (argocd, openbao, uptime kuma, victoriametrics, cnpg/postgres, cloud beaver, traefik)
  * keycloak for everything that supports it or can be made to support it without patching it
  * personal website (via WordPress)
  * grafana for monitoring my side project
  * foundry to play DSA with friends
  * various small hobby stuff
  * best: paperless ngx

The kubernetes infra was a pain to setup once, and a docker manager like portainer would have been enough. It was fun to learn and the declarative argocd flow makes it really easy to deploy small projects to try them out, especially as I can now ask Claude to generate all the yamls, I commit and all is up.

Minipc:

  * proxmox host
  * home assistant
  * open media vault, jelly fin for digital versions of my DVDs because it is easier than using the physical dvds
  * past: opencode/Claude dev VMs
  * Hermes to play CEO for my side project (just as an advisor, he has little actual connectivity)
  * pihole for local dns and adguard
  * Caddy for local tls

(half the ram died on my minipc making Claude dev annoying so I moved it to my pc as an on demand vm)

By my standards (lowendspirit.com) $5/month is kind of high end for a VPS. I have a small personal web site on a $4 per year VPS. Other than that I have another VPS (I think around $7/m with 500GB of HDD) that I use as a personal storage server and git repo since its internet connection is much faster than my home one, etc. For a while I ran some monitoring tasks on VPSes, though I don't have any active right now.

tierhive.com has super cheap VPS, as low as 10 cents/month for a tiny one (128MB ram, 1GB SSD). ipv6 only, with a NAT proxy for ipv4 I think. It's quite possible to run a useful basic Debian server on that. I ran one with 32MB ram for a while.

Where do you get it ($4/Year VPS, presumably with IPv4 as it is used for a website) from?

It was a promo from Virmach.com. They offer stuff like that around black friday. I've had it for years. You can run a website on v6 NAT though. v6 providers like Tierhive use HAProxy to forward your traffic from v4 port 80 to your v6. You can also just set up an AAAA record and run a pure v6 website. That would probably work fine for my super low traffic thing.

Does that support HTTP/3 with TLS over QUIC (instead of TCP)

I don't know. Maybe I'll look into it sometime. I think I'd just use v6, or NAT with http/2. If you really need v4 you can still do it pretty cheap. Look on lowendspirit.com.

Nuts i thought Hetzner had the cheapest options.

Go to LowEndTalk and Hezner will feel like the priciest option. You’ll need a good tolerance for shadiness though.

Having never been on LowEndTalk, what do you mean by shadiness?

It’s a forum for low end providers. You’re dealing with largely unheard of providers often with seemingly impossibly low prices, so you have to wonder if quoted specs are real (yeah before anyone tells me, the “reputable” flat rate providers are also oversubscribed), whether they’ll disappear on moment’s notice or without notice, whether you can trust your data with them, etc.

lowendtalk is shady in its own right (long story). lowendspirit is sort of a fork of it and is much better. hostballs.com is another one of those, still around but much slower.

Upcloud has the cheapest I found, you can get a full VPS for less than $4.

They have the cheapest trustworthy options.

Due to RAMpocalypse prices have greatly increased

bookstack

keycloak

immich

jellyfin

several personal sites

home assistant

unsloth studio

several synology tools on a nas (drive/security/backups)

etc...

If it's "just you" your laptop is likely fine. Hosted tools really start to shine when you've got a group of folks using them. Ex - Wife/Parents/Kids/Extended Family.

Simple k3s cluster and the shallow end of kubernetes actually saves you a ton of time and effort (don't go into complex orchestrators or helm charts - just write small deployments in static yaml). You can get to roughly the same spot with just docker/compose if you want, but the capabilities cap out earlier (ex - multi-machine, resilient to any one machine going down, gpu sharding, etc)

Maintenance is basically "sudo pacman -Syyu" on a cron job.

I use Yggdrasil [0] to connect my computers. This ensures they are always connected within a flat, private IPv6 namespace. However, two computers cannot find each other if they are both behind NAT on different networks. At least one of them must be reachable by the other via TCP. That’s why I use the cheapest VPS I could find as a globally accessible Yggdrasil hub. I’ve been running it this way for many years now, and it works flawlessly. I can even assign names for the IPv6 addresses using regular DNS, which makes things very convenient.

