I appreciate everyone’s input on this! And remember I’m just here to help

Well you certainly have brought a lot of clarity to the table, and that is admirable and appreciated. Most of use left Reddit for a reason. It would be nice if lemmy.world/c/selfhosted didn’t turn into Reddit. There are so very few selfhosting brain trusts out there.

Cool.

Abut 35+ years ago, I stuck a finger up and didn’t like the way the wind was blowing. I decided to do something about it. While I am a prepper, I do not prep for EOTW scenarios. If we start dropping nukes, point me towards the blast cloud and let this universe recycle the energy it takes to keep this meat bag alive, into something else.

I do, however, prep for inclement weather, shortages, civil unrest, pandemics, etc. I have solar and whole house generators. I grow my own food, raise my own livestock, can and freeze my vegetables, meats, and such. During the pandemic, I rarely ventured off the compound as there was no real need to. I’ve long since turned my dining room into a pantry and it is well stocked and rotated. I stock medicinal supplies, things that would be needed in a disaster scenario, not gadetry. I have taught myself the skill of making very good alcohol, which can be used medicinally, and for barter. I stock a lot of staples, things that can be turned into multiple meals; flours, sugar, corn meal, etc.

I would say that my servers would be a minor issue or concern in a disaster scenario. I would most likely depend on Ham radio and CB communications, vs the internet. We would be back to living like say mine, or your, grandparents did. Very lean and close to the bone, relying on what we could scratch together to survive, such as Victory Gardens, etc.

We live in a world of convenience, and while that’s great and all, we get used to the notion that we will always be able to go to the grocery to pick up food supplies, and that is a false comfort. For anyone interested, I’d start with extending your pantry. Make wise purchases. Don’t fall for all the gizmos and gadgetry surrounding prepping. They’ll sell you a sack full of crap you’ll probably never use, or be useless when the time comes.

and use some lego to enforce spacing between 'em.

Brilliant! You like things straight and even…so do I :) When I read that I said. this is a kindred spirit. I have two door wedges (stops?) up under one of my keyboards because it sits behind yet another keyboard, and the factory height wasn’t sufficient.

Neat. The cli is so powerful. I probably haven’t even explored 1% of what it can do.

Bookmarked. I’ll add it to the things you can do from the cli, like get the weather, which is pretty cool.

I’ve never heard of twtxt. When you say ‘posting entirely as plain text’, are you posting as plain text to a blog, forum, etc from the cli?

It’s quite secure. Privacy depends on who you ask. Obviously Cloudflare will be handling your data which is something some selfhosters do not like. Ultimately you have to make that decision as to whether it fits within your threat model. As far as security, you don’t need to fiddle with NAT or open/close ports. You will, of course, need to allow ssh in UFW, so you can admin the server itself. All you do is install Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust on the server, and Cloudflare takes care of the rest. If you decide to go the Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust route, I have a set of my notes I would be more than happy to share. They’ve seemed to have helped a handful of people, and you could use them as a guide.

I had a laptop server back in the day. I took the battery out just because it was one less thing to worry about. YMMV. At the very least, there are ways to cap the charge level on the battery, tho I have no experience doing that. Perhaps others may chime in if that is a route you choose.

I take back everything I said then. OP, just disregard the old head mumbling on about the past.

I’ve read blogs that talk about video streaming/TOS issues. Personally, I have had no issues. Just figured I’d throw it out there.

"As long as the media is not being distributed publicly or cached on Cloudflare’s network, and you are only using Cloudflare to proxy encrypted traffic to your own origin server, this is acceptable use. Community thread quote ~ 2025

Cloudflare distinguishes between protected internal endpoints versus public-facing content delivery. The former is generally acceptable on free tiers when combined with Zero Trust authentication. There have been no updates to the TOS since this was posted:

…so, my guess is that it’s still in effect unless superseded by an update. However, it seems arbitrarily enforced searching reddit for data. Again, just a cautionary comment.

