1y ago

anyone willing to walk a noob through getting some services running?

I've tried to figure some of this stuff out but I really don't know what I'm doing. Most documentation is written with a vocabulary I don't understand. Tutorials assume a high-level understanding of coding, software, CLI and a bunch of other stuff.

So far I've got an old gaming PC with a R7 2700x + 2060 Super and I think maybe it's overkill. I've got TrueNAS running on it but that's about as far as I got...

Thinking maybe we can have an open Jitsi meeting and just anyone who needs help can get it (myself included 🙂)?

Would anyone be interested in something like that?

E: some people have imagined up some things that I said so let me be clear about what I did not say:

At no time did I insist, beg, or demand that anyone help me.

I did NOT ask anyone to help with a specific issue, nor should I be required to.

I asked if anyone would be willing to help myself and possibly others to get some services running, and I asked to do it in a videoconference setting where we can have a discussion and where you can see what I'm doing as I'm doing it, out of respect for both of our time.

If you are not interested, you do not need to come in here and announce it, and you sure as shit do not need to speak for anyone else on whether they will want to. Just keep scrolling.

E2: special thanks to those who actually reached out and offered to help!

62 comments

You’re probably not going to find someone knowledgeable that’s willing to do open ended support like that, because we all know it turns into a huge time sink. But if you post specifics we can try to help.
The truth is self hosting also involves a lot of self learning. People will help you solve problems, but nobody has time to give free classes.
- When you run into something vocabulary wise you don't understand, Google is your friend just keep googling and reading to get the gist, Google any error messages too, I'm 43, I've been googling my whole life as a big fraud in IT, jk
  But seriously Google Google Google has all the answers and as you use it more you hone your search skills to the point where you just scroll past the crap and wham find things right away. The more you search and work with the stuff the better you'll get way more comfortable. Maybe try and find a local friend who's good with computers or search that can help you a bit
  I've helped many friends fix and troubleshoot stuff from time to time, but I'm not anyone's full time IT, I work on retainer.
  I don't know everything but every day I learn, even stuff I'll never have to use again.
  I do IT consulting Reiners.io , if you want paid help no problem, but it does turn into a huge free time sink, with no reward.
  Source: retired 15 year Linux systems engineer and sysadmin, turned consultant at https://reiners.io $60/hr minimum I charge clients much more, including my old boss, who's at $110/h but I bring my laptop to Hawaii for that guy, so he pays for access to me in 80 hr blocks.
  It is freaking expensive and few people will want to do it for free.
  
  Don't give up! There are a wealth of basic tutorials on Youtube. You just need to find one that works for you, and work up from there.
  The problem with someone setting everything up for you is, what do you do when something goes wrong? If you don't have an understanding of the basics, you're back to square one of just asking someone to fix it for you. And at that point you're not really self hosting, you're just a residential co-lo (datacenter) for your managed service provider (whoever is helping you) that's doing all the work!

Start by walking us through what you're trying to do, and where you've run into problems.
- We know. What you're asking for is the wrong to thing to ask for, here in these forums. Aint nobody got time for walking a strqnger through thw entire install process of five or eight different self hosting programs. My own personal process has taken several months and is still ongoing.
  
  Then why did you make this post?
  
  Wow I hope English isn't your first language.

Not to be a dick, but to explain why forming the question the way you did will not get you any assistance or responses for that matter.
https://dontasktoask.com
The truth is, not a single person here went to self-hosting school, we got to where we are because of our love for the craft. I hope this doesn’t discourage you from trying. The high you’ll get from finally solving that one error you’ve been trying to resolve for hours is one I love experiencing over and over again which is why I self-host.
- Your self righteous answer, is why Linux will never be a viable solution on the desktop. Or in this case why self hosting will never take off.
  