I also run a few personal web services: Immich, Gitea, Bookstack, Jellyfin, and more. That cheap VPS couldn't handle it. I run the services on a computer in my home office. Caddy runs on the VPS with one proxy line per service. Data is, of course, exchanged via Yggdrasil. The domains for the various services all map to the VPS’s IP addresses. Caddy then handles the routing correctly. The system works simply. I can even run storage-intensive services like Jellyfin, and it only costs me a few euros for the VPS.

[0] https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/

Can you tell how you configured the tool to accomplish this? It sounds very convenient!

Does it mean that the VPS has to be in-between all the traffic, or do we punch holes through the NAT for direct connections?

> Can you tell how you configured the tool to accomplish this?

The Yggdrasil client is installed on every computer. I'm running Debian. I have no idea how well it works on Mac or Windows. Yggdrasil assigns a key pair to each computer.

On the VPS, the config is modified in two places:

    Listen: [
      tcp://[::]:51350
    ]

This makes the VPS listen for Yggdrasil connections.

    AllowedPublicKeys: [ 
      pubkey1
      pubkey2
      pubkey3
      ...
    ]

This ensures that it only accepts connections from the specified computers. You can also leave that part out. But then any Yggdrasil client out there could connect to your VPS.

Note that this is only the config for the VPS.

I only make one change to the config of the other computers:

    Peers: [
      tcp://hub.mydomain.tld:51350
    ]

This causes them to actively connect to the VPS.

> Does it mean that the VPS has to be in-between all the traffic, or do we punch holes through the NAT for direct connections?

It depends. If the computers can reach each other on a local network, the Yggdrasil clients will automatically find each other and connect. To do this, you wouldn't have had to change anything in the default configuration. you would simply have had to install and start the Yggdrasil client on the computers.

With NAT in between, they wouldn’t connect on their own. But since they’re configured to actively connect to the hub in any case, they can still see each other via the hub and exchange data even in this scenario. Yggdrasil handles routing and NAT traversal. If both paths are available (locally or via the VPS), Yggdrasil defaults to the local path. But in the general case (where all other computers are behind NAT), all traffic would go through the VPS.

Special case: If only one of the two computers is behind NAT and you want a direct connection, then the accessible computer corresponds to the VPS in the configuration above.

“ Anything that saved enough time or replaced enough subscriptions to justify keeping it around?”

You’re going to get a lot of affirmative answers here, which is maybe what you’re looking for. Maybe you’re brainstorming.

But I’ll affirm what you’ve probably been thinking all along: It’s not worth it. I set up a Lenovo ThinkCentre to be my personal Linux server running on my home network. I could use it for backups, ssh, taskwarrior, etc. It did solve some problems.

It also creates problems. The biggest is that it’s another computer to maintain. It needs updates. Critically, it needs security. You need to secure the ports and services, use vpn, etc.

I found that none of the gains were worth the maintenance. For my problem set, it’s easier to keep multiple cheap laptops in multiple locations and use a flash drive (rather than network) to move data between them.

For backups, specialized cloud services (currently Arq going to B2) does the job better, along with Carbon Copy Cloner to a local volume.

For me, having to maintain and secure it was too much work. A vps may have been easier in some ways, but harder in others.

So in the end you may be right: just run things on your laptop.

  > For me, having to maintain and secure it was too much work. A vps may have been easier in some ways, but harder in others.

For security you simply setup Tailscale and only allow private network to access your VPS -> 1h max to setup

Maintenance is running upgrades once a week/month -> 10mn

Depending on how critical your data is, you can rely on the provider's backup policy or setting up something as simple as a cron rsync on an external provider -> 2h to setup

Beelink mini PC, I think S12 with N100 and 16 GB RAM, purchased before the rampocalypse...

Immich, Jellyfin, Gonic, Snapcast, Slskd, Audiobookshelf, Transmission, Automatic Ripping Machine, Vaultwarden, Frigate, Home Assistant, Actual Budget, Pocketbase, Vikunja, Forgejo, Readeck, Backrest/Restic, Gotify, Uptime Kuma, Homepage, Caddy, Shared network folder with spouse

I also run Cockpit and Beszel but don't use them often.

