I have a foldable Bluetooth keyboard that I sometimes use with an ssh app on my phone

Some of those services are pretty easy to set up, some might be more complicated. You’d have to look around for open source projects for those services and see if you can find ones you like. It will take more time to get it initially set up than to maintain, but expect to fix something that breaks every once in a while.

As for cost, probably like a few hundred to a thousand USD can get a reasonable computer for this. You don’t need a GPU, but want a decent CPU, plenty of RAM, and a LOT of storage. Look for companies auctioning off old servers.

Loosely I’d say expect this project to be a whole hobby.

As the result of a single misconfigured security setting on my Android, I was locked out of my Google Account on my phone AND all of my PCs.

Just a heads up on what you are getting yourself into, if you fuck up your self hosted setup badly enough there is no recovery.

That isn’t necessarily intended to scare you off from self hosting, just that the first and most important lesson to learn is to have a good system of backups that are backed up automatically, are easy to recover from, and are separated enough from other copies of the data that if something goes terribly wrong one copy will survive.

I use rsync + ZFS for backups which includes historical backups

If the ISP doesn’t provide V6 though it’s time to switch ISPs.

cries in USA

I got a huge reduction in random login attempts when I changed my ssh port away from the default.

(Of course I also have actual security measures like log in by key only)

While selling data in general is shitty, I want to push back on the fear mongering a little bit.

This only applies to new accounts, can be opt-out of, and doesn’t apply to self-hosted content.

I tried jellyfin but it isn’t even close to as a good as plex

I was able to quiet mine with a bash script until eventually a software update changed the fan control to keep it quiet for me.

There are advantages to getting server-grade hardware. It’s designed to run 24/7, often supports more hard drives, ram sticks, processors, etc, and often is designed to make it very quick to replace things when they break.

You can find used servers on sites like EBay for reasonable prices. They typically come from businesses selling their old hardware after an upgrade.

However, for simple home use cases, an old regular desktop PC will be just fine. Run it until it breaks!

The multiple power supplies are for redundancy. It will work with one plugged in but you are “supposed” to plug in both.

It’s fundamentally not that different from a consumer desktop. Plug in a monitor and a keyboard and a USB with your preferred flavor of headless Linux installer on it. Configure ssh as the first thing you do because you won’t want to plug the monitor and keyboard into it every time you need to tweak something.

You can probably find VGA to HDMI adapters if you can’t find a monitor with VGA support.

TBF 0C and 0F are kinda arbitrary values.

Wire guard is pretty easy to set up. Also Docker is great.

I only let things I trust are secure (e.g. ssh) have access from the internet, other services I hide behind a VPN (e.g. Tailscale).

Most routers have a feature to assign static IPs to a specific MAC address. You can also tell most devices to try to take a specific IP instead of using DHCP.

There are multiple ways to set it up, but it’s very possible to set a specific device to always have the same local IP, which is usually the first step to many self-hosting scenarios.

Neat!

Any chance you could share some resources on how you did it? I’d kinda like to give it a try…

she has to twitch the jack in the adapter for the thing to work

This is the downfall of all headphone jacks tbh

I have a similar project called PiKVM. I can remotely turn on my computer from a full shutdown, navigate the BIOS to select an OS, and log in, after which I typically switch to a software-based Remote Desktop which is more performant. But you can’t power on a computer and navigate a BIOS with a software solution.

Could I run larger LLMs with multiple GPUs? E.g. would 2x3090 be able to run the 48GB models? Would I need NVLink to make it work?