My homelab has two disks. One with the OS and files, and the other as a backup. Every night, I run dd to copy everything to the second disk. The idea was simple: if one disk fails, I can just switch to the other one. I've managed to rescue my data several times this way.

But not today. If one disk gets corrupted and then dd copies that corrupted data to the other disk, well... now both disks are corrupted.

What I lost:

• All my recipes in Mealie
• My unchecked-out code in Gitea, including my diary that I've had for 10 years
• My Home Assistant configuration

That's pretty sad. Luckily, I have another backup for my holidays memories, and I have my homelab Git repo checked out on another device.

Still, I guess this is a good reminder that a copy isn't necessarily a backup. If the backup gets overwritten every night, one bad night can overwrite the backup too.

Just remember that not every self hosted application has a team of experienced devs behind it ensuring security is adequate. It’s super cool to setup 15 different services/containers and configure them exactly how you want, until it comes time to maintain and update.

Every other day I see a new self hosted program that someone made in an afternoon. Usually, there’s absolutely zero security or failsafe built in if a bad actor were to target you. Also, you never know who’s an upcoming, eager developer, versus a seasoned red black-hat trying to sneak malware into your Docker stack.

There’s been countless CVEs that affect self hosted applications. And many more we haven’t discovered yet. Last week my buddy had to take his main machine offline because the application he was hosting was unknowingly working as a botnet.

You’d have to pay me a lot of money to get me to self host some shit Bob Smith vibe coded in his basement. Even if the author doesn’t have malicious intentions, you can’t expect professional, or even an acceptable level security unless there’s a real team working on the project. Even then, no one is safe.

If you’re just starting out and aren’t too sure what you’re doing, please stick with the basics until you get your footing. Hosting is fun, but you quickly get diminishing returns when you enter the phase “Damn, what else should I host?”.

With all that being said I run lots of containers, but only ones that have been tried, tested, and proven to have responsive developer(s). Good luck!

Edit: I wasn’t expecting so many technical people to show up to this thread. It truly was awesome seeing everyone’s view on this, but just remember this post was made for people who are new to self hosting or are not technically inclined. There’s many people who started from ground zero, including myself. I wish someone would have been transparent with me and actually explain why hosting anything and everything may be a bad idea in the long term.

Trying to get into self hosting as a college student, and my brother gave me an old macbook air 2017 (intel chip) that i thought could serve as a simple server to get my foot in the door.

I've used Arch for a little while now on my school laptop, but I'm not super well versed in the options available with linux, nor do i really use most of the features Arch provides (im a larper 😔). The macbook is too old to support MacOS, and I was looking at what options i have with linux. I dont need anything bleeding edge, the easier the maintenance the better.

One of my first goals was to maybe host a minecraft server or something on it, mostly to gain some experience.

Ubuntu server seemed like a good option, I'm fine not having a gui for anything, and Debian seemed appealing as well.

Was curious what experience you guys have using these OSs for hosting things and what you would recommend I try out.

Thanks in advance for the help :)

I've been running PiHole for a while on my home network and am about to make some changes to my server. During this change up I was thinking of switching from PiHole to AdGuard. For people who have used both, are there any benefits of using one versus the other? I know it's not going to have a huge effect overall, I was just curious about looking into it and seeing what other people thought too.

Ive always wanted to start self hosting but never had the budget to do it, i tried building a pc with spare parts i had but the price spikes for ram and storage kinds ruined it for me.

But when i least expected, i received a call from my friend telling me how the place he works had a bunch of spare pc parts and asked if i wanted it, which i obviously said yes.

Fast foward to today and now i went from a spare cpu and power supply to 3 amd fx pcs, 32gb of ddr3 ram, 12 500gb hdd and 1 240 gb sata ssd, all working!

Now i need help to decide what i should do to start building my homelab, for example i have no idea how i would connect all of those 12 hdd lol. My main focus is creating a media server with jellyfin and making a self hosted google drive like system for all my data and photos.

I've recently moved all my devices to it, and added some friends/family to my network so they can play with some of my self hosted tools

Any horror stories I've missed? Am i blindly opening myself up to exploits? Are there better alternatives?

Seems too good to be true tbh

I maintain a self-hosted project and received an email yesterday for a sponsorship like many other companies have done. However, this one was different: https://imgur.com/a/OKGMWFx

They started off with a simple and flattering email of what my project does (probably AI description) and that they have shared it with their team and offered to sponsor me like many other companies have done in the past. They say that the sponsorship will come through "Pump.fun's GitHub Sponsorship integration" however that integration does not exist.

Here is what is actually being proposed. They launch a memecoin on pump.fun using your project name as the ticker. Every trade on that token pays a fee of ~1%. The token creator receives a share of those fees. Thats the money for the sponsor, its not them writing you a check or a wire transfer.

A five figure payout means something around a million dollars in trading volume moved through a token with your projects name on it. The token makes nothing and has no claim on anything whatsoever. Whatever money came out of it came from people who bought it and most pump.fun tokens end up near zero. Your sponsorship is literally a cut of peoples loses.

I then proceeded to tell them no and they told me I would get 100% of the fees however that was not my concern. Whether I get 1% or 100% of peoples loses that does not change the fact that I don't want it. They also mentioned they would generate trading activity themselves to make it a more attractive token for people to lose their money on.

The challenging part of this is that the money is real: https://thoughts.greyh.at/posts/pumpfun/ . Checkout this post. He received around $11,000 within a day and confirmed that they literally do pay out. However, he also said that afterwards there were no PR's, no issues, no activity, and no one wanting to test his app. His conclusion was that the whole thing was for traders rather than anyone who wanted to support open source. He also said that he probably wont do it again.

The token only draws volume because your project is real and your name is attached to it. Thats the entire product. The token, the wallet, and the fees that are given to you are permanently public and are attributed to you. So when the coin collapses, the people holding it see a coin named after your project and the maintainer who took a cut of peoples loses. After that, they move to the next repo.

My suggestion is that if you get one of these, you do not have to be rude about it, but just say that you don't consent. Know that nothing stops someone from launching it anyway so be warned about that and if you do see it happen, consider letting your community know.

I'm not trying to claim fraud and I'm not going to deliberately name the person who emailed me (they likely change their name every email since their PFP is clearly AI generated and its a gmail account).

Shodan, searched pve-api-daemon/3.0, got 170k matches, big chunks on: - Hetzner - OVH - Linode

Many behind :3128 proxy, but 30k just like that on :8006 too.

Is this normal? Expected? Why are people doing this?

Planka is a snappy Web Kanban with a decent API. The company offers some additional functionality with their paid "Pro" plans.

They have now announced to move SSO/OIDC out of the Community edition into Pro.

What do you think about that?

What alternatives exist?

Anyone interested in forking?

A lot has changed since I last posted here 4 months ago. Got some harsh criticism back then and it was honestly deserved, the project was early and messy. But we kept going.

Obscura is a headless browser built in Rust for scraping and automation. V8 engine, native rendering, 30MB memory, 80ms page loads.

Works drop-in with Puppeteer and Playwright.

Just shipped rendering which includes screenshots, PDFs, live video capture. No Chromium. 20k stars now.

https://github.com/h4ckf0r0day/obscura

obscura serve --port 9222 and point your scripts at it. Happy to answer questions.