You get a domain name, and use an A record to point it towards your server’s public IP address.

You tell nginx to forward requests to a given domain. For instance, you could tell nginx to forward requests to foo.bar.com to 127.0.0.1:1337. To do this:

http {
    server {
        server_name foo.bar.com;
        listen 80;
        
        location / {
            proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:1337$request_uri;
        }
    }
}

Note that this is a very basic setup that doesn’t have HTTPS or anything. If you want an SSL certificate, look into Let’s Encrypt and Certbot.

Also, the service you’re hosting (which I’m not familiar with) may have an example reverse proxy config you should use as a starting point if it exists.

Been self hosting email for a good while now and it’s been largely painless. My emails are not getting marked spam either. Although my only outgoing mails are to FOSS mailing lists and occasionally to individuals, not for anything business related.

I would say that if self hosting email sounds like something you’d be interested in, then it probably is worthwhile for you. I like being able to configure my mail server exactly the way I want it, and I have some server side scripts I wrote for server side mail processing, which is useful as I have several different mail clients so it makes sense to do processing on the server rather than trying to configure it on my many clients. It definitely falls into the “poweruser” category of activities but I’ve had fun and I enjoy my digital sovereignty.

Do you have an old laptop somewhere? You shouldn’t need a new machine for a home lab if you’re just hosting services. Most of my self hosted services are on a fairly lightweight VPS.

And yeah, I’d second the commenter suggesting you look for a second hand computer somewhere instead of buying HP.

Why ZFS?

I think in general people start out in VMs and advance to containers. If you are already using containers stick with it, otherwise you are taking a step back.

Interesting perspective—I had thought that running an entire VM would be more difficult, but I’ve never used virtualisation for server stuff, only ever used VMs with a GUI VM manager on my personal computer. Thanks for the input.

I think you should open a Forgejo issue requesting a cache size limit option. It seems like quite a big problem if bots can fill up your hard drive like this without you setting a limit on all data used by Forgejo (when, for single-user instances, you probably only want to limit archive size or size of any data the public can create, not the size of your own repos)

Codeberg Pages. Neocities.

You’ve not made it clear what exactly it is you want. Nextcloud or syncthing are good for syncing personal files. If you want to make server backups, they’re not gonna be the way.

If you want to automate backups, you could just use a cronjob to make a tarball and rsync it?

I see, that’s interesting. Well glad that it’s not hard to switch away from systemd on Debian for those who want it—although I still think if you don’t want systemd you should just pick another distro, given that the Debian installer doesn’t let you pick another init.

On Debian you can use both sysvinit and openrc

Huh really? Then why does Devuan exist? (I don’t use Debian for context)

I use Alpine for servers because I like its simplicity. Not in terms of computational power requirements, just in terms of user experience.

Alpine is an interesting choice for hosting

I’d say servers are one of the main uses of Alpine, second to containers. It would be a much more unusual choice for a desktop OS.

Alpine already uses OpenRC. There’s no option to use systemd with Alpine.

Popular alternatives include runit (which Void uses), OpenRC (Gentoo and Alpine), s6, sysVinit, dinit. The suckless people have also written some suckless inits—I think one of them’s called sinit.

So what are the alternatives that work with both Alpine and Debian?

None. On Alpine you can only use OpenRC and on Debian you can only use systemd. Most distros don’t let you change out the init system. If you want systemdless Debian look into Devuan.

Judging from this post, I would say you should not be looking to change out your init system as, no disrespect intended, but you really don’t seem to know what you’re talking about. You don’t even know what init systems your operating systems (Alpine and Debian) are using, let alone the details of different init systems.

Some people have strong opinions about init systems. They are nerds with reasons behind those opinions. You don’t seem to have many reasons and you don’t seem to be particularly invested in the debate. I would say it’s not worth your time to change operating system (which is what you would need to do to change your init) just because you heard vaguely that systemd is bad. If you reach a point where init system matters to you, then you won’t need to be asking the questions you’re asking in the OP.

I think you’re still avoiding the point:

I will never wait for any individual or group to give me the go ahead to do what I think is the right thing. BDS isn’t perfect.

The point isn’t that you have to follow the BNC specifically. The point is that announcing you’re not using any software hosted on GH, on a small social media platform, is far from organising a boycott. If you are serious about organising a boycott, that is what you do in the movement, with the masses. As it currently stands, you are simply making a personal consumer decision.

