This posts lists inexpensive home servers, Tailscale and Claude Code as the big unlocks.
I actually think Tailscale may be an even bigger deal here than sysadmin help from Claude Code at al.
The biggest reason I had not to run a home server was security: I'm worried that I might fall behind on updates and end up compromised.
Tailscale dramatically reduces this risk, because I can so easily configure it so my own devices can talk to my home server from anywhere in the world without the risk of exposing any ports on it directly to the internet.
Being able to hit my home server directly from my iPhone via a tailnet no matter where in the world my iPhone might be is really cool.
I'd rather expose a Wireguard port and control my keys than introduce a third party like Tailscale.
I am not sure why people are so afraid of exposing ports. I have dozens of ports open on my server including SMTP, IMAP(S), HTTP(S), various game servers and don't see a problem with that. I can't rule out a vulnerability somewhere but services are containerized and/or run as separate UNIX users. It's the way the Internet is meant to work.
> I'd rather expose a Wireguard port and control my keys than introduce a third party like Tailscale.
Ideal if you have the resources (time, money, expertise). There are different levels of qualifications, convenience, and trust that shape what people can and will deploy. This defines where you draw the line - at owning every binary of every service you use, at compiling the binaries yourself, at checking the code that you compile.
> I am not sure why people are so afraid of exposing ports
It's simple, you increase your attack surface, and the effort and expertise needed to mitigate that.
> It's the way the Internet is meant to work.
Along with no passwords or security. There's no prescribed way for how to use the internet. If you're serving one person or household rather than the whole internet, then why expose more than you need out of some misguided principle about the internet? Principle of least privilege, it's how security is meant to work.
> Ideal if you have the resources (time, money, expertise). There are different levels of qualifications, convenience, and trust that shape what people can and will deploy. This defines where you draw the line - at owning every binary of every service you use, at compiling the binaries yourself, at checking the code that you compile.
Wireguard is distributed by distros in official packages. You don't need time, money and expertise to setup unattended upgrades with auto reboot on a debian or redhat based distro. At least it is not more complicated than setting an AI agent.
What about SMTP, IMAP(S), HTTP(S), various game servers parent mentioned have open ports for?
Having a single port open for VPN access seems okay for me. That's what I did, But I don't want an "etc" involved in what has direct access to hardware/services in my house from outside.
Ah… I really could not disagree more with that statement. I know we don’t want to trust BigCorp and whatnot, but a single exposed port and an incomplete understanding of what you’re doing is really all it takes to be compromised.
Same applies to Tailscale. A Tailscale client, coordination plane vulnerability, or incomplete understanding of their trust model is also all it takes. You are adding attack surface, not removing it.
If your threat model includes "OpenSSH might have an RCE" then "Tailscale might have an RCE" belongs there too.
If you are exposing a handful of hardened services on infrastructure you control, Tailscale adds complexity for no gain. If you are connecting machines across networks you do not control, or want zero-config access to internal services, then I can see its appeal.
Even if you understand what you are doing, you are still exposed to every single security bug in all of the services you host. Most of these self hosted tools have not been through 1% of the security testing big tech services have.
Now you are exposed to every security bug in Tailscale's client, DERP relays, and coordination plane, plus you have added a trust dependency on infrastructure you do not control. The attack surface did not shrink, it shifted.
This felt like it didn’t do your aim justice, “$X and an incomplete understanding of what you’re doing is all it takes to be compromised” applies to many $X, including Tailscale.
Headscale is only really useful if you need to manage multiple users and/or networks. If you only have one network you want to have access to and a small number of users/devices it only increases the attack surface over having one wireguard listening because it has more moving parts.
I set it up to open the port for few secs via port knocking. Plus another script that runs on the server that opens connections to my home ip addr doing reverse lookup to a domain my router updates via dyndns so devices at my home don’t need to port knock to connect.
I think the most important thing about Tailscale is how accessible it is. Is there a GUI for Wireguard that lets me configure my whole private network as easily as Tailscale does?
Yggdrasil network is probably the future. At Hoppy Network we're about to release private yggdrasil relays as a service so you don't get spammed with "WAN" traffic. With Yggdrasil, IP addresses aren't allocated by an authority - they are owned and proven by public key cryptography.
Of course. A port is a door. If service listening on a port is secure and properly configured (e.g. ssh), whole Internet can bang on it all day every day, they won't let through without proper key. Same for imap, xmpp or any othet service.
But what can you expect from people who provide services but won't even try to understand how they work and how they are configured as it's 'not fun enough', expecting claude code to do it right for them.
Asking AI to do thing you did 100 times before is OK I guess. Asking AI to do thing you never did and have no idea how it's properly done - not so much I'd say. But this guy obviously does not signal his sysadmin skills but his AI skills. I hope it brings him the result he aimed for.
> I'd rather expose a Wireguard port and control my keys than introduce a third party like Tailscale.
This is what I do. You can do Tailscale like access using things like Pangolin[0].
You can also use a bastion host, or block all ports and set up Tor or i2p, and then anyone that even wants to talk to your server will need to know cryptographic keys to route traffic to it at all, on top of your SSH/WG/etc keys.
> I am not sure why people are so afraid of exposing ports. I have dozens of ports open on my server including SMTP, IMAP(S), HTTP(S), various game servers and don't see a problem with that.
This is what I don't do. Anything that needs real internet access like mail, raw web access, etc gets its own VPS where an attack will stay isolated, which is important as more self-hosted services are implemented using things like React and Next[1].
I personally wouldn't trust a machine if a container was exploited on it, you don't know if there were any successful container escapes, kernel exploits, etc. Even if they escaped with user permissions, that can fill your box with boobytraps if they have container-granted capabilities.
I'd just prefer to nuke the VPS entirely and start over than worry if the server and the rest of my services are okay.
there are some well respected compute providers as well which you can use and for very low amount, you can sort of offload this worry to someone else.
That being said, VM themselves are good enough security box too. I consider running VM's even on your home server with public facing strategies usually allowable
I understand where you are coming from but no, containers aren't enough isolation.
If you are running some public service, it might have bugs and of course we see some RCE issues as well or there can be some misconfig and containers by default dont provide enough security if an hacker tries to break in. Containers aren't secure in that sense.
Virtual machines are the intended use case for that. But they can be full of friction at time.
It allows you to setup vm's as containers and even provides a web ui and provides the amount of isolation that you can trust (usually) everything on.
I'd say to not take chances with your home server because that server can be inside your firewall and can infect on a worst case scenario other devices but virtualization with things like incus or proxmox (another well respected tool) are the safest and provide isolation that you can trust with. I highly recommend that you should take a look at it if you deploy public serving services.
It's the way the internet was meant to work but it doesn't make it any easier. Even when everything is in containers/VMs/users, if you don't put a decent amount of additional effort into automatic updates and keeping that context hardened as you tinker with it it's quite annoying when it gets pwned.
I agree maintaining wireguard is a good compromise. It may not be "the way the internet was intended to work" but it lets you keep something which feels very close without relying on a 3rd party or exposing everything directly. On top of that, it's really not any more work than Tailscale to maintain.
It protected the host itself but it did not protect the server from being compromised and running malware, mining cryptocurrency.
Containerizing your publicly exposed service will also not protect your HTTP server from hosting malware or your SMTP server from sending SPAM, it only means you've protected your SMTP server from your compromised HTTP server (assuming you've even locked it down accurately, which is exactly the kind of thing people don't want to be worried about).
Tailscale puts the protection of the public portion of the story to a company dedicated to keeping that portion secure. Wireguard (or similar) limit the protection to a single service with low churn and minimal attack surface. It's a very different discussion than preventing lateral movement alone. And that all goes without mentioning not everyone wants to deal with containers in the first place (though many do in either scenario).
I do that as well, along with using sshd as a SOCKS proxy for web based stuff via Firefox, but it can be a bit of a pain to forward each service to each host individually if you have more than a few things going on - especially if you have things trying to use the same port and need to keep track of how you mapped it locally. It can also a lot harder to manage on mobile devices, e.g. say you have some media or home automation services - they won't be as easy to access via a single public SSH host via port forwarding (if at all) as a VPN would be, and wireguard is about as easy a personal VPN as there is.
That's where wg/Tailscale come in - it's just a traditional IP network at that point. Also less to do to shut up bad login attempts from spam bots and such. I once forgot to configure the log settings on sshd and ended up with GBs of logs in a week.
The other big upside (outside of not having a 3rd party) in putting in the slightly more effort to do wg/ssh/other personal VPN is the latency+bandwidth to your home services will be better.
> and wireguard is about as easy a personal VPN as there is.
I would argue OpenVPN is easier. I currently run both (there are some networks I can’t use UDP on, and I haven’t bothered figuring out how to get wireguard to work with TCP), and the OpenVPN initial configuration was easier, as is adding clients (DHCP, pre-shared cert+username/password).
This isn’t to say wireguard is hard. But imo OpenVPN is still easier - and it works everywhere out of the box. (The exception is networks that only let you talk on 80 and 443, but you can solve that by hosting OpenVPN on 443, in my experience.)
This is all based on my experience with opnsense as the vpn host (+router/firewall/DNS/DHCP). Maybe it would be a different story if I was trying to run the VPN server on a machine behind my router, but I have no reason to do so - I get at least 500Mbps symmetrical through OpenVPN, and that’s just the fastest network I’ve tested a client on. And even if that is the limit, that’s good enough for me, I don’t need faster throughput on my VPN since I’m almost always going to be latency limited.
Also to Simon: I am not sure about how Iphone works but in android, you could probably use mosh and termux to then connect to the server as well and have the end result while not relying on third party (in this case tailscale)
I am sure there must be an Iphone app which could probably allow something like this too. I highly recommend more people take a look into such workflow, I might look into it more myself.
Tmate is a wonderful service if you have home networks behind nat's.
I personally like using the hosted instance of tmate (tmate.io) itself but It can be self hosted and is open source
Once again it has third party issue but luckily it can be self hosted so you can even have a mini vps on hetzner/upcloud/ovh and route traffic through that by hosting tmate there so ymmv
My biggest source of paranoia is my open home assistant port, while it requires a strong password and is TLS-encrypted, I'm sure that one day someone will find an exploit letting them in, and then the attacker will rapidly turn my smart home devices on and off until they break/overheat the power components until they start a fire and burn down my house.
That seems like a very irrational fear. Attackers don't go around trying to break into Home Assistant to turn the lights on at some stranger's house.
There's also no particular reason to think Home Assistant's authentication has to have a weakness point.
And your devices are also unlikely to start a fire just by being turned on and off, if that's your fear you should replace them at once because if they catch fire it doesn't matter if it's an attacker or yourself turning them on and off.
> I am not sure why people are so afraid of exposing ports.
Similar here, I only build & run services that I trust myself enough to run in a secure manner by themselves. I still have a VPN for some things, but everything is built to be secure on its own.
It's quite a few services on my list at this point and really don't want to have a break in one thing lead to a break in everything. It's always possible to leave a hole in one or two things by accident.
On the other side this also means I have a Postgres instance with TCP/5432 open to the internet - with no ill effects so far, and quite a bit of trust it'll remain that way, because I understand its security properties and config now.
> I'd rather expose a Wireguard port and control my keys than introduce a third party like Tailscale.
I’m working on a (free) service that lets you have it both ways. It’s a thin layer on top of vanilla WireGuard that handles NAT traversal and endpoint updates so you don’t need to expose any ports, while leaving you in full control of your own keys and network topology.
The main issue people have with Tailscale is that it's a centralised service that isn't self hostable. The Tailscale server manages authentication and keeping track of your devices IPs.
Your eventual connection is direct to your device, but all the management before that runs on Tailscales server.
But I also think it's worth a mention that for basic "I want to access my home LAN" use cases you don't need P2P, you just need a single public IP to your lan and perhaps dynamic dns.
- Each device? This means setting up many peers on each of your devices
- Router/central server? That's a single point of failure, and often a performance bottleneck if you're on LAN. If that's a router, the router may be compromised and eavesdrop on your connections, which you probably didn't secure as hard because it's on a VPN.
Not to mention DDNS can create significant downtime.
Tailscale fails over basically instantly, and is E2EE, unlike the hub setup.
A lot of people are behind CGNAT or behind a non-configurable router, which is an abomination.
> Secure your router
A typical router cannot be secured against physical access, unlike your servers which can have disk encryption.
> Your router is a SPOF regardless
Tailscale will keep your connection over a downstream switch, for example. It will not go through the router if it doesn't have to. If you use it for other usecases like kdeconnect synchronizing clipboard between phone and laptop, that will also stay up independent of your home router.
The VPS (using wg-easy or similar solutions) will be able to decrypt traffic as it has all the keys. I think most people self-hosting are not fine with big cloud eavesdropping on their data.
Tailscale really is superior here if you use tailnet lock. Everything always stays encrypted, and fails over to their encrypted relays if direct connection is not possible for various reasons.
Every time I put anything anywhere on the open net, it gets bombarded 24/7 by every script kiddie, botnet group , and these days, AI company out there. No matter what I'm hosting, it's a lot more convenient to not have to worry about that even for a second.
> Every time I put anything anywhere on the open net, it gets bombarded 24/7 by every script kiddie, botnet group , and these days, AI company out there
Are you sure that it isn't just port scanners? I get perhaps hundreds of connections to my STMP server every day, but they are just innocuous connections (hello, then disconnect). I wouldn't worry about that unless you see repeated login attempts, in which case you may want to deploy Fail2Ban.
Port scanners don't try to ssh into my server with various username/password combinations.
I prefer to hide my port instead of using F2B for a few reasons.
1. Log spam. Looking in my audit logs for anything suspicious is horrendous when there's just megs of login attempts for days.
2. F2B has banned me in the past due to various oopsies on my part. Which is not good when I'm out of town and really need to get into my server.
3. Zero days may be incredibly rare in ssh, but maybe not so much in Immich or any other relatively new software stack being exposed. I'd prefer not to risk it when simple alternatives exist.
Besides the above, using Tailscale gives me other options, such as locking down cloud servers (or other devices I may not have hardware control over) so that they can only be connected to, but not out of.
This is a good reason not to expose random services, but a wireguard endpoint simply won't respond at all if someone hits it with the wrong key. It is better even than key based ssh.
Defence in dept. You have a layer of security even before a packet reaches your port. I might have a zero day on your service, but now I also need to breach your reverse proxy to get to it.
Speaking of Wireguard, my current topology has all peers talking to a single peer that forwards traffic between peers (for hole punching / peers with dynamic ips).
But some peers are sometimes on the same LAN (eg phone is sometimes on same LAN as pc). Is there a way to avoid forwarding traffic through the server peer in this case?
Have your network managing software setup a default route with a lower metric than wireguard default route based on wifi SSID. Can be done easily with systemd-networkd, because you can match .network file configurations on SSID. You're probably out of luck with this approach on network-setup-challenged devices like so called smart phones.
I used to do that, but Tailscale with your own headscale server is pretty snazzy. The other thing is with cloudflared running your server doesn't have to be Internet-routable. Everything is tunneled.
i tried wireguard and ended up giving up on it, too many isps just block it here or use some kind of tech that fucks with it and i have no idea why, i couldn't connect to my home network because it was blocked on whatever random wifi i was on
the new problem is now my isp uses cgnat and there's no easy way around it
tailscale avoids all that, if i wanted more control i'd probably use headscale rather than bother with raw wireguard
A mesh-type wireguard network is rather annoying to set up if you have more than a few devices, and a hub-type network (on a low powered router) tends to be so slow that it necessitates falling back to alternate interfaces when you're at home. Tailscale does away with all this and always uses direct connections. In principle it is more secure than hosting it on some router without disk encryption (as the keys can be extracted via a physical attack, and a pwned router can also eavesdrop on traffic).
Wireguard is _really_ simple in that sense though. If you're not doing anything complicated it's very easy to set up & maintain, and basically just works.
You can also buy quite a few routers now that have it built in, so you literally just tick a checkbox, then scan a QR code/copy a file to each client device, done.
My ISP-provided router (Free, in France) has WG built-in. But other than performance being abysmal, its main pain point is not supporting subnet routing.
So if all you want is to connect your phone / laptop while away to the local home network, it's fine. If you want to run a tunnel between two locations with multiple IPs on the remote side, you're SoL.
If you expose ports, literally everything you are hosting and every plugin is an attack surface. Most of this stuff is built by single hobbiest devs on the weekend. You are also exposed to any security issues you make in your configuration. My first attempt self hosting I had redis compromised because I didn't realise I had exposed it to the internet with no password.
Behind a VPN your only attack surface is the VPN which is generally very well secured.
Edit: This is the kind of service that you should only expose to your intranet, i.e. a network that is protected through wireguard. NEVER expose this publicly, even if you don't have admin:admin credtials.
Isn't GP's point inadvertently exposing stuff? Just mention docker networking on HN and you'll get threadfuls of comments on how it helpfully messes with your networking without telling you. Maybe redis does the same?
I mitigate this by having a dedicated machine on the border that only does routing and firewalling, with no random services installed. So anything that helpfully opens ports on internal vms won't automatically be reachable from the outside.
I actually didn't know I had. At the time I didn't properly know how docker networking worked and I exposed redis to the host so my other containers could access it. And then since this was on a VPS with a dedicated IP, this made it exposed to the whole internet.
I now know better, but there are still a million other pitfalls to fall in to if you are not a full time system admin. So I prefer to just put it all behind a VPN and know that it's safe.
> but there are still a million other pitfalls to fall in to if you are not a full time system admin.
Pro tip: After you configure a new service, review the output of ss -tulpn. This will tell you what ports are open. You should know exactly what each line represents, especially those that bind on 0.0.0.0 or [::] or other public addresses.
The pitfall that you mentioned (Docker automatically punching a hole in the firewall for the services that it manages when an interface isn't specified) is discoverable this way.
I have a VPS with OVH, I put Tailscale on it and it's pretty cool to be able to install and access local (to the server) services like Prometheus and Grafana without having to expose them through the public net firewall or mess with more apache/nginx reverse proxies. (Same for individual services' /metrics endpoints that are served with a different port.)
The answer is people who don't truly understand the way it works being in charge of others who also don't in different ways. In the best case, there's an under resourced and over leveraged security team issuing overzealous edicts with the desperate hope of avoiding some disaster. When the sample size is one, it's easy to look at it and come to your conclusion.
In every case where a third party is involved, someone is either providing a service, plugging a knowledge gap, or both.
Tailscale does not solve the "falling behind on updates" problem, it just moves the perimeter. Your services are still vulnerable if unpatched: the attacker now needs tailnet access first (compromised device, account, or Tailscale itself).
You have also added attack surface: Tailscale client, coordination plane, DERP relays. If your threat model includes "OpenSSH might have an RCE" then "Tailscale might have an RCE" belongs there too.
WireGuard gives you the same "no exposed ports except VPN" model without the third-party dependency.
The tradeoff is convenience, not security.
BTW, why are people acting like accessing a server from a phone is a 2025 innovation?
SSH clients on Android/iOS have existed for 15 years. Termux, Prompt, Blink, JuiceSSH, pick one. Port N, key auth, done. You can run Mosh if you want session persistence across network changes. The "unlock" here is NAT traversal with a nice UI, not a new capability.
> Tailscale does not solve the "falling behind on updates" problem, it just moves the perimeter.
nothing 100% fixes zero days either, you are just adding layers that all have to fail at the same time
> You have also added attack surface: Tailscale client, coordination plane, DERP relays. If your threat model includes "OpenSSH might have an RCE" then "Tailscale might have an RCE" belongs there too.
you still have to have a vulnerable service after that. in your scenario you'd need an exploitable attack on wireguard or one of tailscale's modifications to it and an exploitable service on your network
The "layers" argument applies equally to WireGuard without Tailscale. Attacker still needs VPN exploit + vulnerable service.
The difference: Tailscale adds attack vectors that do not exist with self-hosted WireGuard: account compromise, coordination plane, client supply chain, other devices on your tailnet. Those are not layers to bypass, they are additional entry points.
Regardless, it is still for convenience, not security.
> BTW, why are people acting like accessing a server from a phone is a 2025 innovation?
> SSH clients on Android/iOS have existed for 15 years
That is not the point, Tailscale is not just about having a network connection, it's everything that goes with. I used to have OpenVPN, and there's a world of difference.
- The tailscale client is much nicer and convenient to use on Android than anything I have seen.
- The auth plane is simpler, especially for non tech users (parents, wife) whom I wish to access my photo album. They are basically independent with tailscale.
- The simplicity also allows me to recommend it to friends and we can link between our tailnet, e.g. to cross backup our NAS.
- Tailscale can terminate SSH publicly, so I can selectively expose services on the internet (e.g. VaultWarden) without exposing my server and hosting a reverse proxy.
There’s also Cloudflare tunnels for stuff that you want to be available to the internet but dont want to open ports and deal with that. You can add an auth policy that only works with your email and Github/whatever SSO.
Now I wish there was some kind of global, single-network version of Tailscale...
TS is cool if you have a well-defined security boundary. This is you / your company / your family, they should have access. That is the rest of the world, they should not.
My use case is different. I do occasionally want to share access to otherwise personal machines around. Tailscale machine sharing sort of does what I want, but it's really inconvenient to use. I wish there was something like a Google Docs flow, where any Tailscale user could attempt to dial into my machine, but they were only allowed to do so after my approval.
You have more or less described OpenZiti. Just mint a new identity/JWT for the user, create a service, and viola, only that user has access to your machine. Fully open source and self-hostable.
Maybe I'm dumb, but I still don't quite understand the value-add of Tailscale over what Wireguard or some other VPN already provides. HN has tried to explain it to me but it just seems like sugar on top of a plain old VPN. Kind of like how "pi-hole" is just sugar on top of dnsmasq, and Plex is just sugar on top of file sharing.
I think you answered the question. Sugar. It's easier than managing your own Wireguard connections. Adding a device just means logging into the Tailscale client, no need to distribute information to or from other devices. Get a new phone while traveling because yours was stolen? You can set up Tailscale and be back on your private network in a couple minutes.
Why did people use Dropbox instead of setting up their own FTP servers? Because it was easier.
Software engineering is a broad spectrum where we can move up and down its abstraction ladder. Using off-the-shelf tools and even third-party providers is fine. I don't have to do everything from scratch - after all, I didn't write my own text editor. I'm also happy to download prepacked and preconfigured software on my Linux distro instead of compiling and adding them to PATH manually.
I could, I just choose not to and direct my interests elsewhere. Those interests can change over time too. One day someone with Tailscale can decide to explore Wireguard. Similarly, someone who runs their own mail server might decide to move to a hosted solution and do something else. That's perfectly fine.
To me, this freedom of choice in software engineering is not disheartening. It's liberating and exciting.
That is a strawman though, and I am not sure why all replies assume extremes all the time.
Nobody said do everything from scratch. The point is: basic networking (port forwarding, WireGuard) should not be beyond someone's capability as a software engineer.
"I use apt instead of compiling" is a time tradeoff. "I can't configure a VPN" is a skill gap. These are not equivalent.
If you choose convenience for whatever reasons, that is completely fine.
"I can't configure a VPN" and "I don't want to configure a VPN" are 2 entirely different things. Mind you I have no idea how complex tailscale setup is in comparison.
I'm in the middle of setting up my own homeserver. Still deciding on what/if I want to expose to the internet and not just local network and while setting everything up and tinkering is part of the fun for me. I get some people just want results that they can rely on. Tailscale, while not a perfect option, is still an option and if they're fine with the risk profile I can understand sacrificing some security for it.
- SSH with key-only auth, exposed directly. This has worked for decades. Consider non-standard port to reduce log noise (not security, just quieter logs), fail2ban if you want
- Access internal services via SSH tunnels or just work on the box directly
- If exposing HTTP(S): reverse proxy (nginx/caddy) with TLS, rate limiting
- Databases, admin panels, monitoring - access via SSH, not public (ideally)
You do not need a VPN layer if you are comfortable with SSH. It has been battle-tested longer than most alternatives.