  Don't worry, the Microsoft support forums don't lack self righteous answers either. I won't talk about about desktop Linux because that has nothing to do with this thread and has a plethora of other issues as to why it won't take off but specifically self hosting won't take off because it never meant to. We will never get to a point in our lives where 100% (or hell, even 10%) of the population are proficient enough in how a computer works to self host their own software stack, and that is okay. If you self-host services make them available to your friends and family. Never thought that self-host was a movement of some sort where we're trying to convert people who rely on centralized products into self hosting gurus, guess that's a first for me.
  
  why linux will never be a viable solution on the desktop
  Has been pretty viable for me for the last 7 years or so.
  why self hosting will never take off
  Literally who cares, the community stands to gain nothing from another few million novice users who don't even know or care to learn how to formulate a question or usable bug report.
  
  Lol OK
- I didn't read the other comments, only the main post in which I do not see what you define as "detailed account of my situation". You said that you have an issue with some software (you did not even bother to specify which) and that you want people to hop on Jitsi to duke it out with you. Had it been me, I would've posted logs, posted what I'm trying to achieve and why I'm unable to do it so far or where I would appreciate additional explanation. You want people to help you but you do not make it any easy for them to do.
  But that's okay, stay arrogant and we'll see how far it gets you.
  
  I guess so. Your question was
  Would anyone be interested in something like that?
  Which most of us have answered with a clear "no". So I guess we're done here.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters

IP Internet Protocol
IoT Internet of Things for device controllers
NAS Network-Attached Storage
Plex Brand of media server package
SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access
[Thread #239 for this sub, first seen 24th Oct 2023, 19:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
- That's a bot lol

Fewer Letters	More Letters
IP	Internet Protocol
IoT	Internet of Things for device controllers
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
Plex	Brand of media server package
SSH	Secure Shell for remote terminal access

I asked if anyone would be willing to help myself and possibly others to get some services running, and I asked to do it in a videoconference setting where we can have a discussion and where you can see what I’m doing as I’m doing it, out of respect for both of our time.
Sure, I can do that. My rates start at $90/hr, 4hr minimum.
- You want to charge people to help you?

Since the other people don't seem too helpful to you, we can gladly setup a meeting and see where it goes :) I don't have exeprience in all these software like TrueNAS you're using but I have a lot of experience in a lot of other things, so I'm sure I'll be able to help!

Honestly, Switch to a basic Linux distro and use docker directly.
I ran TrueNAS for a while and it's just too complex and janky. I dropped back to void (for ZFS) and have a directory of compose files for radar/sonar, jellyfish, mediawiki, Lemmy etc.
- I'd suggest proxmox. Sinple web UI for management, but debian backend. Very powerful virtualization. Supports GPU passthrough, LVMs, ZFS, and a bunch of other stuff out of the box. If you get another machine, you can also put them into a cluster.

It's better if you struggle, you will learn more that way. For me, the struggle is the fun part anyway. Also, if you need these services to be bulletproof you probably shouldn't be self-hosting them.
- It seems like you have a learning preference for conversational information transfer. Maybe try finding a discord group where people regularly talk about this kind of thing. People on Internet forums tend to prefer written documentation and value search engine prowess.

It's not that hard. Go to awesome-selfhosted to have a look at what you'd like to host. Then, go to YouTube and find videos that host said thing. If you don't find the specific application, watch simpler tutorials deploying containers (most people will use Docker if you'd like) and go from there. Read some documentation on the container runtime and maybe some networking. That's it.
- I suppose it feels like an info dump when you're coming from zero. This community shares a love for hosting and orchestration and it takes a second to get out of that hole. My apologies.
  In my opinion, DBTech has some of the easiest tutorials on this subject. Just search for how to set up Docker on YouTube by DBTech. TBH I'd always recommend reading the documentation, Docker devs tell you how to install Docker and he basically follows that. Should be doable if you have a distribution set up. The documentation covers most use cases whilst he just installs on his distribution in the video, but the process should be similar if not the same.
  Good luck!

