This question is for anyone that manages their own servers and monitors the health of services.

What is your preferred method of receiving alerts?

#FreeBSD #Linux #SelfHosting #monitoring #OpenBSD #Cloud #BastilleBSD

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 212 (consolidating edition) 🎛

If you followed my (mis)adventures yesterday and all the issues I had with caching and #CDN for my #Wordpress site, well, I found a solution.

💫​ Something that had been in front of me the whole time
💫​ ZERO additional costs

Ta-da: 👻​

🔗​: https://news.elenarossini.com/my-so-called-sudo-life/my-adventures-in-self-hosting-day-212-consolidating-edition/

#Ghost #VarnishCache

Never a dull day in this #selfhosting journey: editing important #DNS records while your child is on summer holiday - and may come see you every few minutes - is a very interesting exercise in concentration.

Special thanks to nonna (grandma) for helping with childcare this morning 😅​

I'm hoping I'm successful in setting up a more solid #CDN for my personal website because I keep DDOS'ing myself (from a simple Mastodon reply to a federated Wordpress post - 8k followers will do that).

Wish me luck!

P.S.: another moment of gratitude / deep appreciation for #VarnishCache which has been providing rock solid caching to my #Ghost site. Now I need to take care of my #Wordpress site with a pro CDN solution (Varnish isn't an option sadly bc of the Wordpress setup / I don't have direct access to the server)

I deleted my Strava account and switched to a self-hosted alternative called Geo Activity Playground. More about that in my blog post.

https://saukki.com/2025/07/i-deleted-my-strava-account-what-now/

#selfhosting #homelab #cycling #strava #geoactivityplayground #regel17

Alt...

Strava logo behind a blocked sign

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 210 (viva #FOSS edition) 🎊​

A "micro" blog post about how grateful I am for the ability to self-host essential digital services.

🔗​: https://elenarossini.com/2025/07/my-adventures-in-self-hosting-day-210-viva-foss/

#MySoCalledSudoLife

🚨LIVE NOW!🚨 DevOps/SRE Instructor Live Stream

On this lovely Tuesday, let's chat about #Linux #SystemAdministration, #SelfHosting, or any other topic in the #DevOps and #SRE space you're interested in!

https://monospacementor.com/live-stream/

What #docker #containers do you guys/gals host at home? 😎

#SelfHosting #linux #docker #container

looking for a self-hosting app which has good OCR for printed cooking books. Trying to digitize them.

Any recommendations?

#selfhosting #ocr #cooking #books

This is your casual reminder to #selfhost At least that what you are comfortable with

#selfhosting is about being independent. About owning your data. About reclaiming the 'net and decentralizing it. It is about taking control. Being able to do things the way you see fit. And it is about breaking free from subscriptions and from big tech which is #enshittifying like there is no tomorrow.

Go #selfhosted the way you see fit. In small steps, one platform at a time - or with a head first dive if you are feeling adventurous. Share your experiences, write a blog about it, create a video or post about it on the Fediverse.

It most definitely is not too late to revolt. To give big tech the middle finger. Firmly stand your ground. Be a rebel.

#AskFedi do you know anyone with a federated Wordpress site who uses it extensively? Not just for publishing straight to the Fediverse, but also in a social way (aka as a fedi profile)?

I've run into a few roadblocks with mine and I could really use some inspiration 😊​

#Wordpress #ActivityPub #selfhosting

Has anyone had problems with running mastodon on FreeBSD in the past, especially with updating it?
Whenever I try to run “RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails assets:precompile” there is a node process at about 400% indefinitely. Does anyone know a solution to that?
To install it I followed @stefano's guide (https://it-notes.dragas.net/2022/11/23/installing-mastodon-on-a-freebsd-jail/)
#mastodon #SelfHosting #FreeBSD

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 203 (am I doing POSSE right? edition) 📖​

Experimenting with the #POSSE method by posting on my federated #Wordpress site first and then syndicating elsewhere.

🔗: https://elenarossini.com/2025/07/my-adventures-in-self-hosting-day-203/

Not sure if I'm doing things the right way but it feels empowering to have these posts on my site - it will be so much easier to organize them and find them in the future.

