Owning Your Infrastructure

I have self-hosted a number of things so far , including photos, office, docker registry and chat applications for mine and my own use. This piece is a reflection on that journey, partly inspired by a recent incident where a user was banned from GitHub.

Celeste gets banned

I started self-hosting because I was bored and wanted to do hard things. Not just any hard thing but hard things that I understood ins and outs of. I kicked off with the usual simple applications, went of to projects I actually built and use and started getting dirty with writing programs for my own router - go figure. Be as it may, I have always been a tinkerer and labbing as well as my recent work with DevOps has given me the freedom to do so. What a glorious adventure.

Everything works other than my password manager. Why? Because we all know that if the server that manages your passwords goes down then the world is truly ending.

Indulge: You cannot claim rights to what you do not actually own. Or as FUTO put it: 'If you can’t review the source code, it’s not your software. If you can’t host the service yourself, it’s not really yours.'

While Celeste, tweet above, was rightly banned because of his spam pr (original title), it brings a number of things to question.

What does it mean for our convenient single signons? What happens , as with the case of Mark, if your Google account or any other SSO account is banned either temporarily or permanently? What happens to the ecosystems we so willingly give all our information to? For context, Mark's Google account was flagged when he took photos of his naked toddler for the doctor and Google mistakenly identified him as a criminal. He never recovered that account.

Thought:

What percentage of your life is dependent on your online account?

We place ourselves in bubbles of 'I cannot get banned' until it finally happens. One compromise to your online account , be it LinkedIn (as is so common these days), or any other and a cascading train of events follows.

Indulge:

Maybe some of your online accounts should be your backup instead of your primary source.

I will clone my most important work to my Gitea instance over the weekend and possibly hook it to Authentik. I leave this piece here, until our next conversation - UNRAID.

Reference notes

To sign off on owning, not renting, your software:

- PwediePie starts self-hosting to cut on subscriptions

- Our microphones and our privacy.

Originally published: Indulge

Owning Your Infrastructure

Comments

homelabbing

Keeping the Homelab Alive

More from this blog

One Bucket, Three Jobs

CI/CD for Licensed Software You Don't Host

Business-driven Development

Keeping the Homelab Alive

Command Palette

Comments

homelabbing

Keeping the Homelab Alive

More from this blog