Nice article.

why bother? Why I self host

Most of this article is not purely about that question, but I dislike clickbait, so I’ll actually answer the question from the title: Two reasons.

First of all, I like to be independent - or at least, as much as I can. Same reason we have backup power, why I know how to bake bread, preserve food, and generally LARP as a grandmother desperate to feed her 12 grandchildren until they are no longer capable of self propelled movement. It makes me reasonably independent of whatever evil scheme your local $MEGA_CORP is up to these days (hint: it’s probably a subscription).

It’s basically the Linux and Firefox argument - competition is good, and freedom is too.

If that’s too abstract for you, and what this article is really about, is the fact that it teaches you a lot and that is a truth I hold to be self-evident: Learning things is good & useful.

Turns out, forcing yourself to either do something you don’t do every day, or to get better at something you do occasionally, or to simply learn something that sounds fun makes you better at it. Wild concept, I know.

Contents

Introduction
My Services
Why I self host
Reasoning about complex systems
Things that broke in the last 6 months
Things I learned (or recalled) in the last 6 months

• You can self host VS Code
• UPS batteries die silently and quicker than you think
• Redundant DNS is good DNS
• Raspberry PIs run ARN, Proxmox does not
• zfs + Proxmox eat memmory and will OOM kill your VMS
• The mystery of random crashes (Is it hardware? It’s always hardware.)
• SNMP(v3) is still cool
• Don’t trust your VPS vendor
• Gotta go fast
• CIFS is still not fast
• Blob storage, blob fish, and file systems: It’s all “meh”
• CrowdSec

Conclusion