#MySoCalledSudoLife

Addendum: This is why I think #SelfHosting is more about #DigitalIndependence than #DigitalSovereignty, for example.

And yes, services that implement #DigitalSovereignty can still violate my #DigitalIndependence when they use my data our data about me.

The digital life is complex, not binary ...

@drahardja
Leaving #spotify? Have an old computer laying around? Why not use this opportunity to start #selfhosting your own media library?

With free and #opensource software like #navidrome or #jellyfin, you can have your own private (or semi-private) streaming service, and listen on any device!

🚨 Reminder! Heads up, LA! 🚨

We’re hosting a Tailscale Community Meetup in Pasadena on July 8 — come hang out with the team, grab a snack, and nerd out on networking (no NAT traversal required 😉)

🗓️ https://tailscale.com/events-webinars/tailscale-community-meetup-LA
#Tailscale #LAmeetup #SelfHosting

GitHub Actions + exit nodes = 💡

Simon Willison routed his scraper traffic through Tailscale (on an Apple TV!) to dodge Cloudflare blocks in GitHub Actions.

Ethical, efficient, and pretty clever.

📝 https://til.simonwillison.net/tailscale/tailscale-github-actions
#Tailscale #GitHubActions #SelfHosting

"All Flash" is my new homelab storage (6x 4T) & I'm not sure if it'll still be #FreeBSD.

The goal? Providing storage for clients at home (NFS/CIFS) but also to servers like Proxmox by NVMeoF (TCP).

It's not a ready-to-use NAS and more a MiniPC with 6x NVMe slots and 2x 2.5Gbit and 1x 10Gbit network. So, I'm happy to make the best out of it. Unfortunately, the performance with SPDK is really worse and I'm not yet quite sure why.

#homelab #nas #storage #selfhosting #networking #network #runbsd

Weekend over, 2 mailservers migrated from dovecot to Stalwart…
@stalwartlabs please don't break stuff 🤣
#SelfHosting #mailserver

That whole #dovecot breaking update (and from what I've seen the unreasonable pro version, at least for small setups) makes me question self-hosting my mail server…
I'm fine with investing time to setup something the first time - but updates (especially not minor) should never be breaking… - neither should they require quiet some time investment imho…
#SelfHosting #mailserver

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 188 (REAL self-hosting edition) 👻​

Hello Fedi friends,

I hope you had a nice weekend.

I spent the vast majority of the past two months in full time filmmaking mode, for my Fedi promo video.

Now that the French (https://news.elenarossini.com/fedivers-video/) and the Italian (https://news.elenarossini.com/fediverso-video/) voice-over narrations are complete, I can finally resume my self-hosting adventures.

On the agenda for later this week: updating the version of my Ghost installation, which is something I am genuinely self-hosting, without the help of YunoHost...

I already did it once a couple of months ago, but now the stakes are higher because I'm getting hundreds of visits every day (since publishing the Fedi promo video).

Second item on my to do list: figuring out how to log onto #NextCloud from my mobile phone (the iOS app keeps spinning when I enter my server name).

I'm just really grateful to be able to do all this... A mere 6 months ago it would have seemed impossible.

Wishing everyone a great day! 🌞​

#MySoCalledSudoLife

LA friends! 🎉
We’re hosting a Tailscale Community Meetup in Pasadena on July 8th!

Join us for snacks, stories, and some good old-fashioned tailnet talk. No VPN required.

RSVP here 👉 https://tailscale.com/events-webinars/tailscale-community-meetup-LA

#Tailscale #selfhosting #LAtech

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 186 (bandwidth edition)🚦

A moment of gratitude for #VarnishCache and how incredibly it has protected my self-hosted #Ghost blog from the so-called "Mastodon stampede" / "Mastodon hug of death":

Yesterday I published a page on my site with the French-language version of the Fediverse promo video https://news.elenarossini.com/fedivers-video/

Then I posted a message on my Mastodon account about it, asking people to boost it, so that people in the Francophone world could see it.

How many boosts did I get? 1300 so far (you people are amazing).

Well, my Ghost blog is still standing and super fast. Varnish is INCREDIBLE and I could not recommend it more.

