hckrnws

I met a guy a while ago who's passion was enabling self-hosting. His vision was to use an old android phone as a server--he ended up building a domain registrar[1] to facilitate OAuth-style flows for configuring DNS and an ngrok-style proxy[2] service that could configure DNS through said flow.

[1]: https://takingnames.io/ [2]: https://boringproxy.io/

who's can also mean who has, which is where you've probably seen it used in ways that imply a possessive, but normally means who is, as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45257167 indicated

Whose! Who's means who is

Unrelated to the article, but a creative Canadian flag used the title to spell words out. They slowly circled characters in the title. I thought I was deciphering a cool message… but it was just "whore"

The internet in its purest form. I grepped for all words containing the substring whore in the hopes of coming up with some witty explanation and shame you in assuming the worst from our Canadian bretheren. To my great chagrin they all refer to, well, whores.

Yep, my website (very WIP) is hosted on an RPi 5 in the corner of my apartment, and every once in a while my IP changes and I have to update DNS and tell my friends to connect to the minecraft server by IP. I'm probably around 98% uptime, so github levels of assurance.

Spend 20 minutes setting up DuckDNS and you'll never have to worry about this again.

https://www.duckdns.org

I solved this with a corn tab that runs a script that checks my ip and updates my cloudflare dns if it changes. https://github.com/pastorhudson/cloudflare_dns_updater

> with a corn tab that

A corn tab you say? I'm all ears!

Why not use DDNS?

Alternatively your domain provider likely has some API for you to programmatically update the DNS records.

Home internet is so fast now and hardware is so cheap and powerful its a good solution. It amazes me how expensive aws compared to having your own hardware.

Home internet is only fast downstream.

Upstream is usually awful.

(At least in the USA.)

I have a small cluster I use to run my personal server/nvr/etc on. Instead of Raspberry Pi, I just bought some small mini pcs, which are amazingly powerful and cheap for their size. I have them stashed in a few random places around the house near my switches. Works great!

(2022) Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33165836

Dear Mr. Architect, I've noticed you make this historical link effort frequently, so I hope it's okay to express my appreciation, and gently request you include a little more detail about what is behind it (age + comment count). Otherwise it's hard to know if a link is worth clicking or not.

This one was: Oct 2022 - 440 comments.

And to avoid technicalities, make it big enough so you can see and use it.

This is one of the things that has me so hesitant towards upgrading my "server". I've been using an old Thinkpad for a while now and it has served me well, but lately I've been using it for more intensive things (like JetBrains remote development and a Jellyfin server). It's become a regular occurrence that, while I'm trying to sleep, its fans spin up and sound like it's trying to take off because someone downstairs is watching a movie from it. I don't begrudge them for it since I set it up for that exact purpose, but it can make it difficult to sleep soundly.

The most obvious solution would be make a small PC: more powerful and bigger fans means less noise. I've been considering something like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr5MjhgPz_c)... but then how am I supposed to use it? Yes, I can ssh into it, but what if it fails to start? Just last month my Thinkpad server failed to restart properly. This was a trivial fix but it being a laptop whose lid I can just open and use immediately made it an extremely easy fix, which would not be true for a PC.

Thing is, I know that dumb terminals exist, ie, a screen, keyboard, and trackpad that takes the form-factor of a laptop but has no actual internals, it's just a convenient interface when plugged into a server. I've seen them. I've tried searching for them but there doesn't seem to be an agreed-upon search category, and the ones I manage to find are more expensive than the PC itself and are usually designed as a server-rack drawer.

Genuinely, what do people do here? Do they just have their server setup somewhere like a desktop? Or are people keeping spare monitors, keyboards, and mice around that they then need to unpack, plug in, and use awkwardly before putting it all away again?

My server sits next to my existing desktop, and I just move the keyboard cable from one to the other when I need to get at a local interface on the server. One of my monitors has two inputs, and so is always plugged into both, I can just change the input selected. Not the "cleanest" solution, but it works when I need to get at it, and the space it's in wasn't being used by anything else.

I have a keyboard and monitor somewhere in a closet. That's also what we do at work with our "real" servers.

I'd say it's needed about once a year at most though. Servers don't just fail to start, normally.

PiKVM

or really any cheap IP based KVM is what you’re looking for

How to Create a Cache Server?

https://cyfuture.cloud/kb/howto/how-to-create-a-cache-server

I enjoyed this article very much. It used 99% of my CPU though.

I used to run a Web server (and email server) like this. The novelty wore off, and I currently structure it for static hosting via AWS S3 + CloudFront.

(No matter how personal a Web site, the occasional prospective employer will go look at it. If you're a techbro, you normally don't want this site sometimes acting like it's running on a potato and wet string. Even if you still keep your 2002 visual design, ahem.)

If that's not a concern, you can run a nonessential Web server from home, and it's fun and concrete, like the author suggests. You might want to forward/proxy the traffic through some external cloud server (even if you don't use CDN/caching features), to shield your home pipe a bit.

Claude-Code has turbo charged my (basement) RPi4 development.

Same here! This is an underrated use of LLMs - actually being able to finish weird side projects.