Hi,

for unknown reasons, today I woke up with a lot of motivation to self host a bunch of services. And I know I have a lot to study and I need to prepare for the exams, but I thought I could install some things while studying (which did not work, but I at least I studied afterwards).

Every time I think about self hosting, the first thing that comes to my mind is the fact that I cannot do It right now: first I cannot do port forwarding since I can't control the router of my dormitory, secondly the router uses the university's network which blocks a lot of traffic. This means that I cannot just open some port and access It on another machine, even if I am on the same network. Alternatively I could use a VPN, but It would probably cost a few bucks and I cannot afford to have any more expenses now, especially for recreational (and frankly useless) projects like this. This morning I searched the web for free VPNs and I found tailscale which lets me connect up to 100 devices on the same network with the free plan. I am not affiliated to them in any way but I have to say that the service is amazing and It works beautifully, kudos to them.

Now that I can connect to my other computers remotely, I can have some fun. The computer I wanted to use as a server is my old desktop: It has an i5-6600K, 16GB DDR4, NVIDIA 1060 3G, 1TB M.2 SSD and 10 years of experience in the trenches. This was my first (and only) desktop computer I got when I was 12. I grew up with It, I played hundreds of games, spent days and nights on discord and It is still working nicely. It has installed Fedora 42 on the M.2 and Linux From Scratch on another SSD. So I booted up fedora, connected the network and ssh into it from my laptop. Time to have fun.

Since my laptop is not really powerful, the first thing I did was installing ollama to play with some models. In particular, I installed llama3.2:3B and qwen2.5:3B (7B is already too slow, and more that this does not work at all). The difference in quality from last year's models is really incredible: 3B parameters were basically useless a few months ago and now they are good enough to use daily on my 10 year old computer, truly amazing. After installing the model, I wanted some kind of frontend to use and I downloaded Open WebUI. Installing It felt dystopic, It downloaded literally thousands of dependencies! Then, after downloading half of the pip repository, you can run the program just to download a few other hundreds of dependencies. All of this for a website with a text field that sends the text to an api, disgusting. But after all the application (to my surprise) managed to run and It was working flawlessly. It is probably the most feature rich LLM frontend out there, I have to say, but It is also quite bloated. Still, I don't feel comfortable running an application that depends on billions of lines of python and javascript code so I will seek something else.

Another thing I installed is a minecraft server. I haven't played minecraft in a while (at least a few years) and I know they added so many things, playing It now would be like rediscovering everything from scratch. But for for today I have plenty to do so I just installed the server, joined to make sure It worked and moved on.

I then wanted some kind of filemanager, but my experience was even worse than with Open WebUI. Most of the things I found online were completely bloated and difficult to install. Some of them didn't work because of various dependencies issues which I did not dare to debug. Fortunately, there is some good and I found Tiny File Manager which is a single php file that implements the entire web app. I think many project should take this as an example: you get a full file manager just by creating a php server and accessing that file. Easy.

I also wanted to install cgit as a frontend to access all my repositories. It took some time and struggles, I first tried to make It work with nginx but apparently It does not natively support CGI and I found issues in making the communication to the socket so I switched to apache and It worked well. I had some other issues with file permissions which I sort of solved, wonderful.

Going forward, I want to upgrade my system and have a NAS and a rack, when I will have an economical possibility. I would also like to use my setup as a node to host some community services such as a mastodon node or contribute to a research project like the CENR's @home projects.

I am also taking some time to reflect on the importance of self hosting and being independent from big predatory corporations. We are all so dependent on them and this makes us vulnerable and makes them money, If I can be a little more independent I will also be a little happier.

– Giovanni

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