Oh and my VPS with PeerTube is also still standing because I embedded the French version of the video on my Ghost site, so that hundreds of Mastodon servers attempted to fetch the cover image of the POST and not the cover image of the video.

Bandwidth consumption (for my VPS with GoToSocial and PeerTube) so far this month: 0.457 TB (my limit is 8 TB)

Bandwidth consumption for my VPS with Ghost: 0.06 TB (limit: 4 TB)

So far so good 😅​

#MySoCalledSudoLife

Thanks to all our customers who run their own #selfhosting #NetBSD VMs with us for helping with this migration. Our #FreeBSD and #OpenBSD VMs were already running HVM. Yes, we #RunBSD and provide hosting in our UK datacentres (also #Windows and #Linux as required)

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 182 (new software edition!) ☁️​

Good morning Fedi friends!

This #GoToSocial account is officially back to posting about... self-hosting from the POV of a newbie / non-dev.

This morning I hit a new little milestone: I FINALLY installed #NextCloud on my VPS (thank you #YunoHost).

I'm getting ready to share short clips of my Fedi promo video (that anybody could use / upload on their own accounts - esp. Big Tech ones, if they're so inclined) and I needed a solution to let people download files. NextCloud is perfect for the task - and something I had looked forward to installing for a looooong time.

I'll share more details soon, but so far I'm excited to finally use it.

Wishing everyone a great day! 🌞​

#FOSS #MySoCalledSudoLife

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 177 (VPS stress test edition) 📈

Dear Fedi friends,

You might have noticed I've been a little quiet on here since launching my Fedi promo video. What happened?

Well well well, the unexpected victim of my viral toot / video was... my beloved #GoToSocial account.

Approximately 12 hours after posting about my video - a toot that got 1200+ boosts - for some reason federation broke on this account. I was still posting messages and replying but getting zero interactions.

So yesterday evening, thanks to the amazing help of people on the GoToSocial Matrix help room, I was told to upgrade to the latest version of GoToSocial. And that fixed the problem, yay.

If you don't mind, I'll copy and paste parts of 2 messages I had tried to publish Tue & Wed:

((( message from Tue evening )))

Thank you for all the amazing feedback you shared today re: my Fediverse promo video. I’m really touched.

Extra thanks to everyone who helped spread the word on Big Tech platforms - to reach a wider audience. I don’t have any accounts there anymore (not even on LinkedIn) so I appreciate your help with fediverse advocacy 🙏

And special special thanks to all the superheroes who intentionally left the browser tab open on my video to take advantage of PeerTube’s P2P feature, helping offload bandwidth strain from my little server. You rock! 🥹

((( beginning of message from Wed Jun 11 )))

The past 24 hours have been incredible! Thank you for all the boosts to the post about my Fedi promo video (over a thousand!)

It looks like my self-hosted Ghost blog did well with the massive wave of traffic and didn't experience the "Mastodon hug of Death." THANK YOU Varnish cache for it! Total game changer. I could not recommend it more! (As someone who experienced the Mastodon hug of death TWICE before installing Varnish cache) 😅​

So: my #Ghost blog survived. Ditto for my self-hosted #PeerTube (which is on a separate VPS - installed/managed via #YunoHost). The video so far has almost 5000 views - which is pretty good for PeerTube.

✨​ The magic of the fediverse for you ✨​

((( end of pasted messages )))

Since yesterday, I changed the visibility of the video, making it public. And my VPS is surviving, thanks to PeerTube's P2P and various instances mirroring the video (thank you fellow admins, I owe you big time!)

I'm just so grateful for all your nice words and support.

Later today I'll travel to Amsterdam, as I will be speaking at #PubConf2025 about the Fediverse YAY. I'm super honored for this opportunity and I look forward to reconnecting with many other Fediverse advocates who have become friends.

Exciting times 🥹

Wishing you all a lovely day! ✨🚀

#MySoCalledSudoLife #TheFutureIsFederated

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 175 (video launch day) 🍿​

Dear Fedi friends, you may have noticed that 20 minutes ago I made the announcement about the release of my Fediverse promo video on here. Why? 5000 character limit, so I could credit/thank everyone who helped. It really took a village to make it.

