I’ve been a Software Engineering Student for 2 years now. I understand networks and whatnot at a theoretical level to some degree.
I’ve developed applications and hosted them through docker on Google Cloud for school projects.
I’ve tinkered with my router, port forwarded video game servers and hosted Discord bots for a few years (familiar with Websockets and IP/NAT/WAN and whatnot)
Yet I’ve been trying to improve my setup now that my old laptop has become my homelab and everything I try to do is so daunting.
Reverse proxy, VPN, Cloudfare bullshit, and so many more things get thrown around so much in this sub and other resources, yet I can barely find info on HOW to set up this things. Most blogs and articles I find are about what they are which I already know. And the few that actually explain how to set it up are just throwing so many more concepts at me that I can’t keep up.
Why is self-hosting so daunting? I feel like even though I understand how many of these things work I can’t get anything actually running!
“Selfhost authorative dns” returns this for example https://wiki.selfhosted.show/DNS/
And we have two guides for the most common dns implementantations. Depending on the vpn software you can push the dns ip as part of the configuration or by using DHCP.
I also found the pihole docs for unbound rather helpful https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns/unbound/.
For me, I have that as the 4th result, after some Reddit and IBM which probably would’ve discouraged me from continuing my search. I’d have to read on it.
Also, TIL PiHole doesn’t necessarily need to run on a Raspberry Pi. I guess assumptions really do come back to bite me in the ass haha
There’s a lesson in here somewhere about patience. Get good at skimming. I was looking for how to do something I was unfamiliar with the other day and I had to sift through 15 results across four different search strings before I found the solution that was going to work for me. But because I’m good at skimming it only took me 1/2 hour to discover and implement. Google isn’t magic and this is why someone else recommended Chat GPT to help with some of the sifting, especially early on.
Pi runs Raspbian which is just Debian with customisation applied. So of course it can run elsewhere. You don’t know as much as you think you do perhaps 😉
I seriously thought it was a product, rather than software tbf. The name always sounded so “corporate” I never considered it.
I definitely know more about the theory than the practice. I’m clueless as to what my options even are so I can’t argue with that.
But I did know about the Linux “inheritance” of distros if you wanna call it that, and I’m fully aware of what that entails.
Just honestly didn’t look at it twice cause I thought “there must be an FOSS option” without realizing what PiHole really is. Just a case of prejudice biting me in the ass I guess.
Sounds like the next step in your journey is combing through this list and seeing what’s out there: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
So much great stuff! But most of it has drawbacks, like missing features or less attractive UI. But it’s free and open source so we love it all the same.
I’ve read that repo a million times! My self-hosting needs are more esoteric and I mostly play around with it. I’ve no need for media services or 90% of what that repo offers yet!
I mostly want to end up self-hosting my own apps, but I need some foundational knowledge
Then maybe start by hosting things you don’t really need. Host a single media file, but so so with every single service you can think of. Can you access the file internally? Externally? On browser? Dedicated app? Via SSH? With a VPN? Did you host your own VPN?
You just need to learn to approach practical problems that are common, and then adapt what you learned to your other needs. These are how most of us have grown and learned.
Based on your OP and a few of your answers, it looks like you’re struggling with setting up too many things together, when in reality some of them are meant to be a foundation and /or are required to move on to the next sparky thing in the awesome list.
You mentioned “Reverse proxy and VPN bullshit” in your OP. Start with setting up your internal DNS (Pi-hole and Adguard are good examples that work mostly out of the box). Once you’re confortable with managing internal DNS, and only then, start messing around with reverse proxy.
And like you realized a few posts up, pretty much “every” Pi-related software can be run in a regular computer. If you’re not yet familiar with virtual machines, do some research on Proxmox and the likes and it will benefit you immensely.