The fun part of tinkering is also learning what is actually necessary vs. cargo-culted advice. You will find most "security hardening" guides are overkill for a homeserver with sensible defaults.
WireGuard is ~10 lines of config and wg genkey. Calling that "network engineering" is a stretch.
The siloing of basic infrastructure knowledge into "not my discipline" is part of the problem. Software gets deployed somewhere: understanding ports, keys, and routing at a basic level is not specialized knowledge.
Honestly, if 10 lines of config is "network engineering", then the bar for software engineering has dropped considerably.
I am probably in the camp where I've found myself ovewhelmed with the amount of information about networks and I'm an alleged software engineer (without formal training in CS albeit).
The 10 loc is not a valid measure.
`sudo rm -rf /` is a 1 line of code. It's not the lines that are hard to wrap your brain around, it's the implication of the lines that really what we are talking about.
First and foremost they are humans, with a limited time on Earth.
Being a software engineer doesn't mean you want to spend you free time tinkering about your self-hosting setup and doing support for your users.
With Tailscale, not only you don't have to care about most things since _it just works_, but also on-boarding of casual users is straightforward.
Same goes for Plex.
I want to watch movies/shows, I don't want to spend time tinkering with my setup.
And Plex provides exactly that.
Ditto for my family/friends that can access my library with the same simple experience as Netflix or whatever.
Meanwhile, I have a coworker who want to own/manage everything.
So they don't want to use Tailscale and they dropped Plex when they forced to use the third-party login system.
Now they watch less than a third than they used to be, and they share their setup with nobody since it's too complicated to do.
To each their own, but my goal is to enjoy my setup and share it with others. Tailscale and Plex give me that.
There is a difference between "I choose not to" and "I cannot". The thread is full of people saying Tailscale "unlocked" self-hosting, implying capability, not time savings or time preference.
Choosing convenience is fine. But if basic port forwarding or WireGuard is beyond someone's skill set, "software engineer" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
I am not saying they are, but if it really is the case, then yeah.
As for file sharing... I remember when non-SWEs knew how to torrent movies, used DC++ and so on. These days even SWEs have no idea how to do it. It is mind-boggling.
If you're confident that you know how to securely configure and use Wireguard across multiple devices then great, you probably don't need Tailscale for a home lab.
Tailscale gives me an app I can install on my iPhone and my Mac and a service I can install on pretty much any Linux device imaginable. I sign into each of those apps once and I'm done.
The first time I set it up that took less than five minutes from idea to now-my-devices-are-securely-networked.
Tailscale is Wireguard but it automatically sets everything up for you, handles DDNS, can punch through NAT and CGNAT, etc. It's also running a Wireguard server on every device so rather than having a hub server in the LAN, it directly connects to every device. Particularly helpful if it's not just one LAN you are trying to connect to, but you have lots of devices in different areas.
> Kind of like how "pi-hole" is just sugar on top of dnsmasq, and Plex is just sugar on top of file sharing.
Speaking of that, I have always preferred a plain Unbound instance and a Samba server over fancier alternatives. I guess I like my setups extremely barebone.
Yea, my philosophy for self-hosting is "use the smallest amount of software you can in order to do what you really need." So for me, sugar X on top of fundamental functionality Y is always rejected in favor of just configuring Y."
I always assumed it was because a lot of ISPs use CGNAT and using tailscale servers for hole punching is (slightly) easier than renting and configuring a VPS.
And some people may not value that but a lot of people do. It’s part of why Plex has become so popular and fewer people know about Jellyfin. One is turnkey, the other isn’t.
I could send a one page bullet point list of instructions to people with very modest computer literacy and they would be up and running in under an hour on all of their devices with Plex in and outside of their network. From that point forward it’s basically like having your own Netflix.
If Plex is "just file sharing" then I guarantee you'd find Tailscale "just WireGuard".
I enjoy that relative "normies" can depend on it/integrate it without me having to go through annoying bits. I like that it "just works" without requiring loads of annoying networking.
For example, my aging mother just got a replacement computer and I am able to make it easy to access and remotely administer by just putting Tailscale on it, and have that work seamlessly with my other devices and connections. If one day I want to fully self-host, then I can run Headscale.
Just be sure to run it with --accept-dns=false otherwise you won't have any outbound Internet on your server if you ever get logged out. That was annoying to find out (but easy to debug with Claude!)
These are two very separate issues. Tailscale or other reverse proxies will give you access from the WAN.
Claude Code or other assistants will give you conversational management.
I already do the former (using Pangolin). I'm building towards the latter but first need to be 100% sure I can have perfect rollback and containement across the full stack CC could influence.
Tailscale is a good first step, but its best to configure wireguard directly on your router. You can try headscale but it seems to be more of a hobby project - so native wireguard is the only viable path. Most router OS's supports wireguard these days too. You can ask claude to sanity check your configuration.
Yeah same story for me. I did not trust my sensitive data on random self hosting apps with no real security team. But now I can put the entire server on the local network only and split tunnel VPN from my devices and it just works.
LLMs are also a huge upgrade here since they are actually quite competent at helping you set up servers.
I just have a vpn server on my fiber modem/router (edgerouter-4) and use vpn clients on my devices. I actually have two vpn networks - one that can see the rest of my home network (and server) and the other that is completely isolated and can't see anything else and only does routing. No need to use a third-party and I have more flexibility
> The biggest reason I had not to run a home server was security: I'm worried that I might fall behind on updates and end up compromised.
In my experience this is much less of an issue depending on your configuration and what you actually expose to the public internet.
Os-side, as long as you pick a good server os (for me that’s rocky linux) you can safely update once every six months.
Applications-wise, i try and expose as little as possible to the public internet and everything exposed is running in an unprivileged podman container. Random test stuff is only exposed within the vpn.
Also tailscale is not even a hard requirement: i rub openvpn and that works as well, on my iphone too.
The truly differentiating factor is methodological, not technological.
definitely, but to be fair, beyond that it's just linux. Most people would need claude code to get what ever they want to use linux for running reliably (systemd service, etc.)
Besides the company that operates it, what is the big difference between Tailscale and Cloudflare tunnels? I've seen Tailscale mentioned frequently but I'm not quite sure what it gets for me. If it's more like a VPN, is it possible to use on an arbitrary device like a library kiosk?
But Tailscale is just a VPN (and by VPN, I mean: Something more like "Connect to the office networ" than I do "NordVPN"). It provides a private network on top of the public network, so that member devices of that VPN can interact together privately.
Which is pretty great: It's a simple and free/cheap way for me to use my pocket supercomputer to access my stuff at home from anywhere, with reasonable security.
But because it happens at the network level, you (generally) need to own the machines that it is configured on. That tends to exclude using it in meaningful ways with things like library kiosks.
People are way too worried about security imo. Statistically, no one is targeting you to be hacked. By the time you are important and valuable enough for your home equipment to be a target you would have hired someone else to manage this for you
I think this is very dangerous perspective. A lot of attacks on infra are automated, just try to expose a Windows XP machine to the internet for a day and see with how much malware you end up with. If you leave your security unchecked, you will end up attacked; not by someone targeting you specifically, but having all your data encrypted for ransom might still create a problem for you (even if the attacker doesn’t care about YOUR data specifically).
I was just thinking I should write something about this, because the words needs spreading.
I cannot say how happy I am configuring my own immich server on a decade old machine. I just feel empowered. Because despite my 9 years of software development, I haven't gotten into the nitty gritties of networking, VPN and I always see something non-standard while installing an open source package and without all of this custom guidance, I always would give up after a couple of hours of pulling my hair apart.
I really want to go deeper and it finally feels this could be a hobby.
PS: The rush was so great I was excitedly talking to my wife how I could port our emails away from google, considering all of the automatic opt in for AI processing and what not. The foolhardy me thought of even sabbatical breaks to work on long pending to-do's in my head.
I went down the self host route some years ago but once critical problems hit I realized that beyond a simple NAS it can be a very demanding hobby.
I was in another country when there was a power outage at home. My internet went down, the server restart but couldn't reconnect anymore because the optical network router also had some problems after the power outage. I could ask my folks to restart, and turn on off things but nothing more than that. So I couldn't reach my Nextcloud instance and other stuff. Maybe an uninterruptible power supply could have helped but the more I was thinking about it after just didn't really worth the hassle anymore. Add a UPS okay. But why not add a dual WAN failover router for extra security if the internet goes down again? etc. It's a bottomless pit (like most hobbies tbh)
Also (and that's a me problem maybe) I was using Tailscale but I'm more "paranoid" about it nowadays. Single point of failure service, US-only SSO login (MS, Github, Apple, Google), what if my Apple account gets locked if I redeem a gift card and I can't use Tailscale anymore? I still believe in self hosting but probably I want something even more "self" to the extremes.
My spouse and I work at home and after the first couple multi-day power outages we invested in good UPSs and a whole house standby generator. Now when the power goes out it's down for at most 30 seconds.
This also makes self-hosting more viable, since our availability is constrained by internet provider rather than power.
Yeah we did a similar thing. Same situation, spouse and I both work from home, and we got hit by a multiple day power outage due to a rare severe ice storm. So now I have an EV and a transfer switch so I can go for a week without power, and I have a Starlink upstream connection in standby mode that can be activated in minutes.
Of course that means we’ll not have another ice storm in my lifetime. My neighbors should thank me.
Well, it's an EV with a big inverter, not a generator, but I get your point. And I do periodically fire it up and run the house on it for a little while, just to exercise the connection and maintain my familiarity with it in case I need to use it late at night in the dark with an ice storm breaking all the trees around us.
2025 was the year of LiFePo power packs for me and my family. Absolute game changers: 1000Wh of power with a multi-socket inverter and UPS-like failover. You lose capacity over a gas genny but the simplicity and lack of fumes adds back a lot of value. If it’s sunny you can also make your own fuel.
Yea I think my own preference for self-hosting boils down to a distrust of a continuous dependency on a service in control of a company and a desire to minimize such dependencies. While there are FOSS and self-hostable alternatives to tailscale or indeed claude code, using those services themselves simply replaces old dependencies on externally-controlled cloud-based services on new ones
I thought I was smart because I invested in UPS backup from the start.
Then 5 years later there was a power outage and the UPS lasted for about 10 seconds before the batteries failed. That's how I learned about UPS battery maintenance schedules and the importance of testing.
I have a calendar alert to test the UPS. I groan whenever it comes up because I know there's a chance I'm going to discover the batteries won't hold up under load any more, which means I not only have to deal with the server losing power but I have to do the next round of guessing which replacement batteries are coming from a good brand this time. Using the same vendor doesn't even guarantee you're going to get the same quality when you only buy every several years.
Backup generators have their own maintenance schedule.
I think the future situation should be better with lithium chemistry UPS, but every time I look the available options are either exorbitantly expensive or they're cobbled together from parts in a way that kind of works but has a lot of limitations and up-front work.
My APC UPS self-tested and monitored battery status automatically. Then started to endlessly beep when it noticed the battery needed replacing (could be muted though). Eventually, I stopped using UPS since I rarely needed it and it was just another thing to keep and maintain.
syncthing might be worth looking into. ive been using that more and more the last few years for anything that i use daily, things like keepass, plain-text notes, calendars/contacts, rss feeds, then everything else that im "self hosting" are just things that i might only use a few times a week so its no big deal if i lose access.
its so much simpler when you have the files stored locally, then syncing between devices is just something that can happen whenever. anything that is running on a server needs user permissions, wifi, a router etc etc, its just a lot of complexity for very little gain.
although keep in mind im the only one using all of this stuff. if i needed to share things with other people then syncthing gets a bit trickier and a central server starts to make more sense
Tailscale has passkey-only account support but requires you to sign up in a roundabout way (first use an SSO, then invite another user, throw away the original). The tailnet lock feature also protects you to some extent, arguably more so than solutions involving self-hosting a coordination server on a public cloud.
For this reason I have hybrid homelab, with most stuff hosted at home, but critical things I'd need to have running are on a VM in cloud. Best of both worlds.
You can self-host Pocket ID (or another OIDC auth service) on a tiny $1/mo box and use that as your identity provider for Tailscale. Here's a video explaining how: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPUkAm7yDlU
I really enjoy self-hosting on rented compute. It's theoretically easy to migrate to an on-prem setup, but I don't have to deal with the physical responsibilities while it's in the cloud.
Depends what you are trying to host. For many people it’s either to keep their private data local, or stuff that has to be on the home network (pi hole / home assistant)
If you just want to put a service on the internet, a VPS is the way to go.
I mean you're right in terms of it being a demanding hobby. The question is, is it worth the switch from other services.
I have 7 computers on my self-hosted network and not all of them are on-prem. With a bit of careful planning, you can essentially create a system that will stay up regardless of local fluctuations etc. But it is a demanding hobby and if you don't enjoy the IT stuff, you'll probably have a pretty bad time doing it. For most normal consumers, self-hosting is not really an option and the isn't worth the cost of switching over. I justify it because it helps me understand how things work and tangentially helps me get better my professional skills as well.
So now you need to test them regularly. And order new ones when they're not holding a charge any more. Then power down the server, unplug it, pull the UPS out, swap batteries, etc.
Then even when I think I've got the UPS automatic shutdown scripts and drivers finally working just right under linux, a routine version upgrade breaks it all for some reason and I'm spending another 30 minutes reading through obscure docs and running tests until it works again.
My home server doesn't need to be high availability, and the BIOS is set to whatever state prior to power loss. I don't have a UPS. However, we were recently hit with a telco outage while visiting family out of town. As far as I can tell there wasn't a power outage, but it took a hard reboot of the modem to get connectivity back. Frustrating because it meant no checking home automation/security and of course no access to the servers. I'm not at a point where my homelab is important enough that I would invest in a redundant WAN though.
I've also worked in environments where the most pragmatic solution was to issue a reboot periodically and accept the minute or two of (external) downtime. Our problem is probably down to T-Mobile's lousy consumer hardware.
Power outages here tend to last an hour or more. A UPS doesn't last forever, and depending on how much home compute you have, might not last long enough for anything more than a brief outage. A UPS doesn't magically solve things. Maybe you need a home generator to handle extended outages...
How bottomless of a pit it becomes depends on a lot of things. It CAN become a bottomless pit if you need perfect uptime.
I host a lot of stuff, but nextcloud to me is photo sync, not business. I can wait til I'm home to turn the server back on. It's not a bottomless pit for me, but I don't really care if it has downtime.
Fairly frequently, 6kVA UPSs come up for sale locally to me, for dirt cheap (<$400). Yes, they're used, and yes, they'll need ~$500 worth of batteries immediately, but they will run a "normal" homelab for multiple hours. Mine will keep my 2.5kW rack running for at least 15 minutes - if your load is more like 250W (much more "normal" imo) that'll translate to around 2 hours of runtime.
Is it perfect? No, but it's more than enough to cover most brief outages, and also more than enough to allow you to shut down everything you're running gracefully, after you used it for a couple hours.
Major caveat, you'll need a 240V supply, and these guys are 6U, so not exactly tiny. If you're willing to spend a bit more money though, a smaller UPS with external battery packs is the easy plug-and-play option.
> How bottomless of a pit it becomes depends on a lot of things. It CAN become a bottomless pit if you need perfect uptime.
At the end of the day, it's very hard to argue you need perfect uptime in an extended outage (and I say this as someone with a 10kW generator and said 6kVA UPS). I need power to run my sump pumps, but that's about it - if power's been out for 12-18 hours, you better believe I'm shutting down the rack, because it's costing me a crap ton of money to keep running on fossil fuels. And in the two instances of extended power outages I've dealt with, I haven't missed it - believe it or not, there's usually more important things to worry about than your Nextcloud uptime when your power's been out for 48 hours. Like "huh, that ice-covered tree limb is really starting to get close to my roof."
This is a great example of how the homelab bottomless pit becomes normalized.
Rewiring the house for 240V supply and spending $400+500 to refurbish a second-hand UPS to keep the 2500W rack running for 15 minutes?
And then there's the electricity costs of running a 2.5kW load, and then cooling costs associated with getting that much heat out of the house constantly. That's like a space heater and a half running constantly.
Long time ago, it was popular for ISPs offer a small amount of space for personal websites. We might see a resurgence of this, but with cheap VPS. Eventually.
Free static site hosting and cheap VPSs already exist. Self hosting is less about putting sites on the internet now and more about replicating cloud services locally.
VPS's are really so dirt cheap that some of them only work because people dont use the servers 100% that they are allocated at or when people dont use the resources they have for most part because of economies of scale but vps's are definitely subsidized.
Cheap vps servers 1 gb ram and everything can cost around 10-11$ per year and using something like hetzner's cheap as well for around 30$ ish an year or 3$ per month most likely while having some great resilient numbers and everything
If anything, people self host because they own servers so upgrading becomes easier (but there are vps's which target a niche which people should look at like storage vps, high perf vps, high mem vps etc. which can sometimes provide servers for dirt cheap for your specific use case)
The other reason I feel like are the ownership aspect of things. I own this server, I can upgrade this server without costing a bank or like I can stack up my investment in a way and one other reason is that with your complete ownership, you don't have to enforce t&c's so much. Want to provide your friends or family vps servers or people on internet themselves? Set up a proxmox or incus server and do it.
Most vps servers sometimes either outright ban reselling or if they allow, they might sometimes ban your whole account for something that someone else might have done so somethings are at jeopardy if you do this simply because they have to find automated ways of dealing with abuse at scale and some cloud providers are more lenient than others in banning matters. (OVH is relaxed in this area whereas hetzner, for better or for worse, is strict on its enforcement)
Self hosting for me is important because I want to secure the data. I've got my files and photos on there, I want to have the drive encrypted with my key. Not just sitting on a drive I don't have any control over. Also because it plugs in to my smart home devices which requires being on the local network.
For something like a website I want on the public internet with perfect reliability, a VPS is a much better option.
> I was in another country when there was a power outage at home.
If you are going to be away from home a lot, then yes, it's a bottomless pit. Because you have to build a system that does not rely on the possibility of you being there, anytime.
I have a desktop I use but if I had to start again, I’d build a low power r pi or n100 type system that can be powered by a mobile battery backup with solar (flow type with sub 10ms switching and good battery chemistry for long life) that can do the basic homelab tasks. Planning for power outages from the get go rather than assuming unlimited and cheap power
Hey, if tailscale is something you are worried about. There are open source alternatives to it as well but I think if your purpose is to just port forward a simple server port, wouldn't ssh in general itself be okay with you.
You can even self host tailscale via headscale but I don't know how the experience goes but there are some genuine open source software like netbird,zerotier etc. as well
You could also if interested just go the normal wireguard route. It really depends on your use case but for you in this case, ssh use case seems normal.
You could even use this with termux in android + ssh access via dropbear I think if you want. Tailscale is mainly for convenience tho and not having to deal with nats and everything
But I feel like your home server might be behind a nat and in that case, what I recommend you to do is probably A) run it in tor or https://gitlab.com/CGamesPlay/qtm which uses iroh's instance but you can self host it too or B (recommended): Get a unlimited traffic cheap vps (I recommend Upcloud,OVH,hetzner) which would cost around 3-4$ per month and then install something like remotemoe https://github.com/fasmide/remotemoe or anything similar to it effectively like a proxy.
Sorry if I went a little overkill tho lol. I have played too much on these things so I may be overarchitecting stuff but if you genuinely want self hosting to the extreme self, tor.onion's or i2p might benefit ya but even buying a vps can be a good step up
> I was in another country when there was a power outage at home. My internet went down, the server restart but couldn't reconnect anymore because the optical network router also had some problems after the power outage. I could ask my folks to restart, and turn on off things but nothing more than that. So I couldn't reach my Nextcloud instance and other stuff. Maybe an uninterruptible power supply could have helped but the more I was thinking about it after just didn't really worth the hassle anymore. Add a UPS okay. But why not add a dual WAN failover router for extra security if the internet goes down again? etc. It's a bottomless pit (like most hobbies tbh)
Laptops have in built ups and are cheap, Laptops and refurbished servers are good entry point imo and I feel like sure its a bottomless pit but the benefits are well worth it and at a point you have to look at trade offs and everything and personally laptops/refurbished or resale servers are that for me. In fact, I used to run a git server on an android tab for some time but been too lazy to figure out if I want it to charge permanently or what
Oh yeah this is a really funny story considering what thread we are on, but I remember asking chatgpt or claude or gemini or anything xD to make QTM work and none of them could figure out
But I think in the end what ended up working was my frustration took over and I just copy pasted the commands from readme and if I remember correctly, they just worked.
This is really ironical considering on what thread we are on but in the end, Good readme's make self hosting on a home server easier and fun xD
(I don't exactly remember chatgpt's conversations, perhaps they might have helped a bit or not, but I am 99% sure that it was your readme which ended up helping and chatgpt etc. in fact took an hour or more and genuinely frustrated me from what I remember vaguely)
I hope QTM reaches more traction. Its build on solid primitives.
One thing I genuinely want you to perhaps take a look at if possible is creating an additional piece of software or adding the functionality where instead of the careful dance that we have to make it work (like we have to send two large data pieces from two computers, I had to use some hacky solution like piping server or wormhole itself for it)
So what I am asking is if there could be a possibility that you can make the initial node pairing (ticket?) [Sorry, I forgot the name of primitive] between A and B, you use wormhole itself and now instead of these two having to send large chunks of data between each other, they can now just send 6 words or similar
I even remember building some of my own CLI for something liek this and using chatgpt to build it xD but in the end gave up because I wasn't familiar with the codebase or how to make these two work together but I hope that you can add it. I sincerely hope so.
Another minor suggestion I feel like giving is to please have asciinema demo. I will create an asciinema patch if you want between two computers but a working demo gif from 0 -> running really really would've helped me save some/few hours
QTM has lots of potential. Iroh is so sane, it can run directly on top of ipv4 itself and talk directly if possible but it can even break through nats and you can even self host the middle part itself. I had thought about building such a project when I had first discovered QTM and you can just imagine my joy when I discovered QTM from one of your comments a long time ago for what its worth
Wishing the best of luck of your project! The idea is very fascinating. I would appreciate a visual demo a lot though and I hope we can discuss more!
Edit: I remember that qtm docs had this issue of where they really felt complex for me personally when all I wanted was one computer port mapped to another computer port and I think what helped in the end was the 4th comment if I remember correctly, I might have used LLM assistance or not or if it helped or not, I genuinely don't remember but it definitely took me an hour or two to figure things out but its okay since I still feel like the software is definitely positive and this might have been a skill issue from my side but I just want if you can add asciinema docs, I can't stress it enough if possible on how much it can genuinely help an average person to figure out the product.
(Slowly move towards the complex setups with asciinema demos for each of them if you wish)
Once again good luck! I can't stress qtm and I still strongly urge everyone to try qtm once https://gitlab.com/CGamesPlay/qtm since its highly relevant to the discussion
You aren't actually supposed to ever need to deal with tickets manually, unless you are trying to get a tunnel between two machines and neither can SSH into the other. It could be streamlined with something like Magic Wormhole, though. I'll add that to the backlog and see if there's interest. The normal way is to use SSH / docker exec / any remote shell to let QTM swap the tickets over it.
I've added an asciinema to the README now <https://asciinema.org/a/z2cdsoVDVJu0gIGn>, showing the manual connection steps. Thanks for the kind words. Hope you find it useful!
well my use case is the fact of connecting two servers behind nat. If I were to be able to gain ssh lets say, then I could've simply port forwarded in the first place.
Wow the asciinema is really good and very professional, thanks for creating it, I found it very helpful (in the sense that if I ever were to repeat my experiment, now I got your asciinema server) and I hope more people use it
> It could be streamlined with something like Magic Wormhole, though. I'll add that to the backlog and see if there's interest
To be really honest, its not that big of a deal considering one can do that on their own but I just had this idea for my own convenience when I was using QTM
I really like QTM a lot! Thanks for building it once again, I would try to integrate it more often and give you more feedback when possible from now.