Today is not only the video's release day, but also, from the POV of a new self-hoster:

- a stress test for my self-hosted #PeerTube instance (worry level: low, they have P2P)
- a stress test for my self-hosted Ghost blog (it should hold up just fine with Varnish cache)
- and a test to see how far and wide a message posted on my #GoToSocial goes. If you're a fan of #GtS you may be pleased to see it mentioned in the video 🤗​

I was afraid of the infamous Mastodon Hug of Death (with hundreds / thousands of servers trying to fetch the video cover image) so I ended up uploading it as UNLISTED on my PeerTube and embedding it on my Ghost blog... this way Ghost (protected by Varnish cache) will take most of the hit. I also provided an alternative video location for it.

Curious to see how all these self-hosted services will do today.

Have a great day everyone!

#MySoCalledSudoLife

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 170 (studying edition) 🎒​

Hello Fedi friends!

This account will hopefully revert back to tales of self-hosting in a few days. My Fediverse promo video is 99% done and I'm currently working on English subtitles. Then: French and Italian.

Monday will be a stress test for my #PeerTube instance and how well it deals with concurrent viewers. It'd be fascinating to see its P2P functions at play. In the meantime I'm getting an education in PeerTube optimization.

Very excited about premiering the Fedi promo video at #FediForum tomorrow (I was about to type in a couple of days but ahhhhhhh it's tomorrow).

My first #FediForum last September felt like my personal SuperBowl, plus Christmas plus birthday rolled into one. It was such a fantastic event - truly energizing and heartwarming. It felt incredible to be in the same virtual room as people I had gotten to know in my year on the Fediverse... It was such a special special feeling.

I never imagined that at the following FediForum I'd be showcasing a video I had made to promote the Fediverse to people who are not familiar with it. Plus I have the tremendous honor of showing it right after @cwebber 's presentation. She's an absolute legend and icon, whom I admire tremendously, and I'm super honored to present right after her. Thank you @j12t 🙏​

So: premiere at FediForum tomorrow. Video upload on my self-hosted #PeerTube on Monday: @ele

Now: subtitles! And final tweaks.

Thanks for all the support and encouragement. I hope you will like the video, it's been a real labor of love ❤️​

#EleFediVideos #MySoCalledSudoLife

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 165 (VFX edition) 🎞️​

Good morning Fedi friends!

I've been quiet on here (it's a temporary pause, I promise) as I have been spending every second of free time - that doesn't include childcare - editing the fediverse promo video.

The video will premiere next week at a really exciting event, right after a presentation by an absolute legend. I'm experiencing low key anxiety / palpitations, rushing to get the film ready for that.

On the to do list: sound mix, fixing some VFX animations, adding a couple of slides to the end credits, color grading, doing subtitles, exporting the video and uploading it to my PeerTube. Gaaaaah!

On the self-hosting side, I have to admit it's incredibly empowering to know I can put it on my PeerTube. Super grateful to #YunoHost for that.

If you're curious, I've published some updates re: what I've been up to this month... including a video replay of my presentation for YunoHost at #JDLL: https://news.elenarossini.com/what-im-up-to-may-2025-edition/

As a geeky side note, I had to edit a link in the article... and it would not update on my site. Awww the wonders of #Varnish cache. It's really THAT powerful. So even though I don't have time to do proper self-hosting tasks these days, I still went into my VPS and used command lines to clear Varnish cache. It counts for something, right?

Wishing everyone a wonderful weekend!

#MySoCalledSudoLife

Puh. Finally simplified my web server setup, consolidated a bunch of letsencrypt certificates, cleaned up my repositories and forgejo-runner workflows to make updates and deploying new sites as automated as possible.

#SelfHosting

#onpremisesinfrastructure is vastly underrated. What are you going to do when #GoogleWorkspace or #Microsoft365 shut your account down because their AI decides to and you have no recourse. You can’t sue them because you’ve agreed to their terms of service. Oops? 🤷‍♂️

Also, what many don’t know is even if data is stored in the cloud, the customer is still responsible for backing up and archiving their data. The cloud company does some rudimentary disaster recovery but has specific indemnification against data loss. Marketing conveniently glosses over this. 😈

The #cloud cannot be trusted for small businesses. #Selfhosting is the way to go. It’s not hard at all and I am in the midst of writing a book for people with a minimal technical background to get started as easily as possible. Or even for them to have a technical friend help them out.

