I’ve tried to figure some of this stuff out but I really don’t know what I’m doing. Most documentation is written with a vocabulary I don’t understand. Tutorials assume a high-level understanding of coding, software, CLI and a bunch of other stuff.
So far I’ve got an old gaming PC with a R7 2700x + 2060 Super and I think maybe it’s overkill. I’ve got TrueNAS running on it but that’s about as far as I got…
Thinking maybe we can have an open Jitsi meeting and just anyone who needs help can get it (myself included 🙂)?
Would anyone be interested in something like that?
E: some people have imagined up some things that I said so let me be clear about what I did not say:
At no time did I insist, beg, or demand that anyone help me.
I did NOT ask anyone to help with a specific issue, nor should I be required to.
I asked if anyone would be willing to help myself and possibly others to get some services running, and I asked to do it in a videoconference setting where we can have a discussion and where you can see what I’m doing as I’m doing it, out of respect for both of our time.
If you are not interested, you do not need to come in here and announce it, and you sure as shit do not need to speak for anyone else on whether they will want to. Just keep scrolling.
E2: special thanks to those who actually reached out and offered to help!
You’re probably not going to find someone knowledgeable that’s willing to do open ended support like that, because we all know it turns into a huge time sink. But if you post specifics we can try to help.
The truth is self hosting also involves a lot of self learning. People will help you solve problems, but nobody has time to give free classes.
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When you run into something vocabulary wise you don’t understand, Google is your friend just keep googling and reading to get the gist, Google any error messages too, I’m 43, I’ve been googling my whole life as a big fraud in IT, jk
But seriously Google Google Google has all the answers and as you use it more you hone your search skills to the point where you just scroll past the crap and wham find things right away. The more you search and work with the stuff the better you’ll get way more comfortable. Maybe try and find a local friend who’s good with computers or search that can help you a bit
I’ve helped many friends fix and troubleshoot stuff from time to time, but I’m not anyone’s full time IT, I work on retainer.
I don’t know everything but every day I learn, even stuff I’ll never have to use again.
I do IT consulting Reiners.io , if you want paid help no problem, but it does turn into a huge free time sink, with no reward.
Source: retired 15 year Linux systems engineer and sysadmin, turned consultant at https://reiners.io $60/hr minimum I charge clients much more, including my old boss, who’s at $110/h but I bring my laptop to Hawaii for that guy, so he pays for access to me in 80 hr blocks.
It is freaking expensive and few people will want to do it for free.
Hey can you suggest a good vinyl cutter/sticker printer/plotter/whatever for making small batches of high quality stickers for under $300? $500?
Not gonna happen, you need a vinyl printer my suggestion is buy a broken one and find the service manual and fix it. My printer is worth about $5000-$8000, I bought it for parts, $1000 and changed the parts out to make mine work 100% check out marketplace and dial that distance up, I rented a uhaul, mines huge.
I really doubt there are smaller vinyl capable printers for $500, but if you find one lemme know and I’ll buy one, I hate doing singles on my giant machine, so I usually give the purchaser a 24/42/60 inch line of them, unless I’m running multiple jobs.
Also hp latex requires a flexi subscription, and my printer doesn’t contour cut, so you need a cutter as well, mine was about $4000, it’s a uscutter titan 3 68 inch.
If you want to do wraps I use vinyl master dsr, it’s excellent also has masking of images and other cool features.
Plus you’ll need adobe or some other editing software.
Honestly, the only reason I purchased the printer is because I sponsor two race cars where I was spending thousands of dollars on decals to a company here in town, I ended up purchasing a printer so that I could print decals for the guy that I sponsor and some of his friends. So far it’s worked out well, but finding people for custom decals is a chore most of the time.
I’m just kind of saying if you’re having a problem with the $500 cost, you’re going to have way bigger problems with the cost of all the software subscriptions to run the printer. Maybe some of the other solvent printers and stuff don’t require flexi and that might be best. I’m not sure. I haven’t used eco solvent or solvent printers since I did my research. Latex printers are amazing. They don’t smell it all and they’re dry immediately.
