New post:

"A newbie's guide to self-hosting with YunoHost. Part 3: Let’s install NextCloud"

🔗 : https://blog.elenarossini.com/a-newbies-guide-to-self-hosting-with-yunohost-part-3-lets-install-nextcloud/

And sorry for repeating myself, but the path to digital independence and empowerment is easier than you thought.

My self-hosted #NextCloud has fully replaced WeTransfer, Google Drive and Dropbox for me... and it's only the tip of the iceberg.

I hope this visual guide will help fellow newbies.

#SelfHosting #YunoHost #MySoCalledSudoLife #FOSS #blog #resist

@vkc It's probably worth distinguishing between services to better scope the project, especially since various projects will require varying levels of public exposure and various kinds of resources.

I'd recommend starting people off with building their own firewall so they're less at risk from their own ISPs. This will be really good practice for setting up complex services like email.

#selfhosting

Running Mastodon on FreeBSD? Stop using wrapper scripts that break service status.

I've refactored the init scripts for Sidekiq, Puma, and Streaming to be fully production-grade:

- Clean privilege dropping (no su wrappers)
- Native signal handling for log rotation
- Correct PID tracking & status reporting.

I published the scripts and the reasoning behind them in my Codeberg gists:

https://codeberg.org/Larvitz/gists/src/branch/main/2026/20250115-FreeBSD_Mastodon_rc.d.md

I use those to run a Mastodon instance and they're working great so far!

❤️ 🦣

#FreeBSD #Mastodon #SelfHosting #mastoadmin #runbsd #OpenSource

Alt...

Screenshot showing the service status of several Mastodon services on FreeBSD

Jeff Bezos is saying the quiet part out loud. They want to kill local computing.

You will own nothing and be happy. You will rent your computing power from the cloud. You pay a subscription for the privilege of using a computer.

AI demand is artificially spiking DRAM prices and Big Tech is pushing "AI PCs," the squeeze is on to force us into a rental model.

Reject this future.

Keep your hardware local.

Run #Linux.

Own your data.

The "cloud" is just a landlord for your data.

#NoAi #FOSS #OpenSource #Privacy #SelfHost #SelfHosting #BigTech #RightToRepair #RAM #Amazon #EatTheRich

https://www.windowscentral.com/artificial-intelligence/jeff-bezos-says-the-quiet-part-out-loud-bezos-envisions-that-youll-give-up-your-pc-for-an-ai-cloud-version

Now pondering: email feudalism

#SelfHosting #EMail #lang_en

I'm getting back into #selfhosting after 20-odd years off. I keep looking at containers and kubernetes and cloud-init and feeling like they don't offer a whole lot over just writing a couple of bash scripts to provision a server (just one with everything on it) from scratch. Does anyone have anything lightweight they like for hosting a web app?

#devops

Was mir an der Bilderverwaltung mit Immich auf dem Homeserver nicht gefällt, ist die Möglichkeit einer eigenen Ordnerstruktur. Ich sortiere seit 29 Jahren nach: Jahr - Ereignis - eventuelle Unterordner nach Monaten. Immich sortiert nach Datum. Da finde ich mich in meinen gut 25k an Bildmaterial nie mehr zurecht...
#immich #immichapp #selfhosting #homeserver #unplugtrump #unplugbigtech

Finally (2), I have some good enough DHCP server!

Tried kea from ISC — it works but requires some additional actions to be launched under #NetBSD. It has very strange default paths for file with leases, PIDs and logs:
- /usr/pkg/var/lib/kea/
- /usr/pkg/var/lib/run/kea
- /usr/pkg/var/log/kea

BTW, it could be changed via playing with some environment variables.

Also, the default startup script uses keactrl to launch DHCP server and keactrl requires some configuration for it. So, to use "service kea start" there are two configuration files are necessary:
- /usr/pkg/etc/keactrl.conf — the main configuration file for server.
- /usr/pkg/etc/kea/keactrl.con — the configuration file for keactrl.