Honestly I think that there must be adapters which can use unlimited 5g sim's data plans as fallback network or perhaps (even primary?)
They would be cheaper than starlink fwiw and most connections can be robust usually.
That being said, one can use tailscale or cloudflare tunnels to expose the server even if its behind nat which you mention in your original comment that you might be against at for paranoid reasons and thats completely fine but there are ways to go do that if you want as well which I have talked about it on the other comment I have written here in-depth.
Some SOHO branch office routers like Cisco ISR models can take cellular dongles and/or SIM. Drivers for supported models are baked into ROM and everything works through CLI.
man I have this vague memory that I was at a neighbour's house and we were all kids and internet wasn't that widespread (I was really young) and I remember that they had this dongle in which they inserted an sim card in for network access. This is why this idea has always persisted in my head in the first place.
I don't know what's the name of dongle though, it was similar to those sd card to usb thing ykwim, I'd appreciate it if someone could help find this too if possible
but also yeah your point is also fascinating as well, y'know another benefit of doing this is that atleast in my area, 5g (500-700mbps) is really cheap (10-15$) with unlimited bandwidth per month and on the ethernet side of things I get 10x less bandwidth (40-80mbps) so much so that me and my brother genuinely thought of this idea
except that we thought that instead of buying a router like this, we use an old phone device and insert sim in it and access router through that way.
Next level up is self hosting your LLM! I put LM Studio on a mac mini at home and have been extremely happy with it. Then you can use a tool like opencode to connect to that LLM and boom, Claude Code dependency is removed and you just got even more self-hosted. For what you're using Claude Code for, a smaller open-weight model would probably work fine
you are learning what it takes to keep a machine up and running. You still witness the breakage. You can still watch the fix. You can review what happened. What you are implying from your question is that compared to doing things without AI, you are learning less (or perhaps you believe nothing). You definitely are learning less about mucking around in linux. But, if the alternative was not ever running a linux machine at all because you didn't want to deal with running it, you are learning infinitely more.
You can learn a lot from watching your doctor, plumber or mechanic work, and you could learn even more if you could ask them questions for hours without making them mad.
You learn less from watching a faux-doctor, faux-plumber, faux-mechanic and learn even less by engaging in their hallucinations without a level horizon for reference.
Bob the Builder doesn't convey much about drainage needs for foundations and few children think to ask. Who knows how AI-Bob might respond.
I've landed on a similar philosophy but with a slightly different approach to orchestration. Instead of managing everything interactively, I built a lightweight bash-based deployment system that uses rsync + docker compose across multiple machines.
The structure is dead simple: `machines/<hostname>/stacks/<service>/` with a `config.sh` per machine defining SSH settings and optional pre/post deploy hooks. One command syncs files and runs `docker compose up -d`.
I could see Claude Code being useful for debugging compose files or generating new stack configs, but having the deployment itself be a single `./deploy.sh homeserver media` keeps the feedback loop tight and auditable.
I think it's great that people are getting into self-hosting, but I don't think it's _the_ solution to get us off of big tech.
Having others run a service for you is a good thing! I'd love to pay a subscription for a service, but ran as a cooperative, where I'm not actually just paying a subscription fee, instead I'm a member and I get to decide what gets done as well.
This model works so well for housing, where the renters are also the owners of the building. Incentives are aligned perfectly, rents are kept low, the building is kept intact, no unnecessary expensive stuff added. And most importantly, no worries of the building ever getting sold and things going south. That's what I would like for my cloud storage, e-mail etc.
Hey, I was thinking about this same idea lately. What exactly would you want hosted by somebody?
I was thinking about what if your "cloud" was more like a tilde.club, with self hosted web services plus a Linux login. What services would you want?
Email and cloud make sense. I think a VPN and Ad Blocker would too. Maybe Immich and music hosting? Calendar? I don't know what people use for self hosting
Fun. I don't agree that Claude Code is the real unlock, but mostly because I'm comfortable with doing this myself. That said, the spirit of the article is spot on. The accessibility to run _good_ web services has never been better. If you have a modest budget and an interest, that's enough -- the skill gap is closing. That's good news I think.
But Tailscale is the real unlock in my opinion. Having a slot machine cosplaying as sysadmin is cool, but being able to access services securely from anywhere makes them legitimately usable for daily life. It means your services can be used by friends/family if they can get past an app install and login.
I also take minor issue with running Vaultwarden in this setup. Password managers are maximally sensitive and hosting that data is not as banal as hosting Plex. Personally, I would want Vaultwarden on something properly isolated and locked down.
I can believe this, and it's a good point. I believe Bitwarden does the same. I'm not against Vaultwarden in particular but against colocation of highly sensitive (especially orthogonally sensitive) data in general. It's part of a self-hoster's journey I think: backups, isolation, security, redundancy, energy optimization, etc. are all topics which can easily occupy your free time. When your partner asks whether your photos are more secure in Immich than Google, it can lead to an interesting discussion of nuances.
That said, I'm not sure if Bitwarden is the answer either. There is certainly some value in obscurity, but I think they have a better infosec budget than I do.
On the one hand, self-hosting, even at home, is more accessible than it has ever been. Hardware, software, and agents to help with setup and maintenance. While at the same time ISPs, the big email providers, and even (in the UK) government legislation makes it more difficult or risky than it has ever been. We have gained much but also lost much since the mid 1990s.
Been self-hosting for last 20 years and I would have to say LLMs were good for generating suggestions when debugging an issue I hadn't seen before, or for one I had seen before but was looking for a quicker fix. I've used it to generate bash scripts, firewall regex.
On self-hosting: be aware that it is a warzone out there. Your IP address will be probed constantly for vulnerabilities, and even those will need to dealt with as most automated probes don't throttle and can impact your server. That's probably my biggest issue along with email deliverability.
~10 years ago I remember how shocked I was the first time I saw how many people were trying to probe my IP on my home router, from random places all over the globe.
Years later I still had the same router. Somewhere a long the line, I fired the right neurons and asked myself, "When was the last time $MANUFACTURER published an update for this? It's been awhile..."
In the context of just starting to learn about the fundamentals of security principles and owning your own data (ty hackernews friends!), that was a major catalyst for me. It kicked me into a self-hosting trajectory. LLMs have saved me a lot of extra bumps and bruises and barked shins in this area. They helped me go in the right direction fast enough.
Point is, parent comment is right. Be safe out there. Don't let your server be absorbed into the zombie army.
These days I just wouldn't put my homeserver exposed to the internet only. LAN only with a VPN. Does mean you can't share links and such with other people, but your server is now very secure and most of the stuff you do on it doesn't need public access anyway.
I would really like some kind of agnostic backup protocol, so I can simply configure my backup endpoint using an environment variable (e.g. `-e BACKUP_ENDPOINT=https://backup.example.com/backup -e BACKUP_IDENTIFIER=xxxxx`), then the application can push a backup on a regular schedule. If I need to restore a backup, I log onto the backup app, select a backup file and generate a one time code which I can enter into the application to retrieve the data. To set up a new application for backups, you would enter a friendly name into the backup application and it would generate a key for use in the application.
At the moment I am docker compose down everything, run the backup of their files and then docker compose up -d again afterwards. This sort of downtime in the middle of the night isn't an issue for home services but its also not an ideal system given most wont be mid writing a file at the time of backup anyway because its the middle of the night! But if I don't do it the one time I need those files I can guarantee it will be corrupted so at the moment don't feel like there are a lot of other options.
Maybe apps could offer backup to stdout and then you pipe it. That way each app doesn’t have to reason about how to interact with your target, doesn’t need to be trusted with credentials, and we don’t need a new standard.
I use Pika Backup which runs on the BorgBackup protocol for backing up my system’s home directory. I’m not really sure if this is exactly what you’re talking about, though. It just sends backups to network shares.
I'm actively in the process of setting this up for my devices. What have you done for off-site backups? I know there are Borg specific cloud providers (rsync.net, borgbase, etc.). Or have you done something like rclone to an S3 provider?
No off-site backup for me, these items aren’t important enough, it’s more for “oops I broke my computer” or “set my new computer up faster” convenience.
Anything I really don’t want to lose is in a paid cloud service with a local backup sync over SMB to my TrueNAS box for some of the most important ones.
An exception is GitHub, I’m not paying for GitHub, but git kinda sorta backs itself up well enough for my purposes just by pulling/pushing code. If I get banned from GitHub or something I have all the local repos.
Good to know! I have shifted more to self hosting, e.g., Gitea rather than Github, and need to establish proper redundancy. Hopefully Borg Backup, with it's deduplication will be good, at least for on-site backups.
I am much more in-between. I don’t mind cloud stuff and even consider it safer than my local stuff due to other smart people doing the work. And I’m not looking for a second job self hosting, except for my game servers.
I mostly just don’t want to be stuck with cloud services from big tech that have slimy practices. I’d rather pay for honest products that let me own my data better. With the exception given to GitHub which I guess is out of my own laziness and maybe I should do something about that.
If you’re using gitea you might be interested in Forgejo, it’s a fork and I think it’s well regarded since gitea went more commercial-ish IIRC?
>I am spending time using software, learning, and having fun - instead of maintaining it and stressing out about it.
Using software, learning and having fun with with what? everything is being done by Claude here. The part of fun and learning is to learn to use and maintain it in the first place. How will you learn anything if Claude is doing everything for you ? You are not understand how things work and where everything goes.
This post could be written or at least modified by an LLM, but more importantly I think this person is completely missing the point of self hosting and learning.
I just got around to a fresh NixOS install and I couldn't be happier as I've been able to do practically everything via Codex while keeping things concise and documented (given it's nix, not a bunch of commands of the past).
I recently had a bunch of breakages and needed to port a setup - I had a complicated k3s container in proxmox setup but needed it in a VM to fix various disk mounts (I hacked on ZFS mounts, and was swapping it all for longhorn)
As is expected, life happens and I stopped having time for anything so the homelab was out of commission. I probably would still be sitting on my broken lab given a lack of time.
I've been building a home library system mainly for personal use, I want to run it cheaply so a $4 black Friday sale OVH vps is perfect.
But I wanted decent deployments. Hosting a image repository cost 3-4x of the server. Sending over the container image took over an hour due to large image processing python dependencies.
Solution? Had a think and a chat with Claude code, now I have blue-green deployments where I just upload the code which takes 5 seconds, everything is then run by systemd. I looked at the various PaaSes but they ran up to $40/month with compute+database etc.
I would probably never have built this myself. I'd have gotten bored 1/3 through. Now it's working like a charm.
Is it enterprise grade? Gods no. Is it good enough? Yes.
I self-host many things on a NAS (Asustor) using Portainer (a Docker UI/facilitator). It all works perfectly and has a marginal cost of about zero, since I need the NAS in any case.
But I wouldn't give the keys of the house to Claude or any LLM for that matter. When needed, I ask them questions and type commands myself. It's not that hard.
What I do at home is ubuntu on a cheap small computer I found on ebay. ufw blocks everything except 80, 443, and 22. Setup ssh to not use passwords and ensure nginx+letsencrypt doesn’t run as root. Then, forward 80 and 443 from my home router to the server so it’s reachable from the internet. That’s about it, now I have an internet accessible reverse proxy to surface anything running on that server. The computers on the same LAN (just my laptop basically) have host file entries for the server. My registrar handles DNS for the external side (routers public ip). Ssh’ing to the server requires a lan IP but that’s no big deal I’m at home whenever I’m working on it anyway.
Put wireguard on that thing and don't expose anything on your public IP. Better yet don't have a public IP. Just port forward the wireguard IP from your router. That's it. No firewall no nothing. Not even accidental exposure.
> Put wireguard on that thing and don't expose anything on your public IP. Better yet don't have a public IP.
This is nonsense. You can't self-host services meant to interact with the public (such as email, websites, Matrix servers, etc.) without a public IP, preferably one that is fixed.
Love this. I run also all my stuff by myself and I’m not an infra expert by all means just know enough to self host my app and services. I also built an remote monitoring agent using Go and rails I call it https://bareagent.io which monitors servers, docker containers and sends notifications when in any of those containers an error occurres as it is attached to the container logs
Wait… tailscale connection to your own network, and unsupervised sysadmin from an oracle that hallucinates and bases its decisions on blog post aggregates?
p0wnland. this will have script kiddies rubbing their hands
Home NAS servers are already shipped with user friendly GUI. Personally I haven't used them, but I certainly would prefer it, or recommend it to tech-illitarate people instead of allowing LLM to manage the server.
Me personally; I have a similar mini pc with kubuntu installed, coolify to deploy my projects & cloudflare tunnels to expose them to the internet. the mini pc is still usable for daily use so that's great too
I used Codex to set up a raspberry pi as a VPN with WireGuard. I had no similar experience before and it was super easy. I used Claude Code to audit and clean up a 10+ year old AWS account- patching security, shutting down redundant services, simplifying the structure. I want Claude Code to replace every bad UI out there. I know what outcome I want and don’t need to learn all the details to get there.
Been using Claude Code to build a small deployment tool (Frost) for exactly this use case. The meta experience is interesting - using an AI agent to build tooling that makes self-hosting easier.
What I've found: Claude Code is great at the "figure out this docker/nginx/systemd incantation" part but the orchestration layer (health checks, rollbacks, zero-downtime deploys) still benefits from purpose-built tooling. The AI handles the tedious config generation while you focus on the actual workflow.
Prices are going to have an effect here. I have a 76TB backup drive of 8 drives. A few months ago one of my 10TB drives failed and I replaced it with a 12 TB WD gold for 269CHF. I was thinking of building a new backup drive (for fun) and so I priced the same drive and now it's 409CHF.
It's not tariffs (I'm in Switzerland). It's 100% the buildout of data centers for AI.
I use coding agents for similar kind of problem very frequently. It makes wonders debugging obscure system issues related to components that I have no faintest idea about. Also building a homelab very soon. I think you may find this project useful: https://github.com/av/harbor
I also started started experimenting with self-hosting in the last few years. Started with a simple Plex server, then gradually evolved my little setup into a handful of open-source apps that now cover most of what I use during my day to day.
There are a few important things to consider, like unstable IPs, home internet limits, and the occasional power issue. Cloud providers felt overpriced for what I needed, especially once storage was factored in.
In the end, I put together a small business where people can run their own Mac mini with a static IP: https://www.minimahost.com/
I’m continuing to work on it while keeping my regular software job. So far, the demand is not very high, or perhaps I am not great at marketing XD
I have a love-hate relationship with Home Assistant. I love its mission and I love it in spirit, but whenever I need to add or change something in it, I don't love the process. Without disparaging the work already done on improving it in recent years, I still find the UI and UX to be lacking. Claude Code has been shifting my perception much closer to the love end of the axis, because it allows me to side-step the boring parts of managing my Home Assistant instance and it is able to carry out the changes I want very reliably.
I still struggle with letting go of writing code and becoming only a full-time reviewer when it comes to AI agents doing programming, but I don't struggle in the slightest with assuming the position of a reviewer of the changes CC does to my HA instance, delegating all the work to it. The progress I made on making my house smart and setting up my dashboards has skyrocketed compared to before I started using CC to manage HA via its REST and WS APIs.
I recently got a zimaboard2 and have been blown away how powerful it is, x86 and 16GB I think it was around 250$. I have it running proxmox. Dedicated GPU for transcoding, all working out of the box with the ZimaOS.. And no AI needed.
I find LLMs remove all the fun for me. When I build my homelab, I want the satisfaction of knowing that I did it. And the learning gains that only come from doing it manually. I don't mind using an LLM to shortcut areas that are just pure pain with no reward, but I abstain from using it as much as possible. It gives you the illusion that you've accomplished something.
> It gives you the illusion that you've accomplished something.
What’s the goal? If the act of _building_ a homelab is the fun then i agree 100%. If _having_ a reliable homelab that the family can enjoy is the goal, then this doesn’t matter.
For me personally, my focus is on “shipping” something reliable with little fuss. Most of my homelab skills don’t translate to my day job anyway. My homelab has a few docker compose stacks, whereas at work we have an internal platform team that lets me easily deploy a service on K8s. The only overlap here is docker lol. Manually tinkering with ports and firewall rules, using sqlite, backups with rsync, etc…all irrelevant if you’re working with AWS from 9-5.
I guess I’m just pointing out that some people want to build it and move on.
Getting it up and running is fun but I find maintaining some services a pain. For example, Authelia has breaking configuration changes every minor release, and fixing that easily takes 1-X hours every time. I gave up for 4.38 and just tossed the patch notes into NotebookLM.
I also liked using AI agents to do sysadmin stuff, especially with Nix OS. On top of Nix being great, the configuration of a system being files gives the agent good context on the current state the system is. Then when it does make changes, its great to be able to review its work via diffs.
I've recently begun moving the systems I administer to Claude-written NixOS configs. Nix is great but can be a real pain to write yourself; Claude removes the pain.
Just got a home-server. Immich is awesome! How's Caddy working out though? I need a way to expose immich to public internet (not just a VPN). Something like photos.domain.com
For now I'm just using Cloudflare tunnels, but ideally I also want to do that myself (without getting DDoS)
I am curious what you mean by doing it yourself, i.e., do you mean (as perhaps an oversimplification) having a DNS record pointing at your home IP address? What are you wanting to see as the alternative to a Cloudflare tunnel?
Tailscsle was never the unlock for me, but I guess I never was the typical use case here.
I have a 1U (or more), sitting in a rack in a local datacenter. I have an IP block to myself.
Those servers are now publicly exposed and only a few ports are exposed for mail, HTTP traffic and SSH (for Git).
I guess my use case also changes in that I don’t use things just for me to consume, select others can consume services I host.
My definition here of self-hosting isn’t that I and I only can access my services; that’s be me having a server at home which has some non critical things on it.
Curious how long you've been sitting on the IP block. I've been nosing around getting an ASN to mess around with the lower level internet bones but a /24 is just way too expensive these days. Even justifying an ASN is hard, since the minimum cost is $275/year through ARIN.
The minimum publicly routable IPv4 subnet is /24 and IPv6 is /48. IPv6 is effectively free, there are places that will lease a /48 for $8/year, whereas as far as I can tell it's multiple thousands of USD per year to acquire or lease a /24 of IPv4.
I literally did this yesterday and had the same thought. Older computer (8 gigs ram) with crappy windows I never used and I thought huh, I wonder how good these models can take me through installing linux with goal of docker deploys of relatively basic things like cron tasks, personal postgres, and minio that I can used for self shared data.
Took a couple hours with some things I ran across, but the model had me go through the setup for debian, how to go through the setup gui, what to check to make it server only, then it took me through commands to run so it wouldn't stop when I closed the laptop, helped with tailscale, getting the ssh keys all setup. Heck it even suggested doing daily dumps of the database and saving to minio and then removing after that. Also knows about the limitations of 8 gigs of ram and how to make sure docker settings for the difference self services I want to build don't cause issues.
Give me a month and true strong intention and ability to google and read posts and find the answer on my own and I still don't think I would have gotten to this point with the amount of trust I have in the setup.
I very much agree with this topic about self hosting coming alive because these models can walk you through everything. Self building and self hosting can really come alive. And in the future when open models are that much better and hardware costs come down (maybe, just guessing of course) we'll be able to also host our own agents on these machines we have setup already. All being able to do it ourselves.
Anyone seriously about tech should have a homelab. It’s a small capital investment that lasts for years and with proxmox or similar having your own personal “private cloud” on demand is simple.
I haven't tried it yet, but the evil twin to this practice is to nuke everything periodically to ensure that your agent isn't relying on any filesystem state that it hasn't specified builds for (i.e. https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/).
They tend to slip out of declarative mode and start making untracked changes to the system from time to time.
There's something ironic about using Claud Code – a closed source service, that you can't self-host the hardware for, and that you can't get access to the data for – to self-host so that you can reduce your dependencies on things.
Before you had to rely on blog posts and reddit for information, something you also couldn't self host. And if you are just asking it questions and taking actions yourself, you are learning how it works to do it yourself next time.
Or you could read man pages, ask people for help, read books... all of which are more closely aligned with self-hosting than outsourcing the whole process.
I agree you could use LLMs to learn how it works, but given that they explain and do the actions, I suspect the vast majority aren't learning anything. I've helped students who are learning to code, and very often they just copy/paste back and forth and ignore the actual content.
Sure, you could. But this isn't my job, it isn't my career. I just want Nextcloud running on a machine at home. I know linux and docker well enough to validate the ideas coming out of Gemini, and it helps me find stuff much faster than if I had to read man pages or read books.
And I find the stuff that the average self hoster needs is so surface level that LLMs flawlessly provide solutions.
My push back isn't really on the possibility, it's on the irony. Self hosting is for many an ideological act that's about reducing dependencies on big tech, removing surveillance, etc. LLMs are essentially the antithesis of this.
If you're self hosting for other reasons then that's fine. I self host media for various reasons, but I also give all my email/calendar/docs/photos over to a big tech company because I'm not motivated by that aspect.
Kind of but I don't really agree. Before LLMs you were still reliant on online resources, forums, digitalocean blog posts. The server itself also doesn't rely on an LLM. If one goes down, your server will continue functioning. You are also not tied to any particular LLM and can freely switch.
They also aren't seeing any of your sensitive data being hosted on the server. At least the way I use them is getting suggestions for what software and configs I should go with, and then I do the actual doing. Which means I'm becoming independently more capable than I was before.
There is, but if I have to chose between tolerating the irony, and waiting for the hardware/model performance situation to improve before getting started, I'll ironically mark self-hosting a claude-equivalent as a TODO and get started on the other stuff now.
If I google how to host a Wordpress blog are you going to tell me what I am doing is "ironic" because Google is not hosted by me? Even more ironic, Google has a competing product, blogspot! How ironic!
Ahh yes, the irony is not lost on using a paid closed-source service to create and help manage a self-hosted service running FOSS. I thought it was because I didn't want to pay SAAS subscription costs, but now I just need Claude Pro...
I'm asking Claude technical questions about setup, e.g., read this manual, that I have skimmed but don't necessarily fully understand yet. How do I monitor this service? Oh connect Tailscale and manage with ACLs. But what do I do when it doesn't work or goes down? Ask Claude.
To get more accurate setup and diagnostics, I need to share config files, firewall rules, IPv6 GUAs, Tailscale ACLs... and Claude just eats it up, and now Anthropic knows it forever too. Sure, CGNET, Wireguard, and ssh logins stand between us, but... Claude is running a terminal window on a LAN device next to another terminal window that does have access to my server. Do I trust VS Code? Anthropic? The FOSS? Is this really self-hosting? Ahh, but I am learning stuff, right?
Great article! I think a paragraph on your backup strategy would make it even more complete and compelling, particularly given you put your passwords and photos in there.
Interesting use case for Claude Code, or any similar local executor talking to a remote AI (Gemini suggests that "Hybrid-Local AI Agent" is a generic name for these, although I've never heard it called that before).
I wonder if a local model might be enough for sysadmin skills, especially if were trained specifically for this ?
I wonder if iOS has enough hooks available that one could make a very small/simple agentic Siri replacement like this that was able to manage the iPhone at least better than Siri (start and stop apps, control them, install them, configure iPhone, etc) ?
Doesn't have to be that way though. As discussed here recently, a basic local agent like Claude Code is only a couple hundred lines of code, and could easily be written by something like Claude Code if you didn't want to do it yourself.
If you have your own agent, then it can talk to whatever you want - could be OpenRouter configured to some free model, or could be to a local model too. If the local model wasn't knowledgeable enough for sysadmin you could perhaps use installable skills (scripts/programs) for sysadmin tasks, with those having been written by a more powerful model/agent.
I’ve also found AI to be super helpful for self-hosting but in a different way. I set up a Pocketbase instance with a Lovable-like app on top (repo here: https://github.com/tinykit-studio/tinykit) so I can just pull out my phone, vibecode something, and then instantly host it on the one server with a bunch of other apps. I’ve built a bunch of stuff for myself (journal, CRM, guitar tuner) but my favorite thing has been a period tracker for a close friend who didn’t want that data tracked + sold.
