I had a little Debian-based box installed at a co-lo locally for 7
years that I ran myself. After the HDD died the 3rd time, I decided
to pull the plug on it.
That was back around 1995-2002 time-frame.
It had a Mini-ITX mobo with a 600 MHz x86 clone chip, maybe 256MB of
RAM, and a 20 GB HDD in it. The Ethernet port was 10Mbps. It took a
lot of care and feeding.
I think a Rasperry Pi Pico would have the same performace that that
little box had. :)
I’ve thought about setting up a local server at home, but mainly
as a local file server. I have a Dropbox Plus account that gives me
2TB of storage, but I’m not about to mirror that on all of my
machines. It would be nice to have it mirrored to a local file store
instead that had a driver that let you treat it as a local drive (as
if it was plugged into a USB port).
I think I have 8 computers attached to my LAN at home right now: 3
Mac Minis, a little Windows box that’s like a Mac Mini (N150 CPU),
two iPads, and a MacBook Pro. The LAN is running at 1GB.
My internet here is from Cox; it’s Fiber and it goes 1GB both up
and down, but only if you connect via ethernet; the WiFi is about
600 megs.
Cox won’t give me a static IP. Fiber to the home is a different
division than their Business group and they said they cannot run a
fiber line to the property for some reason. (It’s a big apartment
complex and I guess Cox Residential is their exclusive internet &
cable provider.)
So I’ve looked around to see what options I might have for setting
up a home file server that could also run a dynamic DNS for external
access. I’ve got a couple of RPi 4’s that I could use, or maybe
one of my Mac Minis.
The problem I ran into is that most of the info I found was for
hosting video streaming. Basic file hosting, like for mirroring
Dropbox, doesn’t seem to be of much interest. I could shut off
Dropbox if I had a decent file server, but there doesn’t seem to
be much demand for it. Maybe there is, but I haven’t found much
activity there.
Another area I found that might be of interest to you is showing
people how to set up a server that can host podcasts. Podcasting is
growing like crazy, and the size of the MP3 files is smaller than a
lot of HD photos, let alone videos.
I don’t know if there’s an open source Podcasting service that
does hosting, but it needs to have an RSS feed, which isn’t very
complicated. I think there’s a market for a simple Podcast hosting
device people could set up in their home that has a good set of
features on it. Personally, I’d like to see something like YouTube
but for audio podcasts. All of the big podcast platforms don’t
offer much. If you want comments and interactions between your
listeners, you need to set that up separately, whereas YT has all of
that built-in — which is probably why so many podcasts are hosted
there using a static page as the video. Just beware of the ads.
It’s kind of strange to me.
-David Schwartz
On Apr 20, 2025, at 1:11 PM, [email protected] wrote:
Thanks for your feedback David!!
Here is where I am coming from. I think there are 3 types of
people. System Admin, business folks, and hobbyists. I used to
have a friend who is a sys admin and a programmer. He does all his
own hosting. There is a person on the list that has referred to his
home lab a few times. I suspect most have some level of a home lab.
I was doing some research and found there is demand for learning
how to build and maintain a web server out of ones home/home
office/home lab.
My commercial advice is don't do it. Much cheaper to rent shared
hosting or a VPS. That is my advice to a business owners.
Having said that I was able to configure an old laptop as a web
server + Bind+Postfix+Dovecot+let's Encrypt... and possible some
other packages.
I did it to learn and in the end I liked the fact that I could do
so. As you know I am a PHP dev. I made mention at the time that I
had bragging rights. Was a big accomplishment for me. I assume
being able to build a full stack web server pushes me in the realm
of being a full-stack developer.
The motivation for this post was based on some research I
performed that showed there is a fair amount of interest in leaning
how to build and maintain a web server out of ones home/home
office/home lab.
I posted hoping for feedback on what others might know of the
demand.
I learned a lot the first go around and would like to learn more.
And as you know I have a YouTube channel and blog. I would like to
share my experience with others.
Keith
On 2025-04-19 21:47, David Schwartz via PLUG-discuss wrote:
I guess this all depends on if this is just a hobby for you or
something you want to make money from.