Then, I tried the dhcpsd — the new promising successor of ISC dhcpd, which could be configured with configuration file in Lua and conforms Unix FHS — all necessary files lies in the right places: /var/run, /var/log, etc. Sadly, it doesn't work: server starts but there are no leases for clients and no any errors in the log :-(

Then, I found cmu-dhcpd in the repos — there is a dhcpd from Carnegie Mellon University with some patches from Princeton. And, finally it works! And it also conforms Unix FHS: main configuration in the /etc/dhcpd.conf, PID-file in the /var/run/dhcpd.pid and logs in the /var/log/messages

#selfhosting #dhcp #DHCPv4 #dhcpd

Alt...

Screenshot of xterm with vi opened in it. In the vi there is a /etc/dhcpd.conf opened with some simple configuration for plain home network.

Here’s to the DevOps who plan so nothing goes bang.
Here’s to the engineers who make reliability boring.

Quiet systems aren’t accidents.
They’re the result of careful design, hard choices, and work done before the lights ever flicker.

#selfhosting #devops

My #Mastodon instance is going to be moved from #Hetzner to this beaty ^_^

#HomeLab #SelfHost #SelfHosted #SelfHosting #MiniPC #JetKVM

Alt...

An Asus mini PC with JetKVM connected to it

Speaking of #JDLL, some of you may remember that I had the honor of speaking at the 2025 edition, invited by the awesome @yunohost team to share my experiences self-hosting with them.

I asked my husband to tag along and bring our daughter so she could see me speaking on stage... and see that mamma does cool stuff outside the house too.

Well, my daughter brought up Lyon and the conference on the way to school the other morning. I asked her: "did you have a good time?" and her immediate response was: "I didn't understand anything you said!"

Me: "Well, it's normal, I talked about grown up stuff."

Child (4 then, 5 soon): "But what did you say?"

And then I proceeded to try to explain the concept of #selfhosting and #digitalsovereignty and how empowering it is to use a tech stack independent of #BigTech platforms... in an accessible way that she would understand.

It was SO DIFFICULT.

I probably failed spectacularly and she still doesn't understand. But it made me think that it'd be worth trying to explain this to older kids... like pre-adolescents or in their early teens? Maybe a project for another time.

Edit/add-on: my daughter asked me to speak about the Pink Panther or Bluey next time so she could understand 😂

#MySoCalledSudoLife #resist #parenting

New #Documentation: #SelfHosting a #Firefox #Sync Server

I decided to look at the feasibility of moving syncing off Mozilla's servers and onto one that I control.

It turned out not to be too much work as someone else had already done the legwork

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/documentation/linux/selfhosting-a-firefox-sync-server.html

#introduction ― I decided to create an alt account here to allow me
to connect more easily with SDF community.

My primary focus will be on tech-related things I like:
#pkgsrc on #netbsd #illumos and #slackware
#unix #sdf #gopher #smolnet #usenet #dos #c #lisp
#selfhosting #homeserver #permacomputing #lowtech
#hamradio #progrock #progmetal #ambient #postrock
#90s #scifi #cyberpunk #novels #seinen #manga

Quick question for the ZFS experts: I'm planning to install FreeBSD on my home server and want to use raidz2 with four disks. One thing is not clear to me from the manual.

I'd like to install FreeBSD on "hard disk 1" and leave the other drives untouched until I've configured the system (so I can still boot into the current OS on let's say "hard disk 2"). After having configured the system, I'd like to add "hard disk 2 - 4" to the existing zpool which has "hard disk 1", so that I end up with a raidz2 setup.

Reading https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/man/master/8/zpool-attach.8.html I'm not sure how I should go about this. Should I configure the initial zpool (with one hdd) already as raidz2 (is that possible?), or is it converted automatically once I add the extra drives? The way I read the man page, the result after `zpool attach` will be a mirror instead of raidz2.

As you can tell, I'm quite new to this and still figuring things out. Any advice, links or boosts are greatly appreciated.