Jellyfin and Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust might present some problems. Yes, it will undoubtedly work, however, streaming video through Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust is against the TOS. Now, I suspect that if you had one user, you’d probably slide by. 10 users streaming large video files at a sustained rate would probably raise a red flag. I stream audio through Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust and have had no issues, tho I am the only user. There are other alternatives to Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust such as NetBird, ZeroTier, Headscale, or Tailscale. Just something to consider.

Cloudflare tunnel has a bad relationship with streaming video

From their standpoint I can understand why, tho if you had just one user you might be able to get away with it. When you have 10 users streaming large files at a sustained rate, that eats up some bandwidth. However, I stream audio from Navidrome daily and I’ve had no issues. I am the only user of my network.

I rage guit my email server long ago. True, as evidenced in this thread, there are some who successfully run their own email server and that’s awesome. I am quite jealous. I too gave up, but I went with a small EU based company. It’s no frills, just the basics. I don’t send/receive a lot of email, so I don’t need all the bells and whistles. If you’re de-googling your life, you don’t have to specifically run your own email service. I do hear a lot of positives about MailCow tho.

Sweet! I wish I could game. So many intense graphics games with deep plot lines etc. I love technology…most of the time.

Yeah, I can do that. I just wanted to understand why it work sometimes but not others.

It’s been a few minutes since I’ve run Caddy, and like I mentioned, I don’t own a QNAP. So, I’m just spitballing.

So… I started “Self hosting” wolf/games on whales this past week from my laptop

Sweet! Family first. I am unfamiliar with ‘Games on Whales’. What all can you play?

When I start Caddy with a docker compose file,

So, I’ve never owned a QNAP product running QTS nor have I run Caddy in a Docker container before, but I am assuming it looks something similar to this:

networks:
  proxy-network:
    external: true

services:
  caddy:
    image: caddy
    container_name: caddy
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 80:80
      - 443:443
    volumes:
      - ./data:/data
      - ./config:/config
      - ./Caddyfile:/etc/caddy/Caddyfile:ro
    networks:
      - proxy-network

Have you tried changing the port #:

    ports:
      - 80:80
      - 4443:443

ETA:

I’m fairly new to selfhosing

Welcome to the club bro. You’re in the right place.

• I’ve always felt that if you are soliciting recommendations for self hosting equipment, why not ask self hosters? I would say that 99% of all equipment threads that get posted here are directly related to beginners or even seasoned vets, asking 'what kind of equipment world I need to run ‘xxx stack’. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a thread where the OP was building his next gaming machine asking for recommends.

• The whole gatekeeping about the strict definition of ‘self hosting’. Self hosting is a huge conglomeration of different approaches. Sometimes, especially with beginners, outright buying a proper piece of equipment to use in your residence might be problematic, or cost prohibitive. However a small, $30 USD/year VPS might fit for getting your feet wet, or even on into the future. In past lives I have started, modded, forums. I used to be a mod at reddit for quite a while of a good handful of subs like De-Google/De-Amazon/ all the De-(corporate services). I seriously despise gatekeeping. I think we can all co-exist whether you have a full blown rack in your closet that dims the neighborhood lights when you power up, a small VPS, an RPi, or a repurposed disposable vape-server (which was pretty doggone impressive).

I honestly haven’t seen too many completely off topic threads started here. There are a few. There was the Anonymous recruiting thread, a lost Lemmy with children down on his luck, and a few others. However, for the most part, people who bypass reddit and navigate all the way to Lemmy c/selfhosting are pretty much within the realm of selfhosting.

I believe in being encouraging and positive, even if the topic of discussion is something I’m not really kosher with. We’re all, I’m assuming, fully autonomous adults capable of making our own decisions…and living with them.

djdupriest.org

Interesting. I like rifling through someone’s blog even tho may not have an immediate use for the data contained in the blog. You never know. Might stumble on something that will be useful later on.