Router runs Adguard, Wireguard, and OpenVPN.

What's your strategy for juggling all of these on only 16GB? Docker?

I have a similar amount running on a 16GB NUC in proxmox LXCs and it usually sits at less than half memory usage.

The only big memory guzzlers are generally proprietary software, like the unifi network controller software which basically requires an entire room of Cray supercomputers just to view your Wifi AP status.

Probably half run natively, and half on podman as systemd quadlets.

I specifically look for efficient projects when I have a choice. Also most of my video media is in 720p. The 8 IP cameras I run in lower resolution as well, though that's mainly to avoid network bandwidth issues.

Honestly I have not run into any memory issues.

That all probably fits comfortably in like 12-14GB easily

Why do you need both wireguard and ovpn ?

Wireguard is easier to set up and add clients so I did that first, but it does not work over my phone's mobile data connection due to carrier filtering, whereas OpenVPN does. Also doesn't hurt to have two options.

Different platforms Tinker, tailor, ...?

Might as well add Tailscale if there's already those two. And IPSec.

For less than half that, I host my personal email with Postfix and Dovecot. Totally worth it to automate archiving and cut down on spam.

I might also have a really stupid website^H^H^H^Hpage "counting" how many hours of daylight we saved. (Hint: It's just a static page with the number 0 on it.)

Too many. Ended up getting a $100 physical machine from Hetzner and doing virtualization - was cheaper than keeping all the VPSes.

For starters, a VPS for each claude code project (with a simple orchestrator and project creator).

I'm also playing lowkey with small ESP32 powered automations, and having a VPS to monitor them, show a web interface and push updates. And I've just added a small REPL like module.

Hehe, I started out with good and frugal intentions but my $5/month Hetzner VPS has turned into a $100/month bill. I love exploring all kinds of data, but obviously, if you just do that on an ad hoc basis, the data gets stale. So I just setup some continuous workers and nighly batch jobs that ingest and keep certain data up to date :)

I've opened some of the data up to the public: cvrdb.dk for danish companies (working on granting users access to 'full' extracts of certain parts). ratemyaisite.com which is just a tiny subset of a larger project that I've dubbed commoncrawl-explore (cc-explore), which is run on a subdomain of my personal website, but purely for my own sake.

Making your own devex pleasant is the real game changer imho, not the VPS. I've made it easy for myself to deploy new projects using Dokploy (also tried Coolify).

I don't find the maintenance to be a problem - but part of that is not treating hobby projects as something that has to be enterprise-ready :)

I have a server that's now my Claude Code development machine, as well as a host server for the various tools I develop. Its only accessible over my tailnet.

I uninstalled Claude Code from my laptop after an incident where it got stuck on an issue and started scanning my home folder for resources. Its unacceptable and scary behavior, so now it gets it own machine where it can't touch my keys.

Maintenance is not an issue, if vm/pc setup is done correctly. Simple is better in that case. Just a docker-compose or two or three with app data stored directly on disk to be able to move things easily between VM/PC's if needed. If hosted on VPS, set up your containers to be accesible only through VPN and you're good to go.

Things i use daily-ish:

- Wireguard with wg-easy to access my home network and other way around to keep services i don't want to be seen on my network away from my ISP.

- Calibre-web for my ebooks

- Forgejo/Gitea as local git server + CrowCI for my hobby projects.

- Samba server to access my things over the network.

- Trillium for note taking.

- Nomad for my other more infra related projects

My email (postfix and dovecot), my personal website (nginx, traefik, and various apps I've written), my IRC web client (thelounge), and git repositories (gitolite) all comfortably run in 1gb of ram. Sadly it isn't enough for GitLab, but I've been meaning to attempt Gitea on it.

Yeah i just tried self-hosting GitLab again and was surprised that I was getting OOM errors when I provisioned it with an 6GB memory limit. Turns out 8GB is like, the bare minimum. Crazy

I vouch for gitea too! I have it on my home cluster with about 50 repos and some actions, 150MB memory for gitea and 50MB memory for the actions/runner pod sitting idle. Plus postgres (another < 200mb). Do keep in mind gitea does ALOT of read queries on page load so keep db and gitea close, but it's tiny!!