#zfs #raid #FreeBSD #BSD #SelfHosting #homelab

#SelfHosting week 0:
Phase 0. Choosing domain name for self hosting: plusbrothers.online seems available. the .net is my main website based on #WordPress
Considering also plusbrothers.community but who knows if it's possible. Something that warns users that's the same site but with other purposes.
What to do there: Mastodon instance with more than 500 characters if possible. Then Castopod, and maybe a WordPress to transfer English blog there.
Finally, choosing the most appropriate VPS server where to install #YunoHost currently confronting most famous VPS vendors' websites user interface for #accessibility - this is a showcase for customer care. Less accessible means less disability-friendly, that means "I'd prefer you don't come to us". Hostinger has an accessibility statement but it's very superficial and maybe copy-pasted from a template just because obliged by european laws, not for real care.

#selfhosting is:

Commitin programming crimes }:->

Few weeks ago I seriously looked to the mine OpenHAB installation and asked a question for myself: "Am I really need it?" Look, I have a few ZigBee devices, which are connected to the my server with the help of ZigBee2MQTT. Thusly, all necessary values and knobs are accessible through the MQTT topics.

And I'm using the OpenHAB (big Java application which eats ton's of RAM and constantly swapping) just to:
1) Read values from MQTT topic
2) Read weather forecast from Open-Meteo through simple REST API endpoints
3) Store all the data to the PostgreSQL DB.
4) Display these data in the nice Web page which works only in browsers with JS engine.

So, basically, I trade tons of RAM and processing power just for a nice web-page with few indicators. While retrieving data from my ZigBee devices processed by the another service.

After that thought, I started to think about replacing this monster with small hand-written program, which will not eat 700 MB of RAM. Just Nginx, small FastCGI script on C, which will read values from DB and display them on the simple HTML page. And another small daemon (also written in C) which will take data from MQTT topic (and from REST API of Open-Meteo) and will write them to the DB. And possibly some PGSQL procedures to analyze these data.

At least I'll have fun

#programming #C #smarthome #selfhosting

Alt...

Emacs buffer with some C code, which spews out the string with HTML, with substituted values for temperature and humidity.

Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is paperless-ngx, a key part of keeping us, well, paperless.

It is a document management tool, but I use it in a very basic way: it is hooked up to our scanner, and anything we scan gets automatically converted to PDF and OCRd. We then shred the paper. I try to scan, and shred, everything on the day that it arrives.

It is particularly useful around tax return time, as it means I can easily get the information I need from stuff which people have posted to us.

https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx

#FOSS #SelfHosting #Paperless

I had an old desktop PC sitting around. Yesterday I installed Ubuntu Linux, then Apache Server. Found that the instructions and help files are pretty good. So i decided to try to connect it to the internet. I had an old domain that was parked at namecheap, which seemed great for experimentation ... Got that hooked up to my home IP and set up port forwarding on the router. It worked! I now can see a basic website. Next are certificates for https, then email. Later then #mastodon ?
#selfhosting

Welp, the self-hosted, open-core, Mattermost release just introduced a 10k message limit on each channel.

Time to look for alternatives ...

#mattermost #selfhosting #enshittification

RE: https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@Larvitz/115678438984350657

FreeBSD 15.0-p1 fixed the bhyve regression, I've had 🙂 Home-server now running stable on the new release

YAY!

root@voyager:~ # freebsd-version -kru
15.0-RELEASE
15.0-RELEASE
15.0-RELEASE-p1

root@voyager:~ # uptime
10:14PM up 58 mins, 2 users, load averages: 1.27, 1.44, 1.22

#freebsd #freebsd15 #selfhosting

New post:

"A newbie's guide to self-hosting with #YunoHost. Part 2: installation & setup"

🔗 : https://blog.elenarossini.com/a-newbies-guide-to-self-hosting-with-yunohost-part-2-installation-setup/

with a special shout-out to @shollyethan and @ilja who, a year ago, encouraged me to try self-hosting. And of course immense gratitude to the @yunohost team for making all this possible ❤️

I hope this guide may inspire others to try it, too. The path to digital independence and empowerment is easier than you thought...

