I’ve got 3 “servers” at the moment running lots of fun services.
Dell Optiplex Tower
Sevarr Suite
Audiobookshelf
Calibre/Calibre-Web
Nextcloud
FreshRSS
Paperless
Linkding
Dillinger
HomeAssistant
Mealie
WikiJS
Gitea
PiHole
Homepage
Old Laptop
Project Zomboid Server
Minecraft Server
copyparty
Tinfoil/NUT
Raspi4
Klipper/Mainsail
Obico
VanDam
I also run Plex off of my Desktop, but I plan to build a new server soon to replace the Optiplex that I can migrate it to. I’m also going to be integrating Authentik. Everything is managed using Yacht and running on Ubuntu, then proxied through Cloudflare or tunnelled through Tailscale.
I haven’t used Docker Swarm (I have barely used Docker Compose), but I have run a couple on-prem Kubernetes clusters (at my house and for clients at my day job) and cloud Kubernetes clusters, so I can speak to how complex it is it set up and run.
My background is systems administration, engineering, IT, and now DevOps. I’ve been using Linux since Ubuntu 6.06.
I set up my Kubernetes cluster with kubeadm because I wanted to learn, and it took me about a weekend to get my single master, two worker cluster up and running. I think you could probably do this using k3s much faster and have less learning curve (you don’t have to care as much about Container Network Interfaces, for example, because k3s makes that decision for you.)
There is a lot of documentation out there on Kubernetes. Helm as a “package manager” (really a templating engine) can be nice if the software you want to deploy has a Helm chart that is well written. Writing your own Helm charts can be a learning process, I’ve modified some but not written one from scratch yet.
Kubernetes releases new versions about quarterly. I’ve done several upgrades on my primary home cluster over the course of the past 2 years and they’ve been pretty smooth, about an hour of time investment total each. And remember, I’m on the more nerdy and complex flavor of Kubernetes. I think with k3s these would be even smoother and quicker.
I feel like Kubernetes knowledge is probably more valuable out in the industry if that’s a factor for you. I haven’t come across any Docker Swarm clusters in my DevOps travels, just Kubernetes and some HashiCorp Nomad.
I’m curious to see what folks say about Docker Swarm. If you have any questions about Kubernetes or running your workload on it, I’d be happy to try to help!
I also have a background as Linux Sysadmin but barely a couple of years.
I have managed to get a Kubernets cluster up and running but I have difficult setting up containers. The Classic “whoami” works flawless by Traefik for example, but doing the same for Portainer seems like impossibile for me right now, going crazy :D
I’m i choosing a difficult path? Is it possibile to have a good K8s cluster running nice without traefik?
I use ingress-ngnix for all my ingress controllers, I’ve only messed with Traefik a bit in Kubernetes and it felt like it was fighting me the whole time.
I agree with this. I think single node or not the industry is moving towards Kubernetes for container orchestration. Docker has showed their evil intentions and it’s time to leave them in the past. Even podman has native kubernetes manifest support (albeit limited last i checked) as @rs5th pointed out there’s good avenues to take if you want to avoid the complexities of kubernetes like k3s.
I just got going on matrix and I wish there were better XMPP iOS apps. Chat services without friends don’t work and bad iOS apps keeps people away. After all this time there isn’t a good adoption of XMPP for iOS except iMessage I guess.
yes, that’s definitely very mildly infuriating - but wait, your const is a function???
Reddit’s CEO just infuriated his striking moderators by saying ‘this one will pass,’ the way ‘all blowups’ do. They want to keep the site dark indefinitely.
The Reddit blackout was supposed to be a two-day event. But comments made by CEO Steve Huffman in an internal memo that leaked have strengthened the resolve of protesting moderators, who are vowing to keep the popular channels offline indefinitely.
Huffman, in a memo to Reddit staff Monday, reportedly downplayed the blackout. The Verge, which posted the email, quotes Huffman as saying the company has “not seen any significant revenue impact so far” and “like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well”.
As of 11:00 a.m. ET Wednesday, more than 6,000 subreddits were still dark, with a large number set to restricted access, meaning Reddit users could see old posts, but are unable to make new ones.
Among the subreddits that remain dark are r/funny (with over 40 million subscribers), r/Music and r/science (with over 30 million subscribers each) and r/DIY, which has more than 20 million subscribers.
Shhhhh… I think I was very high when I set my username. My instance won’t let me change my username right now, so we’ll all have to cope with my blunder for now lol
When I was a kid (late teens) I read a Henry Miller book that had a line something like,“Do exactly what they tell you to do, and let them live to regret it.” Just made me appreciate malicious compliance for most of my working life.
Did 800mb broke his mind or did the pretty print did something weird or just the fact it formatted 800mb in the eay 2000s? Because I am trying to figure out why that was the only question.
Edit: just realized is a repost by someone else. Now I am left with the question.
I’ve been running my own Mastodon instance for several months now, and I’ve enjoyed it. I don’t have to rely on someone else, either, which is nice. I’m in control of everything on that instance.
As for Lemmy, I just started my own instance today, and am currently writing you from it. What made me decide to setup my own instance was some performance issues I was seeing with Lemmy.world, although that might have been an UI problem. Anyway, I enjoy doing this stuff, so I’m running my own instance for the sake of doing it.
On the flip side, it’s more expensive and time consuming, and I’m the one who has to worry about backing up data, etc. Like I said, though, I enjoy doing it, so it’s no big deal.