Try gitea. It's super lightweight and feels and looks very similar to gitlab. I did not benchmark but it feels like it needs 10% of ram and cpu of gitlab requirements. It's great.

  Tangled Knots and Spindles
  Uptime Kuma
  Umami analytics
  Netbird
  Linklater
  Miniflux
  Seafile
  A few other small apps

The rest lives on my NAS or Rock 5B as it deals with large data, backups, pictures, etc. Like Jellyfin, Immich and supporting tooling.

A $4 a month personal private movie logging project for my friends and family. Was a pain to keep up with everyone's emails and text messages about what they were watching, or what they recommend. Simple, and serves its purpose wonderfully. https://mymovielog.com

My personal homepage.

I dont know how much value there is to that, but i like having an apache server just running on the internet with a page on it. After all it is only $5

Its also useful in a pinch if i have to transfer files somewhere. upload with scp then download with http is easy, and i dont have to worry about third party services or anything.

After having traveled the world, hearing "only $5" reminds me of how how far that goes in some places. Right now I have a friend in Nepal renting a 2 bedroom house for $58/month. I have another friend in Nepal that's earns less than $100/month, and is able to afford they're own place to live alone.

So, you'd get 1/11 of a renting a house in Nepal, so?

right, but curious why not use github + cloudflare pages = totally free and far better infrastructure/scaling. Also for file transfers, there's wormhole (which also handles huge files)

Not GP, but I also run a cheap VPS to host my personal website. I don't want to depend on GitHub or Cloudflare. I don't need better infrastructure or scaling, and $5 is ~0.03% of my monthly salary, which is indistinguishable from free. What benefit is there to using a more complicated platform to host a simple website?

which is fine if you have good reasons not to depend on them (you can actually do the same kind of thing with a bunch of things) and somehow depend on whoever provides your cheap VPS instead? I have a VPS as well for bots (digital ocean), though VPS hosts containers and the containers run the bots. A decade or so ago I used VPS for websites, but now it seems a lot simpler using things like cloudflare. Thing about websites on little VPS's you have to be more concerned about patching/security etc which you can mostly automate but really need alerting then for when it goes wrong. Which all seems way more hassle.

Sure there are plenty of options out there, but its kind of nice to just have my own thing.

As far as scaling, it's apache serving static html. Even on a $5 vps it would be incredibly difficult to saturate that.

Also sometimes i just want a host to try things on and experiment with.

What does Cloudflare add over just plain GitHub Pages?

(I'm familiar with and use them both, but have never bothered putting my personal GitHub page behind CF, I'm curious to see where other people get value from combining.)

Personally I'd just use Cloudflare Pages, unlike GitHub Pages I can let the backing repo private. Maybe OC originally started with GitHub Pages and wants some analytics and filtering with Cloudflare.

honestly I would rather not have a personal website than be beholden to some big company to host it and have to worry about what random crap they would pull via some flaky automated ToS enforcement.

You just listed off 3 different services, probably involves even more than that.

Bro has a single server and ssh.

what difference does that make? if you have to install 3 different things, same difference. There is no real burden in using 2 services, weird way to evaluate it. FYI wormhole is just a program https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole

I've been self-hosting since 1999---first with a co-located server (perks of working at a small web hosting company) and now with a VPS. I host not only my own email and web site, but also DNS, SSH, gopher, gemini, and qotd. It's not as much work as you might think. But what works for me might not work for others.

Same, since 1999. My thoughts are if you did all this stuff before it got cloudy out, it’s already a routine that’s second nature/familiar and switching actually looks way more of an undertaking with way more risks. I could see how those coming to it later just became cloud native in a sense and never did the full admin stuff, so it looks equally risky, cumbersome and laborious

meh, but then you have to keep track of the changing landscape for not much benefit.

Meanwhile, i have been apt-get install'ing apache since i was a teenager, and it still all works the same.

lol GitHub is down all the time.