My prints can be powerwashed and usually do not require any protection at all from sun and rain, race decals I do overwrap for scratches, overwrap laminate vinyl is extremely expensive for good quality rolls and the race drivers are the only ones I do it for, and some don’t even want that for cost savings, a wreck can ruin a whole side of a car.
Rolls of material are expensive and so are inks. But it’s fun and you meet all kinds of interesting people.
Edit oops accidentally cut some text before submitting pasted in edit
Edit 2 forgot to say my printer is an older HP latex 260, also known as the HP Designer 26500. I get aftermarket inks, and print heads , you can buy lots of them on eBay, bought about 12 cartridges of most of the colors I need all genuine but expired, works perfectly for me and I’m not worried about warranty as I service it myself.
Cricut?
And then if you can’t find help on Google or are confused with a specific problem, THEN ask your specific question here or somewhere similar.
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If you’re confused about a specific term, ask about that specific term, and you’ll get many people eager to help. Sorry nobody wants to get on an open ended video call with a stranger to teach you how to run a server, but that’s just how these forums work. Everyone’s setup is different so there’s not much I could do to help in your video call.
Learning this stuff is hard, don’t let anyone tell you any different. We all went through the same struggles, perhaps for some people that was so long ago that they forgot how hard it was.
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If you can’t make any sense of it, keep trying. If keep trying isn’t what you want to do, don’t do it. Really, you don’t have to force yourself into this if it’s unintelligible and frustrating. I’ve hit the wall plenty of times, and I keep hitting the wall, sometimes I wish I could just stop while I’m not stressed and going bald.
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Don’t give up! There are a wealth of basic tutorials on Youtube. You just need to find one that works for you, and work up from there.
The problem with someone setting everything up for you is, what do you do when something goes wrong? If you don’t have an understanding of the basics, you’re back to square one of just asking someone to fix it for you. And at that point you’re not really self hosting, you’re just a residential co-lo (datacenter) for your managed service provider (whoever is helping you) that’s doing all the work!
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Start by walking us through what you’re trying to do, and where you’ve run into problems.
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We know. What you’re asking for is the wrong to thing to ask for, here in these forums. Aint nobody got time for walking a strqnger through thw entire install process of five or eight different self hosting programs. My own personal process has taken several months and is still ongoing.
Then why did you make this post?
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Point 1. If you’re asking someone to donate their time to help you, don’t be surprised if they have a few questions first. Wanting to know more about the exact nature of your problem is a good start to figuring out, for example, if they’re even the right person to assist you.
It doesn’t do you any favours to insist that someone commit to teaching a class over video chat without even being willing to go so far as to give them a syllabus first.
Point 2. When begging for a free ride, don’t complain that the car didn’t come with seat warmers. If you’re going to insist on dictating the manner in which people help you, the result is just going to be that people don’t want to help you.
For instance, after posting my first comment, I actually considered offering to PM or chat on Discord so that we could sort out your problem together. I have since reconsidered; this is, in fact, exactly why people who know how to do this stuff usually aren’t super jazzed about the idea of an open jitsi meeting or similar. You’re going to end up dealing with far too many people who feel entitled to make demands of your time.
I actually like helping people learn about computers. Part of my job involves teaching IT skills, and I genuinely enjoy it. Under the right circumstances, I would be exactly the kind of person you’re looking for. And I genuinely do appreciate your frustration; self-hosting is a mess of bad documentation and incomplete guides full of jargon, poorly explained ideas and assumptions of prior knowledge.
But looking at your behaviour throughout this thread, I don’t think you’re ready to be a student. You’ve been nothing but combative and demanding, while showing absolutely no appreciation for the time that people are taking to try to help you. It’s a bad look, and it just reinforces exactly why people generally prefer to do this stuff at a remove, if at all.
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The entire purpose of my inquiry is to not sit here and waste each others’ time going back and forth for hours on end over text trying to figure it out. It’s for us to be able to have a discussion and so that you can see what I’m doing as I’m doing it.
I only post on forums because if everybody used discord and other non-searchable communication mediums, the internet would be a complete failure, or about as available as peoples secret mushroom spots. I promise you that the issues you face are not original. Everybody else who comes across this thread looking for a good place to start is going to be pissed because there’s only one or two listed, when there could have been an entire thread full of good places to start, with commentary about specific tutorials and why they suck or what parts a new person could get stuck on.