This post is spot on, the combo of tailscale + Claude Code is a game changer. This is particularly true for companies as well.
CC lets you hack together internal tools quickly, and tailscale means you can safely deploy them without worrying about hardening the app and server from the outside world. And tailscale ACLs lets you fully control who can access what services.
It also means you can literally host the tools on a server in your office, if you really want to.
Putting CC on the server makes this set up even better. It’s extremely good at system admin.
it's kind of fascinating, LLMs suddenly are making the Linux Desktop waaay more accessible, of all things.
All those fancy GUIs in Mac and Windows designed to be user friendly (but which most users hate and are baffled by anyway) are very hostile for models to access. But text configuration files? it's like a knife through butter for the LLMs to read and modify them. All of a sudden, Linux is MORE user friendly because you can just ask an LLM to fix things. Or even script them - "make it so my theme changes to dark at night and then back to light each morning" becomes something utterly trivial compared to the coding LLMs are being built to handle. But hey, if your OS really doesn't support something? the LLM can probably code up a whole app for you and integrate it in.
I think it's going to be fascinating to see if the power of text based interfaces and their natural compatibility with LLMs transfers over into an upswing in open source operating systems.
I had problems with tailscale being flaky about a year ago and it would stop responding taking down networking with it. I've since ripped it out and went with a VPS based wireguard for all PCs and mobiles. Stable since then.
I feel the same way. I now have around 7 projects hosted on a home server with Coolify + Cloudflare. Always worry about security and I have seen many posts related to self hosting on HN trending recently
For security just don't expose the server to the internet. Either set up wireguard or tailscale. You can set it up in a split tunnel config so your phone only uses the VPN for LAN requests.
I am expecting Cloudflare Tunnel to take care of security. In fact, that is the only reason I am okay hosting from home. Are you talking about something more on top of Cloudflare Tunnel or extra security features or a replacement?
Might as well ask here in case author or anyone else with a similar setup is reading. Has anyone run into stability issues running a bunch of self-hosting stuff on a mac mini M1 (8GB)? My setup is pretty basic - docker running Jellyfin, Immich, *arr software, qbittorrent. Stuff is stored on a NAS over SMB. Usually within a few hours of rebooting, the OS or at least userspace totally freezes. SSH connections are instantly closed, screen share doesn't work. It responds to ping for a while but that also goes down eventually. Pretty stumped...
Others here mention Coolify for a homeserver. If you're looking for turnkey docker-compose based apps rather than just framework/runtime environments, I will recommend the runtipi project. I have found it to be simple and flexible. It offers an 'app store' like interface, and supports hosting your own app store. It manages certs and reverse proxy via traefik as well.
Nice. This is a great start. The next steps are backups and regular security updates. The former is probably pretty easy with Claude and a provider like Backblaze, for updates I wonder if "check for security issues with my software and update anything in need" will work well (and most importantly, how consistently). Alternatively, getting the AI to threat model and perform any docker hardening measures.
Then someday we self-host the AI itself, and it all comes together.
My security update system is straightforward but it took quite a lot of thought to get here.
My self hosted things all run as docker containers inside Alpine VMs running on top of Proxmox. Services are defined with Docker Compose. One of those things is a Forgejo git server along with a runner in a separate VM. I have a single command that will deploy everything along with a Forgejo action that invokes that command on a push to main.
I then have Renovate running periodically set to auto-merge patch-level updates and tag updates.
Thus, Renovate keeps me up to date and git keeps everyone honest.
Impeccable timing, I finally got around to putting some old hardware to use and getting a home assistant instance (and jellyfin, and immich, and nextcloud, ...) set up over winter break. Claude (and tailscale) saved hours of my time and enabled me to build enough momentum to get things configured. It's now feasible for me to spend 15-20 minutes knocking down homeserver tasks that I otherwise would've ignored. Quite fun!
What I’d really like is to run the admin interface for an app on a self hosted system behind firewalls, and push read replicas out into the cloud. But I haven’t seen a database where the master pushes data to the replicas instead of the replicas contacting the master. Which creates some pretty substantial tunneling problems that I don’t really want on my home network.
Is there a replica implementation that works in the direction I want?
Interesting subject, thank you! I have a cluster of 2 Orange Pis (16 GB RAM each) plus a Raspberry Pi. I think it's high time to get them back on my desk. I never had time to get very far with the setup due to a lack of time. It took so long to write the Ansible scripts/playbooks, but with Claude Code, it's worth a try now. So thanks for the article; it makes me want to dust it off!
One day when I have some extra bucks I'd try to get a home server running, but the idea of having something eating grid electricity 24/7 doesn't seem to play along well with this 3rd world budget. Are there some foolproof and not so costly off-grid/solar setups to look at (like a Raspberry-based thingy or similar)?
Your fridge and other home appliances likely use much more power than whatever a small server would. The mini PC in the article is very power efficient. You likely won't notice it in your power bill, regardless of your budget. You could go with a solar-powered setup if you prefer, but IMO for this type of use case it would be overengineering.
Only thing is you can't run Proxmox which makes self hosting much better, and you'll be limited to ARM builds, which on server is at least a lot easier than trying to run desktop apps. Modern micro desktops are also fairly power efficient, perhaps not quite as low as the mac, but much lower than a regular gaming desktop idling.
Avoid stacking in too many hard drives since each one uses almost as much power as the desktop does at idle.
I used Claude Code just yesterday in a similar way: to solve a computer problem that I previously would have tried googling.
I had a 30-year-old file on my Mac that I wanted to read the content of. I had created it in some kind of word processing software, but I couldn’t remember which (Nexus? Word? MacWrite? ClarisWorks? EGWORD?) and the file didn’t have an extension. I couldn’t read its content in any of the applications I have on my Mac now.
So I pointed CC at it and asked what it could tell me about the file. It looked inside the file data, identified the file type and the multiple character encodings in it, and went through a couple of conversion steps before outputting as clean plain text what I had written in 1996.
Maybe I could have found a utility on the web to do the same thing, but CC felt much quicker and easier.
I find myself a bit overwhelmed with hardware options during recent explorations. Seemingly everything can handle what I want a local copy of my Bandcamp archive to stream via jellyfin. Good times we’re in but even having good sysadmin skills, I wish someone would just tell me exactly what to buy.
> I wish someone would just tell me exactly what to buy.
I’ll bite.
You can save a lot of money by buying used hardware. I recommend looking for old Dell OptiPlex towers on Facebook Marketplace or from local used computer stores. Lenovo ThinkCentres (e.g., m700 tiny) are also a great option if you prefer something with a smaller form factor.
I’d recommend disregarding advice from non-technical folks recommending brand new, expensive hardware, because it’s usually overkill.
I spent so long trying to make Raspberry Pis work but they just kind of suck and everything is harder on them. I only just discovered that there are an infinite supply of these micro desktops second hand from offices/government. I was able to pick up a 9th gen intel with 16gb ram for less than the cost of a Pi 5, and it's massively more powerful.
Yeah, they’re amazing value. I paid $125 CAD for a 4th gen i7 with 16GB of RAM about 5 years ago. It’s been running almost 24/7 ever since with no issues.
You also don't have to deal with the usual annoyance of second hand gear like facebook marketplace and no delivery. These companies / governments have contracts with reseller companies who will buy the entire stock and sell them online just like buying new.
I just found their proprietary hardware and being ARM too limiting. I wanted to set up full disk encryption to set up nextcloud on, and found that on the pi this is an incredibly complex process. While on an x86 PC it's just a checkbox on install.
And then you can only use distros which have a raspberry pi specific build. Generic ARM ones won't work.
Yeah the complaints are fair. I stick to RPi OS for maximum compatibility. People have been crying for a Google Drive client for Linux for over a decade, but still have to set it up in rclone.
I build out my server in Docker and I’ve been surprised that every image I’ve ever wanted to download has an ARM image.
Way too expensive for their moderate performance. All serious self-hosters (not Youtube home-labbers) use x86 machines, often retired desktop/gaming rigs or used datacenter hardware.
Get started a corporate surplus mini pc on ebay. They super cheap - search for micro pc - if you get a recent CPU from Dell or Lenovo should be under $200, you can install Fedora or other Linux distribution. Ask Claude for everything else.
has any one experience using cloudflare tunnels in a (small scale - 5000 user/day) self hosted web service? I just got 2 dynabook XJ-40 (32 gb ram, 512 gb ssd) for 200 usd each and I'm going to replace my DO droplets with them (usd150+ per month). I plan to use cloudflare tunnel to make the service available to the internet without exposing my home network. Any downsides ? (besides that cloudflare will be MITM for the service but it is not a privacy focused business)
I am in the process of doing the same. I have a Netbird mesh (Tailscale but open source) with 3 k3s nodes. They are geographically separated for HA.
Claude and Gemini have been instrumental in helping me understand the core concepts of kubernetes, how to tune all these enterprise applications for high latency, think about architecture etc...
My biggest "wow, wtf?" moment was ben I was discussing the cluster architecture with Claude. It asked: want me to start the files?
I thought it meant update the notes, so replied 'yes'.
It spit out 2 sh files and 5 YAMLs that completely bootstrapped my cluster with a full GitOps setup using ArgoCD.
Learning while having a 24/7 senior tutor next to me has been insane value.
This is great and echoes my experience. Although I would add a caveat that this mostly applies to solo work. Once you need to collaborate or operate on a team, many of limits of self-hosting return.
I have a hard time reading things like “The last one is the real unlock.” or “That alone justified the box.” without immediately thinking of an AI trying to explain something. Not to say this was written with one, but the frequency with which I see phrasing like this nowadays is skyrocketing...
Tailscale is pretty sweet. Cloudflare WARP is also pretty sweet, a little clunkier but you get argo routing for free and I trust Cloudflare for security.
That's the flaw right there. Don't mix company assets with pricate use. Phone, laptop, car. Your life is already very dependent on your employer (through income), don't get yourself locked in even more by depending on them for personal tech. Plus it's a security risk to your company.
Unless you have a low paying job, which rarely anybody on HN does, you can afford your own phone and laptop. And IT won't find your messages to girlfriend or pictures you don't want others to see or browsing history.
My work WiFi blocked traffic to port 51820, the default WireGuard port. I was wondering why my VPN started failing to handshake one day. I changed my ports to 51821 that night and back in business. I checked our technology policy and there’s no “thou shalt not use a VPN” clause so no clue why someone one day decided to drop WireGuard traffic on the network.
Though just blocking particular ports for this purpose is very 90s and obviously ineffective, as you demonstrated. Anybody proficient in installing wireguard also knows how to change ports.
Oh my gosh, everything you want to host comes with a docker compose file that requires you to tweak maybe two settings. Caddy as your web proxy has the absolute simplest setup possible. You don't need AI to help you with this. You got this. You want to make sure you understand the basics so you (or your LLM doesn't do anything brain dead stupid). It's not that hard, you can do it!
Opens with "self-hosting" and then brings claude code into the mix. You realize it's not actually running locally right? Privcy-wise that's a nightmare. A non-deterministic blackbox running in somebody's AI cloud is controlling your server. Congrats.
Basic question: If I wanted a simple self hosting solution for a bot with a database, what is the simplest solution / provider I can go with. This bot is just for me doesn't need to be accessible to the general public.
Vibe-setting up a home network server with VaultWarden is beyond reckless. LLMs have tendency to overlook security in order to get things working. You are, thereby, exposing your passwords (and potentially your 2FA as bitwarden supports that) to the whole world. This is beyond stupid. Even before LLMs my main concern with setting up BitWarden on my own server was two folds: security and availability. LLMs doesn't fix the second point but they make the first point much worse.
none of you have what it takes to self host your perfect self hosting fantasy because most of you won't cooperate with others. keep waiting for that unicorn you wouldn't see standing right in front of you.
My idea of fun is deeply tied to understanding how things work—learning them, then applying that knowledge in my own way, as simply as possible. That process gives me a sense of ownership and control, which is not something I get from an approach where AI does things for me that I do not understand.
Nope, never trust AI to do such things, it’s imminent to cause issues. Maybe as an assistant only but never installed on the same server and worse, the privilege to access/execute commands.
I just use Proxmox on Optiplex 3060 micro. On it, a Wireguard tunnel for remote admin. The ease of creating and tearing down dedicated containers makes it easy to experiment.
I too have that same Dell Optiplex 3060 micro. I love it for experimenting also. Also use wireguard for remote access. I use incus for my Linux containers, preferring it to proxmox.
Can the same thing be said for using docker compose etc on a VPS to host a web app? Ie you can get the ergonomic / ease of using Fly, Renderer?
Historically, managed platforms like Fly.io, Render, and DigitalOcean App Platform existed to solve three pain points:
1. Fear of misconfiguring Linux
2. Fear of Docker / Compose complexity
3. Fear of “what if it breaks at 2am?”
CLI agents (Claude Code, etc.) dramatically reduce (1) and (2), and partially reduce (3).
So the tradeoff has changed from:
“Pay $50–150/month to avoid yak-shaving”
→
“Pay $5–12/month and let an agent do the yak-shaving”
I started self-hosting after noticing that my AWS bill increased from like $300 per month to $600 per month within a couple of years. When looking at my bill, 3/4 of the cost was 'AWS Other'; mostly bandwidth. I couldn't understand why I was paying so much for bandwidth given that all my database instances ran on the same host as the app servers and I didn't have any regular communication between instances.
I suspect it may have been related to the Network File System (NFS)? Like whenever I read a file on the host machine, it goes across the data-center network and charges me? Is this correct?
Anyway, I just decided to take control of those costs. Took me 2 weeks of part-time work to migrate all my stuff to a self-hosted machine. I put everything behind Cloudflare with a load balancer. Was a bit tricky to configure as I'm hosting multiple domains from the same machine. It's a small form factor PC tower with 20 CPU cores; easily runs all my stuff though. In 2 months, I already recouped the full cost of the machine through savings in my AWS bill. Now I pay like $10 a month to Cloudflare and even that's basically an optional cost. I strongly recommend.
Anyway it's impressive how AWS costs had been creeping slowly and imperceptibly over time. With my own machine, I now have way more compute than I need. I did a calculation and figured out that to get the same CPU capacity (no throttling, no bandwidth limitations) on AWS, I would have to pay like $1400 per month... But amortized over 4 years my machine's cost is like $20 per month plus $5 per month to get a static IP address. I didn't need to change my internet plan other than that. So AWS EC2 represented a 56x cost factor. It's mind-boggling.
I think it's one of these costs that I kind of brushed under the carpet as "It's an investment." But eventually, this cost became a topic of conversation with my wife and she started making jokes about our contribution to Jeff Bezos' wife's diamond ring. Then it came to our attention that his megayacht is so large that it comes with a second yacht beside it. Then I understood where he got it all from. Though to be fair to him, he is a truly great businessman; he didn't get it from institutional money or complex hidden political scheme; he got it fair and square through a very clever business plan.
Over 5 years or so that I've been using AWS, the costs had been flat. Meanwhile the costs of the underlying hardware had dropped to like 1/56th... and I didn't even notice. Is anything more profitable than apathy and neglect?
The most likely culprit was talking to other nodes via their public IP instead of their local ones. That gets billed as interent traffic (most expensive). The second culprit is your database or other nodes are in different AZs and you get a x-zone bandwidth charge.
You can go much newer than that and get semi modern intel chips second hand. For something that runs 24/7, the power cost will exceed the savings from using long obsolete chips.
Maybe because I don’t do SWE for my job, but I have fun writing docker-compose files, troubleshooting them, and adding containers to my server. Then I understand how/why stuff works if it breaks, why would I want to hand that over to an AI?
Waiting for the follow-on article “Claude Code reformatted my NAS and I lost my entire media collection.”
Everything is now not-niche but on the cusp of hitting the mainstream. Like Formal Methods.[1] But they were nice enough to put it in the title. Then tptacek replied that he “called it a little bit” because of: Did Semgrep Just Get A Lot More Interesting?[2] (Why? What could the reason be?)
This posts lists inexpensive home servers, Tailscale and Claude Code as the big unlocks.
I actually think Tailscale may be an even bigger deal here than sysadmin help from Claude Code at al.
The biggest reason I had not to run a home server was security: I'm worried that I might fall behind on updates and end up compromised.
Tailscale dramatically reduces this risk, because I can so easily configure it so my own devices can talk to my home server from anywhere in the world without the risk of exposing any ports on it directly to the internet.
Being able to hit my home server directly from my iPhone via a tailnet no matter where in the world my iPhone might be is really cool.
I'd rather expose a Wireguard port and control my keys than introduce a third party like Tailscale.
I am not sure why people are so afraid of exposing ports. I have dozens of ports open on my server including SMTP, IMAP(S), HTTP(S), various game servers and don't see a problem with that. I can't rule out a vulnerability somewhere but services are containerized and/or run as separate UNIX users. It's the way the Internet is meant to work.
> I'd rather expose a Wireguard port and control my keys than introduce a third party like Tailscale.
Ideal if you have the resources (time, money, expertise). There are different levels of qualifications, convenience, and trust that shape what people can and will deploy. This defines where you draw the line - at owning every binary of every service you use, at compiling the binaries yourself, at checking the code that you compile.
> I am not sure why people are so afraid of exposing ports
It's simple, you increase your attack surface, and the effort and expertise needed to mitigate that.
> It's the way the Internet is meant to work.
Along with no passwords or security. There's no prescribed way for how to use the internet. If you're serving one person or household rather than the whole internet, then why expose more than you need out of some misguided principle about the internet? Principle of least privilege, it's how security is meant to work.
> Ideal if you have the resources (time, money, expertise). There are different levels of qualifications, convenience, and trust that shape what people can and will deploy. This defines where you draw the line - at owning every binary of every service you use, at compiling the binaries yourself, at checking the code that you compile.
Wireguard is distributed by distros in official packages. You don't need time, money and expertise to setup unattended upgrades with auto reboot on a debian or redhat based distro. At least it is not more complicated than setting an AI agent.
What about SMTP, IMAP(S), HTTP(S), various game servers parent mentioned have open ports for?
Having a single port open for VPN access seems okay for me. That's what I did, But I don't want an "etc" involved in what has direct access to hardware/services in my house from outside.
> It's simple, you increase your attack surface, and the effort and expertise needed to mitigate that.
Sure, but opening up one port is a much smaller surface than exposing yourself to a whole cloud hosting company.
Ah… I really could not disagree more with that statement. I know we don’t want to trust BigCorp and whatnot, but a single exposed port and an incomplete understanding of what you’re doing is really all it takes to be compromised.
Same applies to Tailscale. A Tailscale client, coordination plane vulnerability, or incomplete understanding of their trust model is also all it takes. You are adding attack surface, not removing it.
If your threat model includes "OpenSSH might have an RCE" then "Tailscale might have an RCE" belongs there too.
If you are exposing a handful of hardened services on infrastructure you control, Tailscale adds complexity for no gain. If you are connecting machines across networks you do not control, or want zero-config access to internal services, then I can see its appeal.
Using a BigCorp service also has risks. You are exposed to many of their vulnerabilities, that’s why our information ends up in data leaks.
Someone would need your 256-bit key to do anything to an exposed Wireguard port.
In theory.
In the same theory, someone would need your EC SSH key to do anything with an exposed SSH port.
Practice is a separate question.
Even if you understand what you are doing, you are still exposed to every single security bug in all of the services you host. Most of these self hosted tools have not been through 1% of the security testing big tech services have.
Now you are exposed to every security bug in Tailscale's client, DERP relays, and coordination plane, plus you have added a trust dependency on infrastructure you do not control. The attack surface did not shrink, it shifted.
This felt like it didn’t do your aim justice, “$X and an incomplete understanding of what you’re doing is all it takes to be compromised” applies to many $X, including Tailscale.
Headscale is a thing
Headscale is only really useful if you need to manage multiple users and/or networks. If you only have one network you want to have access to and a small number of users/devices it only increases the attack surface over having one wireguard listening because it has more moving parts.
I set it up to open the port for few secs via port knocking. Plus another script that runs on the server that opens connections to my home ip addr doing reverse lookup to a domain my router updates via dyndns so devices at my home don’t need to port knock to connect.
I think the most important thing about Tailscale is how accessible it is. Is there a GUI for Wireguard that lets me configure my whole private network as easily as Tailscale does?
Yggdrasil network is probably the future. At Hoppy Network we're about to release private yggdrasil relays as a service so you don't get spammed with "WAN" traffic. With Yggdrasil, IP addresses aren't allocated by an authority - they are owned and proven by public key cryptography.
Of course. A port is a door. If service listening on a port is secure and properly configured (e.g. ssh), whole Internet can bang on it all day every day, they won't let through without proper key. Same for imap, xmpp or any othet service.
But what can you expect from people who provide services but won't even try to understand how they work and how they are configured as it's 'not fun enough', expecting claude code to do it right for them.
Asking AI to do thing you did 100 times before is OK I guess. Asking AI to do thing you never did and have no idea how it's properly done - not so much I'd say. But this guy obviously does not signal his sysadmin skills but his AI skills. I hope it brings him the result he aimed for.
> I'd rather expose a Wireguard port and control my keys than introduce a third party like Tailscale.
This is what I do. You can do Tailscale like access using things like Pangolin[0].
You can also use a bastion host, or block all ports and set up Tor or i2p, and then anyone that even wants to talk to your server will need to know cryptographic keys to route traffic to it at all, on top of your SSH/WG/etc keys.
> I am not sure why people are so afraid of exposing ports. I have dozens of ports open on my server including SMTP, IMAP(S), HTTP(S), various game servers and don't see a problem with that.
This is what I don't do. Anything that needs real internet access like mail, raw web access, etc gets its own VPS where an attack will stay isolated, which is important as more self-hosted services are implemented using things like React and Next[1].
[0] https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46136026
Is a container not enough isolation? I do SSH to the host (alt-port) and then services in containers (mail, http)
Depends on your risk tolerance.
I personally wouldn't trust a machine if a container was exploited on it, you don't know if there were any successful container escapes, kernel exploits, etc. Even if they escaped with user permissions, that can fill your box with boobytraps if they have container-granted capabilities.
I'd just prefer to nuke the VPS entirely and start over than worry if the server and the rest of my services are okay.
Yea I feel that too.
there are some well respected compute providers as well which you can use and for very low amount, you can sort of offload this worry to someone else.
That being said, VM themselves are good enough security box too. I consider running VM's even on your home server with public facing strategies usually allowable
Yeah, I only run very little on VPS, so this is practically free to me. Everything else I host at home behind Wireguard w/ Pangolin.
I understand where you are coming from but no, containers aren't enough isolation.
If you are running some public service, it might have bugs and of course we see some RCE issues as well or there can be some misconfig and containers by default dont provide enough security if an hacker tries to break in. Containers aren't secure in that sense.
Virtual machines are the intended use case for that. But they can be full of friction at time.
If you want something of a middle compromise, I can't recommend incus enough. https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/
It allows you to setup vm's as containers and even provides a web ui and provides the amount of isolation that you can trust (usually) everything on.
I'd say to not take chances with your home server because that server can be inside your firewall and can infect on a worst case scenario other devices but virtualization with things like incus or proxmox (another well respected tool) are the safest and provide isolation that you can trust with. I highly recommend that you should take a look at it if you deploy public serving services.
It's the way the internet was meant to work but it doesn't make it any easier. Even when everything is in containers/VMs/users, if you don't put a decent amount of additional effort into automatic updates and keeping that context hardened as you tinker with it it's quite annoying when it gets pwned.
There was a popular post less than a month ago about this recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46305585
I agree maintaining wireguard is a good compromise. It may not be "the way the internet was intended to work" but it lets you keep something which feels very close without relying on a 3rd party or exposing everything directly. On top of that, it's really not any more work than Tailscale to maintain.
> There was a popular post less than a month ago about this recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46305585
This incident precisely shows that containerization worked as intended and protected the host.
It protected the host itself but it did not protect the server from being compromised and running malware, mining cryptocurrency.
