What hobby seems boring to most people but is actually fascinating if you dive into it?
What hobby seems boring to most people but is actually fascinating if you dive into it?
Tell us why we should unexpectedly come to love your hobby.
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Self Hosting. I love optimizing my securing my life while improving my family's privacy. Nextcloud to store and backup media, contacts, and knowledge base. Hosting a free remote VPN on OCI, remote encrypted backups to a fellow enthusiast's server...I love that while my data is local, if my house was to burn down, the years of pictures and precious memories will still be available. I also like being able to use this tech to help people close to me, doing backups for them, sharing ISO's, etc.
Yes! It's a hobby that can go as deep as you want it to.
Though it doesn't produce physical outputs like many others :/
Once you start getting deeper into computational and stored requirements the costs really start to shoot up. Networking, device management, storage management, power usage, heat & noise, orchestration...etc
I hear that! Admittedly, I've gotten grumpy at myself a few times for "not being able to make something practical," but I'm reminded when my wife thanks me occasionally for our home server setup (she loves Nextcloud), that it is practical and we use it all the time.
I've got my Wireguard I'm hosting on OCI (they give you 2 free VM instances), and looking to use the second instance to host SearXNG, then have Azure AD for free Active Directory, Home Assistant & Mycroft on Pi's, and otherwise, hosting local VM's via Proxmox on some older servers. I haven't gone too hard into clustering or orchestration yet, though I'm looking to replace most of those VM's with Docker instances at some point here, reduce compute reservations. Most of my power reduction has been through logical means, not yet through hardware, the costs involved keep me from leaping too hard quite yet. (Hard to drop big money on servers when rent is over half of my income) But I'll get there! I love seeing how much I can do with very little, so it at least scratches that part of the brain in the meantime :)
Where do you host your nextcloud?
I host it on my own server at home :) Low latency and secure. Partially because I don't trust myself to keep things secure, so the less I can have things publicly accessible, the better I feel