These forums are not just for you to use as a dump to vaguepost and hope someone will spend several hours of their life cheering you on while you figure out how to do stuff. They are for everyone in the thread, and everyone who comes after while looking for similar solutions. Trying to take whatever support you end up getting away from everyone who comes after you is called pulling up the ladder after yourself, and is the exact opposite of why forums exist in the first place.
If people had actually been rude when you asked a basic question, it would be different. But it isn’t. You’re not trying to engage with the way this forums actually works and it really shows. As far as I can see, most everyone here is trying to help. You just don’t want the great help that is being offered. You want an unpaid private tutor who will cheer you on and sometimes give you a tip to make things easier, while you avoid doing things like reading the manual, looking through tutorials, or heaven forbid, googling what aomething is.
When everywhere you go smells like shit, check your shoes.
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Not to be a dick, but to explain why forming the question the way you did will not get you any assistance or responses for that matter.
The truth is, not a single person here went to self-hosting school, we got to where we are because of our love for the craft. I hope this doesn’t discourage you from trying. The high you’ll get from finally solving that one error you’ve been trying to resolve for hours is one I love experiencing over and over again which is why I self-host.
Your self righteous answer, is why Linux will never be a viable solution on the desktop. Or in this case why self hosting will never take off.
Don’t worry, the Microsoft support forums don’t lack self righteous answers either. I won’t talk about about desktop Linux because that has nothing to do with this thread and has a plethora of other issues as to why it won’t take off but specifically self hosting won’t take off because it never meant to. We will never get to a point in our lives where 100% (or hell, even 10%) of the population are proficient enough in how a computer works to self host their own software stack, and that is okay. If you self-host services make them available to your friends and family. Never thought that self-host was a movement of some sort where we’re trying to convert people who rely on centralized products into self hosting gurus, guess that’s a first for me.
why linux will never be a viable solution on the desktop
Has been pretty viable for me for the last 7 years or so.
why self hosting will never take off
Literally who cares, the community stands to gain nothing from another few million novice users who don’t even know or care to learn how to formulate a question or usable bug report.
Lol OK
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I didn’t read the other comments, only the main post in which I do not see what you define as “detailed account of my situation”. You said that you have an issue with some software (you did not even bother to specify which) and that you want people to hop on Jitsi to duke it out with you. Had it been me, I would’ve posted logs, posted what I’m trying to achieve and why I’m unable to do it so far or where I would appreciate additional explanation. You want people to help you but you do not make it any easy for them to do.
But that’s okay, stay arrogant and we’ll see how far it gets you.
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Actually I did.
No you didn’t. You said that you had set up TrueNAS, that means it’s working. I inferred from a different comment that you’re actually experiencing problems with TrueNAS and even left a reply to hopefully help you.
Logs of…what, exactly?
It was an example. I did not expect you to take it literally. If things aren’t working, then we need to know which things aren’t working. Screenshots, logs, even “I can’t connect to my own server” is better.
I did
I had to infer from other comments that you’re having trouble with TrueNAS. Perhaps it’s because English is my 3rd language, but clearly the point didn’t get across to others in this thread either.
Nah they were quite clear they need help setting up “some services”, isn’t that specific enough for you? Ha! They really do not know the magnitude of what they are asking for. I tried to be helpful and encouraging and point them towards a path of self learning but after reading all the comments and the way they respond to people, I’m done and they’re going on my block list. It’s clear from their attitude that this person does not want to do anything for themselves and is doomed to fail at self hosting. Anyone getting involved is asking for pain.
I just read some their other comments on this thread… lmao… don’t think I’d ever seen such entitlement in this community.
You said that you have an issue with some software (you did not even bother to specify which)
Actually I did.
You didn’t. You very specifically asked for someone to commit to helping you personally with nonspecific issues rather than asking for help from a general group for a specific issue (which would have been more likely to get help).
posted what I’m trying to achieve
I did.
Maybe, but what youre trying to achieve isn’t getting a helpful answer for a specific question. You’re trying to get someone to commit to helping you for an unspecified amount of time with an unspecified amount of problems. CriticalMass is telling you that is a bad way of obtaining help for a problem anywhere except in school and a job classroom. This is neither of those.
why I’m unable to do it so far
Did that also.
