Ieris19

joined 11 months ago
 

I know I probably fucked something up, but still want some advice.

I have two houses, halfway across the world from each other. Whenever I am on holidays in my second home, I would like to still access my home network and vice versa. I have a Tailscale VPN setup for this and I regularly SSH into my server from other devices to configure it, rather than use the physical device. I tend to only access it whenever I need to turn it on or off.

TIFU by trying to reboot it. I was configuring some network stuff for my brand-new project with installing PiHole, and after debugging a little issue, having changed many configurations and being unsure about how to restart everything needed for the configs to take effect, the answer that I was following suggested rebooting to sort all issues in one go. Having tried `sudo reboot` on my local VM earlier today, I thought it couldn't hurt, ran the command on my remote, and it hasn't come back online yet.

It should be automatically connecting to tailscale on startup, it has worked like that in the past, but it hasn't this time. It has been an hour since tailscale last connected with the device.

What did I do wrong, and how do y'all handle rebooting your bare metal when you don't have access to the physical server atm?

 

I know I probably fucked something up, but still want some advice.

I have two houses, halfway across the world from each other. Whenever I am on holidays in my second home, I would like to still access my home network and vice versa. I have a Tailscale VPN setup for this and I regularly SSH into my server from other devices to configure it, rather than use the physical device. I tend to only access it whenever I need to turn it on or off.

TIFU by trying to reboot it. I was configuring some network stuff for my brand-new project with installing PiHole, and after debugging a little issue, having changed many configurations and being unsure about how to restart everything needed for the configs to take effect, the answer that I was following suggested rebooting to sort all issues in one go. Having tried `sudo reboot` on my local VM earlier today, I thought it couldn't hurt, ran the command on my remote, and it hasn't come back online yet.

It should be automatically connecting to tailscale on startup, it has worked like that in the past, but it hasn't this time. It has been an hour since tailscale last connected with the device.

What did I do wrong, and how do y'all handle rebooting your bare metal when you don't have access to the physical server atm?

[–] Ieris19@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago
[–] Ieris19@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That’s basically the problem, yet almost everywhere people make these look so essential and necessary

[–] Ieris19@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

I’m not interested in Plex/Jellyfin or any other media service that this sub seems to be obsessed with.

I mostly deploy my own applications so I don’t get shortcuts and need to work most of the tools directly. That’s perhaps some of my frustration

[–] Ieris19@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

I’ve always struggled to find good books. And as a broke student in college, the ones I find are either too expensive or unavailable in my region.

It’s also highly illegal and actually prosecuted to do piracy where I live, so I don’t want to do that…

[–] Ieris19@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Except using a VPS defeats the purpose of trying to learn how to deploy my own apps…

[–] Ieris19@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don’t have a need but I do have a goal for the things I want to setup.

I got downvoted to oblivion for saying I didn’t even find what kind of software I could use to make an internal authoritative DNS service for example, where I want to create a custom internal TLD for my VPN.

But apparently people took offense I’d never heard of bind and assumed PiHole was proprietary…

[–] Ieris19@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Putting a server in front of my own defeats the whole purpose of self-hosting for me.

I didn’t say CloudFlare “bullshit” so aggressively for no reason.

I want to learn, because I feel like I should know how to deploy stuff and my uni is not teaching me.

[–] Ieris19@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

That doesn’t even scratch the surface with the issues I face…

[–] Ieris19@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Quite the contrary, I’m stuck at finding a reverse proxy in the first place. If I didn’t know nginx had a reverse proxy, which is the only one I know about, where would I even start finding the docs? I can’t repeat this enough, but I rarely ever do tutorials, I find them basic and lackluster

I don’t think I need specifically a reverse proxy rn so I don’t really have a clue about that kind of service specifically, but even finding WHAT to use to do an authoritative DNS was a challenge in its own right that I only solved somewhere else in this thread.

[–] Ieris19@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

I wanna preface this making something clear, I have probably never managed to follow a tutorial. I usually have an idea and try to run it. What I’m getting stuck at is precisely at the “what are my options”

I did say that I understand why docs expect you to be familiar with knowledge, I’m even complaining that I don’t need to read what something is a million times and sometimes I just need to get a solution to my problem.

My biggest issue here is lack of experience, but after two years in an IT education, I know some basics. I am familiar with countless topics and have a general idea of how things work in theory, but getting these ideas into a setup is what’s hard. Uni doesn’t help at all with this.

I think my problem is quite honestly the opposite of what you present, I need to know deeper knowledge than what’s enough and have trouble actually conceptualizing things that are presented as magic. For example, Docker presents itself as magic in most of the docs. Volumes, layers, and so much more are explained with how to make one and what to use them for rather than what they are. It might just be the way I memorize things is weird, or that I’m stuck with too little knowledge and way too deep.

I do mostly agree with your comment though, I just feel like I’m shit at explaining myself cause I’m clearly not getting my point across

[–] Ieris19@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

While this post is a bit of a generic rant, I do know what I’m trying to do, and the issue is that as soon as you go into anything slightly more complex than setting up a VPN, you’ll be bombarded with a thousand words that barely mean anything, everyone and their mother has a different opinion on what’s optimal, minimal and desired and to top all of that, most resources out there focus on making you understand what things are rather than how to set it up.

My issue and what I was ranting is why is most shit on the internet so unhelpful, hoping to find someone who’s had a similar struggle and learn how to get better. And I’ve succeeded, many people have given me useful advice.

I never said anything remotely as vague as “computers are hard” I think my post clearly states my issue is with resources being unhelpful for complete beginners

[–] Ieris19@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It comes with experience I guess, I’ve got a bad habit of researching to the core and many times have a hard time grasping things like containers without understanding how it’s setup technically. Sometimes I find a decent explanation, but specially for libraries that do “magic” I gotta go diving into the source to understand what’s going on, else I have trouble understanding what I am doing and what I should be doing.

Which makes it so hard because networking is very low level and I’m very unfamiliar with this environment

 

I’ve been a Software Engineering Student for 2 years now. I understand networks and whatnot at a theoretical level to some degree.

I’ve developed applications and hosted them through docker on Google Cloud for school projects.

I’ve tinkered with my router, port forwarded video game servers and hosted Discord bots for a few years (familiar with Websockets and IP/NAT/WAN and whatnot)

Yet I’ve been trying to improve my setup now that my old laptop has become my homelab and everything I try to do is so daunting.

Reverse proxy, VPN, Cloudfare bullshit, and so many more things get thrown around so much in this sub and other resources, yet I can barely find info on HOW to set up this things. Most blogs and articles I find are about what they are which I already know. And the few that actually explain how to set it up are just throwing so many more concepts at me that I can’t keep up.

Why is self-hosting so daunting? I feel like even though I understand how many of these things work I can’t get anything actually running!

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