Containerizing your publicly exposed service will also not protect your HTTP server from hosting malware or your SMTP server from sending SPAM, it only means you've protected your SMTP server from your compromised HTTP server (assuming you've even locked it down accurately, which is exactly the kind of thing people don't want to be worried about).
Tailscale puts the protection of the public portion of the story to a company dedicated to keeping that portion secure. Wireguard (or similar) limit the protection to a single service with low churn and minimal attack surface. It's a very different discussion than preventing lateral movement alone. And that all goes without mentioning not everyone wants to deal with containers in the first place (though many do in either scenario).
I just run an SSH server and forward local ports through that as needed. Simple (at least to me).
I do that as well, along with using sshd as a SOCKS proxy for web based stuff via Firefox, but it can be a bit of a pain to forward each service to each host individually if you have more than a few things going on - especially if you have things trying to use the same port and need to keep track of how you mapped it locally. It can also a lot harder to manage on mobile devices, e.g. say you have some media or home automation services - they won't be as easy to access via a single public SSH host via port forwarding (if at all) as a VPN would be, and wireguard is about as easy a personal VPN as there is.
That's where wg/Tailscale come in - it's just a traditional IP network at that point. Also less to do to shut up bad login attempts from spam bots and such. I once forgot to configure the log settings on sshd and ended up with GBs of logs in a week.
The other big upside (outside of not having a 3rd party) in putting in the slightly more effort to do wg/ssh/other personal VPN is the latency+bandwidth to your home services will be better.
> and wireguard is about as easy a personal VPN as there is.
I would argue OpenVPN is easier. I currently run both (there are some networks I can’t use UDP on, and I haven’t bothered figuring out how to get wireguard to work with TCP), and the OpenVPN initial configuration was easier, as is adding clients (DHCP, pre-shared cert+username/password).
This isn’t to say wireguard is hard. But imo OpenVPN is still easier - and it works everywhere out of the box. (The exception is networks that only let you talk on 80 and 443, but you can solve that by hosting OpenVPN on 443, in my experience.)
This is all based on my experience with opnsense as the vpn host (+router/firewall/DNS/DHCP). Maybe it would be a different story if I was trying to run the VPN server on a machine behind my router, but I have no reason to do so - I get at least 500Mbps symmetrical through OpenVPN, and that’s just the fastest network I’ve tested a client on. And even if that is the limit, that’s good enough for me, I don’t need faster throughput on my VPN since I’m almost always going to be latency limited.
How many random people do you have hitting port 22 on a given day?
Dozens. Maybe hundreds. But they can't get in as they don't have the key.
change port.
Underrated reply - I randomize the default ports everywhere I can, really cuts down on brute force/credential stuffing attempts.
Also to Simon: I am not sure about how Iphone works but in android, you could probably use mosh and termux to then connect to the server as well and have the end result while not relying on third party (in this case tailscale)
I am sure there must be an Iphone app which could probably allow something like this too. I highly recommend more people take a look into such workflow, I might look into it more myself.
Tmate is a wonderful service if you have home networks behind nat's.
I personally like using the hosted instance of tmate (tmate.io) itself but It can be self hosted and is open source
Once again it has third party issue but luckily it can be self hosted so you can even have a mini vps on hetzner/upcloud/ovh and route traffic through that by hosting tmate there so ymmv
My biggest source of paranoia is my open home assistant port, while it requires a strong password and is TLS-encrypted, I'm sure that one day someone will find an exploit letting them in, and then the attacker will rapidly turn my smart home devices on and off until they break/overheat the power components until they start a fire and burn down my house.
That seems like a very irrational fear. Attackers don't go around trying to break into Home Assistant to turn the lights on at some stranger's house.
There's also no particular reason to think Home Assistant's authentication has to have a weakness point.
And your devices are also unlikely to start a fire just by being turned on and off, if that's your fear you should replace them at once because if they catch fire it doesn't matter if it's an attacker or yourself turning them on and off.
People are putting their whole infrastructure onto HA - cars, Apple/Google/other accounts, integrations to grid companies, managing ESP software etc..
I think that has more potential for problems than turning lights on and off and warrants strong security.
Why expose HA to the internet? I’m genuinely curious.
> I am not sure why people are so afraid of exposing ports.
Similar here, I only build & run services that I trust myself enough to run in a secure manner by themselves. I still have a VPN for some things, but everything is built to be secure on its own.
It's quite a few services on my list at this point and really don't want to have a break in one thing lead to a break in everything. It's always possible to leave a hole in one or two things by accident.
On the other side this also means I have a Postgres instance with TCP/5432 open to the internet - with no ill effects so far, and quite a bit of trust it'll remain that way, because I understand its security properties and config now.
> I'd rather expose a Wireguard port and control my keys than introduce a third party like Tailscale.
I’m working on a (free) service that lets you have it both ways. It’s a thin layer on top of vanilla WireGuard that handles NAT traversal and endpoint updates so you don’t need to expose any ports, while leaving you in full control of your own keys and network topology.
https://wireplug.org
Apparently I'm ignorant about Tailscale, bacause your service description is exactly what I thought Tailscale was.
The main issue people have with Tailscale is that it's a centralised service that isn't self hostable. The Tailscale server manages authentication and keeping track of your devices IPs.
Your eventual connection is direct to your device, but all the management before that runs on Tailscales server.
Isn't this what headscale is for?
This is very cool!
But I also think it's worth a mention that for basic "I want to access my home LAN" use cases you don't need P2P, you just need a single public IP to your lan and perhaps dynamic dns.
Where will you host the wg endpoint to open up?
- Each device? This means setting up many peers on each of your devices
- Router/central server? That's a single point of failure, and often a performance bottleneck if you're on LAN. If that's a router, the router may be compromised and eavesdrop on your connections, which you probably didn't secure as hard because it's on a VPN.
Not to mention DDNS can create significant downtime.
Tailscale fails over basically instantly, and is E2EE, unlike the hub setup.
To establish a wg connection, only one node needs a public IP/port.
> Router/central server? That's a single point of failure
Your router is a SPOF regardless. If your router goes down you can't reach any nodes on your LAN, Tailscale or otherwise. So what is your point?
> If that's a router, the router may be compromised and eavesdrop on your connections, which you probably didn't secure as hard because it's on a VPN.
Secure your router. This is HN, not advice for your mom.
> Not to mention DDNS can create significant downtime.
Set your DNS ttl correctly and you should experience no more than a minute of downtime whenever your public IP changes.
> one node needs a public IP/port
A lot of people are behind CGNAT or behind a non-configurable router, which is an abomination.
> Secure your router
A typical router cannot be secured against physical access, unlike your servers which can have disk encryption.
> Your router is a SPOF regardless
Tailscale will keep your connection over a downstream switch, for example. It will not go through the router if it doesn't have to. If you use it for other usecases like kdeconnect synchronizing clipboard between phone and laptop, that will also stay up independent of your home router.
A public IP and DDNS can be impossible behind CGNAT. A VPN link to a VPS eliminates that problem.
When I said "you just need a single public IP" I figured it was clear that I wasn't claiming this works for people who don't have a public IP.
The VPS (using wg-easy or similar solutions) will be able to decrypt traffic as it has all the keys. I think most people self-hosting are not fine with big cloud eavesdropping on their data.
Tailscale really is superior here if you use tailnet lock. Everything always stays encrypted, and fails over to their encrypted relays if direct connection is not possible for various reasons.
Every time I put anything anywhere on the open net, it gets bombarded 24/7 by every script kiddie, botnet group , and these days, AI company out there. No matter what I'm hosting, it's a lot more convenient to not have to worry about that even for a second.
> Every time I put anything anywhere on the open net, it gets bombarded 24/7 by every script kiddie, botnet group , and these days, AI company out there
Are you sure that it isn't just port scanners? I get perhaps hundreds of connections to my STMP server every day, but they are just innocuous connections (hello, then disconnect). I wouldn't worry about that unless you see repeated login attempts, in which case you may want to deploy Fail2Ban.
Port scanners don't try to ssh into my server with various username/password combinations.
I prefer to hide my port instead of using F2B for a few reasons.
1. Log spam. Looking in my audit logs for anything suspicious is horrendous when there's just megs of login attempts for days.
2. F2B has banned me in the past due to various oopsies on my part. Which is not good when I'm out of town and really need to get into my server.
3. Zero days may be incredibly rare in ssh, but maybe not so much in Immich or any other relatively new software stack being exposed. I'd prefer not to risk it when simple alternatives exist.
Besides the above, using Tailscale gives me other options, such as locking down cloud servers (or other devices I may not have hardware control over) so that they can only be connected to, but not out of.
This is a good reason not to expose random services, but a wireguard endpoint simply won't respond at all if someone hits it with the wrong key. It is better even than key based ssh.
I've managed wireguard in the past, and would never do it again. Generating keys, distributing them, configuring it all...... bleh!
Never again, it takes too much time and is too painful.
Certs from Tailscale are reason enough to switch, in my opinion!
The key with successful self hosting is to make it easy and fast, IMHO.
Defence in dept. You have a layer of security even before a packet reaches your port. I might have a zero day on your service, but now I also need to breach your reverse proxy to get to it.
Speaking of Wireguard, my current topology has all peers talking to a single peer that forwards traffic between peers (for hole punching / peers with dynamic ips).
But some peers are sometimes on the same LAN (eg phone is sometimes on same LAN as pc). Is there a way to avoid forwarding traffic through the server peer in this case?
The way I do it is to have two different first level domains. Let's say:
- w for the wireguard network. - h for the home network.
Nothing fancy, just populate the /etc/hosts on every machine with these names.
Now, it's up to me to connect to my server1.h or server1.w depending whether I am at home or somewhere else.
I guess I'm looking for wireguard's version of STUN. And now that I know what to google for, finally found some promising leads.
https://github.com/jwhited/wgsd
https://www.jordanwhited.com/posts/wireguard-endpoint-discov...
https://github.com/tjjh89017/stunmesh-go
Two separate WG profiles on the phone; one acting as a Proxy (which forwards everything), and one acting just as a regular VPN without forwarding.
Have your network managing software setup a default route with a lower metric than wireguard default route based on wifi SSID. Can be done easily with systemd-networkd, because you can match .network file configurations on SSID. You're probably out of luck with this approach on network-setup-challenged devices like so called smart phones.
I used to do that, but Tailscale with your own headscale server is pretty snazzy. The other thing is with cloudflared running your server doesn't have to be Internet-routable. Everything is tunneled.
i tried wireguard and ended up giving up on it, too many isps just block it here or use some kind of tech that fucks with it and i have no idea why, i couldn't connect to my home network because it was blocked on whatever random wifi i was on
the new problem is now my isp uses cgnat and there's no easy way around it
tailscale avoids all that, if i wanted more control i'd probably use headscale rather than bother with raw wireguard
I don't have a static IP, so tailscale is convenient. And less likely to fail when I really need it, as apposed to trying to deal with dynamic dns.
Which router OS are you using? I have openwrt + daily auto updates configure with a couple of packages blacklisted that I manually update now & then.
A mesh-type wireguard network is rather annoying to set up if you have more than a few devices, and a hub-type network (on a low powered router) tends to be so slow that it necessitates falling back to alternate interfaces when you're at home. Tailscale does away with all this and always uses direct connections. In principle it is more secure than hosting it on some router without disk encryption (as the keys can be extracted via a physical attack, and a pwned router can also eavesdrop on traffic).
> introduce a third party like Tailscale.
Well just use headscale and you'll have control over everything.
That just moves the problem, since headscale will require a server you manage with an open port.
Sure, tailscale is nice, but from an open-port-on-the-net perspective it's probably a bit below just opening wireguard.
People are not full time maintainers of their infra though, that's very different to companies.
In many cases they want something that works, not something that requires a complex setup that needs to be well researched and understood.
Wireguard is _really_ simple in that sense though. If you're not doing anything complicated it's very easy to set up & maintain, and basically just works.
You can also buy quite a few routers now that have it built in, so you literally just tick a checkbox, then scan a QR code/copy a file to each client device, done.
This may come with its own limitations, though.
My ISP-provided router (Free, in France) has WG built-in. But other than performance being abysmal, its main pain point is not supporting subnet routing.
So if all you want is to connect your phone / laptop while away to the local home network, it's fine. If you want to run a tunnel between two locations with multiple IPs on the remote side, you're SoL.
If you expose ports, literally everything you are hosting and every plugin is an attack surface. Most of this stuff is built by single hobbiest devs on the weekend. You are also exposed to any security issues you make in your configuration. My first attempt self hosting I had redis compromised because I didn't realise I had exposed it to the internet with no password.
Behind a VPN your only attack surface is the VPN which is generally very well secured.
You exposed your redis publicly? Why?
Edit: This is the kind of service that you should only expose to your intranet, i.e. a network that is protected through wireguard. NEVER expose this publicly, even if you don't have admin:admin credtials.
Isn't GP's point inadvertently exposing stuff? Just mention docker networking on HN and you'll get threadfuls of comments on how it helpfully messes with your networking without telling you. Maybe redis does the same?
I mitigate this by having a dedicated machine on the border that only does routing and firewalling, with no random services installed. So anything that helpfully opens ports on internal vms won't automatically be reachable from the outside.
I actually didn't know I had. At the time I didn't properly know how docker networking worked and I exposed redis to the host so my other containers could access it. And then since this was on a VPS with a dedicated IP, this made it exposed to the whole internet.
I now know better, but there are still a million other pitfalls to fall in to if you are not a full time system admin. So I prefer to just put it all behind a VPN and know that it's safe.
> but there are still a million other pitfalls to fall in to if you are not a full time system admin.
Pro tip: After you configure a new service, review the output of ss -tulpn. This will tell you what ports are open. You should know exactly what each line represents, especially those that bind on 0.0.0.0 or [::] or other public addresses.
The pitfall that you mentioned (Docker automatically punching a hole in the firewall for the services that it manages when an interface isn't specified) is discoverable this way.
Thanks, didn't know about this one.
I have a VPS with OVH, I put Tailscale on it and it's pretty cool to be able to install and access local (to the server) services like Prometheus and Grafana without having to expose them through the public net firewall or mess with more apache/nginx reverse proxies. (Same for individual services' /metrics endpoints that are served with a different port.)
The answer is people who don't truly understand the way it works being in charge of others who also don't in different ways. In the best case, there's an under resourced and over leveraged security team issuing overzealous edicts with the desperate hope of avoiding some disaster. When the sample size is one, it's easy to look at it and come to your conclusion.
In every case where a third party is involved, someone is either providing a service, plugging a knowledge gap, or both.
Honestly the managed PKI is the main value-add from Tailscale over plain wireguard.
I’ve been meaning to give this a try this winter: https://github.com/juanfont/headscale
With ports you have dozens or hundreds of applications and systems to attack.
With tailscale / zerotier / etc the connection is initiated from inside to facilitate NAT hole punching and work over CGNAT.
With wireguard that removes a lot of attack surfaces but wouldn't work if behind CGNAT without a relay box.
Tailscale does not solve the "falling behind on updates" problem, it just moves the perimeter. Your services are still vulnerable if unpatched: the attacker now needs tailnet access first (compromised device, account, or Tailscale itself).
You have also added attack surface: Tailscale client, coordination plane, DERP relays. If your threat model includes "OpenSSH might have an RCE" then "Tailscale might have an RCE" belongs there too.
WireGuard gives you the same "no exposed ports except VPN" model without the third-party dependency.
The tradeoff is convenience, not security.
BTW, why are people acting like accessing a server from a phone is a 2025 innovation?
SSH clients on Android/iOS have existed for 15 years. Termux, Prompt, Blink, JuiceSSH, pick one. Port N, key auth, done. You can run Mosh if you want session persistence across network changes. The "unlock" here is NAT traversal with a nice UI, not a new capability.
> Tailscale does not solve the "falling behind on updates" problem, it just moves the perimeter.
nothing 100% fixes zero days either, you are just adding layers that all have to fail at the same time
> You have also added attack surface: Tailscale client, coordination plane, DERP relays. If your threat model includes "OpenSSH might have an RCE" then "Tailscale might have an RCE" belongs there too.
you still have to have a vulnerable service after that. in your scenario you'd need an exploitable attack on wireguard or one of tailscale's modifications to it and an exploitable service on your network
that's extra difficulty not less
The "layers" argument applies equally to WireGuard without Tailscale. Attacker still needs VPN exploit + vulnerable service.
The difference: Tailscale adds attack vectors that do not exist with self-hosted WireGuard: account compromise, coordination plane, client supply chain, other devices on your tailnet. Those are not layers to bypass, they are additional entry points.
Regardless, it is still for convenience, not security.
> BTW, why are people acting like accessing a server from a phone is a 2025 innovation?
> SSH clients on Android/iOS have existed for 15 years
That is not the point, Tailscale is not just about having a network connection, it's everything that goes with. I used to have OpenVPN, and there's a world of difference.
- The tailscale client is much nicer and convenient to use on Android than anything I have seen.
- The auth plane is simpler, especially for non tech users (parents, wife) whom I wish to access my photo album. They are basically independent with tailscale.
- The simplicity also allows me to recommend it to friends and we can link between our tailnet, e.g. to cross backup our NAS.
- Tailscale can terminate SSH publicly, so I can selectively expose services on the internet (e.g. VaultWarden) without exposing my server and hosting a reverse proxy.
- ACLs are simple and user friendly.
You are listing conveniences, which is fair. I said the tradeoff is convenience, not security.
> "Tailscale can terminate SSH publicly"
You are now exposing services via Tailscale's infrastructure instead of your own reverse proxy. The attack surface moved, it did not shrink.
There’s also Cloudflare tunnels for stuff that you want to be available to the internet but dont want to open ports and deal with that. You can add an auth policy that only works with your email and Github/whatever SSO.
Is Tailscale still recording metadata about all your connections? https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/16165
Now I wish there was some kind of global, single-network version of Tailscale...
TS is cool if you have a well-defined security boundary. This is you / your company / your family, they should have access. That is the rest of the world, they should not.
My use case is different. I do occasionally want to share access to otherwise personal machines around. Tailscale machine sharing sort of does what I want, but it's really inconvenient to use. I wish there was something like a Google Docs flow, where any Tailscale user could attempt to dial into my machine, but they were only allowed to do so after my approval.
You have more or less described OpenZiti. Just mint a new identity/JWT for the user, create a service, and viola, only that user has access to your machine. Fully open source and self-hostable.
Take a look at Zrok it might be what you want: https://zrok.io
I agree! Before Tailscale I was completely skeptical of self hosting.
Now I have tailscale on an old Kindle downloading epubs from a server running Copyparty. Its great!
Maybe I'm dumb, but I still don't quite understand the value-add of Tailscale over what Wireguard or some other VPN already provides. HN has tried to explain it to me but it just seems like sugar on top of a plain old VPN. Kind of like how "pi-hole" is just sugar on top of dnsmasq, and Plex is just sugar on top of file sharing.
I think you answered the question. Sugar. It's easier than managing your own Wireguard connections. Adding a device just means logging into the Tailscale client, no need to distribute information to or from other devices. Get a new phone while traveling because yours was stolen? You can set up Tailscale and be back on your private network in a couple minutes.
Why did people use Dropbox instead of setting up their own FTP servers? Because it was easier.
Yeah, but "people" here are alleged software engieners. It is quite disheartening.
Software engineering is a broad spectrum where we can move up and down its abstraction ladder. Using off-the-shelf tools and even third-party providers is fine. I don't have to do everything from scratch - after all, I didn't write my own text editor. I'm also happy to download prepacked and preconfigured software on my Linux distro instead of compiling and adding them to PATH manually.
I could, I just choose not to and direct my interests elsewhere. Those interests can change over time too. One day someone with Tailscale can decide to explore Wireguard. Similarly, someone who runs their own mail server might decide to move to a hosted solution and do something else. That's perfectly fine.
To me, this freedom of choice in software engineering is not disheartening. It's liberating and exciting.
That is a strawman though, and I am not sure why all replies assume extremes all the time.
Nobody said do everything from scratch. The point is: basic networking (port forwarding, WireGuard) should not be beyond someone's capability as a software engineer.
"I use apt instead of compiling" is a time tradeoff. "I can't configure a VPN" is a skill gap. These are not equivalent.
If you choose convenience for whatever reasons, that is completely fine.
"I can't configure a VPN" and "I don't want to configure a VPN" are 2 entirely different things. Mind you I have no idea how complex tailscale setup is in comparison.
I'm in the middle of setting up my own homeserver. Still deciding on what/if I want to expose to the internet and not just local network and while setting everything up and tinkering is part of the fun for me. I get some people just want results that they can rely on. Tailscale, while not a perfect option, is still an option and if they're fine with the risk profile I can understand sacrificing some security for it.
It seems like we do agree. :)
For a homeserver:
- SSH with key-only auth, exposed directly. This has worked for decades. Consider non-standard port to reduce log noise (not security, just quieter logs), fail2ban if you want
- Access internal services via SSH tunnels or just work on the box directly
- If exposing HTTP(S): reverse proxy (nginx/caddy) with TLS, rate limiting
- Databases, admin panels, monitoring - access via SSH, not public (ideally)
You do not need a VPN layer if you are comfortable with SSH. It has been battle-tested longer than most alternatives.
The fun part of tinkering is also learning what is actually necessary vs. cargo-culted advice. You will find most "security hardening" guides are overkill for a homeserver with sensible defaults.
I'd argue that no, managing your own VPN is not a basic skill - certainly not in the realms of software engineering (more like network engineering).
WireGuard is ~10 lines of config and wg genkey. Calling that "network engineering" is a stretch.
The siloing of basic infrastructure knowledge into "not my discipline" is part of the problem. Software gets deployed somewhere: understanding ports, keys, and routing at a basic level is not specialized knowledge.
Honestly, if 10 lines of config is "network engineering", then the bar for software engineering has dropped considerably.
I am probably in the camp where I've found myself ovewhelmed with the amount of information about networks and I'm an alleged software engineer (without formal training in CS albeit).
The 10 loc is not a valid measure.
`sudo rm -rf /` is a 1 line of code. It's not the lines that are hard to wrap your brain around, it's the implication of the lines that really what we are talking about.
First and foremost they are humans, with a limited time on Earth.
Being a software engineer doesn't mean you want to spend you free time tinkering about your self-hosting setup and doing support for your users.
With Tailscale, not only you don't have to care about most things since _it just works_, but also on-boarding of casual users is straightforward.
Same goes for Plex. I want to watch movies/shows, I don't want to spend time tinkering with my setup. And Plex provides exactly that. Ditto for my family/friends that can access my library with the same simple experience as Netflix or whatever.
Meanwhile, I have a coworker who want to own/manage everything. So they don't want to use Tailscale and they dropped Plex when they forced to use the third-party login system. Now they watch less than a third than they used to be, and they share their setup with nobody since it's too complicated to do.
To each their own, but my goal is to enjoy my setup and share it with others. Tailscale and Plex give me that.
There is a difference between "I choose not to" and "I cannot". The thread is full of people saying Tailscale "unlocked" self-hosting, implying capability, not time savings or time preference.
Choosing convenience is fine. But if basic port forwarding or WireGuard is beyond someone's skill set, "software engineer" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
I am not saying they are, but if it really is the case, then yeah.
As for file sharing... I remember when non-SWEs knew how to torrent movies, used DC++ and so on. These days even SWEs have no idea how to do it. It is mind-boggling.
If you're confident that you know how to securely configure and use Wireguard across multiple devices then great, you probably don't need Tailscale for a home lab.
Tailscale gives me an app I can install on my iPhone and my Mac and a service I can install on pretty much any Linux device imaginable. I sign into each of those apps once and I'm done.
The first time I set it up that took less than five minutes from idea to now-my-devices-are-securely-networked.
It’s a bit more than sugar.
1. 1-command (or step) to have a new device join your network. Wireguard configs and interfaces managed on your behalf.
2. ACLs that allow you to have fine grained control over connectivity. For example, server A should never be able to talk to server B.