Maybe try reading more carefully before calling someone out for some bullshit.
No, he read your post just fine. You just don’t like the answers you’re getting. Asking for help with a specific thing is exactly what these forums are for. Asking for help getting started is even okay. We love sharing a good tutorial for getting a new user started with a specific software.
You aren’t doing any of those things. You’re asking for someone to spend hours of their time, in a call with you, to walk you through a process that has hundreds of online tutorials already out there. You’re also getting mad when people tell you that what you’re after is not what this discussion forum is for.
Maybe try reading more carefully before calling someone out for some bullshit.
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I guess so. Your question was
Would anyone be interested in something like that?
Which most of us have answered with a clear “no”. So I guess we’re done here.
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I asked if anyone would be willing to help myself and possibly others to get some services running, and I asked to do it in a videoconference setting where we can have a discussion and where you can see what I’m doing as I’m doing it, out of respect for both of our time.
Sure, I can do that. My rates start at $90/hr, 4hr minimum.
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You want to charge people to help you?
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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters IP Internet Protocol IoT Internet of Things for device controllers NAS Network-Attached Storage Plex Brand of media server package SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access
[Thread #239 for this sub, first seen 24th Oct 2023, 19:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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That’s a bot lol
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Since the other people don’t seem too helpful to you, we can gladly setup a meeting and see where it goes :) I don’t have exeprience in all these software like TrueNAS you’re using but I have a lot of experience in a lot of other things, so I’m sure I’ll be able to help!
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Honestly, Switch to a basic Linux distro and use docker directly.
I ran TrueNAS for a while and it’s just too complex and janky. I dropped back to void (for ZFS) and have a directory of compose files for radar/sonar, jellyfish, mediawiki, Lemmy etc.
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I’d suggest proxmox. Sinple web UI for management, but debian backend. Very powerful virtualization. Supports GPU passthrough, LVMs, ZFS, and a bunch of other stuff out of the box. If you get another machine, you can also put them into a cluster.
It’s better if you struggle, you will learn more that way. For me, the struggle is the fun part anyway. Also, if you need these services to be bulletproof you probably shouldn’t be self-hosting them.
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It seems like you have a learning preference for conversational information transfer. Maybe try finding a discord group where people regularly talk about this kind of thing. People on Internet forums tend to prefer written documentation and value search engine prowess.
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So, most of us aren’t in the industry yet we managed to learn the jargon we needed to learn in order to do what we wanted to do. I don’t understand why you are adamant about others helping you when you don’t really seem to care enough to learn some words and their meanings.
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Yeah at this point I’m ready to pay someone for help. I wasn’t expecting setting up a mastodon or piped instance in docker to be so hard.
How much?
Lol
It’s not that hard. Go to awesome-selfhosted to have a look at what you’d like to host. Then, go to YouTube and find videos that host said thing. If you don’t find the specific application, watch simpler tutorials deploying containers (most people will use Docker if you’d like) and go from there. Read some documentation on the container runtime and maybe some networking. That’s it.
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I suppose it feels like an info dump when you’re coming from zero. This community shares a love for hosting and orchestration and it takes a second to get out of that hole. My apologies.
In my opinion, DBTech has some of the easiest tutorials on this subject. Just search for how to set up Docker on YouTube by DBTech. TBH I’d always recommend reading the documentation, Docker devs tell you how to install Docker and he basically follows that. Should be doable if you have a distribution set up. The documentation covers most use cases whilst he just installs on his distribution in the video, but the process should be similar if not the same.
Good luck!
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In truenas go to apps, pick one, and click install.
Also, you may want to add truecharts repository (assuming you’re using truenas scale)
https://truecharts.org/manual/SCALE/guides/getting-started/#adding-truecharts
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Guess what all of that is on the getting started page for truenas. Instead of reading that you made a post here.
Why?