#selfhosting #FOSS #empowerment

My way of rebelling against techbros and autocrats:

December 2024: quit all Big Tech platforms and start #selfhosting essential services

December 2025: write guides for newbies about how to self-host

I'm also in discussion with a blogger I admire to start a podcast about tech... where we'll focus on solutions (instead of problems)... aiming to inspire others to join in...

It's been a really heavy year but these little acts of rebellion give me hope ✨

Self-hosting does not make your data safe.

If you don't put in place, review, *and test* backup and recovery plans,,and security measures appropriate to the risk, your data are not "safe".

Your data might be less affected by the whims of third parties, which can be valuable for sure, but don't confuse that with your data being "safe".

And I say this as someone who loves self-hosting.

Any "beginners' guide to self-hosting" which doesn't lead with, or at least focus on, security and resiliency, is getting it wrong, IMHO.

#SelfHosting

BookLore: A self-hosted, multi-user digital library with smart shelves, auto metadata, Kobo & KOReader sync, BookDrop imports, OPDS support, and a built-in reader for EPUB, PDF, and comics.

https://github.com/booklore-app/booklore

#Books #Reading #FOSS #SelfHosting #BookLore #Software

Reaching out to fellow #selfhosting fans and #DevOps using #S3 Storage. Since #minio is no more and is now just in "Maintenance Mode", what alternatives are you recommending?
currently thinking between SeaweedFS (https://seaweedfs.com/) and and Garrage (https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/)

Boost welcome.

Good morning Fedi friends!

This week I will publish a first post in my mini series for total newbies about how to self-host with #YunoHost.

The very first article will simply cover the basics of what is needed... then part 2 will be the step-by-step installation and connecting a domain + creating a subdomain... and then part 3 will cover installing an app (NextCloud) and setting up a backup system.

I'm hoping to get all this done before Christmas, in time for my one year anniversary of self-hosting with YunoHost (thank you again @ilja for setting all this in motion last year).

As I type this, I'm currently backing up my YunoHost and these days my backup files are about 13GB in size, broken down as follows (in descending order):

• #GoToSocial: 5.3 GB
• #PeerTube: 4 GB
• #NextCloud: 2.3 GB
• #Pixelfed: 1.4 GB
• #LinkStack: 91 MB

Wishing you all a great day & week!

#MySoCalledSudoLife #SelfHosting

In the past few days I’ve seen talk about RAM prices shooting up due to demand from big datacenters.

Today I read that a historic brand like Crucial - I own plenty of their hardware, including SSDs - is dropping consumer products to focus on gear for those same datacenters.
The result (or maybe the intention?) is to push people away from self hosting, undermine the OwnYourData idea and make everyone depend on huge datacenters for life.

So much for owning your data.
So much for decentralisation.

Because taking down one giant datacenter is far easier than taking down thousands or millions of individual nodes.

Friends and colleagues, don’t trade your freedom for a bit of convenience. Once you give it away, getting it back is very hard.

Always Own Your Data.

#OwnYourData #SelfHosting

Aaaand we're back!

https://kzimmermann.0x.no

Now from a new location!

#selfhosting

Obligatory meme for my fellow homelab hosters 🙂
#homelab #selfhosting

Alt...

The Drake "no / yes" meme with cloudflare as the "no" and homelab as the "yes"

#selfhosting folks:

How, really, louder are ironwolfs 10tb+ compared to we red 6tb?

@rainy Get a
VPS (Vultr, Digital Ocean), a domain (Porkbun). Learn some DNS (BIND) and email handling (Postfix, maybe Courier IMAP). Pick a Fediverse server (Friendica, Mastodon). There's a lot to learn but you'll become more powerful for knowing it.

#selfhosting

PS: Dovecot is the common option for IMAP but they pulled a fast one recently with their config that's impacted lots of folks, and I've lost faith.