An external uptime monitor seems like a useful fit for a small VPS: it can check whether your home server or websites are reachable even when your laptop is off.

I recently closed down a VPS I had been running for the last 10 years. Mostly used it for hosting a personal website and some smaller other static sites, as well as git repo backups.

After getting into home assistant and setting up a proper home server I no longer saw a need to keep the VPS running. With cloudflare reverse proxy I can still host personal websites, but from inside my home network. Since getting the home server I'm discovering a lot of neat self hosted options and use it a lot more than I ever did the VPS. If nothing else, hosting your own stuff provides a great place to learn and explore. It doesn't have to be always on/on the internet for that to be true though.

There’s a lot. You can surprisingly run a competent web application with a React client, Go backend, and SQLite DB. Go in particular is very efficient on small compute instances.

It’s definitely a way to get a competitive advantage over others that rely on more traditional architecture.

Bastion host! My home servers do all the heavy lifting and then go through the VPS as a sacrificial server

In my case Pangolin as a secured gateway to my homelab services.

https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin

Linkding [0] has replaced Pinboard for me.

[0]: https://linkding.link/

An appointment finder for the Berlin citizen's office. It looks for available appointments and broadcasts them to people via websockets. A frontend shows a calendar of available appointments and makes a sound when new slots are available.

Now the city got its act together and appointments are easy to find, but for a while it was very useful. I'm glad to say that this service is ready to be shut down.

https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/appointment-finder

Damn. Thanks for the amazing work. I used it to get my first-ever appointment in Berlin, around ~2yrs ago.

I'm surprised that so far nobody has mentioned using one for a password store. The 'pass' utility has git integration and encourages you to have a git remote somewhere to host a duplicate of your encrypted store. For over a decade I have had a cloud VM costing a few cents a month to do this.

I would be terrified of the server being breached and having my passwords/key material leaked.

Well the passwords are GPG encrypted, so they'd need your private key too, not just breach the server. What sites you have accounts on is visible though.

Where is it hosted that costs a few cents per month?

Uh, where are you getting a “cloud VM” for a few cents per month?

Not the OP but https://lowendbox.com/blog/1-vps-1-usd-vps-per-month/ lists multiple for around $10/year. I'd say that is more than a few cents per month but it is less than a dollar...

That's probably because `pass` is a dumb idea if you have a phone or a Windows PC and want to access your passwords there.

There are great clients for both phones and windows machines.

I vibe code a lot of little projects. Specialized calculators (math, programming, electronics, etc.), an SVG maker for my laser cutter, a blueprint explorer for my condo, various little graphics projects (visualizers for space, math, physics, etc.), games, and so on. I made a little tool to publish these to a subdomain with the ability to selectively make them public or available only via my Tailnet. I also host an LLM and some things at home that the VPS can access if it needs.

I just use a $10/yr VPS with one core, 1 GB RAM, and I forget how much storage. It's more than enough. None of my things need much storage, and if they did I could pull them over Tailscale from home.

Not quite a VPS, but I recently found a box of old single-board computers that were collecting dust: a RasPi Zero W, an MK802+, a DragonBoard, a BeagleBone, and some others. All pretty ancient and I wasn't super motivated to go scrounging for working Linux images. But Codex did a great job of building images for them and getting them running with minimal intervention. So now I have one running with the sole purpose of keeping a persistent tmux session going (with the terminals going to various other endpoints). I'll put the others to work in some similar way, probably.

I work on a product called Sailboxes [0], which are durable cloud VMs designed to be effectively free when idle. It's elastically powerful enough to host a Minecraft server (my preferred use case), but still scales down to near-zero resource consumption when nothing heavy is running. More recently, it's become the default cloud environment for all my coding agents, because I can control and fork its state whenever I want.

[0]: https://docs.sailresearch.com/sailboxes

I started out "self-hosting" by paying for self-hosted app instances on PikaPods, but then I learned could get a $5 VPS and run most of the same apps there for less cost overall per month while knowing very little about how it all works (using CapRover on a DigitalOcean VPS).

The main apps I run are Actual Budget (YNAB alternative), Wallabag (read-it-later service), and FreshRSS (RSS aggregator).

