[xyzzy123]

I had fun doing this until I had kids.

I have a rack with 10gbe, ups, kubernetes a zfs storage server, multiple vlans, 4 unifi APs & locally hosted controller and all sorts of self-hosted stuff.

My heart breaks slightly as I watch things slowly degrade and break down due to bit-rot and version creep, I now wish I had a synology, flat network and cloud everything possible.

There are days when the kids can't watch a particular movie and I find out it's because a particular kube component failed (after an hour of root-causing) because I haven't touched it in 2 years. I then have regrets about my life choices. Sometimes the rack starts beeping while I'm working and I realise the UPS batteries are due for replacement because it's been 4 years. I silence the alarm and get back to the production issue at work, knowing it'll beep at me again in 30 days. I'll still be too busy to fix it. It doesn't help that in Australia the ambient can get to 45 degrees C pushing disks and cpus to their limits.

Just sharing a different perspective...

[tharkun__]

Sounds like a bit of overkill too if you ask me. You can self-host most things that make sense to keep private without going all in on the fun stuff.

As in, k8s is cool to play with and understand and all but why would I bring that complexity to a simple home setup that can run on a single machine in a corner somewhere?

You don't have to go to a synology box and give up everything but there are simpler options without going "Cloud everything". Of course you will be giving up some features as well, the more you strip things down, but that can beneficial in and of itself if you ask me.

Personally I went from being the "Linux from scratch" guy to running Ubuntu LTS. Natural progression and the kids can watch any of their movies at any time they want. Keep the hard drives rotated, do an LTS to LTS upgrade every few years and that's about it. Heck I've been running the exact same Postfix, fetchmail and IMAP setup for probably 20 years now and I don't even remember what all the options I set do any longer. I also don't need to though. It's just rock solid. All the other fun stuff has passed me by and I don't care. Don't get me wrong, it's still fun to play with stuff and we do use k8s at work and it's great. But it's just complete overkill for home.

[8fingerlouie]

> I had fun doing this until I had kids.

As i keep telling people, self hosting is fun as long as your user count is 1. When it grows beyond that, you suddenly have a SLA.

I self hosted almost everything (e-mail is pointless from privay concerns), and when we had kids i moved to a dual Synology setup with a single proxmox server for running services. Fast forward some years and electricity suddenly costs about an arm and a leg, so i had to do "something".

I completely stopped self hosting anything "publicly" available. Everything moved to the cloud including most file storage, using Cryptomator for privacy where applicable.

The server got reduced to a small ARM device with the prime task of synchronizing our cloud content locally, and making backups of it, both remote and local. As a side bonus it also runs a Plex server off of a large USB hard drive. All redundancy has been removed, and my 10G network has been switched off, leaving only a single 16 port POE switch for Access Points and cameras.

The Synology boxes now only comes online a couple of times every week to take a snapshot of all shares, pull a copy from the ARM device, after which it powers down again.

In the process i reduced my network rack power consumption from just below 300W to 67W, and with electricity prices for the past year averaging around €0.6/kWh that means i save around 2050 kWh/year, which adds up to €1225/year, or just over €100/month.

Subtract from those savings the €25/month i pay for cloud services and i still come out ahead. On top of that i literally have zero maintenance now. My home network is only accessible from the outside through a VPN. The only critical part is backups, but i use healthchecks.io to alert me if those fail.

I still kept the network seggregation, so everything "IoT" is on it's separate VLAN, as well as the kids. The only major change was that the "adults" VLAN is now the management VLAN. I have no wired computers, so maintaining a management VLAN over WiFi was more trouble than i could be bothered with :)

Why are the kids on their own VLAN/WiFi ? Because kids wants to play games with their friends, something the normal Guest network does not support. Kids also brings all sorts of devices with new and exiting exploits/vira, and i didn't feel like doing the maintenance on that. So instead my kids have their very own VLAN with access to just printers, AirPlay devices and the Plex server.

[Terretta]

> As i keep telling people, self hosting is fun as long as your user count is 1. When it grows beyond that, you suddenly have a SLA.