Yeah at this point I’m ready to pay someone for help. I wasn’t expecting setting up a mastodon or piped instance in docker to be so hard.
- How much?
  
  Lol

In truenas go to apps, pick one, and click install.
Also, you may want to add truecharts repository (assuming you're using truenas scale)
https://truecharts.org/manual/SCALE/guides/getting-started/#adding-truecharts
- Guess what all of that is on the getting started page for truenas. Instead of reading that you made a post here.
  Why?

- TrueNAS is good but has a steepish learning curve for many people, it's way more oriented towards being a NAS than running services, which can be confusing overkill (only using ZFS for example).
  I recently discovered CasaOS which is now my go-to recommendation for people starting off. It is a good combo of "just works" with the ability to tweak for those who are interested in diving deeper.
- Proxmox as a host for a VM running Docker is the way to go. You can snapshot and restore things when you mess up, and you can install Proxmox Backup Server alongside to take point in time backups that you can restore to a new VM if you have to. I probably have a couple dozen inactive VMs of various learning projects that I can fire up and play with as the mood takes me.

If you need something running fast and easy buy a synology nas. Not the best hardware and expensive geat if youi dont have the time to mess around with stuf like unraid etc. There a lots of great guides on setting op docker containers on that. https://drfrankenstein.co.uk/ is a geat example of easy to follow guides.

I'm happy to help if anyone needs help with docker and/or Linux stuff. (I'll probably try to convert you to Linux, the os to rule them all. You've been warned) Wont necessarily be everything or set it all up for you, but enough knowledge to get you started and able to learn more yourself is doable
For op, that setup is likely overkill, most stuff will use more ram than cpu and very few self hosted apps will use the GPU at all (Plex and jellyfin are the only ones that come to mind). Only hurt to it being overkill is a higher power usage than a smaller setup, but if you already have it running full time then it's unlikely to make a different
- In terms of electricity consumption, it's still not going to be huge, just was noted in case you wanted to go smaller. You can almost certainly go smaller, but at the same time if you already have the hardware it's not going to be useful to sell it second hand and buy new hardware that has less performance.
  Hosting static websites at home is fine if you really want to, but for anything dynamic and/or that will have a lot of users, get a vps (basically a server that you pay for storage and compute resources on and can use remotely how you like, including hosting stuff like mastodon and lemmy instances)

If you are successful in this, perhaps a twitch channel walking through the basics running on a regular ish basis
- I was imagining a "I just wiped my hard drive and flashed the current version of Debian. Let's get basic services up."
  I wish there was a "hey watch me code/self host" channel that helped noobs see how to approach the problem of starting. Usually their is a "hey watch me code" YouTube that is old enough to have a critical breaking point (some library updated) so a noob finds it impossible.

You don't need to use the cert, but I've got a basic setup here that you could get running in docker, then play around with understanding it / adding to it:
https://homelab.express
- A quick docker setup to get you going with a reverse proxy (Traefik) and insights/management (Portainer).

What services are you looking at? TrueNAS can be good for some situations but isn't always the best it terms of flexablity. It really depends on what you are trying to host
- In that case I would either go with proxmox, debian or Ubuntu server with docker.
  If you are wanting to do virtualization then go for proxmox but if you want to just run the services as containers I would just use Ubuntu or Debian. Once you have Ubuntu or Debian installed I would look into how to write docker compose files. There are plenty on the internet and they make setup very straight forward. If you want a web interface you can install cockpit.
  Sorry to be a bringer of bad news but I believe your truenas install is going to be the limiting factor.

No joke, I learned a ton this summer just by asking AI how to do stuff.
- My go-to is perplexity.ai. I found it better than ChatGPT on the web as it uses api calls which are found to me “smarter”. And it also actively searches the web before producing and answer. Worth paying for it honestly. Oh and you also have the option to choose what model to use as it has acces to both Claude and ChatGPT.

62 comments