What’s up, what’s down and what are you not sure about?
Let us know what you set up lately, what kind of problems you currently think about or are running into, what new device you added to your homelab or what interesting service or article you found.
I finally finished my first iteration of my Minilab including a very smooth migration from the old server yesterday so I can go to the service side of things again. I plan to get some kind of selfhosters VPN for external access to stuff that’s not exposed to the internet, I’ll have to investigate which one.
I know next to nothing about using the command line, so I’ve been relying pretty heavily on ChatGPT to set my stuff up and so far it has reliably helped me overcome every issue. The problem is, of course, that I often don’t even understand what the issue was in the first place so I don’t even know if the fix that the ai spits out is, let’s say, correct. I don’t really want to become an It expert, I just want to be able to host some services on my own to depend less on corps, is it alright if I continue to rely on the AI? Or do you guys think that I just have to learn this stuff or else I might mess up?
I don’t have great security concerns btw, my ISP doesn’t allow port forwarding, so I access my server exclusively though Tailscale.
I’ve had some amusing mixed experience with ChatGPT for this. When I asked about iptables rules to restrict podman, it was great. About podaman quadlets, though, which I first misspelled ‘quartlets’, it completely made it up, and even sent me a fake link to nonexistent documentation when I challenged it!
Try to understand whatever you use from AI. At least understanding the general picture of what it means, and a basic idea of “this flag is for this; this option is for that”. AI can also help you with that understanding, but again beware of it completely making up something logically coherent but wrong.
Yes this happened to me as well, I don’t remember what I was talking about but I remember I made a typo and it just ran with it as if it was a real thing. I let it keep going to see if it ever realized it was talking about something that didn’t exist but nope it kept going until I pointed it out.
I ask for it to explain what the command did and I did manage to wrap my head around a few concepts but in the end I feel like I’m trusting it to not insert any vulnerabilities into the system, and I don’t like that. Mistrust is the whole reason I’m doing this. But yeah I’ll pay close attention and maybe even ask all the implications of he changes we make.
I love Tailscale.
The more you learn with the command line the more interesting stuff you can do.
Most of the stuff will somewhat work, but you’ll introduce side effects sooner or later by using commands that might work but are not the proper ones and alter unrelated things. At some point those will likely bite you and you have no idea where it’s coming from. I’d suggest to check at least what the commands you are copying are doing.
I’d encourage learning. The more you understand the better you can control your data and maintain your services. You don’t need to be an expert but I’d encourage working towards relying less on gpt.
What you can probably do to build some knowledge if you’re going to be using AI anyway is ask it to explain some of the concepts to you. You also have the ability to ask clarifying questions about anything you don’t understand.
Yes I do that, and it does help me a lot to understand what I’m doing it’s just I’m a top down type of guy. Like I don’t like messing with anything unless I fully understand it, which often makes me very unproductive. I decided to not be that way with this self hosting thing because I realized I would never get around to it with that mentality. Better to break shit as I go.
Yeah, I’m the same way. I learned mostly through making Docker containers and bumbling through tutorials/documentation until things worked, just deleting them and starting over when I fucked up irreparably (except the compose file, of course).
There are a lot more comprehensive written and video tutorials than there used to be so those are very helpful too.