This is the principle I.T. departments fail to grasp.

> Kids also brings all sorts of devices with new and exiting exploits/vira...

Curiosity: while vira is arguably less wrong, hackers of a certain age would have expected viri or virii, which are more wrong:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_form_of_words_ending_in...

From Tom Christiansen, of Perl fame:

http://www.ofb.net/~jlm/virus.html

// Meanwhile, in "Kids also brings" – I fully support what you did there!

[8fingerlouie]

> Meanwhile, in "Kids also brings" – I fully support what you did there!

It of course also helps that in 2023, literally all school work, for better or for worse, is done through the cloud. I wrote printers above, and yes, they do have access to the printers, but apart from our 3D Printers, the laser/inkjet printers have seen very little use.

Here the schools use Microsoft, which means assignments are done in Word/Excel, and handed in online either through a school portal, or shared from OneDrive.

I won't get into the privacy details, but we do have some fairly strict laws concerning kids and identity protection (a thing that recently got Google kicked out from the educational sector), so while not ideal it is probably not as bad as it sounds.

Apart from school work, their needs are mostly only local peer to peer networking for games, and/or internet access, and all can be accomplished by simply sticking them on a "less restricted" guest network, while at the same time making reasonably sure they're not wiping out the rest of the households computers :)

The firewall also runs a very small subset of IDS/IPS rules, mostly concerning malware/bot rules, and we use a NextDNS profile per subnet to filter out the worst.

> Curiosity: while vira is arguably less wrong, hackers of a certain age would have expected viri or virii

My bad, i used the latin plural form of virus, which is vira. In any case, my network setup should keep most vira, viruses or virii out :)

[grepfru_it]

I hosted email until my email to a college student was rejected with no way of contacting either him or the admins of his school. That was the straw on the camels back.

I still self host apps today but my hardware is old enough that it costs more in power and cooling than what I get out of it, and the roi on new hardware doesn’t justify the means

[8fingerlouie]

> and the roi on new hardware doesn’t justify the means

That was my takeaway as well, considering that a 4 bay synology uses more in electricity than purchasing the same storage in the cloud (up to a certain point, datahoarders need not apply).

On top of that i then need to purchase new hardware every 3-6 years if i want reasonable assurance that my data is still there, and doing the math on a 5 year TCO, i would end up paying around double what i pay now, and still have worse data integrity.

I haven't done the math on where the breakaway point is, but i have around 10TB of cloud storage (including backups), as well as DNS services, static web hosting, mail, and a few other curiosities, and i average €25/month on cloud services.

Comparing that to a 4 bay synology with 4x6TB WD Red drives, you end up with €1276 in hardware costs (current prices here). Over a 5 year period that's €21.2/month for the hardware alone. Assuming the Synology draws 10W, and each WD Red draws an average of 5W, that's 30W of power, totalling around 22 kWh/month, which at €0.6/kWh adds up to an additional €13/month.

So in total around €35/month to self host what i can host in the cloud (including backups!) for €25/month.

[Helmut10001]

This is of course very context dependent and no critique whatsoever. I also have kids and my self-hosting became ever more important since. No Youtube commercials or auto-continuation for kid-videos thanks to invidious, reduced costs due to a lot of cancelled software plans (because everything runs on my rust), I can care better for my parents, e.g. helping with technology, monitoring, burglars (my homelab sits at my parents house, remotely connected via IPSEC), data backup is solid and under my control (ZFS Rz2, & offsite backup with borgmatic & rsync), and most important I have reduced my life dependencies and lock-in effects to worldwide companies.

Maintenance is 1-2 hours a month: Proxmox, various Docker nested in unprivileged LXC, everything automated (cronjobs, Watchtower, Backups etc.). I also built a pretty big PV-plant to safe energy costs (30wkp). My main strategy was a "minimal" approach, going slowly, thinking carefully _what I really need_ and preferring robustness over new features or software. I usually take 1-2 months of review before deciding to install any new software, most often longer. I am against the "All in One" mentality (e.g. prefer custom bash scripts over third-party automation; or selectively install needed parts instead of the all-in-one alternatives, e.g. nextcloud/all-in-one).

