Why bother?

Self Hosting is a funny thing, you buy some hardware and pretend you can run the stuff that you pay for on the internets without any headaches.

Truth be told you don’t have to go far to find a few meme’s about self hosters spending all their time self hosting something and then talking about self hosting. Its just a bit of fun, but there is an aim. Mainly to not rely on commercial solutions to things I could do myself. Also I’m not massively keen on being at the behest or a Corporation that might stop functioning or is reading your stuff. After all Paul the Postman doesn’t open my letters before he putsthem through the letterbox.

Ok what’s the setup

I’ve got a couple of things on the go. One is the place I actually fart about installing and running applications and the other that holds the data. Handy to keep them physically seperated so I don’t knacker something up and lose stuff I want to keep.

The ‘server’

Its a bit of a leap to call it a server. I supose it does fulfil that function but its just a Raspberry Pi 4 running Diet Pi OS. As you might suspect from the title DietPi is a slim OS that has been rock solid for years and it allows me to run the stuff I want.

Much of the software you might want can be installed from the software repository that teh DietPi peeps maintain. It grows slowly but essentially has many of the things you might want. For everything else (and there’s not much else) I use Docker and because I’m not great at this whole container business I use Portainer as a tool to install stuff from templates. A really handy source of templates that seem to work out the box on RPi’s can be found in the Novaspirit Repo

So the list is…..

  • Paperless-ngx - A brilliant way to file stuff and then not panic when you can’t find the email that the document was attached to. A bit of dicsipline is required :-)
  • Nextcloud - Not much to say about this. The default alternative to commercial drives
  • Gitea - Personal Git thingy
  • DietPi Dashboard - Just a way of looking at the Pi
  • Bookstack - I’ve never really got on with jus text notes. Bookstack is a bit bigger and fancier. But helps me stop having bits of paper everywhere. Again discipline is required.

The data

I keep my data on a Synology DS220+ NAS which arguably could run everything I want in Docker (and it does do a few things for me like music and photos) but I like to have a bit of seperation. I’m not paranoid but if the SD card goes on the server then I can restore it up with the usb stick. I prefer to keep all the media in one place and for that place to be slightly independent of the server. Not exactly off site but If the house goes up. I’ll moan a bit about the data only after I’ve dealt with the bigger issue.

Some useful information

  1. Install Docker and Portainer from the DietPi software list then work from there. Seems to be the simplest option to me.

That’ll do :-)