kickaha

Thanks for the endorsement and the links.

Hm. I'll take a look.

I experimented with NixOS for the desktop and ran into too many paper cuts too fast to be motivated to continue. Mentally put it in the "try this again next summer" file.

But for server stuff it might be a good way to go...? Maybe I'll try it.

Thanks for the advice.

Super helpful list. Thanks!

It's a fair point, like jaequery's SPOF sibling remark. I think ultimately my goal is to have local/remote redundancy, and get to the point where I am sufficiently informed to trust myself to administer everything.

Thanks for the tips. Yes, the subjective experience I'm looking for is tinkering-and-independence-satisfaction.

> even if you're in a flat behind a gateway

Perfect example: to my ears, this could be (1) networking jargon, (2) American football jargon, (3) puerile sex euphemisms

> be confident you have good, usable, backups.

Oh dear god yes.

jzymbaluk's fear is mine too. I should have made it explicit!

I'll follow these pointers for sure.

Thanks for those pointers!

Thank god my wife will never know I read those words. :-)

Wow, thank you for all the concrete pointers!

>> In short it’s all about control, privacy, and security, in that order.

> I am going to strongly urge you to consider changing that order and move security to the first priority.

I made myself easily misunderstood. On the desktop, I moved away from proprietary platforms because of good old-fashioned paranoia ("security and privacy"), but first for control.

Needless to say, for anything exposed to the net all considerations come after security. That's why I need to "understand."

Another example of just the kind of concrete answers I was hoping for.

Exactly why I asked for pointers to tutorials: I have only the most superficial, decontextualized comprehension of words like WireGuard, tunnel, (virtual) private network, etc. Thanks to everyone who made suggestions.

> I don't see much downside to sticking with Tailscale indefinitely, what are your reasons?

Tailscale and Bitwarden both fall into the same category: they seem like good actors, they have generous free tiers, and if I come to rely on them at scales that aren't free I would be happy to pay. However, I want to understand them enough to be able to know that I could host them myself if god forbid they go out of business, are subject to attack, or whatever.

As I've succeeded at on the desktop, the hobbyist gratification is both the fun of tinkering mixed with the confidence that if it need it I have packed my own parachute.

>plenty of people on HN who have these skills but prefer to rely on managed providers.

Yes! I want to learn enough to know the difference!

E.g. Fastmail has been rock solid for me for years now and I am delighted to pay them for email and calendar.

Thank you! I listen to Chris and Alex religiously (and all the Jupiter Broadcasting shows), and learned a lot. But never heard mention of a beginner's reference there. Maybe I'll send this question into them.

Joe, Jim, and Allen on 2.5 Admins is also informative, but veers back and forth between English and Greek to my ears. :-)

This is great advice! I can vouch for it---I am no longer a young man and if I don't write it down it's gone. Just for the stuff I've done so far, it has saved my bacon countless times.

Looking at you, ~/.emacs.d/init.el. :-)

Just the kind of concrete suggestions, of where to start, that I was hoping to get. Thanks!

No offense taken. Sounds like good advice.

> Note, if any of that sounds hard I must kindly point out that you're playing a risky game trying to do all this yourself securely and should evaluate whether it's easier to just pay a service for all this.

You articulated something I couldn't: an important goal for me is to know enough to be able to evaluate such risks and decide which things to hobbyist tinker and which things to pay to outsource.

> To understand networking: read a book. Much of my early networking knowledge came from https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/1593414 > [Computer networking: a top-down approach, Kurose and Ross 2009]

This is the kind of reference I was looking for. Anybody else have a favorite. Maybe more accessible? "For Dummies?" :-)

Thanks for all these concrete suggestions.

EDIT: "Free t-shirt"?! AWESOME :-)

I appreciate this perspective. But I was hoping for something at, um, a smaller scale of commitment. :-)

Wow! Thanks!

I like this idea. I live in a little college town so I think I can tap into a circle of nerds.

Thanks especially for the concrete list of topics to bork around with.

There are a number of quite interesting ideas in this article—mixed with some confusion and misunderstanding, and presented in a flawed rhetorical framework.

Ah, nostalgia. Reminds me of my first Linux install, 1997, when I had to worry about the kernel destroying my display.

For those like me who are utterly ignorant but interested in self-hosting.

Can anyone point to a useful tutorial for someone with a solid understanding of desktop Linux but for whom networking is just incomprehensible magic?

>> menus and the toolbar

> The what now? :)

My response was: Is it possible? Is it possible that Lars uses the menus and the toolbar?

It’s a nice coincidence that this event corresponds to the new moon, so great viewing conditions.

Not at all a coincidence that the new moon corresponds to the Black Forest Star Party, if you happen to be in Central Pennsylvania this weekend.

https://bfsp.org/