I’m a web dev with a wife who is a researcher, and on the side I’ve built a few tools for her work. Web apps are great because cross-platform distribution and compatibility are non-issues. If you don’t need a database or server-side logic, a client-side only application is basically free to host given that it’s ultimately just a pile of static files. You can use localstorage for persistence, and because there’s no server logic you have a lot fewer security implications to worry about.

JavaScript gets a bad rap, but if you pair it with typescript and decent tooling it’s really not bad. HTML and CSS are an incredibly powerful engine for building UI, which is only getting better.

So there’s a storage protocol called “S3” (I wanna say it stands for simple scalable storage?), first created by Amazon for AWS. Many types of software, including backup programs, have been designed to use it as a storage backend. There are now many S3 compatible providers, last I looked the best value was backblaze B2.

You need a backup program with end-to-end encryption, S3 compatibility, and whatever other features you like. I use restic but it’s CLI only, there’s also borg backup and many others.

If you encrypt locally with a good key, you don’t have to trust the remote storage provider. They just see a bunch of meaningless noise. Just don’t lose the key or your backup is useless.

Probably not great to return server stack traces. Otherwise, yeah

Self hosting is pretty great right now. Immich, Tailscale, truenas, docker, vaultwarden - you can solve so many of your own problems with any old computer you have lying around

lol raid1c10

Oh cool, this is exactly what I was looking for! Thanks :)

Performance is all but irrelevant in this case

It’s a 4gb pi4, think it could boot from ZFS?

I like the DNS on the router idea, I’ll look into it. I do have some split DNS set up as well as adblocking lists (technitium). Not sure what my router can do.

Edit: autocorrect got me

Yeah, I’m getting a pretty strong consensus here that an SSD is the way to go. I’ve also had at least one SD card die on me, and because I didn’t have backups it was pretty inconvenient. Had to recreate my homeassistant setup from scratch.

I get the config only backup, but when I have a mondohuge nas available and we’re dealing with like less than 100 gigs, why not just take a full disk image?

Well, this is my DNS server which means if it’s down the internet is down and I can’t resolve hostnames to ssh into. I know that can be worked around, but I’d really like a quick and easy fix that I could even talk someone through over the phone if I had to.

My real backups are squared away, no worries. Nightly automatic restic snapshots, one to an external drive on this very pi and another to a NAS at my parents’ house.

I’ve also been using BTRFS for awhile, and recently I’ve been getting into zfs which IMO does a better job of handling large software raid arrays. They’re both pretty great!

Yeah, I definitely won’t be buying a new pi anytime soon for exactly that reason but I’ve had this one for awhile and would prefer to do something useful with it.

I have a decent Samsung card in there now, it might survive. Can’t remember what brand the one that failed was, but I don’t tend to buy crappy ones

That’s true, just booting from an SSD would be a lot more reliable and simple.

As others have mentioned, find a decent beginner program and follow it. Other advice:

• run slow. Really slow. Embarrassingly slow. Slow enough to have a conversation. You don’t need to do any speed work yet.
• your biggest priority is avoiding injury; it’s a lot harder to recover from one than to avoid it in the first place. You accomplish this by slowly ramping up training volume, using decent shoes that aren’t worn out, and having decent form.
• heart rate training is neat
• sign up for a 5k

• you do not need kubernetes
• you do not need anything to be „high availability”, that just adds a ton of complexity for no benefit. Nobody will die or go broke if your homelab is down for a few days.
• tailscale is awesome
• docker-compose is awesome
• irreplaceable data gets one offsite backup, one local backup, and ideally one normally offline backup (in case you get ransomwared)
• yubikeys are cool and surprisingly easy to use
• don’t offer your services to other people until you are sure you can support it, your backups are squared away, and you are happy with how things are set up.

That’s not really what a UPS is designed for, they’re meant to last minutes. Long enough for a clean shutdown or to start a generator.

You’d want something like a whole house battery backup instead.

If you can avoid it, don’t open ports in your firewall, don’t publish your home IP address, and keep everything behind a VPN. If only you and your family will be using these services, go with Tailscale or one of its competitors. Otherwise, VPS or cloudflare tunnel/competitor.

If they have an email address they can send a license key