I've also been using the VPS to run some scripts daily for my planet site(s): they ingest RSS feeds, regenerate the static site files, and push the files to my static site host (https://pgs.sh) instead of worrying about hosting them myself (threatening the VPS's apps).

First time I hear of Actual Budget, will have a look.

An AlgoVPN server. At least, I did that some years ago, not sure if AlgoVPN is still a thing.

- Navidrome

- Jellyfin

- Vaultwarden

- Immich

- pi agent. I use it through tmux and iSH on my iPhone

- librechat. nice UI but honestly I probably jsut use pi more often

- copyparty. to visually inspect whatever I create with pi, and to access my documents, to upload files I need on the server quickly and easily from any device

I'm a type-1 diabetic. I'm running Nightscout[0] on my VPS so I can sync my blood sugar from my glucose monitor to my pebble watch. Only took an hour or so to set up with the help of a coding agent.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightscout

Been running services myself for a few years now. This is what I'm lately running. Maintenance is just running apt-get update and upgrade myself every 2 weeks. Apart from that, I don't spend much time on it. The config is basically a Git repo with one folder per Docker Compose service. And then one Caddy which reverse proxies to the other services. I just give each service a unique port. Not Docker network namespaces nonsense. Everything is just a separately running Docker service and they connect via the ports.

- fx (my own blog software)

- syncthing (sync files to remote servers for backup)

- borgbackup (store old copies of files for backup; via cron)

- radicale (calendar)

- pingvin-share-x (file sharing with other people)

- Forgejo (GitHub-like clone; using it many times a day most days)

- vaultwarden (self-hosted Bitwarden)

- immich (not really using it much)

I host a searchable database of my physical books so that family and friends can search what I've got. Also if they run the same software, I can authorize their instance to work with a primitive inter-library search feature (their library has a public key and signs their request). Fun for book clubs!

It also hosts e-books, primarily so I can load up the website in an ebook reader and download my own books, rather than worry about connecting my reader up via cable and so on.

Also when I'm out, and I find a maybe interesting book, I can check if I have it or (if the price is too high) add it to my wishlist. Similar for relatives who wish to buy me a book. I live in Asia but primarily read in English, so I do have to capitalize on opportunities to buy books when they arise.

It's open-source, I've been running it a few years, you can use it if you like. It runs on a potato, so your 5$ VPS will be able to host several other things at the same time:

https://github.com/seanboyce/ubiblio

I host https://math.tejstead.com - a little website about math.

Also have my resume and other such projects on the server

I pay $2.03/month and ran seven theatre company sites including ticketing, five restaurants with online ordering, and my personal site with FreeBSD including email.

I'm curious what you use for the ticketing. Theater has pretty specific requirements, to allow customers to see the theater layout and choose their preferred seats.

These VPS no longer make much sense for self-hosting imo. I have two refurbished 32gb ram Lenovo k14 laptops (250$ each) that I use for self-hosting over tailscale and cloudflare tunnels. This is a lot of compute and very little power use.

One for personal self-hosted projects: languagetool, nextcloud, hister, syncthing, restic backups, vaultwarden, windmill.

Another for public facing web apps I host through cloudflare tunnels. As well as public facing friend tools like jellyfin via tailscale tunnels.

Everything on nixos with config repo that configs all of my machines with claude code. Restrict claude from executing `nixos-rebuild switch` and review each change before switching manually.

I do self-host but the amount of maintenance that physical machines require is a cost in itself.

You placed the laptop in a location where slowly but surely there is a dust build up in the fans? You get some issues.

Hard drives start degrading? You get some issues.

And so on, while I've been running some personal things off VPSs too and those never had a single second of downtime. My home machine is my pride and joy but for sure 1 day a year on average there is something. But much cheaper in terms of raw components and performance.

So, yeah, it makes sense if you want the things you run not become a side job/hobby.

I think you are underestimating modern hardware though I'd agree that it's more of a hobby than fire-and-forget of an VPS app.

That being said, it's really fun and claude code on nixos is excellent rn at doing all the boring grunt work while letting you remain in the "grand architect" position. Lastly, it feels really nice to have personal compute you can trust and good future investment as compute is increasing in accessibility and risk so self-hosting is really popping off right now.