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SSH - secure shell. It is a way to connect to your remote machine. On server distributions it is usually open by default. If you’re running Windows on your main computer, you can connect with either the included OpenSSH client (terrible experience) or download a utility like PuTTY. Detailed explanation here: https://bitlaunch.io/blog/how-to-connect-to-ssh-with-putty/
Web shell - Likely refers to the admin control panel of the software. I don’t run TrueNAS so I can only assume. Likely if you open a browser tab and type in your server’s IP and the specified port in the documentation you’ll be able to access it (i.e http://192.168.50.2:8080)
“go to system --> advanced” where!? - Likely in the admin panel. Again, don’t run the software personally.
Link aggregations - This is more on the advanced side and likely not necessary for you at this stage. The idea is to allow you to connect more interfaces and increase bandwidth, likely not necessary for a home set up, would advise you keep it for later.
VLAN - Virtual Local Area Network. In the past before VLANs we had switches/hubs that when you connected a cable to them they would automatically become a member of the same network. VLAN allows you to split one physical network into many virtual networks. This is good because you can them limit access inbetween VLANs or block traffic for your server VLANs (if for example, you don’t want it to collect telemetry and phone home. I personally do it on the IoT VLAN).
Default Gateway - It is the IP address of your router in most cases. If you are on the 192.168.10.0 - 192.168.10.255 network and you’re trying to send packets inside that network then your clients will not contact the default gateway, they will instead just reach each other directly. The default gateway is necessary to send packets outside of your network.
If you need something running fast and easy buy a synology nas. Not the best hardware and expensive geat if youi dont have the time to mess around with stuf like unraid etc. There a lots of great guides on setting op docker containers on that. https://drfrankenstein.co.uk/ is a geat example of easy to follow guides.
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TrueNAS is good but has a steepish learning curve for many people, it’s way more oriented towards being a NAS than running services, which can be confusing overkill (only using ZFS for example).
I recently discovered CasaOS which is now my go-to recommendation for people starting off. It is a good combo of “just works” with the ability to tweak for those who are interested in diving deeper.
Proxmox as a host for a VM running Docker is the way to go. You can snapshot and restore things when you mess up, and you can install Proxmox Backup Server alongside to take point in time backups that you can restore to a new VM if you have to. I probably have a couple dozen inactive VMs of various learning projects that I can fire up and play with as the mood takes me.
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If you are successful in this, perhaps a twitch channel walking through the basics running on a regular ish basis
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I was imagining a “I just wiped my hard drive and flashed the current version of Debian. Let’s get basic services up.”
I wish there was a “hey watch me code/self host” channel that helped noobs see how to approach the problem of starting. Usually their is a “hey watch me code” YouTube that is old enough to have a critical breaking point (some library updated) so a noob finds it impossible.
This will forever be the problem with video tutorials.
Development often moves fairly quickly and videos on most platforms can’t be edited after posting.
The result is your best outcome is if they make an update video to address the changes. Unfortunately that’s also one of the least likely outcomes.
Otherwise the options are:
- Take the video down and lose any income it generates
- Put a note in the description linking to a document addressing the updates
- Keep the outdated video up and keep making money from it
If you’re lucky you might get option 2, but in most cases you’re gonna end up with option 3.
In the vast majority of cases content creators aren’t going to pull or replace a profitable video even if it becomes outdated.
It’s a tough situation, I can’t really blame them for doing what is in their best interest as a business.
Ideally you should try to get comfortable with non-video tutorials.
I’m happy to help if anyone needs help with docker and/or Linux stuff. (I’ll probably try to convert you to Linux, the os to rule them all. You’ve been warned) Wont necessarily be everything or set it all up for you, but enough knowledge to get you started and able to learn more yourself is doable
For op, that setup is likely overkill, most stuff will use more ram than cpu and very few self hosted apps will use the GPU at all (Plex and jellyfin are the only ones that come to mind). Only hurt to it being overkill is a higher power usage than a smaller setup, but if you already have it running full time then it’s unlikely to make a different
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In terms of electricity consumption, it’s still not going to be huge, just was noted in case you wanted to go smaller. You can almost certainly go smaller, but at the same time if you already have the hardware it’s not going to be useful to sell it second hand and buy new hardware that has less performance.
Hosting static websites at home is fine if you really want to, but for anything dynamic and/or that will have a lot of users, get a vps (basically a server that you pay for storage and compute resources on and can use remotely how you like, including hosting stuff like mastodon and lemmy instances)
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