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Why is starting with Self-hosting so daunting? (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by Ieris19@alien.top to c/main@selfhosted.forum
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I’ve been a Software Engineering Student for 2 years now. I understand networks and whatnot at a theoretical level to some degree.

I’ve developed applications and hosted them through docker on Google Cloud for school projects.

I’ve tinkered with my router, port forwarded video game servers and hosted Discord bots for a few years (familiar with Websockets and IP/NAT/WAN and whatnot)

Yet I’ve been trying to improve my setup now that my old laptop has become my homelab and everything I try to do is so daunting.

Reverse proxy, VPN, Cloudfare bullshit, and so many more things get thrown around so much in this sub and other resources, yet I can barely find info on HOW to set up this things. Most blogs and articles I find are about what they are which I already know. And the few that actually explain how to set it up are just throwing so many more concepts at me that I can’t keep up.

Why is self-hosting so daunting? I feel like even though I understand how many of these things work I can’t get anything actually running!

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[-] Ieris19@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

I actually hate GPT, dislike it’s answers and find myself knowing better than it most times.

I’ve been trying to setup a DNS server to create my own domains internally within my VPN but I keep finding info on how DNS servers work, and how to make a records on registrars, but nothing on what I actually need to install and run to have my own DNS for example. Same thing goes for many other services, but that’s the one bugging me for the longest time because it should be so simple.

I’ve found plenty of tutorials on how to make a cache DNS, just not an authoritative name server btw, and I’ve searched for both DNS and name server to no avail. If it was Linux I’d write some custom rules in my hostfiles and be done with it, but it’s so much harder to do on Windows and that’s my daily use OS for now…

[-] Salty-Masterpiece-31@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

"Selfhost authorative dns" returns this for example https://wiki.selfhosted.show/DNS/

And we have two guides for the most common dns implementantations. Depending on the vpn software you can push the dns ip as part of the configuration or by using DHCP.

I also found the pihole docs for unbound rather helpful https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns/unbound/.

[-] Ieris19@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

For me, I have that as the 4th result, after some Reddit and IBM which probably would’ve discouraged me from continuing my search. I’d have to read on it.

Also, TIL PiHole doesn’t necessarily need to run on a Raspberry Pi. I guess assumptions really do come back to bite me in the ass haha

[-] AllisonIsReal@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

There's a lesson in here somewhere about patience. Get good at skimming. I was looking for how to do something I was unfamiliar with the other day and I had to sift through 15 results across four different search strings before I found the solution that was going to work for me. But because I'm good at skimming it only took me 1/2 hour to discover and implement. Google isn't magic and this is why someone else recommended Chat GPT to help with some of the sifting, especially early on.

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this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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