Are you calling my hardware old? ;(

I strongly agree. Plus, personally, I wouldn't put a box online. I have a desktop at home that I keep off the internet. I only connect to it via ZeroTier.

I have kept a personal server for decades in one form or another. At the moment running two Optiplex 9020s (Intel I7, 8GB RAM) one running TrueNAS (and several USB hard drives) and the other is the "app" server running Debian LTS. I prefer local servers because I can usually get far more bang for my buck at the cost of the headache of putting it on the Internet. The power cost to run both is the same as a cheap VPS. Recycling old consumer/SOHO tech is probably the best bang for your buck.

File sharing, BitTorrent, and version control are my mainstay applications I've run on my servers over the years. File servers are out of trauma; I've lost too much data to trust software or hardware, and servers are the easiest way to configure stuff like RAID/ZFS as well as automated backups. BitTorrent on a server lets me be a good citizen and seed consistently. Version control right now is Forgejo, and given the nonsense at Github this is becoming a better decision by the day. There are also a number of support services like PostgreSQL and NGINX, with CRON powered backups to the fileserver.

On my local network:

- An old desktop running alpine that hosts two minecraft servers

- Another old desktop acting as a NAS. Currently planning on migrating that to a mini lenovo pc to reduce size and unify everything. I have a single HDD that I've split into partitions for projects and Linux ISOs, currently serving over samba. It also has a transmission client on it to download the Linux ISOs. Probably the most useful box on my network

- A mini lenovo PC that runs homeassistant, and in future will probably turn into my NAS, once I can find a good storage solution for it (Not much expandability inside the box itself, but it has some usb 3 ports. Id put my existing 3.5" HDD on a usb sata adapter, but they also need 12v. Currently looking into an NVME dock or multi-terabyte laptop SSDs)

- A raspberry pi that will, in future, run my website (currently still working on the software for it)

I run https://klar.im/ on slightly more but the VPS is $5–10/month for a total bill under $20.

I wrote about it a couple days ago actually https://klar.im/blog/launch-a-startup-for-15-euros-a-month

I have a couple of $10/yearly (so less than $1 a month) VPSs. (Found them on Lowendbox.com). Some uses:

- Tailscale exit nodes (I don't use them to stream Netflix or torrents over, but sometimes they're useful to browse "this content is not available in your region" sites, to use WhatsApp while transiting through Bejing airport, ...)

- Invidious

- FreshRSS.org

- Vaultwarden

- some silly scripts

I treat these as disposable and can spin them up again from daily backups if needed. So far the stability has been good as with more expensive infrastructure providers.

My home setup is not $5/month VPS but a sub $100 second hand thin client running KVM is used for: - Home Assistant

- Immich photo hosting

- Music Assistant

- Pihole

- Hister

- Invidious

Obviously the storage requirements for media and photos are higher, these go to a (more expensive) Synology NAS, and are backed up externally, but that's beyond the scope of this post. The Home Assistant + Pihole storage requirements are minimal.

Wow that’s really cheap. Are the VPS reliable?

suprisingly so... Haven't had any unplanned downtime in a couple of years. (But as I mentioned, I treat them as disposable and wouldn't miss anything if they disappeared suddenly.)

I use the free-tier Oracle server, but: Nextcloud. Minecraft server. I will probably move my Joplin and Wallabag hosting there soon, currently paying for both. I tried running a Valheim server there, but ran into bugs emulating it with FEX, unfortunately.

I use an old desktop PC.

Runs IRC bouncer, some scraping jobs, samba server for the family (mostly music and films), backs up our IMAP boxes (on iCloud and other providers).

Hosted in a cloud: a VPN Lowendtalk Is an amazing community to get offers for those.

At home: truenas and gitlab.

At home, for work: I have an older HP workstation with an older Xeon with 24 physical cores and it runs a rhel (I have them for free as a partner) and I use it to run VMs for experiments and replicating infras, K8S, Windows AD stuff, etc.

NTP!!! https://dreamstation.systems/personal/ntppool.html