xmpp server (prosody) for chat, sms, and audio/video calls
Hi, all!
Bartender, pour me a beer, please. And not a cheap one, nor a traditional one. I had a bad beer (the most sold in the country) yesterday at a friend's house and it left me a bitter taste (figuratively and literally, too).
Wanna talk about self hosting? For the past year I've been slowly moving some services to self hosted alternatives and it's all been going very well.
I'm currently self hosting a music server (I've been doing this for 3 years now), backups for a website/app thingie with 6 users, Syncthing for files and smartphone photo backup, a web based file manager and 2 personal websites.
I'm very happy with it and I want to also host an RSS reader, maybe a searx instance.
For this I'm using a Raspberry Pi 1, a Raspberry Pi 3, an external SSD, 2 SD cards, and an Ethernet cable.
Why 2 Raspberry Pies? I figured I'd set up 2 Syncthing instances so if one fails, I'll have the other and the backups keep rolling! I was going to set up 2 drives on RAID, but this sounded easier for me and more resistant, maybe? I already had 2 Raspberry Pies anyways!
So, what do you guys self host?
xmpp server (prosody) for chat, sms, and audio/video calls
Oh my. I'm tempted to self host an xmpp instance for a couple of friends! That's a good next project :)
Hi ~bitdweller! Good to see you. ~bartender? A stout, please. Thanks!
Self hosting, you ask? Oh well. I do have a small system that is up 7x24h. It serves dhcp, dns, ntp, mqtt, smtp and imap, apt (apt-cacher), git (nginx/cgit), gemini (agate), mqtt, influxdb and grafana for nice graphs of environmental data, and even a much neglected nextcloud instance. Sounds like a lot? Well, not really. Accessible from the planet wide network are only 2 things: the gemini capsule as a onion service, and ssh access via a hidden onion service. And the gemini server has a publicly accessible copy on sourcehut.
Is that still "self hosting"? /me takes another sip.
I have toyed with the idea to setup another small system to serve as a family chat/messaging/picture-exchange server using freedombone/libreserver. But it has not become a reality, more so since I'm without a smart phone. /me stares a long while out of the window into the rain, that has washed away most of yesterdays snow. On the other hand, if I don't offer this family service, there is no chance for them to even try out alternative, self hosted services. I'm the "strange uncle" already "who is afraid of google", as they phrase it. But since I'm not on whatsapp or similar, I don't even hear much. Apparently email is too old fashioned and slow.
So yes, I do self host for myself and my wife. But that's about as far as it gets, I think.
For the records: the small system is a pcengines.ch APU2.
Bad Beatles joke in three... two...
Help me if you can I'm feeling like hosting a glass onion service.
At work, I have a Windows PC, which runs VMware Workstation, which hosts Linux, which runs kvm-qemu, which hosts a cross build tool chain for arm ... wrong. it hosts a arm machine which runs said tool chain ... absolutely fantastic!
Onion-Virtual-Machines, I call this horrifying pile of indirections. Which always reminds me strongly of Nr. 6a of the 12 networking truths :)
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1925.txtOh this is interesting! ~bartender, please, another beer. I'd like a pilsen now, and if you have somwthing with a hint of lemon, I want that!
I have never heard of the APU2 or pcengines, I'm not the most verses in this area. I'm using Rpis because that's what I know, also because there's more tutorials and guides around, a bigger (specific) community, more accessories and related hardware, at least more for me to find.
You self host a lot of things. So you're running your own email server? Does that work OK for you? Email is too critical for me to self administer and host. I move and travel a lot and, sometimes I won't have a permanent house to have the server on.
I'm thinking of having some stuff available on the onion network as well, so I won't need to mess with routers or tunnelling. Thats5a great idea, thank you :)
There is a large number of Single-Board-Computers. The Pi happens to be well known. But each of these machines were done with some task in mind, so they have different design decisions ... The APU and ALIX line have mostly 3 ethernet interfaces, which is the stuff you want to have, if this box serves like a gateway of some sort. I have also used soekris.net boxes.
As for the Pi, I have a few complaints:
But I disgress. The Pi is a fascinating machine, it's just not the answer to all problems computing :-)
Email. Well, I do host an instance of dovecot/postfix. dovecot serves my several email boxes on the local network. However, it is not contacted directly. My official mailboxes are still hosted at some provider, I just download their content periodically using old and trusty fetchmail. For a nomadic setup this is not really good. Accessing home via TOR is possible but slow. You don't want to "work" with this. But you can then start any other tunnel/VPN solution from the "inside'. I do use this like once in a year. So, for me, this is good enough.
~bartender? All this techno-babbling makes my mouth dry ... how about another stout? Same as before? Yes? Ah, good. Thanks so much.
Cheers!