Here’s my opinion; it’s not exactly what you’re wanting to
hear, but it’s a legitimate option… I may have mentioned it
before.
Take a look at Latenode. It’s an automation service,
functionally similar to Zapier, Make, Pabbly, and others, but I
think its a lot more affordable.
Most web apps these days require logic to be hidden in a back-end
service to keep people from accessing your keys. As a result, the
majority of things the back-ends do is forwarding requests on to
other services, including DBs, AIs, and other things.
I really do not want to deal with my own server ANYWHERE — at
home or anywhere else in the world, especially if I can build little
modular services accessible as webhooks on an automation platform.
The servers they run on are fast, scalable, and made for heavy-duty
use. (Mostly cloud-based, I’m guessing.)
I can’t speak to the security issues, but nothing I’m doing
is worse than keeping my backend “secret keys” out of reach from
the front-end users. (If you don’t, they end up in your browser in
clear-text and they can be scraped without much trouble.)
If you’re really that paranoid and worried about stuff that it
makes sense to become an expert on all of those server-side tools on
a server you keep hidden in your home or office, then knock yourself
out. I don’t care; I don’t want to care, or even keep up with
the changes they’re constantly undergoing. I want to be able to
quickly set up a proxy to sit between my front-end and some other
service that gets me what I want without having to manage anything
you mentioned.
If you need some custom programming, then Latenode allows you to
use javascript in their nodes. Pickaxe works with Python, and it can
even help you write the code.
(Pickaxe is an interesting 2-faced thing, part of which is an
app-builder and part of which is has some basic logic and it can
trigger webhooks to other back-end services, including automation
services. They only mention Zapier and Make, but their interface is
not specific to either one except in name only. It works fine with
Latenode, Pabbly, and others. I think something called Lemonade is
somewhat competitive with Pickaxe.)
I know, folks on this list are going to complain that these
services are not free except for trivial purposes to get familiar
with them. But I value my time far more and I don’t mind paying a
couple hundred bucks a month to have SEVERAL high-quality services
managed for me so I don’t have to deal with anything to keep them
running. I did that for a while on a Windows VPS (which I had to use
b/c the code I needed only targets Windows) and problems were
constantly coming up; unfortunately, the VPS host didn’t provide
an support.
I bought a small Windows box to run at home to replace the VPS,
but I decided I can do pretty much anything I need on Latenode. So
it’s just sitting there.
I learned how to admin Unix boxes back in the 80’s, and it has
always been one of my least favorite things to do. I’m very happy
to pay people the cost of one restaurant dinner per month to keep my
services working. But my goal is to use these services to make
money, at which point the costs are going to be minscule compared to
the potential revenues.
If it’s not a hobby, then you need to decide if you want to
work ON your business or IN your business. Running your own server
means it’s all on you. Outsourcing it lets you work ON your
business.
TBH, I’m getting away from programming and all of this admin
crap. It’s about frigging time we’re seeing things start to bury
this stuff behind walls that are being run by AI services. Dealing
with AI prompts and automation tools is the future, IMHO. Working
with stuff that’s still clearly recognizable today from what it
looked like in the 80’s is hardly “progress”. I’ve had
people ask me over time, “Why don’t you get certified to work on
Cisco hardware?” I used to write code for devices like that back
in the 80’s, and it looks like it HAS NOT CHANGED AT ALL, just
like talking to modems and Epson printer escape codes.
This is 2025; I’ve been there, done that, and AI is the future.
Prompts are actually structured a lot like imperative programming
code but they use normal language to explain things. Unfortunately,
if you don’t know the basics of imperative programming, you’re
going to miss a lot of details and mess up the structure. And if you
aren’t an SME in the domain you’re trying to get AI to do for
you, you’re screwed.
Just my thoughts.
-David Schwartz
On Apr 19, 2025, at 6:10 PM, Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi,
I did some research and it appears there is a lot of demand for
content that covers how to create a web server out of home/home
office/home lab.
I assume this means Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP + Bind9, Postfix,
Dovecot, some form of webmail, Let Encrypt, and possibly other
servers/software.
What does the list think on this subject?
Keith
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