3. NAT is handled completely transparently.
4. SSO and other niceties.
For me, (1) and (2) in particular make it a huge value add over managing Wireguard setup, configs, and firewall rules manually.
> Plex is just sugar on top of file sharing.
right, like browsers are just sugar on top of curl
curl is just sugar on sockets ;)
SSH is just sugar on top of telnet and running your own encryption algorithms by hand on paper and typing in the results.
Tailscale is Wireguard but it automatically sets everything up for you, handles DDNS, can punch through NAT and CGNAT, etc. It's also running a Wireguard server on every device so rather than having a hub server in the LAN, it directly connects to every device. Particularly helpful if it's not just one LAN you are trying to connect to, but you have lots of devices in different areas.
> Kind of like how "pi-hole" is just sugar on top of dnsmasq, and Plex is just sugar on top of file sharing.
Speaking of that, I have always preferred a plain Unbound instance and a Samba server over fancier alternatives. I guess I like my setups extremely barebone.
Yea, my philosophy for self-hosting is "use the smallest amount of software you can in order to do what you really need." So for me, sugar X on top of fundamental functionality Y is always rejected in favor of just configuring Y."
Setting up wireguard manually can be a pain in the butt sometimes. Tailscale makes it super easy but then your info flows through their nodes.
I always assumed it was because a lot of ISPs use CGNAT and using tailscale servers for hole punching is (slightly) easier than renting and configuring a VPS.
Tailscale is able to punch holes in CGNAT which a vanilla wireguard cannot
It's plug and play.
And some people may not value that but a lot of people do. It’s part of why Plex has become so popular and fewer people know about Jellyfin. One is turnkey, the other isn’t.
I could send a one page bullet point list of instructions to people with very modest computer literacy and they would be up and running in under an hour on all of their devices with Plex in and outside of their network. From that point forward it’s basically like having your own Netflix.
You don’t have to run the control plane and you don’t have to manage DNS & SSL keys for the DNS entries. Additionally the RBAC is pretty easy.
All these are manageable through other tools, but it’s more complicated stack to keep up.
Yes, that is really all it is.
If Plex is "just file sharing" then I guarantee you'd find Tailscale "just WireGuard".
I enjoy that relative "normies" can depend on it/integrate it without me having to go through annoying bits. I like that it "just works" without requiring loads of annoying networking.
For example, my aging mother just got a replacement computer and I am able to make it easy to access and remotely administer by just putting Tailscale on it, and have that work seamlessly with my other devices and connections. If one day I want to fully self-host, then I can run Headscale.
Just be sure to run it with --accept-dns=false otherwise you won't have any outbound Internet on your server if you ever get logged out. That was annoying to find out (but easy to debug with Claude!)
These are two very separate issues. Tailscale or other reverse proxies will give you access from the WAN.
Claude Code or other assistants will give you conversational management.
I already do the former (using Pangolin). I'm building towards the latter but first need to be 100% sure I can have perfect rollback and containement across the full stack CC could influence.
Tailscale is a good first step, but its best to configure wireguard directly on your router. You can try headscale but it seems to be more of a hobby project - so native wireguard is the only viable path. Most router OS's supports wireguard these days too. You can ask claude to sanity check your configuration.
Its especially important in the CGNAT world that has been created and the enormous slog that IPv6 rollout has ultimately become.
Yeah same story for me. I did not trust my sensitive data on random self hosting apps with no real security team. But now I can put the entire server on the local network only and split tunnel VPN from my devices and it just works.
LLMs are also a huge upgrade here since they are actually quite competent at helping you set up servers.
I just have a vpn server on my fiber modem/router (edgerouter-4) and use vpn clients on my devices. I actually have two vpn networks - one that can see the rest of my home network (and server) and the other that is completely isolated and can't see anything else and only does routing. No need to use a third-party and I have more flexibility
Just use subpath routing and fail2ban and Im very comfortable with exposing my home setup to the world.
The only thing served on / is a hello world nginx page. Everything else you need to know the randomly generated subpath route.
Why not cloudflare tunnels ?
CF tunnels are game changers for me!
> The biggest reason I had not to run a home server was security: I'm worried that I might fall behind on updates and end up compromised.
In my experience this is much less of an issue depending on your configuration and what you actually expose to the public internet.
Os-side, as long as you pick a good server os (for me that’s rocky linux) you can safely update once every six months.
Applications-wise, i try and expose as little as possible to the public internet and everything exposed is running in an unprivileged podman container. Random test stuff is only exposed within the vpn.
Also tailscale is not even a hard requirement: i rub openvpn and that works as well, on my iphone too.
The truly differentiating factor is methodological, not technological.
definitely, but to be fair, beyond that it's just linux. Most people would need claude code to get what ever they want to use linux for running reliably (systemd service, etc.)
i'm still waiting for ECC minipcs, then i'll go all in on local DBs too
Supermicro has some low power options such as https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/Mini-ITX/SYS-E...
Besides the company that operates it, what is the big difference between Tailscale and Cloudflare tunnels? I've seen Tailscale mentioned frequently but I'm not quite sure what it gets for me. If it's more like a VPN, is it possible to use on an arbitrary device like a library kiosk?
I don't use Cloudflare tunnels for anything.
But Tailscale is just a VPN (and by VPN, I mean: Something more like "Connect to the office networ" than I do "NordVPN"). It provides a private network on top of the public network, so that member devices of that VPN can interact together privately.
Which is pretty great: It's a simple and free/cheap way for me to use my pocket supercomputer to access my stuff at home from anywhere, with reasonable security.
But because it happens at the network level, you (generally) need to own the machines that it is configured on. That tends to exclude using it in meaningful ways with things like library kiosks.
You can self host a tailscale network entirely on your own, without making a single call to Tailscale Inc.
Your cloudflare tunnel availability depends on Cloudflare’s mood of the day.
People are way too worried about security imo. Statistically, no one is targeting you to be hacked. By the time you are important and valuable enough for your home equipment to be a target you would have hired someone else to manage this for you
I think this is very dangerous perspective. A lot of attacks on infra are automated, just try to expose a Windows XP machine to the internet for a day and see with how much malware you end up with. If you leave your security unchecked, you will end up attacked; not by someone targeting you specifically, but having all your data encrypted for ransom might still create a problem for you (even if the attacker doesn’t care about YOUR data specifically).
Oh, sure, no one is targeting me specifically.
Its only swarms of bots and scripts going through the entire internet, including me.
iptables and fail2ban should be installed pretty early, and then - just watch the logs.
I was just thinking I should write something about this, because the words needs spreading.
I cannot say how happy I am configuring my own immich server on a decade old machine. I just feel empowered. Because despite my 9 years of software development, I haven't gotten into the nitty gritties of networking, VPN and I always see something non-standard while installing an open source package and without all of this custom guidance, I always would give up after a couple of hours of pulling my hair apart.
I really want to go deeper and it finally feels this could be a hobby.
PS: The rush was so great I was excitedly talking to my wife how I could port our emails away from google, considering all of the automatic opt in for AI processing and what not. The foolhardy me thought of even sabbatical breaks to work on long pending to-do's in my head.
I went down the self host route some years ago but once critical problems hit I realized that beyond a simple NAS it can be a very demanding hobby.
I was in another country when there was a power outage at home. My internet went down, the server restart but couldn't reconnect anymore because the optical network router also had some problems after the power outage. I could ask my folks to restart, and turn on off things but nothing more than that. So I couldn't reach my Nextcloud instance and other stuff. Maybe an uninterruptible power supply could have helped but the more I was thinking about it after just didn't really worth the hassle anymore. Add a UPS okay. But why not add a dual WAN failover router for extra security if the internet goes down again? etc. It's a bottomless pit (like most hobbies tbh)
Also (and that's a me problem maybe) I was using Tailscale but I'm more "paranoid" about it nowadays. Single point of failure service, US-only SSO login (MS, Github, Apple, Google), what if my Apple account gets locked if I redeem a gift card and I can't use Tailscale anymore? I still believe in self hosting but probably I want something even more "self" to the extremes.
My spouse and I work at home and after the first couple multi-day power outages we invested in good UPSs and a whole house standby generator. Now when the power goes out it's down for at most 30 seconds.
This also makes self-hosting more viable, since our availability is constrained by internet provider rather than power.
Yeah we did a similar thing. Same situation, spouse and I both work from home, and we got hit by a multiple day power outage due to a rare severe ice storm. So now I have an EV and a transfer switch so I can go for a week without power, and I have a Starlink upstream connection in standby mode that can be activated in minutes.
Of course that means we’ll not have another ice storm in my lifetime. My neighbors should thank me.
We had a 5 day outage last year, got a generator at the tail end of the windy season and made exact same jokes.
A year later another atmospheric river hit and we had a 4 hour outage. No more jokes.
Make sure to run that generator once every few months with some load to keep it happy.
Well, it's an EV with a big inverter, not a generator, but I get your point. And I do periodically fire it up and run the house on it for a little while, just to exercise the connection and maintain my familiarity with it in case I need to use it late at night in the dark with an ice storm breaking all the trees around us.
Thanks for taking one for the team.
2025 was the year of LiFePo power packs for me and my family. Absolute game changers: 1000Wh of power with a multi-socket inverter and UPS-like failover. You lose capacity over a gas genny but the simplicity and lack of fumes adds back a lot of value. If it’s sunny you can also make your own fuel.
https://www.ankersolix.com/ca/products/f2600-400w-portable-s...
Yea I think my own preference for self-hosting boils down to a distrust of a continuous dependency on a service in control of a company and a desire to minimize such dependencies. While there are FOSS and self-hostable alternatives to tailscale or indeed claude code, using those services themselves simply replaces old dependencies on externally-controlled cloud-based services on new ones
I thought I was smart because I invested in UPS backup from the start.
Then 5 years later there was a power outage and the UPS lasted for about 10 seconds before the batteries failed. That's how I learned about UPS battery maintenance schedules and the importance of testing.
I have a calendar alert to test the UPS. I groan whenever it comes up because I know there's a chance I'm going to discover the batteries won't hold up under load any more, which means I not only have to deal with the server losing power but I have to do the next round of guessing which replacement batteries are coming from a good brand this time. Using the same vendor doesn't even guarantee you're going to get the same quality when you only buy every several years.
Backup generators have their own maintenance schedule.
I think the future situation should be better with lithium chemistry UPS, but every time I look the available options are either exorbitantly expensive or they're cobbled together from parts in a way that kind of works but has a lot of limitations and up-front work.
My APC UPS self-tested and monitored battery status automatically. Then started to endlessly beep when it noticed the battery needed replacing (could be muted though). Eventually, I stopped using UPS since I rarely needed it and it was just another thing to keep and maintain.
syncthing might be worth looking into. ive been using that more and more the last few years for anything that i use daily, things like keepass, plain-text notes, calendars/contacts, rss feeds, then everything else that im "self hosting" are just things that i might only use a few times a week so its no big deal if i lose access.
its so much simpler when you have the files stored locally, then syncing between devices is just something that can happen whenever. anything that is running on a server needs user permissions, wifi, a router etc etc, its just a lot of complexity for very little gain.
although keep in mind im the only one using all of this stuff. if i needed to share things with other people then syncthing gets a bit trickier and a central server starts to make more sense
Tailscale has passkey-only account support but requires you to sign up in a roundabout way (first use an SSO, then invite another user, throw away the original). The tailnet lock feature also protects you to some extent, arguably more so than solutions involving self-hosting a coordination server on a public cloud.
For this reason I have hybrid homelab, with most stuff hosted at home, but critical things I'd need to have running are on a VM in cloud. Best of both worlds.
You can self-host Pocket ID (or another OIDC auth service) on a tiny $1/mo box and use that as your identity provider for Tailscale. Here's a video explaining how: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPUkAm7yDlU
I really enjoy self-hosting on rented compute. It's theoretically easy to migrate to an on-prem setup, but I don't have to deal with the physical responsibilities while it's in the cloud.
Depends what you are trying to host. For many people it’s either to keep their private data local, or stuff that has to be on the home network (pi hole / home assistant)
If you just want to put a service on the internet, a VPS is the way to go.
I went with home assistant and zigbee smart plugs to restart the router and the optical terminator.
Tailscale recently added passkey log in. Would that alleviate the SSO login?
Tailscale also has a self-hosted version I believe.
I mean you're right in terms of it being a demanding hobby. The question is, is it worth the switch from other services.
I have 7 computers on my self-hosted network and not all of them are on-prem. With a bit of careful planning, you can essentially create a system that will stay up regardless of local fluctuations etc. But it is a demanding hobby and if you don't enjoy the IT stuff, you'll probably have a pretty bad time doing it. For most normal consumers, self-hosting is not really an option and the isn't worth the cost of switching over. I justify it because it helps me understand how things work and tangentially helps me get better my professional skills as well.
Well, its not a bottomless pit really. Yes you need a UPS. That’s basically it though.
UPS batteries don't last forever.
So now you need to test them regularly. And order new ones when they're not holding a charge any more. Then power down the server, unplug it, pull the UPS out, swap batteries, etc.
Then even when I think I've got the UPS automatic shutdown scripts and drivers finally working just right under linux, a routine version upgrade breaks it all for some reason and I'm spending another 30 minutes reading through obscure docs and running tests until it works again.
My home server doesn't need to be high availability, and the BIOS is set to whatever state prior to power loss. I don't have a UPS. However, we were recently hit with a telco outage while visiting family out of town. As far as I can tell there wasn't a power outage, but it took a hard reboot of the modem to get connectivity back. Frustrating because it meant no checking home automation/security and of course no access to the servers. I'm not at a point where my homelab is important enough that I would invest in a redundant WAN though.
I've also worked in environments where the most pragmatic solution was to issue a reboot periodically and accept the minute or two of (external) downtime. Our problem is probably down to T-Mobile's lousy consumer hardware.
Power outages here tend to last an hour or more. A UPS doesn't last forever, and depending on how much home compute you have, might not last long enough for anything more than a brief outage. A UPS doesn't magically solve things. Maybe you need a home generator to handle extended outages...
How bottomless of a pit it becomes depends on a lot of things. It CAN become a bottomless pit if you need perfect uptime.
I host a lot of stuff, but nextcloud to me is photo sync, not business. I can wait til I'm home to turn the server back on. It's not a bottomless pit for me, but I don't really care if it has downtime.
Fairly frequently, 6kVA UPSs come up for sale locally to me, for dirt cheap (<$400). Yes, they're used, and yes, they'll need ~$500 worth of batteries immediately, but they will run a "normal" homelab for multiple hours. Mine will keep my 2.5kW rack running for at least 15 minutes - if your load is more like 250W (much more "normal" imo) that'll translate to around 2 hours of runtime.
Is it perfect? No, but it's more than enough to cover most brief outages, and also more than enough to allow you to shut down everything you're running gracefully, after you used it for a couple hours.
Major caveat, you'll need a 240V supply, and these guys are 6U, so not exactly tiny. If you're willing to spend a bit more money though, a smaller UPS with external battery packs is the easy plug-and-play option.
> How bottomless of a pit it becomes depends on a lot of things. It CAN become a bottomless pit if you need perfect uptime.
At the end of the day, it's very hard to argue you need perfect uptime in an extended outage (and I say this as someone with a 10kW generator and said 6kVA UPS). I need power to run my sump pumps, but that's about it - if power's been out for 12-18 hours, you better believe I'm shutting down the rack, because it's costing me a crap ton of money to keep running on fossil fuels. And in the two instances of extended power outages I've dealt with, I haven't missed it - believe it or not, there's usually more important things to worry about than your Nextcloud uptime when your power's been out for 48 hours. Like "huh, that ice-covered tree limb is really starting to get close to my roof."
This is a great example of how the homelab bottomless pit becomes normalized.
Rewiring the house for 240V supply and spending $400+500 to refurbish a second-hand UPS to keep the 2500W rack running for 15 minutes?
And then there's the electricity costs of running a 2.5kW load, and then cooling costs associated with getting that much heat out of the house constantly. That's like a space heater and a half running constantly.
Long time ago, it was popular for ISPs offer a small amount of space for personal websites. We might see a resurgence of this, but with cheap VPS. Eventually.
Free static site hosting and cheap VPSs already exist. Self hosting is less about putting sites on the internet now and more about replicating cloud services locally.
VPS's are really so dirt cheap that some of them only work because people dont use the servers 100% that they are allocated at or when people dont use the resources they have for most part because of economies of scale but vps's are definitely subsidized.
Cheap vps servers 1 gb ram and everything can cost around 10-11$ per year and using something like hetzner's cheap as well for around 30$ ish an year or 3$ per month most likely while having some great resilient numbers and everything
If anything, people self host because they own servers so upgrading becomes easier (but there are vps's which target a niche which people should look at like storage vps, high perf vps, high mem vps etc. which can sometimes provide servers for dirt cheap for your specific use case)
The other reason I feel like are the ownership aspect of things. I own this server, I can upgrade this server without costing a bank or like I can stack up my investment in a way and one other reason is that with your complete ownership, you don't have to enforce t&c's so much. Want to provide your friends or family vps servers or people on internet themselves? Set up a proxmox or incus server and do it.
Most vps servers sometimes either outright ban reselling or if they allow, they might sometimes ban your whole account for something that someone else might have done so somethings are at jeopardy if you do this simply because they have to find automated ways of dealing with abuse at scale and some cloud providers are more lenient than others in banning matters. (OVH is relaxed in this area whereas hetzner, for better or for worse, is strict on its enforcement)
Self hosting for me is important because I want to secure the data. I've got my files and photos on there, I want to have the drive encrypted with my key. Not just sitting on a drive I don't have any control over. Also because it plugs in to my smart home devices which requires being on the local network.
For something like a website I want on the public internet with perfect reliability, a VPS is a much better option.
> I was in another country when there was a power outage at home.
If you are going to be away from home a lot, then yes, it's a bottomless pit. Because you have to build a system that does not rely on the possibility of you being there, anytime.
I have a desktop I use but if I had to start again, I’d build a low power r pi or n100 type system that can be powered by a mobile battery backup with solar (flow type with sub 10ms switching and good battery chemistry for long life) that can do the basic homelab tasks. Planning for power outages from the get go rather than assuming unlimited and cheap power
Hey, if tailscale is something you are worried about. There are open source alternatives to it as well but I think if your purpose is to just port forward a simple server port, wouldn't ssh in general itself be okay with you.
You can even self host tailscale via headscale but I don't know how the experience goes but there are some genuine open source software like netbird,zerotier etc. as well
You could also if interested just go the normal wireguard route. It really depends on your use case but for you in this case, ssh use case seems normal.
You could even use this with termux in android + ssh access via dropbear I think if you want. Tailscale is mainly for convenience tho and not having to deal with nats and everything
But I feel like your home server might be behind a nat and in that case, what I recommend you to do is probably A) run it in tor or https://gitlab.com/CGamesPlay/qtm which uses iroh's instance but you can self host it too or B (recommended): Get a unlimited traffic cheap vps (I recommend Upcloud,OVH,hetzner) which would cost around 3-4$ per month and then install something like remotemoe https://github.com/fasmide/remotemoe or anything similar to it effectively like a proxy.
Sorry if I went a little overkill tho lol. I have played too much on these things so I may be overarchitecting stuff but if you genuinely want self hosting to the extreme self, tor.onion's or i2p might benefit ya but even buying a vps can be a good step up
> I was in another country when there was a power outage at home. My internet went down, the server restart but couldn't reconnect anymore because the optical network router also had some problems after the power outage. I could ask my folks to restart, and turn on off things but nothing more than that. So I couldn't reach my Nextcloud instance and other stuff. Maybe an uninterruptible power supply could have helped but the more I was thinking about it after just didn't really worth the hassle anymore. Add a UPS okay. But why not add a dual WAN failover router for extra security if the internet goes down again? etc. It's a bottomless pit (like most hobbies tbh)
Laptops have in built ups and are cheap, Laptops and refurbished servers are good entry point imo and I feel like sure its a bottomless pit but the benefits are well worth it and at a point you have to look at trade offs and everything and personally laptops/refurbished or resale servers are that for me. In fact, I used to run a git server on an android tab for some time but been too lazy to figure out if I want it to charge permanently or what
Thanks for the shout-out! If you have any experiential reports using QTM, I'd love to hear them!
Oh yeah this is a really funny story considering what thread we are on, but I remember asking chatgpt or claude or gemini or anything xD to make QTM work and none of them could figure out
But I think in the end what ended up working was my frustration took over and I just copy pasted the commands from readme and if I remember correctly, they just worked.
This is really ironical considering on what thread we are on but in the end, Good readme's make self hosting on a home server easier and fun xD
(I don't exactly remember chatgpt's conversations, perhaps they might have helped a bit or not, but I am 99% sure that it was your readme which ended up helping and chatgpt etc. in fact took an hour or more and genuinely frustrated me from what I remember vaguely)
I hope QTM reaches more traction. Its build on solid primitives.
One thing I genuinely want you to perhaps take a look at if possible is creating an additional piece of software or adding the functionality where instead of the careful dance that we have to make it work (like we have to send two large data pieces from two computers, I had to use some hacky solution like piping server or wormhole itself for it)
So what I am asking is if there could be a possibility that you can make the initial node pairing (ticket?) [Sorry, I forgot the name of primitive] between A and B, you use wormhole itself and now instead of these two having to send large chunks of data between each other, they can now just send 6 words or similar
Wormhole: https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole
I even remember building some of my own CLI for something liek this and using chatgpt to build it xD but in the end gave up because I wasn't familiar with the codebase or how to make these two work together but I hope that you can add it. I sincerely hope so.
Another minor suggestion I feel like giving is to please have asciinema demo. I will create an asciinema patch if you want between two computers but a working demo gif from 0 -> running really really would've helped me save some/few hours
QTM has lots of potential. Iroh is so sane, it can run directly on top of ipv4 itself and talk directly if possible but it can even break through nats and you can even self host the middle part itself. I had thought about building such a project when I had first discovered QTM and you can just imagine my joy when I discovered QTM from one of your comments a long time ago for what its worth
Wishing the best of luck of your project! The idea is very fascinating. I would appreciate a visual demo a lot though and I hope we can discuss more!
Edit: I remember that qtm docs had this issue of where they really felt complex for me personally when all I wanted was one computer port mapped to another computer port and I think what helped in the end was the 4th comment if I remember correctly, I might have used LLM assistance or not or if it helped or not, I genuinely don't remember but it definitely took me an hour or two to figure things out but its okay since I still feel like the software is definitely positive and this might have been a skill issue from my side but I just want if you can add asciinema docs, I can't stress it enough if possible on how much it can genuinely help an average person to figure out the product.
(Slowly move towards the complex setups with asciinema demos for each of them if you wish)
Once again good luck! I can't stress qtm and I still strongly urge everyone to try qtm once https://gitlab.com/CGamesPlay/qtm since its highly relevant to the discussion
You aren't actually supposed to ever need to deal with tickets manually, unless you are trying to get a tunnel between two machines and neither can SSH into the other. It could be streamlined with something like Magic Wormhole, though. I'll add that to the backlog and see if there's interest. The normal way is to use SSH / docker exec / any remote shell to let QTM swap the tickets over it.
I've added an asciinema to the README now <https://asciinema.org/a/z2cdsoVDVJu0gIGn>, showing the manual connection steps. Thanks for the kind words. Hope you find it useful!
well my use case is the fact of connecting two servers behind nat. If I were to be able to gain ssh lets say, then I could've simply port forwarded in the first place.
Wow the asciinema is really good and very professional, thanks for creating it, I found it very helpful (in the sense that if I ever were to repeat my experiment, now I got your asciinema server) and I hope more people use it
> It could be streamlined with something like Magic Wormhole, though. I'll add that to the backlog and see if there's interest
To be really honest, its not that big of a deal considering one can do that on their own but I just had this idea for my own convenience when I was using QTM
I really like QTM a lot! Thanks for building it once again, I would try to integrate it more often and give you more feedback when possible from now.
