Self hosted server to do what?

Because I have a self hosted server running on a refurb Lenovo mini-pc that I bought for $90 and it does a fine job running the dozen or so docker image of service I need.

But I ain’t gonna run no LLM on that machine, that’s for sure.

Sooo… An enterprise cloud ready native DevOps cold fusion AI climate change llm prompt: insert more marketing keyword here ready…

… boolean storage platform ?

Oh don’t get me started on modern “CS” curriculum of some schools, it’s atrocious. I see them start learning about react and nodejs in year 1 because “that’s what companies need” but that leaves them with massive fundamental knowledge gaps. I’ve seen people 5 years in their degree who struggled with Boolean logic.

I believe they should start at the bottom of the stack and climb up instead of starting somewhere at the top and being left oblivious about the massive amount of stuff going on below. And the “internship” system we have in my country is massive BS. Basically instead of learning they spend 1/2 of their education time doing menial job in companies. Which means their 5 years degrees is barely 2.5 of actual school time but we still like to pretend it’s equivalent to a normal masters degree.

The “need of the industry” for “IT people” has lead to the proliferation of diploma mill curriculum that churn out monkeys lightly trained on the proverbial typewriter and calls them “software engineers”.

But we still have excellent schools that produce very well trained people, and I do not believe they produce less of them, it’s just that we also produce a lot more that went through bad curriculums.

You make the same mistake as the previous person. You take the exemple of the minority of people who cared to try to understand how computer worked and generalize it to the entire gen.

I have thousands of people in my office that prove everyday that millenial are for the most part tech illiterate and do not care about how thing works. I’ve seen the millenial arrive in the work env and the gen-z and there is absolutely no difference. Millenial were exactly as dumb (or as smart). If anything, I think gen-z are actually smarter because they come in not believing the corporate bullshit the X and the Y drank like cool-aid. But that’s another topic.

In any case, all the stuff we had to go through didn’t make us smarter, for every 10,000 of people of my gen who learned they had to edit autoexec.bat to launch a game, I’d bet that barely one knew what the heck himem.sys actually was. That didn’t make them smarter, just monkeys who learned a trick.

So yeah, geeky gen-Z don’t need to tweak as many parameters, they can directly launch fusion 360 and start designing parts for their 3D printers. Tech has moved on. Gen-Z geeks fiddle with other stuff than shitty windows drivers.

I don’t know how many time I answered the same thing to the exact same argument but here goes:

In short, it’s most likely not true. You’re implying the the millennials were generally more competent but it’s very likely wrong, the vast majority of people in that gen had absolutely no clue what they were doing on a computer most of the time they just knew how to do a few limited things with them.

The apps didn’t make the masses tech illiterate, the app adjusted to the existing ones and removed the stuff they couldn’t never understand, like where to save a file to be able to find it later. (I’ve worked in a support call center and I can tell you with 98.5% accuracy that the lost file is in system32).

The gen-z has quite a lot of smart, curious tech savvy people, and a vast majority of tech-illiterate people, so did the millenial, and the X, and the boomers.

This whole generational superiority argument is just as baseless as it was when my gen was blaming yours for being lazy, not able to learn anything due to a short attention span and an obsession for brunch and avocado toast.

Back when I lived in Dubai, around 06, you’d go to some well known parking spots and some Indians guy would come to your car with a bunch of burned DVD in giant binders with all of the latest release, classics, complete series…

That was useful because internet was pretty shit and expensive. If I remember I was paying €120 a month for a theoretical 2Mb.

And there was even a “special” binder for that famous vin diesel movie. I guess he was very popular because it was very large binder that lots of people asked to see every week. It’s weird to me because pitch black was clearly his best and the only one worth rewatching but, every single week, people really seems excited to buy a new copy of xXx.

But that’s also why you don’t know the commands in the first place, if you used them you would remember them. It’s self sustaining ignorance ;)

Ps: I kid, there a lot of stuff I don’t care to remember the cli for and I happily use GUI.

PPS: docker logs -f container_name ;)

Millions of people smoke. That doesn’t make it a smart life choice.

The argument “lots of people do it” is probably one of the worst possible to justify anything.

Air is good. Fixed port too so that’s not something you have to deal with more than once.

That reminds me of work. I’m old, young me has been through the mistakes and the pain of wanting to control and self-host everything.

Now I manage a team of young idealists who have not yet been burned sufficiently hard by reality and I feel like I spend half of my time denying them permission to add new self-hosted services to our stack.

Just last month a young padawan was pissed at the spent on an external auth service and had been pushing hard for a self hosted OSS solution which he was convinced he could handle by himself (which was most likely true, from a purely technical standpoint).

Since he wouldn’t let it go, I “punished” him by having him spend one day in excel and powerpoint to prepare a cost benefit analysis to present to the architecture review board, including server cost, backups, redundancy, security, monitoring, pen-testing, auditing, his time and all the bells and whistles we needed to be compliant with all the ISO-x we have to be. (we’re in a banking related field).

Our estimated internal cost ended up about 6x the one of the SASS solutions and still wasn’t as reliable.

Most people don’t understand the amount of effort it requires to run a secure & reliable system and if I had a dollar for everytime I heard it’s as simple as “docker run”, I could retire early.

A) Set up a wiregard VPN server in your remote instance. Or better, get a VPN provider, the VPS is kinda pointless.

B) Assuming you’re using docker as you should to run your home server’s service, use gluetun to connect to the VPN and route your docker traffic for the instances through gluetun. This will ensure that you have a dead man switch when/if the VPN goes down.

C) set-up a reverse proxy to access the various instance from the outside if that is something you need.

Here’s a fully developed config, you can use a jumping point.

https://github.com/geekau/mediastack

Can’t answer your question but I got a refurb corporate m715 for 60 bucks, I haven’t bothered upgrading the 8Gb ram^* and it runs a full dockerized arr stack, vpn and jellyfin without any issue. I don’t reencode and I don’t use 4k media, so I can’t talk about that either.

But if you’re looking for cheap that works, it’s not a bad little machine.

^* The system actually run on 6Gb since 2 are reserved for video and by the time I realized that everything has been up and running fine for a while, so I didn’t even bother rebooting in the bios to change it, I just added a bigger swap 🙄