Hello Fedi friends!

Today marks a really special occasion: I’ll be speaking at #JDLL in Lyon as part of the #YunoHost presentation… discussing how I use their amazing #selfhosting tools for #DigitalSovereignty.

It’s hard to believe I had only installed it 158 days ago (according to my Mastodon archive) https://mastodon.social/@_elena/113667636910565210

Thanks to @yunohost I have been able to self-host my own #GoToSocial #Pixelfed #Friendica & #PeerTube instances. I’m incredibly grateful to them ❤️

#MySoCalledSudoLife

So, WTF, Pocket?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/future-of-pocket

Setting up a @wallabag instance has been on my mind for a while, so I guess thanks for forcing my hand?

The frequency of things like this makes me want to stop using any software I haven't written myself.

https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag

#pocket #selfhosting #wallabag

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 156 (busy bee edition) 🐝

Hello Fedi friends!

Sorry I've been a little quiet over here but any minute of free time I have (aka when my 4-year-old is in pre-school) I spend working on:

1) a promotional video for the Fediverse with my two amazing interns -> #EleFediVideos

2) a presentation about how I use #YunoHost for digital sovereignty - at an upcoming #FOSS conference

I just realized - oh the horror - that it's the first time in 5 months I've been skipping my Monday morning routine of #YunoHost manual backups. So this week I'll be doing it on a Thursday, aka right now 😅​

The Fediverse video is coming together really nicely and I cannot wait to share it on here (actually, on my self-hosted #PeerTube).

I'm infinitely grateful to the Fediverse for getting me back to filmmaking and motion graphics after a long hiatus. It feels amazing.

Wishing you all a lovely day!

#MySoCalledSudoLife

Good morning Fedi friends!

Not much to report on the #selfhosting side... I need to update #Ghost to its latest version but I have another day of filming ahead... so maybe I'll get into it tomorrow morning while my husband takes care of our daughter. VPS Snapshot -> a couple of commands and the new Ghost should be updated in give or take 10 minutes (if all goes well, ha!)

My point today was to say that being a beginner is really humbling. I've been a total newbie in the self-hosting / Linux space. How fun it is to learn new things!

And now I'm experiencing the newbie feeling in my professional field - filmmaking - as I am learning a new editing system: #DaVinciResolve.

I started out editing in #FinalCut Pro in film school... then moved over to #AdobePremiere when Apple remade Final Cut from scratch, simplifying it for beginners. And now that Adobe is on the highway to enshittification and is hiking prices to extortionate levels, I am moving to DaVinciResolve.

When I moved from Final Cut to #Adobe Premiere I imported Final Cut shortcuts... so it was really easy to get started fast. Professional editors use keyboard shortcuts for EVERYTHING and almost never go to the menu for actions... Well, there is no such thing as importing shortcuts into DVR, so I need to learn its shortcuts from scratch. And it's a lot of fun! A little embarrassing to say that yesterday it took me 10 minutes and multiple searches to figure out that to cut a clip at a specific point I had to use command-B.

It's super humbling to feel like a beginner in film editing - when, in my previous life, I used to spend 10 hours a day every day editing or doing motion graphics. I hit the proverbial 10,000 hours many times over.

I love this "newbie" feeling and I never get tired of learning.

Wishing everyone a great day!

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 139 (filmmaker edition) 🎬

Good morning Fedi friends!

I've been quiet over here for a good reason: I'm currently laser-focused on producing a first promo video about the Fediverse. I'm working with two talented interns and today we start filming! More on this here: https://mastodon.social/@_elena/114454286121971517

Any free time I have I spend working on a 10 minute presentation about my self-hosting journey, that I will deliver later this month at a FOSS conference. I was invited by the amazing #YunoHost team to speak along with other inspiring folks about using YunoHost to self-host.

All this to say: it's a very very busy month and I may not have much to say about self-hosting per se. But! I just did my Monday morning ritual AKA backing up my YunoHost setup.

Wishing everyone a great week!

#MySoCalledSudoLife