Starlink backup sounds fun now!
Way too expensive for that imo (but then again might as well just go all in). Probably a 5G connection is more than enough
Honestly I think that there must be adapters which can use unlimited 5g sim's data plans as fallback network or perhaps (even primary?)
They would be cheaper than starlink fwiw and most connections can be robust usually.
That being said, one can use tailscale or cloudflare tunnels to expose the server even if its behind nat which you mention in your original comment that you might be against at for paranoid reasons and thats completely fine but there are ways to go do that if you want as well which I have talked about it on the other comment I have written here in-depth.
Some SOHO branch office routers like Cisco ISR models can take cellular dongles and/or SIM. Drivers for supported models are baked into ROM and everything works through CLI.
man I have this vague memory that I was at a neighbour's house and we were all kids and internet wasn't that widespread (I was really young) and I remember that they had this dongle in which they inserted an sim card in for network access. This is why this idea has always persisted in my head in the first place.
I don't know what's the name of dongle though, it was similar to those sd card to usb thing ykwim, I'd appreciate it if someone could help find this too if possible
but also yeah your point is also fascinating as well, y'know another benefit of doing this is that atleast in my area, 5g (500-700mbps) is really cheap (10-15$) with unlimited bandwidth per month and on the ethernet side of things I get 10x less bandwidth (40-80mbps) so much so that me and my brother genuinely thought of this idea
except that we thought that instead of buying a router like this, we use an old phone device and insert sim in it and access router through that way.
I would do this on OPNSense - with a separate WLAN. Fairly easy to do.
Next level up is self hosting your LLM! I put LM Studio on a mac mini at home and have been extremely happy with it. Then you can use a tool like opencode to connect to that LLM and boom, Claude Code dependency is removed and you just got even more self-hosted. For what you're using Claude Code for, a smaller open-weight model would probably work fine
Well, to a limit. I have an RTX 3090 24gb that enables a lot of use-cases.
But for what i'm using Agents right now, claude code is the tool to go.
> When something breaks, I SSH in, ask the agent what is wrong, and fix it.
> I am spending time using software, learning
What are you actually learning?
PSA: OP is a CEO of an AI company
you are learning what it takes to keep a machine up and running. You still witness the breakage. You can still watch the fix. You can review what happened. What you are implying from your question is that compared to doing things without AI, you are learning less (or perhaps you believe nothing). You definitely are learning less about mucking around in linux. But, if the alternative was not ever running a linux machine at all because you didn't want to deal with running it, you are learning infinitely more.
How can you review if you don‘t know in the first place?
You can watch your doctor, your plumber, your car mechanic and still wouldn’t know if they di something wrong if you don’t know the subject as such.
You can learn a lot from watching your doctor, plumber or mechanic work, and you could learn even more if you could ask them questions for hours without making them mad.
You learn less from watching a faux-doctor, faux-plumber, faux-mechanic and learn even less by engaging in their hallucinations without a level horizon for reference.
Bob the Builder doesn't convey much about drainage needs for foundations and few children think to ask. Who knows how AI-Bob might respond.
I've landed on a similar philosophy but with a slightly different approach to orchestration. Instead of managing everything interactively, I built a lightweight bash-based deployment system that uses rsync + docker compose across multiple machines.
The structure is dead simple: `machines/<hostname>/stacks/<service>/` with a `config.sh` per machine defining SSH settings and optional pre/post deploy hooks. One command syncs files and runs `docker compose up -d`.
I could see Claude Code being useful for debugging compose files or generating new stack configs, but having the deployment itself be a single `./deploy.sh homeserver media` keeps the feedback loop tight and auditable.
I have very similar setup, but I use komo.do with netbird.
Which basically accomplishes same thing, but gives a bit more UI for debugging when needed.
I think it's great that people are getting into self-hosting, but I don't think it's _the_ solution to get us off of big tech.
Having others run a service for you is a good thing! I'd love to pay a subscription for a service, but ran as a cooperative, where I'm not actually just paying a subscription fee, instead I'm a member and I get to decide what gets done as well.
This model works so well for housing, where the renters are also the owners of the building. Incentives are aligned perfectly, rents are kept low, the building is kept intact, no unnecessary expensive stuff added. And most importantly, no worries of the building ever getting sold and things going south. That's what I would like for my cloud storage, e-mail etc.
Hey, I was thinking about this same idea lately. What exactly would you want hosted by somebody?
I was thinking about what if your "cloud" was more like a tilde.club, with self hosted web services plus a Linux login. What services would you want?
Email and cloud make sense. I think a VPN and Ad Blocker would too. Maybe Immich and music hosting? Calendar? I don't know what people use for self hosting
Fun. I don't agree that Claude Code is the real unlock, but mostly because I'm comfortable with doing this myself. That said, the spirit of the article is spot on. The accessibility to run _good_ web services has never been better. If you have a modest budget and an interest, that's enough -- the skill gap is closing. That's good news I think.
But Tailscale is the real unlock in my opinion. Having a slot machine cosplaying as sysadmin is cool, but being able to access services securely from anywhere makes them legitimately usable for daily life. It means your services can be used by friends/family if they can get past an app install and login.
I also take minor issue with running Vaultwarden in this setup. Password managers are maximally sensitive and hosting that data is not as banal as hosting Plex. Personally, I would want Vaultwarden on something properly isolated and locked down.
I believe Vaultwarden keeps data encrypted at rest with your master key, so some of the problems inherent to hosting such data can be mitigated.
I can believe this, and it's a good point. I believe Bitwarden does the same. I'm not against Vaultwarden in particular but against colocation of highly sensitive (especially orthogonally sensitive) data in general. It's part of a self-hoster's journey I think: backups, isolation, security, redundancy, energy optimization, etc. are all topics which can easily occupy your free time. When your partner asks whether your photos are more secure in Immich than Google, it can lead to an interesting discussion of nuances.
That said, I'm not sure if Bitwarden is the answer either. There is certainly some value in obscurity, but I think they have a better infosec budget than I do.
On the one hand, self-hosting, even at home, is more accessible than it has ever been. Hardware, software, and agents to help with setup and maintenance. While at the same time ISPs, the big email providers, and even (in the UK) government legislation makes it more difficult or risky than it has ever been. We have gained much but also lost much since the mid 1990s.
Timely! I just re-setup my Pi5 with the help of Claude. https://github.com/kaihendry/ai-pi
Tbh I did the mistake of throwing away Ansible, so testing my setup was a pain!
Since with AI, the focus should be on testing, perhaps it's sensible to drop Ansible for something like https://github.com/goss-org/goss
Things are happening so fast, I was impressed to see a Linux distro embrace using a SKILL.md! https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/master/default/omar...
Been self-hosting for last 20 years and I would have to say LLMs were good for generating suggestions when debugging an issue I hadn't seen before, or for one I had seen before but was looking for a quicker fix. I've used it to generate bash scripts, firewall regex.
On self-hosting: be aware that it is a warzone out there. Your IP address will be probed constantly for vulnerabilities, and even those will need to dealt with as most automated probes don't throttle and can impact your server. That's probably my biggest issue along with email deliverability.
The best solution I’ve found for probes is to put all eggs into the basket listening on 443.
Haproxy with SNI routing was simple and worked well for many years for me.
Istio installed on a single node Talos VM currently works very well for me.
Both have sophisticated circuit breaking and ddos protection.
For users I put admin interfaces behind wireguard and block TCP by source ip at the 443 listener.
I expose one or two things to the public behind an oauth2-proxy for authnz.
Edit: This has been set and forget since the start of the pandemic on a fiber IPv4 address.
And use a wildcard cert so that all your services don't get proved due to cert transparency logs.
~10 years ago I remember how shocked I was the first time I saw how many people were trying to probe my IP on my home router, from random places all over the globe.
Years later I still had the same router. Somewhere a long the line, I fired the right neurons and asked myself, "When was the last time $MANUFACTURER published an update for this? It's been awhile..."
In the context of just starting to learn about the fundamentals of security principles and owning your own data (ty hackernews friends!), that was a major catalyst for me. It kicked me into a self-hosting trajectory. LLMs have saved me a lot of extra bumps and bruises and barked shins in this area. They helped me go in the right direction fast enough.
Point is, parent comment is right. Be safe out there. Don't let your server be absorbed into the zombie army.
These days I just wouldn't put my homeserver exposed to the internet only. LAN only with a VPN. Does mean you can't share links and such with other people, but your server is now very secure and most of the stuff you do on it doesn't need public access anyway.
> I have flirted with self-hosting at home for years. I always bounced off it - too much time spent configuring instead of using. It just wasn't fun.
No judgement, but wanting to tinker/spend time on configuration is a major reason why many people do self-host.
I would really like some kind of agnostic backup protocol, so I can simply configure my backup endpoint using an environment variable (e.g. `-e BACKUP_ENDPOINT=https://backup.example.com/backup -e BACKUP_IDENTIFIER=xxxxx`), then the application can push a backup on a regular schedule. If I need to restore a backup, I log onto the backup app, select a backup file and generate a one time code which I can enter into the application to retrieve the data. To set up a new application for backups, you would enter a friendly name into the backup application and it would generate a key for use in the application.
At the moment I am docker compose down everything, run the backup of their files and then docker compose up -d again afterwards. This sort of downtime in the middle of the night isn't an issue for home services but its also not an ideal system given most wont be mid writing a file at the time of backup anyway because its the middle of the night! But if I don't do it the one time I need those files I can guarantee it will be corrupted so at the moment don't feel like there are a lot of other options.
Maybe apps could offer backup to stdout and then you pipe it. That way each app doesn’t have to reason about how to interact with your target, doesn’t need to be trusted with credentials, and we don’t need a new standard.
I use Pika Backup which runs on the BorgBackup protocol for backing up my system’s home directory. I’m not really sure if this is exactly what you’re talking about, though. It just sends backups to network shares.
I'm actively in the process of setting this up for my devices. What have you done for off-site backups? I know there are Borg specific cloud providers (rsync.net, borgbase, etc.). Or have you done something like rclone to an S3 provider?
No off-site backup for me, these items aren’t important enough, it’s more for “oops I broke my computer” or “set my new computer up faster” convenience.
Anything I really don’t want to lose is in a paid cloud service with a local backup sync over SMB to my TrueNAS box for some of the most important ones.
An exception is GitHub, I’m not paying for GitHub, but git kinda sorta backs itself up well enough for my purposes just by pulling/pushing code. If I get banned from GitHub or something I have all the local repos.
Good to know! I have shifted more to self hosting, e.g., Gitea rather than Github, and need to establish proper redundancy. Hopefully Borg Backup, with it's deduplication will be good, at least for on-site backups.
I am much more in-between. I don’t mind cloud stuff and even consider it safer than my local stuff due to other smart people doing the work. And I’m not looking for a second job self hosting, except for my game servers.
I mostly just don’t want to be stuck with cloud services from big tech that have slimy practices. I’d rather pay for honest products that let me own my data better. With the exception given to GitHub which I guess is out of my own laziness and maybe I should do something about that.
If you’re using gitea you might be interested in Forgejo, it’s a fork and I think it’s well regarded since gitea went more commercial-ish IIRC?
I don't really understand this post completely.
>I am spending time using software, learning, and having fun - instead of maintaining it and stressing out about it.
Using software, learning and having fun with with what? everything is being done by Claude here. The part of fun and learning is to learn to use and maintain it in the first place. How will you learn anything if Claude is doing everything for you ? You are not understand how things work and where everything goes.
This post could be written or at least modified by an LLM, but more importantly I think this person is completely missing the point of self hosting and learning.
I just got around to a fresh NixOS install and I couldn't be happier as I've been able to do practically everything via Codex while keeping things concise and documented (given it's nix, not a bunch of commands of the past).
I recently had a bunch of breakages and needed to port a setup - I had a complicated k3s container in proxmox setup but needed it in a VM to fix various disk mounts (I hacked on ZFS mounts, and was swapping it all for longhorn)
As is expected, life happens and I stopped having time for anything so the homelab was out of commission. I probably would still be sitting on my broken lab given a lack of time.
I've been building a home library system mainly for personal use, I want to run it cheaply so a $4 black Friday sale OVH vps is perfect.
But I wanted decent deployments. Hosting a image repository cost 3-4x of the server. Sending over the container image took over an hour due to large image processing python dependencies.
Solution? Had a think and a chat with Claude code, now I have blue-green deployments where I just upload the code which takes 5 seconds, everything is then run by systemd. I looked at the various PaaSes but they ran up to $40/month with compute+database etc.
I would probably never have built this myself. I'd have gotten bored 1/3 through. Now it's working like a charm.
Is it enterprise grade? Gods no. Is it good enough? Yes.
I self-host many things on a NAS (Asustor) using Portainer (a Docker UI/facilitator). It all works perfectly and has a marginal cost of about zero, since I need the NAS in any case.
But I wouldn't give the keys of the house to Claude or any LLM for that matter. When needed, I ask them questions and type commands myself. It's not that hard.
To the tailscale promotion team: can you guys please dial it back? The half hidden ads are seriously annoying
What I do at home is ubuntu on a cheap small computer I found on ebay. ufw blocks everything except 80, 443, and 22. Setup ssh to not use passwords and ensure nginx+letsencrypt doesn’t run as root. Then, forward 80 and 443 from my home router to the server so it’s reachable from the internet. That’s about it, now I have an internet accessible reverse proxy to surface anything running on that server. The computers on the same LAN (just my laptop basically) have host file entries for the server. My registrar handles DNS for the external side (routers public ip). Ssh’ing to the server requires a lan IP but that’s no big deal I’m at home whenever I’m working on it anyway.
Put wireguard on that thing and don't expose anything on your public IP. Better yet don't have a public IP. Just port forward the wireguard IP from your router. That's it. No firewall no nothing. Not even accidental exposure.
> Put wireguard on that thing and don't expose anything on your public IP. Better yet don't have a public IP.
This is nonsense. You can't self-host services meant to interact with the public (such as email, websites, Matrix servers, etc.) without a public IP, preferably one that is fixed.
Sure you can. It’s what cloudflared and services like it are designed for.
Is it still self-hosting though?
You just need to keep the DNS record updated.
Love this. I run also all my stuff by myself and I’m not an infra expert by all means just know enough to self host my app and services. I also built an remote monitoring agent using Go and rails I call it https://bareagent.io which monitors servers, docker containers and sends notifications when in any of those containers an error occurres as it is attached to the container logs
Wait… tailscale connection to your own network, and unsupervised sysadmin from an oracle that hallucinates and bases its decisions on blog post aggregates?
p0wnland. this will have script kiddies rubbing their hands
Hope OP has nice neighbors because sharing that password is basically keys to this kingdom
Home NAS servers are already shipped with user friendly GUI. Personally I haven't used them, but I certainly would prefer it, or recommend it to tech-illitarate people instead of allowing LLM to manage the server.
Me personally; I have a similar mini pc with kubuntu installed, coolify to deploy my projects & cloudflare tunnels to expose them to the internet. the mini pc is still usable for daily use so that's great too
Instead of the vibe-admin approach, why not have the LLM write an Ansible playbook? At least its repeatable and auditable that way.
I used Codex to set up a raspberry pi as a VPN with WireGuard. I had no similar experience before and it was super easy. I used Claude Code to audit and clean up a 10+ year old AWS account- patching security, shutting down redundant services, simplifying the structure. I want Claude Code to replace every bad UI out there. I know what outcome I want and don’t need to learn all the details to get there.
Been using Claude Code to build a small deployment tool (Frost) for exactly this use case. The meta experience is interesting - using an AI agent to build tooling that makes self-hosting easier.
What I've found: Claude Code is great at the "figure out this docker/nginx/systemd incantation" part but the orchestration layer (health checks, rollbacks, zero-downtime deploys) still benefits from purpose-built tooling. The AI handles the tedious config generation while you focus on the actual workflow.
github.com/elitan/frost if curious
Prices are going to have an effect here. I have a 76TB backup drive of 8 drives. A few months ago one of my 10TB drives failed and I replaced it with a 12 TB WD gold for 269CHF. I was thinking of building a new backup drive (for fun) and so I priced the same drive and now it's 409CHF.
It's not tariffs (I'm in Switzerland). It's 100% the buildout of data centers for AI.
I use coding agents for similar kind of problem very frequently. It makes wonders debugging obscure system issues related to components that I have no faintest idea about. Also building a homelab very soon. I think you may find this project useful: https://github.com/av/harbor
I also started started experimenting with self-hosting in the last few years. Started with a simple Plex server, then gradually evolved my little setup into a handful of open-source apps that now cover most of what I use during my day to day.
There are a few important things to consider, like unstable IPs, home internet limits, and the occasional power issue. Cloud providers felt overpriced for what I needed, especially once storage was factored in.
In the end, I put together a small business where people can run their own Mac mini with a static IP: https://www.minimahost.com/
I’m continuing to work on it while keeping my regular software job. So far, the demand is not very high, or perhaps I am not great at marketing XD
For me the most important benefit is that the agent can keep the docs up to date. When I do a change, I let it document what is changed, how and why.
I have a love-hate relationship with Home Assistant. I love its mission and I love it in spirit, but whenever I need to add or change something in it, I don't love the process. Without disparaging the work already done on improving it in recent years, I still find the UI and UX to be lacking. Claude Code has been shifting my perception much closer to the love end of the axis, because it allows me to side-step the boring parts of managing my Home Assistant instance and it is able to carry out the changes I want very reliably.
I still struggle with letting go of writing code and becoming only a full-time reviewer when it comes to AI agents doing programming, but I don't struggle in the slightest with assuming the position of a reviewer of the changes CC does to my HA instance, delegating all the work to it. The progress I made on making my house smart and setting up my dashboards has skyrocketed compared to before I started using CC to manage HA via its REST and WS APIs.
I started the same project end of last year and it’s true - having an LLM guide you through the setup and writing docs is a real game changer!
I just wish this post wasn’t written by an LLM! I miss the days where you can feel the nerdy joy through words across the internet.
I recently got a zimaboard2 and have been blown away how powerful it is, x86 and 16GB I think it was around 250$. I have it running proxmox. Dedicated GPU for transcoding, all working out of the box with the ZimaOS.. And no AI needed.
I also built a "devops" agent on top of claude code like that - I deployed it on my server and let it debug all the gnarly infra issues for me.
I route it through a familiar interface like slack tho as I don't like to ssh from phone or w/e using a tool I built - https://www.claudecontrol.com/
> The reason is simple: CLI agents like Claude Code make self-hosting on a cheapo home server dramatically easier and actually fun.
But I want to host an LLM.
I find LLMs remove all the fun for me. When I build my homelab, I want the satisfaction of knowing that I did it. And the learning gains that only come from doing it manually. I don't mind using an LLM to shortcut areas that are just pure pain with no reward, but I abstain from using it as much as possible. It gives you the illusion that you've accomplished something.
> It gives you the illusion that you've accomplished something.
What’s the goal? If the act of _building_ a homelab is the fun then i agree 100%. If _having_ a reliable homelab that the family can enjoy is the goal, then this doesn’t matter.
For me personally, my focus is on “shipping” something reliable with little fuss. Most of my homelab skills don’t translate to my day job anyway. My homelab has a few docker compose stacks, whereas at work we have an internal platform team that lets me easily deploy a service on K8s. The only overlap here is docker lol. Manually tinkering with ports and firewall rules, using sqlite, backups with rsync, etc…all irrelevant if you’re working with AWS from 9-5.
I guess I’m just pointing out that some people want to build it and move on.
Getting it up and running is fun but I find maintaining some services a pain. For example, Authelia has breaking configuration changes every minor release, and fixing that easily takes 1-X hours every time. I gave up for 4.38 and just tossed the patch notes into NotebookLM.
I don’t give them direct access to my computer. I just use them as an alternative to scrolling reddit for answers. Then I take the actions myself.
I also liked using AI agents to do sysadmin stuff, especially with Nix OS. On top of Nix being great, the configuration of a system being files gives the agent good context on the current state the system is. Then when it does make changes, its great to be able to review its work via diffs.
I've recently begun moving the systems I administer to Claude-written NixOS configs. Nix is great but can be a real pain to write yourself; Claude removes the pain.
Me too... using that same logic.
Now if only there were a Nix-like system for FreeBSD! :)
Just got a home-server. Immich is awesome! How's Caddy working out though? I need a way to expose immich to public internet (not just a VPN). Something like photos.domain.com
For now I'm just using Cloudflare tunnels, but ideally I also want to do that myself (without getting DDoS)
I am curious what you mean by doing it yourself, i.e., do you mean (as perhaps an oversimplification) having a DNS record pointing at your home IP address? What are you wanting to see as the alternative to a Cloudflare tunnel?
Look up mutual TLS / client authentication. Caddy and Immich supports it. Then you can expose it to the internet reasonably securely.
Tailscsle was never the unlock for me, but I guess I never was the typical use case here.
I have a 1U (or more), sitting in a rack in a local datacenter. I have an IP block to myself.
Those servers are now publicly exposed and only a few ports are exposed for mail, HTTP traffic and SSH (for Git).
I guess my use case also changes in that I don’t use things just for me to consume, select others can consume services I host.
My definition here of self-hosting isn’t that I and I only can access my services; that’s be me having a server at home which has some non critical things on it.
Curious how long you've been sitting on the IP block. I've been nosing around getting an ASN to mess around with the lower level internet bones but a /24 is just way too expensive these days. Even justifying an ASN is hard, since the minimum cost is $275/year through ARIN.
Is that the minimum for an ASN? /24 is a lot of public IP space! I'd expect just to get a static IP from and ISP if I were to coloc like this
The minimum publicly routable IPv4 subnet is /24 and IPv6 is /48. IPv6 is effectively free, there are places that will lease a /48 for $8/year, whereas as far as I can tell it's multiple thousands of USD per year to acquire or lease a /24 of IPv4.
I see why this is easy and fun, but is it really "self-hosting" if you are dependent on a $1200 a year AI-service to build and maintain it?
I literally did this yesterday and had the same thought. Older computer (8 gigs ram) with crappy windows I never used and I thought huh, I wonder how good these models can take me through installing linux with goal of docker deploys of relatively basic things like cron tasks, personal postgres, and minio that I can used for self shared data.
Took a couple hours with some things I ran across, but the model had me go through the setup for debian, how to go through the setup gui, what to check to make it server only, then it took me through commands to run so it wouldn't stop when I closed the laptop, helped with tailscale, getting the ssh keys all setup. Heck it even suggested doing daily dumps of the database and saving to minio and then removing after that. Also knows about the limitations of 8 gigs of ram and how to make sure docker settings for the difference self services I want to build don't cause issues.
Give me a month and true strong intention and ability to google and read posts and find the answer on my own and I still don't think I would have gotten to this point with the amount of trust I have in the setup.
I very much agree with this topic about self hosting coming alive because these models can walk you through everything. Self building and self hosting can really come alive. And in the future when open models are that much better and hardware costs come down (maybe, just guessing of course) we'll be able to also host our own agents on these machines we have setup already. All being able to do it ourselves.
Anyone seriously about tech should have a homelab. It’s a small capital investment that lasts for years and with proxmox or similar having your own personal “private cloud” on demand is simple.
Great until Claude decides to delete your storage and all your containers are gone
Just make sure you have a local and remote backup server.
From to time, test the restore process.
I haven't tried it yet, but the evil twin to this practice is to nuke everything periodically to ensure that your agent isn't relying on any filesystem state that it hasn't specified builds for (i.e. https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/).
They tend to slip out of declarative mode and start making untracked changes to the system from time to time.
Claude with root access will ensure there's "motivation" to run the restore process regularly.
I’d suggest rather asking it to write you bash scripts
And ideally doing it via lxc or vm.
Extra complication but gives you something repeatable that you can stick on git
Great post! Totally agree – agents like Claude Code make self-hosting a lot more realistic and low maintenance for the average dev.