I run my own Mastodon instance, but for Lemmy it seemed more logical to join an existing instance that aligned with my interests. I wouldn’t be adverse to abandoning my self-hosted Mastodon for a shared instance, but I would prefer a small instance run by and for people I know, rather than one of the huge ones.
What might make you want to ditch your self-hosted Mastodon instance?
With Lemmy, I didn’t feel a need to pick any specific instance because I can follow communities from anywhere, and it seems to work pretty well.
One downside I’ve encountered with my own Lemmy instance is that post and comment history in the communities I follow begins when I started following them on my new instance. New posts and comments are federated my way, going forward, but I don’t have the ability to go back and view as much history as one would on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml, for example.
As someone who likes having control over their data and especially backups, and someone who normally enjoys self-hosting things, I honestly might do it. I’m not sure if I’d want to host a lemmy instance or kbin instance though, since I know they all federate together anyway. I may also end up waiting until the software is more mature too before looking into it.
That’s awesome! Running my own social media instances has become a hobby for me.
Having my own Lemmy instance has felt fairly seamless versus using Lemmy.world, but there have been some kinks. For example, when attempting to subscribe to a new community, the server has to pull a bunch of data first. This takes several seconds, but the UI simply says “not found” – and then after several seconds, the UI updates with the community you want to follow. I figured this out by tailing the logs.
Also, the installation was pretty damn easy, especially when compared to Mastodon.
I’d maybe be interested in trying out self-hosting Mastodon at some point too, good to hear that Lemmy was easy to install though. I’m not too worried since I have quite a bit of Linux experience, I figure it probably won’t be too bad to setup whatever social media instances I’m interested in checking out.
Yeah, if you’ve got a decent amount of Linux experience, I don’t think you’ll have any issues. Mastodon’s installation is well-documented and works. My only criticism is that it’s a bit long and you have to be careful not to miss anything.
On the other hand, I recall installing Pixelfed back several months ago and having a difficult time. The documentation was lacking, and it required me to use Arch Linux, which I had never used. I was able to get it working, but eventually terminated the instance after a while because I was never using it.
I provisioned an Ubuntu 22.02 server at Linode. I chose their 2 GB Shared CPU instance type. Once I configured the server to my liking, I ran through the Lemmy-Ansible instructions. (They have other methods, so check the documentation.)
Essentially, you install Ansible on your workstation. I’m on macOS and installed it via Homebrew. You then download their git repository, create the necessary configuration files, and then have Ansible configure the server. It was fairly simple.
I have a lab at home and do host some stuff for myself from there in a small DMZ (ie: Miniflux RSS readers, Plex through Reverse proxy etc).
But I used a linode for my lemmy/kbin stuff. Reason being is that the code is fairly new and there may be exploits bugs and
I dont want to deal with my ISP made an instance is exploited and becomes some type of C2 box or spews out spam. Kbin specifically already has PRs to fix XSS and Sql injection stuff, the former of which is usually avoidable if you just follow some pretty basic principles. So its a concern.
Linode has better bandwidth than my non-symmetrical ISP uplink and is on its own quota.
It sounds like linode is the way to go then and their prices seem reasonable. The funny thing is I’ve heard of linode before because Computer Clan uses it as a sponsor, but ever since I started using sponsor block I haven’t really heard about it. I didn’t actually know what they did.
I’ve run linodes for years. My blog runs on them. I still host a variety of other services on them. They are good for everything from gaming servers to a blog etc.
They did get bought out by akamai a while back. And have raised their prices but they are still solid.
I am currently the only user. Im considering opening it up to limited users but not really having communities once i get a lot of the instances cached and indexable.
Others like @leopardboy are running on a 2GB shared just fine. I will likely move to that if i choose to keep it solo for sure, or under 100 users and no communities.
I dont have the time to really moderate others or content on the instance. So i dont think I plan to host any communities at all. I do wish you could federate/sync specific communities to your instance to make searching/subscribing easier.
That’s exactly what I’m wanting to do. Just have myself and maybe a few others with limited communities. Would you recommend using ansible to setup a Lemmy on Linode?
Yes the ansible config worked fine for me. I worked for days to get an kbin instance up. Ansible worked first go.
I have yet to get email working but otherwise its solid. Linode will block email btw if you account is new (and frankly may be blocking mine now). You just have to put in a case and justify and it should be fine. My account should be old enough to be exempt but I will likely do it anyhow. Their support is pretty good.
Getting federation crawled and communities added is a bit slow. Mostly because the other instances are a bit slow.
A few pointers if you havent done admin yet.
Put nothing in the federation allow list unless you want to go whitelist only. Over time as other instances hit yours and you search others, the linked list of instances will grow. Just use the blocklist if you want to block certain instances. I havent found a good way to block the growing number of instances in case they have some illegal content like CSAM. So…i may just go whitelist anyhow
Searching for instances seems to be CPU heavy on mine. Its not a problem though. You just cant simply plug in a URL of a community in another instance if you havent linked. You will get a 404 if you do. So you have to go to search, looking for that community by hitting search a few times until it shows up, then you can join and it will start crawling
I have no idea what “Private instance” does other than i believe it will keep your instance form starting in the future if you have it checked AND federation turned on. I saw some logs in dockers startup when i did it but nothing in the UI.,
Thank you for the information. I’ve signed up for a 2GB shared linode and it’s running Debian 11. I assume I need to ssh into it, then run the ansible stuff. I have very basic knowledge of Linux and command line. I am not entirely sure how to fill out the config but I will cross that bridge when I come to it.
kbin.life
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