Personally, I don’t think it’ll be possible for this to become a mass boycott (which it needs to in order to have effect), just because you’re going to struggle to explain to everyone what GitHub even is let alone how to boycott any software that’s hosted on it. That’s why the demand to boycott GitHub ie not host your own software on there is far easier; that only applies to people who make software, who do know what GitHub is and understand how to not use it. If you don’t know what GitHub is then you’re already boycotting it. Meanwhile, your version of the boycott requires teaching people what git is, what a git repo is, and what a git forge is, and then giving them a very long list of software that they need to boycott in order to join you. For the reasons that BDS explains in terms of their tactic of targeted boycotts, that’s not going to work, because in practice very few people will boycott the full list of software and everyone will boycott a few GitHub repos and those repos will be different for each person.

At the end of the day, boycotting is a political strategy to force change through. It’s not about showing how moral you are. If you can’t get a critical mass of people with you, your consumer decision is as impactful as your decision of what shirt to wear today.

I will drop as many projects as I can. Media players, web browsers, mail clients, social platforms - can all be changed for more ethical alternatives. It doesn’t have to be black or white.

That’s still avoiding the real problem of defining strict boundaries for your boycott. It is still entirely unclear to me how I could join you even if I wanted to. What are you proposing we boycott? I adhere to BDS, who have given pretty unambiguous guidelines on how to boycott. Even their Microsoft boycott accounts for “do as much as you can”; they acknowledge that some people will be forced to use MS products, and encourage people to move away from them unless they have no choice. That’s understandable enough and the average person knows exactly how to join that boycott if they want to.

Like I said, if you’re serious about this, you need to go somewhere other than Lemmy. And if you’re not serious about this, then stop pretending you’re making a political decision, and accept that you are just making a personal consumer preference.

No, I’m not arguing that we should be users of Microsoft. You’re still not understanding what I’m saying. I don’t use Microsoft’s services, including their free ones. Software that happens to be hosted on GitHub is not Microsoft’s software.

You can do whatever you want as an individual. But as a political actor, you should be participating in organised boycotts, such as BDS’s boycott of Microsoft. BDS’s boycott is already fairly wide-sweeping, going as far as to ask people to e.g. stop playing Minecraft and Skyrim, even if they already own the game. Avoiding using Microsoft’s products like this is effective because, even if you’ve already bought the game, you lend Microsoft more cultural capital by proliferating their products.

BDS has not, on the other hand, called for a boycott of all software that happens to have a GitHub repo. If you think they should do that, take it up with BDS. If BDS called for such a boycott, it would get much more momentum behind it.

As it currently stands, you are boycotting all software that has a GitHub repo on your own. This is not going to have any effect. You are going to be hard-pressed to get people to join your boycott. What kernel do you use? The Linux kernel has a GitHub mirror. The majority of FOSS projects where collaboration occurs off of GitHub still have a read-only GitHub mirror. Is your boycott suggesting that everybody should be using OpenBSD? That’s going to be a very hard sell.

BDS has achieved huge victories because it offers targeted boycotts that the average consumer is perfectly capable of doing, and it has a mass movement behind it. There are also grassroots boycotts that have been organised outside of BDS, such as the Starbucks and McDonald’s boycotts, but again, these caught on because they had the backing of people active in the movement and were willing to organise said boycotts. You’re a random Lemmy user who, if you are serious about organising a boycott, you’re in the entirely wrong place to do so. You won’t achieve anything doing what you’re currently doing.

You’re welcome to make whatever consumer decisions you want, but don’t confuse that for political organising.

I’m also opposed to “using [Microsoft’s] free stuff”; I’m arguing that using software that happens to use GH isn’t using MS’s stuff at all.

I don’t see a reason to avoid using software hosted on GH. I moved off GH when MS bought it, and all that entailed was no longer hosting my own software on GH, and using alternative FOSS git forges. That still has a similar effect, and when a critical mass of devs move off GH, the rest will follow suit. The main draw of GH is that everything’s on there; when that’s no longer true, it will no longer be the main git forge. Especially once Forgejo adds ActivityPub integration; I imagine that’ll speed the process along a lot.

A lone user boycotting all software hosted on GH is realistically not going to make any devs move their projects off GH. You may say that it doesn’t have to be a lone user, but I think you’ll be hard pressed to get a whole movement of people refusing to use any software hosted on GH.

I also think the boundaries of your boycott are just too ambiguous. What if you download the software from somewhere other than GH, and it just has a GH repo? Is that ok with you? Is it that you just don’t want to touch MS’s servers? What about software where the GH repo is just a read-only mirror, and the main collaboration/development happens elsewhere, like a GitLab or Forgejo instance? I would rather struggle to see an argument for refusing to use software in either of those cases.

In that case, wireguard. I only occasionally need to access a service that’s not exposed to the internet, so I use ssh -L, but that would be quite inconvenient for your own use case.

I know tailscale exists but I’ve never used it, only tried wireguard on its own. Maybe there’s some huge benefit to using it but wireguard worked fine for me.