We've gone a step further, and made this even easier with https://zo.computer
You get a server, and a lot of useful built-in functionality (like the ability to text with your server)
There's something ironic about using Claud Code – a closed source service, that you can't self-host the hardware for, and that you can't get access to the data for – to self-host so that you can reduce your dependencies on things.
Before you had to rely on blog posts and reddit for information, something you also couldn't self host. And if you are just asking it questions and taking actions yourself, you are learning how it works to do it yourself next time.
Or you could read man pages, ask people for help, read books... all of which are more closely aligned with self-hosting than outsourcing the whole process.
I agree you could use LLMs to learn how it works, but given that they explain and do the actions, I suspect the vast majority aren't learning anything. I've helped students who are learning to code, and very often they just copy/paste back and forth and ignore the actual content.
That would be ideal, but there are software engineers who use Tailscale, so I think our expectations are too high.
Sure, you could. But this isn't my job, it isn't my career. I just want Nextcloud running on a machine at home. I know linux and docker well enough to validate the ideas coming out of Gemini, and it helps me find stuff much faster than if I had to read man pages or read books.
And I find the stuff that the average self hoster needs is so surface level that LLMs flawlessly provide solutions.
My push back isn't really on the possibility, it's on the irony. Self hosting is for many an ideological act that's about reducing dependencies on big tech, removing surveillance, etc. LLMs are essentially the antithesis of this.
If you're self hosting for other reasons then that's fine. I self host media for various reasons, but I also give all my email/calendar/docs/photos over to a big tech company because I'm not motivated by that aspect.
Kind of but I don't really agree. Before LLMs you were still reliant on online resources, forums, digitalocean blog posts. The server itself also doesn't rely on an LLM. If one goes down, your server will continue functioning. You are also not tied to any particular LLM and can freely switch.
They also aren't seeing any of your sensitive data being hosted on the server. At least the way I use them is getting suggestions for what software and configs I should go with, and then I do the actual doing. Which means I'm becoming independently more capable than I was before.
There is, but if I have to chose between tolerating the irony, and waiting for the hardware/model performance situation to improve before getting started, I'll ironically mark self-hosting a claude-equivalent as a TODO and get started on the other stuff now.
If I google how to host a Wordpress blog are you going to tell me what I am doing is "ironic" because Google is not hosted by me? Even more ironic, Google has a competing product, blogspot! How ironic!
Ahh yes, the irony is not lost on using a paid closed-source service to create and help manage a self-hosted service running FOSS. I thought it was because I didn't want to pay SAAS subscription costs, but now I just need Claude Pro...
I'm asking Claude technical questions about setup, e.g., read this manual, that I have skimmed but don't necessarily fully understand yet. How do I monitor this service? Oh connect Tailscale and manage with ACLs. But what do I do when it doesn't work or goes down? Ask Claude.
To get more accurate setup and diagnostics, I need to share config files, firewall rules, IPv6 GUAs, Tailscale ACLs... and Claude just eats it up, and now Anthropic knows it forever too. Sure, CGNET, Wireguard, and ssh logins stand between us, but... Claude is running a terminal window on a LAN device next to another terminal window that does have access to my server. Do I trust VS Code? Anthropic? The FOSS? Is this really self-hosting? Ahh, but I am learning stuff, right?
Great article! I think a paragraph on your backup strategy would make it even more complete and compelling, particularly given you put your passwords and photos in there.
Interesting use case for Claude Code, or any similar local executor talking to a remote AI (Gemini suggests that "Hybrid-Local AI Agent" is a generic name for these, although I've never heard it called that before).
I wonder if a local model might be enough for sysadmin skills, especially if were trained specifically for this ?
I wonder if iOS has enough hooks available that one could make a very small/simple agentic Siri replacement like this that was able to manage the iPhone at least better than Siri (start and stop apps, control them, install them, configure iPhone, etc) ?
> Your home server's new sysadmin: Claude Code
(In)famous last words?
So it's self hosting but with a paid and closed saas dependency ? I'll pass.
Doesn't have to be that way though. As discussed here recently, a basic local agent like Claude Code is only a couple hundred lines of code, and could easily be written by something like Claude Code if you didn't want to do it yourself.
If you have your own agent, then it can talk to whatever you want - could be OpenRouter configured to some free model, or could be to a local model too. If the local model wasn't knowledgeable enough for sysadmin you could perhaps use installable skills (scripts/programs) for sysadmin tasks, with those having been written by a more powerful model/agent.
Try Claude and LVM, Linux software RAID and partitions though, it's hilariously bad at it.
I’ve also found AI to be super helpful for self-hosting but in a different way. I set up a Pocketbase instance with a Lovable-like app on top (repo here: https://github.com/tinykit-studio/tinykit) so I can just pull out my phone, vibecode something, and then instantly host it on the one server with a bunch of other apps. I’ve built a bunch of stuff for myself (journal, CRM, guitar tuner) but my favorite thing has been a period tracker for a close friend who didn’t want that data tracked + sold.
This post is spot on, the combo of tailscale + Claude Code is a game changer. This is particularly true for companies as well.
CC lets you hack together internal tools quickly, and tailscale means you can safely deploy them without worrying about hardening the app and server from the outside world. And tailscale ACLs lets you fully control who can access what services.
It also means you can literally host the tools on a server in your office, if you really want to.
Putting CC on the server makes this set up even better. It’s extremely good at system admin.
it's kind of fascinating, LLMs suddenly are making the Linux Desktop waaay more accessible, of all things.
All those fancy GUIs in Mac and Windows designed to be user friendly (but which most users hate and are baffled by anyway) are very hostile for models to access. But text configuration files? it's like a knife through butter for the LLMs to read and modify them. All of a sudden, Linux is MORE user friendly because you can just ask an LLM to fix things. Or even script them - "make it so my theme changes to dark at night and then back to light each morning" becomes something utterly trivial compared to the coding LLMs are being built to handle. But hey, if your OS really doesn't support something? the LLM can probably code up a whole app for you and integrate it in.
I think it's going to be fascinating to see if the power of text based interfaces and their natural compatibility with LLMs transfers over into an upswing in open source operating systems.
I had problems with tailscale being flaky about a year ago and it would stop responding taking down networking with it. I've since ripped it out and went with a VPS based wireguard for all PCs and mobiles. Stable since then.
I feel the same way. I now have around 7 projects hosted on a home server with Coolify + Cloudflare. Always worry about security and I have seen many posts related to self hosting on HN trending recently
For security just don't expose the server to the internet. Either set up wireguard or tailscale. You can set it up in a split tunnel config so your phone only uses the VPN for LAN requests.
I am expecting Cloudflare Tunnel to take care of security. In fact, that is the only reason I am okay hosting from home. Are you talking about something more on top of Cloudflare Tunnel or extra security features or a replacement?
Cloudflare Tunnel is a very similar solution. Just a different product for the same task.
Might as well ask here in case author or anyone else with a similar setup is reading. Has anyone run into stability issues running a bunch of self-hosting stuff on a mac mini M1 (8GB)? My setup is pretty basic - docker running Jellyfin, Immich, *arr software, qbittorrent. Stuff is stored on a NAS over SMB. Usually within a few hours of rebooting, the OS or at least userspace totally freezes. SSH connections are instantly closed, screen share doesn't work. It responds to ping for a while but that also goes down eventually. Pretty stumped...
Others here mention Coolify for a homeserver. If you're looking for turnkey docker-compose based apps rather than just framework/runtime environments, I will recommend the runtipi project. I have found it to be simple and flexible. It offers an 'app store' like interface, and supports hosting your own app store. It manages certs and reverse proxy via traefik as well.
https://runtipi.io/
Cosmos Cloud is great too. I use it on a free tier OCI Ampere 24G VM
https://cosmos-cloud.io/
Nice. This is a great start. The next steps are backups and regular security updates. The former is probably pretty easy with Claude and a provider like Backblaze, for updates I wonder if "check for security issues with my software and update anything in need" will work well (and most importantly, how consistently). Alternatively, getting the AI to threat model and perform any docker hardening measures.
Then someday we self-host the AI itself, and it all comes together.
My security update system is straightforward but it took quite a lot of thought to get here.
My self hosted things all run as docker containers inside Alpine VMs running on top of Proxmox. Services are defined with Docker Compose. One of those things is a Forgejo git server along with a runner in a separate VM. I have a single command that will deploy everything along with a Forgejo action that invokes that command on a push to main.
I then have Renovate running periodically set to auto-merge patch-level updates and tag updates.
Thus, Renovate keeps me up to date and git keeps everyone honest.
Impeccable timing, I finally got around to putting some old hardware to use and getting a home assistant instance (and jellyfin, and immich, and nextcloud, ...) set up over winter break. Claude (and tailscale) saved hours of my time and enabled me to build enough momentum to get things configured. It's now feasible for me to spend 15-20 minutes knocking down homeserver tasks that I otherwise would've ignored. Quite fun!
What I’d really like is to run the admin interface for an app on a self hosted system behind firewalls, and push read replicas out into the cloud. But I haven’t seen a database where the master pushes data to the replicas instead of the replicas contacting the master. Which creates some pretty substantial tunneling problems that I don’t really want on my home network.
Is there a replica implementation that works in the direction I want?
Use NAT hole punching if you're advanced, or you could fall back to IP/port filtering
Tailscale will take care of the networking if you install it in both locations.
Interesting subject, thank you! I have a cluster of 2 Orange Pis (16 GB RAM each) plus a Raspberry Pi. I think it's high time to get them back on my desk. I never had time to get very far with the setup due to a lack of time. It took so long to write the Ansible scripts/playbooks, but with Claude Code, it's worth a try now. So thanks for the article; it makes me want to dust it off!
idk exposing your home network to the world and trusting AI will produce secure code is not a risk I want to take
Was this article written entirely by Claude for the most part? It definitely reads like it was.
One day when I have some extra bucks I'd try to get a home server running, but the idea of having something eating grid electricity 24/7 doesn't seem to play along well with this 3rd world budget. Are there some foolproof and not so costly off-grid/solar setups to look at (like a Raspberry-based thingy or similar)?
Your fridge and other home appliances likely use much more power than whatever a small server would. The mini PC in the article is very power efficient. You likely won't notice it in your power bill, regardless of your budget. You could go with a solar-powered setup if you prefer, but IMO for this type of use case it would be overengineering.
Mac Mini (M1 and later) under Asahi Linux just uses 5 W for a normal workload. If you push it to 100% of CPU it reaches 20 W. That’s very little.
Only thing is you can't run Proxmox which makes self hosting much better, and you'll be limited to ARM builds, which on server is at least a lot easier than trying to run desktop apps. Modern micro desktops are also fairly power efficient, perhaps not quite as low as the mac, but much lower than a regular gaming desktop idling.
Avoid stacking in too many hard drives since each one uses almost as much power as the desktop does at idle.
I doubt anyone who is too tight on cash that they have to think about the electricity cost of a home server can afford a Mac.
Remember: In all likelihood, your residential ISP does not permit you to operate a server.
Granted, that's rarely enforced, but if you're a stickler for that sort of thing, check your ISP's Acceptable Use Policy.
I used Claude Code just yesterday in a similar way: to solve a computer problem that I previously would have tried googling.
I had a 30-year-old file on my Mac that I wanted to read the content of. I had created it in some kind of word processing software, but I couldn’t remember which (Nexus? Word? MacWrite? ClarisWorks? EGWORD?) and the file didn’t have an extension. I couldn’t read its content in any of the applications I have on my Mac now.
So I pointed CC at it and asked what it could tell me about the file. It looked inside the file data, identified the file type and the multiple character encodings in it, and went through a couple of conversion steps before outputting as clean plain text what I had written in 1996.
Maybe I could have found a utility on the web to do the same thing, but CC felt much quicker and easier.
This is the reason why I am creating a Debian VM on my macOS to let Claude code in yolo mode to do some experiment:)
I have found that storage is up in price more than 60% from last year.
I am writing a personal application to simplify home server administration if anybody is interested: https://github.com/prettydiff/aphorio
I find myself a bit overwhelmed with hardware options during recent explorations. Seemingly everything can handle what I want a local copy of my Bandcamp archive to stream via jellyfin. Good times we’re in but even having good sysadmin skills, I wish someone would just tell me exactly what to buy.
> I wish someone would just tell me exactly what to buy.
I’ll bite. You can save a lot of money by buying used hardware. I recommend looking for old Dell OptiPlex towers on Facebook Marketplace or from local used computer stores. Lenovo ThinkCentres (e.g., m700 tiny) are also a great option if you prefer something with a smaller form factor.
I’d recommend disregarding advice from non-technical folks recommending brand new, expensive hardware, because it’s usually overkill.
I spent so long trying to make Raspberry Pis work but they just kind of suck and everything is harder on them. I only just discovered that there are an infinite supply of these micro desktops second hand from offices/government. I was able to pick up a 9th gen intel with 16gb ram for less than the cost of a Pi 5, and it's massively more powerful.
Yeah, they’re amazing value. I paid $125 CAD for a 4th gen i7 with 16GB of RAM about 5 years ago. It’s been running almost 24/7 ever since with no issues.
You also don't have to deal with the usual annoyance of second hand gear like facebook marketplace and no delivery. These companies / governments have contracts with reseller companies who will buy the entire stock and sell them online just like buying new.
Pi’s are incredible little basic home servers but they can’t handle transcoding. Great option for places with very expensive electricity too.
I just found their proprietary hardware and being ARM too limiting. I wanted to set up full disk encryption to set up nextcloud on, and found that on the pi this is an incredibly complex process. While on an x86 PC it's just a checkbox on install.
And then you can only use distros which have a raspberry pi specific build. Generic ARM ones won't work.
Yeah the complaints are fair. I stick to RPi OS for maximum compatibility. People have been crying for a Google Drive client for Linux for over a decade, but still have to set it up in rclone.
I build out my server in Docker and I’ve been surprised that every image I’ve ever wanted to download has an ARM image.
Way too expensive for their moderate performance. All serious self-hosters (not Youtube home-labbers) use x86 machines, often retired desktop/gaming rigs or used datacenter hardware.
What is a “serious self hoster”? How many Docker containers do I need to be running on my Pi 5 to get into the club?
I forgot all about these after I stopped doing desktop support, thanks!
Get started a corporate surplus mini pc on ebay. They super cheap - search for micro pc - if you get a recent CPU from Dell or Lenovo should be under $200, you can install Fedora or other Linux distribution. Ask Claude for everything else.
"another few hundred USD for 8TB in NVMe SSD" lol
I would also suggest the great Karakeep for read-it-later :)
has any one experience using cloudflare tunnels in a (small scale - 5000 user/day) self hosted web service? I just got 2 dynabook XJ-40 (32 gb ram, 512 gb ssd) for 200 usd each and I'm going to replace my DO droplets with them (usd150+ per month). I plan to use cloudflare tunnel to make the service available to the internet without exposing my home network. Any downsides ? (besides that cloudflare will be MITM for the service but it is not a privacy focused business)
I am in the process of doing the same. I have a Netbird mesh (Tailscale but open source) with 3 k3s nodes. They are geographically separated for HA.
Claude and Gemini have been instrumental in helping me understand the core concepts of kubernetes, how to tune all these enterprise applications for high latency, think about architecture etc...
My biggest "wow, wtf?" moment was ben I was discussing the cluster architecture with Claude. It asked: want me to start the files?
I thought it meant update the notes, so replied 'yes'.
It spit out 2 sh files and 5 YAMLs that completely bootstrapped my cluster with a full GitOps setup using ArgoCD.
Learning while having a 24/7 senior tutor next to me has been insane value.
This is great and echoes my experience. Although I would add a caveat that this mostly applies to solo work. Once you need to collaborate or operate on a team, many of limits of self-hosting return.
I have a hard time reading things like “The last one is the real unlock.” or “That alone justified the box.” without immediately thinking of an AI trying to explain something. Not to say this was written with one, but the frequency with which I see phrasing like this nowadays is skyrocketing...
Tailscale is pretty sweet. Cloudflare WARP is also pretty sweet, a little clunkier but you get argo routing for free and I trust Cloudflare for security.
All fine and great with Tailscale until you company places an iOS restriction on external VPNs and your work phone is also your primary phone :(
> your work phone is also your primary phone :(
That's the flaw right there. Don't mix company assets with pricate use. Phone, laptop, car. Your life is already very dependent on your employer (through income), don't get yourself locked in even more by depending on them for personal tech. Plus it's a security risk to your company.
Unless you have a low paying job, which rarely anybody on HN does, you can afford your own phone and laptop. And IT won't find your messages to girlfriend or pictures you don't want others to see or browsing history.
Usually you can ask for a separate phone for work. I can't stand when personal devices are poisoned with Intune and other company crap.
My work WiFi blocked traffic to port 51820, the default WireGuard port. I was wondering why my VPN started failing to handshake one day. I changed my ports to 51821 that night and back in business. I checked our technology policy and there’s no “thou shalt not use a VPN” clause so no clue why someone one day decided to drop WireGuard traffic on the network.
Restrict use of private devices?
Though just blocking particular ports for this purpose is very 90s and obviously ineffective, as you demonstrated. Anybody proficient in installing wireguard also knows how to change ports.
Cloudron makes this even easier. Well worth 1.00 a day! Handles the entire stack (backups , monitoring , dns , ssl , updates ).
Oh my gosh, everything you want to host comes with a docker compose file that requires you to tweak maybe two settings. Caddy as your web proxy has the absolute simplest setup possible. You don't need AI to help you with this. You got this. You want to make sure you understand the basics so you (or your LLM doesn't do anything brain dead stupid). It's not that hard, you can do it!
Self hosting post. Tailscale.
Its comedic at this point.
Can just "self host" documents, email and chat on google workspace.
Opens with "self-hosting" and then brings claude code into the mix. You realize it's not actually running locally right? Privcy-wise that's a nightmare. A non-deterministic blackbox running in somebody's AI cloud is controlling your server. Congrats.
How is readcheck any different than using raindrop.io?
Basic question: If I wanted a simple self hosting solution for a bot with a database, what is the simplest solution / provider I can go with. This bot is just for me doesn't need to be accessible to the general public.
Thanks
Ask chatGPT bro
My stack. Claude code working via CLIs: Coolify on hetzner
>Your home server's new sysadmin: Claude Code
Lol, no thank you. Btw do your knees hurt?
Vibe-setting up a home network server with VaultWarden is beyond reckless. LLMs have tendency to overlook security in order to get things working. You are, thereby, exposing your passwords (and potentially your 2FA as bitwarden supports that) to the whole world. This is beyond stupid. Even before LLMs my main concern with setting up BitWarden on my own server was two folds: security and availability. LLMs doesn't fix the second point but they make the first point much worse.
Vibe-maintaining is even worse than vibe-setting up.
And ironically all in the name of "self hosting". Claude code defies both words in that.
none of you have what it takes to self host your perfect self hosting fantasy because most of you won't cooperate with others. keep waiting for that unicorn you wouldn't see standing right in front of you.
My idea of fun is deeply tied to understanding how things work—learning them, then applying that knowledge in my own way, as simply as possible. That process gives me a sense of ownership and control, which is not something I get from an approach where AI does things for me that I do not understand.
Nope, never trust AI to do such things, it’s imminent to cause issues. Maybe as an assistant only but never installed on the same server and worse, the privilege to access/execute commands.
Umm, what happened to zero trust? Network security is not sufficient.
I just use Proxmox on Optiplex 3060 micro. On it, a Wireguard tunnel for remote admin. The ease of creating and tearing down dedicated containers makes it easy to experiment.
I too have that same Dell Optiplex 3060 micro. I love it for experimenting also. Also use wireguard for remote access. I use incus for my Linux containers, preferring it to proxmox.
Can the same thing be said for using docker compose etc on a VPS to host a web app? Ie you can get the ergonomic / ease of using Fly, Renderer?
Historically, managed platforms like Fly.io, Render, and DigitalOcean App Platform existed to solve three pain points: 1. Fear of misconfiguring Linux 2. Fear of Docker / Compose complexity 3. Fear of “what if it breaks at 2am?”
CLI agents (Claude Code, etc.) dramatically reduce (1) and (2), and partially reduce (3).
So the tradeoff has changed from:
“Pay $50–150/month to avoid yak-shaving” → “Pay $5–12/month and let an agent do the yak-shaving”
I started self-hosting after noticing that my AWS bill increased from like $300 per month to $600 per month within a couple of years. When looking at my bill, 3/4 of the cost was 'AWS Other'; mostly bandwidth. I couldn't understand why I was paying so much for bandwidth given that all my database instances ran on the same host as the app servers and I didn't have any regular communication between instances.
I suspect it may have been related to the Network File System (NFS)? Like whenever I read a file on the host machine, it goes across the data-center network and charges me? Is this correct?
Anyway, I just decided to take control of those costs. Took me 2 weeks of part-time work to migrate all my stuff to a self-hosted machine. I put everything behind Cloudflare with a load balancer. Was a bit tricky to configure as I'm hosting multiple domains from the same machine. It's a small form factor PC tower with 20 CPU cores; easily runs all my stuff though. In 2 months, I already recouped the full cost of the machine through savings in my AWS bill. Now I pay like $10 a month to Cloudflare and even that's basically an optional cost. I strongly recommend.
Anyway it's impressive how AWS costs had been creeping slowly and imperceptibly over time. With my own machine, I now have way more compute than I need. I did a calculation and figured out that to get the same CPU capacity (no throttling, no bandwidth limitations) on AWS, I would have to pay like $1400 per month... But amortized over 4 years my machine's cost is like $20 per month plus $5 per month to get a static IP address. I didn't need to change my internet plan other than that. So AWS EC2 represented a 56x cost factor. It's mind-boggling.
I think it's one of these costs that I kind of brushed under the carpet as "It's an investment." But eventually, this cost became a topic of conversation with my wife and she started making jokes about our contribution to Jeff Bezos' wife's diamond ring. Then it came to our attention that his megayacht is so large that it comes with a second yacht beside it. Then I understood where he got it all from. Though to be fair to him, he is a truly great businessman; he didn't get it from institutional money or complex hidden political scheme; he got it fair and square through a very clever business plan.
Over 5 years or so that I've been using AWS, the costs had been flat. Meanwhile the costs of the underlying hardware had dropped to like 1/56th... and I didn't even notice. Is anything more profitable than apathy and neglect?
The most likely culprit was talking to other nodes via their public IP instead of their local ones. That gets billed as interent traffic (most expensive). The second culprit is your database or other nodes are in different AZs and you get a x-zone bandwidth charge.
Bandwidth inside the same zone is free.
not with these hardware prices...
Second hand micro desktops are still cheap, at least for now.
Hardware that is considered e-waste (like a Core 2 Duo) makes a wonderful home server.
You can go much newer than that and get semi modern intel chips second hand. For something that runs 24/7, the power cost will exceed the savings from using long obsolete chips.
Reminder: If you are using Tailscale or a VPS you aren't really self-hosting.
Or a non-local LLM to keep it all maintained.
how many times will I get clickbaited by some cool title only to see AI praise in the article and nothing more? It's tiring and happens way too often
related "webdev is fun again": claude. https://ma.ttias.be/web-development-is-fun-again/
Also the "Why it matters" in the article. I thought it's a jab at AI-generated articles but it starts too look like the article was AI written as well
Maybe because I don’t do SWE for my job, but I have fun writing docker-compose files, troubleshooting them, and adding containers to my server. Then I understand how/why stuff works if it breaks, why would I want to hand that over to an AI?
Waiting for the follow-on article “Claude Code reformatted my NAS and I lost my entire media collection.”
ROFL. There have been at least two posts of Claude without confirmation deleting a repository and one where it wiped an entire partition
Everything is now not-niche but on the cusp of hitting the mainstream. Like Formal Methods.[1] But they were nice enough to put it in the title. Then tptacek replied that he “called it a little bit” because of: Did Semgrep Just Get A Lot More Interesting?[2] (Why? What could the reason be?)
[1] https://martin.kleppmann.com/2025/12/08/ai-formal-verificati...
[2]: https://fly.io/blog/semgrep-but-for-real-now/