[stonewall]

Your perspective resonates with me! I have 3 kids under 6 years old, and I can definitely see this easily creeping up in my future.

My family situation is partly why I just went with plain old VMs and a Linux Distro with a 10 year support cycle. Its easy to keep all the moving parts in my head, and I figure I can mostly coast for 10 years and then reevaluate.

Thanks for reminding me, I also need to replace my UPS battery...

[hinkley]

For procrastination you have to set yourself up for success.

For instance, what if the alarm sent you the product page for the model of battery you need? You order them, silence the alarm, and when they show up you’re reminded you need to change them. Or if that’s a bad time, when the alarm goes off again.

I think we’ve only begun to work out how alarms are the wrong solution to the problem and what we need are prompts.

[ihateolives]

Do you have kids? It doesn't work that way. It will never be urgent enough to waste time even for setting up the alarm or prompt. People vastly overestimate free time when you have kids. They somehow manage to eat up every single minute.

[thr717272]

As a dad with more kids than the average around here I feel you.

For me it has improved slightly lately:

I have recently started giving my kids bonus allowance if they let me work the hours I need.

And lately I have also played more card games and board games with them in the evenings.

That said, I am up at around 0400 to start the day and I have already spent 15 minutes on HN so I need to leave now :-)

[thr717272]

Follow up: it helps that they all sleep through the night now and that the pandemic is over so they are at school or kindergarten during core hours at work.

[doubled112]

A couple of them. They're 5 and 8.

When they were younger, they slept (sometimes) and I didn't. I've never slept much, so I didn't feel like I was missing out on too much.

Last spring I noticed I could finally do things in the daytime again, too. Which is great, I really missed guitar. Suddenly they're interested in what I'm doing too.

Haven't talked either into updating my VM fleet for me, but maybe some day.

I treat my "alerts" as more of a suggested to do list. The things I'm self-hosting are important to us (we all use them), but not critical. Life will go on until I get to it.

I've also learned that "boring tech" is the way to go.

[hinkley]

Kids and a partner with health issues. My days are all chopped to hell. If there's a 5 hour window, everyone wants to put an event smack in the middle of it so I have an hour here and an hour there and any time I have 3 hours it's probably going to yard work. If it weren't for reminders or having tasks queued up things would be much, much worse.

It does get better in highschool, sometimes middle school. Once the idea of autonomy occurs to them they don't need or want you every fifteen minutes. Plus as another responder said, sometimes they want to see you doing things, and once in a while they want to help. Though it's cool when they do and then sad when they change their minds. There was a two week period where mixing compost was the most fun in the world and then they were no longer interested.

[BLKNSLVR]

Also in Aus - I've got a not-quite-as-complex setup, but I do have it all in a purpose-built room in the shed which is fitted out with an old box air-conditioner[0] with a thermostat power controller to keep the room below a certain temperature, which should help to extend the working life of "all the shit in there". Damn it's nice visiting the "cool room" in summer, there isn't enough floor space to sleep in there though.

Also have kids, and they can be demanding when stuff ain't working.

Also second guess my life choices, but then again I also still love playing around with this stuff, knowing that I can maintain the full stack.

[0]: Replacing that old air-con with a (far) more modern small split system could possibly have paid for itself by now in power savings. I think I should look into that.

[logifail]

> I watch things slowly degrade and break down due to bit-rot and version creep [..] > There are days when the kids can't watch a particular movie and I find out it's because a particular kube component failed (after an hour of root-causing) because I haven't touched it in 2 years. I then have regrets about my life choices. [..] > I now wish I had a synology, flat network and cloud everything possible

No snark intended, but this sounds as though you chose to include a lot of unnecessary complexity into your self-hosting, then discovered that there's almost always a cost to unnecessary complexity(?)

[aliasxneo]

You're not alone :) The only thing I have left at this point is a rather complex network, mostly because it's a pain to undo at this point. Plex went away last year and I just "license" all the kids stuff through Google play now...