I really thought this article was going to offer a solution, not just enumerate the problems. I'm already all too familiar with the problems.
I like what Umbrel[0] is doing. They're essentially expecting that just like computing was able to move from centralized mainframes to homes, servers are poised to make the same migration.
I think they really need to solve redundancy, though. If I'm to self-host anything important on a home server, I need to know I'll have some way to use it even if my home server fails, especially if I'm not at home when it happens.
I'd love to see some kind of system where I could partner up with other Umbrel users for backups/the ability to restore connectivity. If I knew that in an emergency, I could call my friend in town or my brother out of state and there was some procedure that would allow me to connect to an encrypted backup of what I'm needing, I would feel a lot better about taking responsibility for my own system.
> I'd love to see some kind of system where I could partner up with other Umbrel users for backups/the ability to restore connectivity. If I knew that in an emergency, I could call my friend in town or my brother out of state and there was some procedure that would allow me to connect to an encrypted backup of what I'm needing, I would feel a lot better about taking responsibility for my own system.
I'm working on self-hosting my own "personal cloud" (NextCloud with a few other services), and I strongly debated just getting an Umbrel, but this is what kept me from doing so. Instead, I'm going the DIY route with two machines, one in my house and one at my parents', and we're each going to have data replicated across both machines and encrypted at rest.
If Umbrel offered this out of the box, I would probably just use that to save me the time.
Doing this for the last 7 years, too. One server at my parents, one at my home. Connected via IPSEC. I just migrated to ZFS on my offsite backup, too - this is just perfect with syncoid/sanoid atomatic backups and zfs-pull of dataset. Fine grained security but robust at the same time. It is the first time I feel reasonable safe regarding the "worst" that can happen.
We are about 120km apart, different electricity providers. If an area this size looses energy for a considerable time, data is probably my least problem.
If it's just two computers doing mutual backups, then having both stop temporarily due to a power outage isn't a big deal: All the data's still there, at rest, and being unable to access the backup server isn't a problem since you have nothing to make/send new data with anyway.
The real solution is in the last section "Beyond tech". Don't hold your breath though.
The only viable solutions today are true self host or what they call self hosting as a service, by selecting a trusted provider. However all the big names in tech were trusted providers at some point of their history, so good luck with that.
No, I don't think so. I think it's closer to "a plug-and-play computer for self-hostable apps, running locally, with most things configured so you're reasonably secure and you don't have to guess about everything."
That's pretty much what Urbit wanted to be, to be fair, just with a strong networking component powered by a decentralized identity system. It's just too esoteric to have meaningful traction as that.
Running servers at home is surprisingly easy, especially if you have a good ISP. With AT&T Fiber, you can get 5Gbps symmetric internet with dedicated IPs at $3/mo each. With a few threadripper servers and a basic UPS and you have the setup for a real serious home datacenter. I just haven't solved the off-site data backup part of it, yet.
So almost nobody in the US or Canada then...
I get 800/20 for ~140/month, including the $30/month fee for "unlimited" data. My other choices are starlink or DSL which are a fraction of the bandwith or speed.
I self-host everything that's "home-only" at home but use syncthing, rsync and a few other thing to replicate important data to a mix of S3, backblaze, google drive and some PVs attached to a hosted k8s cluster.
Canada is vast, and it definitely causes pain, not that I'm excusing it for the ISPs.
A Bell 1.5Gbps/940Mbps FTTH connection is $120 without a deal if you're in an area it is available, but then you go three blocks down the road and all you can get is a 300/30 cable connection for $90.
A little further down that road, and maybe only DSL or Starlink is available.
If your ISP is not reliable then a VPS or dedicated (budget permitted) are good alternatives. Install docker, and an office suite, file manager, pihole, and you’re good to go. Takes minutes. No need for thread rippers either. Mine’s a low spec nuc alternative. Does wonders.
My take on it: It doesn't really matter at that level tbh. I used to chase that level of connectivity until covid happened. I was working from home on am ADSL with 37mbps download, 10mbps upload. I didn't use much internet at home before 2023 so I always had the cheapest broadband plan. Then I started WFH and the same for my partner and I had a homelab. My ISP offered me 150mbps for just £3 more per month, and then I realised... I don't really need it? I was just fine with the same broadband plan from 2015. I changed my ___location a few times, taking my homelab with me, I moved cities and countries, I'm still using the same DDNS service and as long as my 80 and 443 ports are open, I can transfer anything at any time to and from my network. It's 2023 and I'm still using the cheapest plan my ISP offers, the same hardware since ~2018 and I'm just fine with that. I run k3s, a few docker services, network-wide adblocker, monitoring in grafana and many more etc. Everything works just fine.
Don't fall into the meme that you need IBM or HP server class hardware and 5Gbps fibre to run a homelab. I used to have IBM 3650x with +200Gb of RAM that I sold and bought 3x RPi4. I'm currently backing up 600Gib from my other servers, and it's completely fine that it will take a few days and nights ¯\(ツ)/¯ It's a hobby, I'm not paid for it, I'm not paid to maintain 99.999%, it's OK if it's not the best shit on /r/homelab
Oh I thought they were talking about SHaaS as a "solution" that doesn't really solve the problems, because you're either trusting the hosts not to decrypt and use your data, or you're encrypting it, which has all the drawbacks of key management.
I hope we'll eventually be able to use some of the key storage/backup solutions being developed mostly in the cryptocurrency sphere. Like, multiparty computation (MPC) is agnostic to the type of key being created, and some of the social recovery methods being tested could be applied to parts of the key. Being able to protect your key from loss but also from theft is a hard problem they're highly incentivized to solve (and other people are highly incentivized to test/break).
These concerns are overblown. Unless you're a criminal, nobody's looking inside your VM. Heck, AWS can't access VMs (of course it's Internet cool to not believe this).
I wonder what it would be like to hold no opinions that you could ever imagine becoming controversial enough to get you flagged for investigation of some kind. I live in an intensely polarized country (U.S.), so it's actually hard for me to imagine caring about anything with any level of passion that one party or the other (heck, or both) wouldn't eventually want to put me on a watchlist for.
What's it like to have that much trust in the ongoing goodwill of other people?
Exactly. Anyone who can't imagine a failure case where they suddenly become a "criminal" because people who disagree with them obtain control of the legislative apparatus haven't read enough history (or have extremely boring opinions).
> You rent a VM in a data center, where servers belong, to host your stuff.
If you rent from an actual data center, you pay for a ton of stuff you don't really need for personal backups. If your home internet goes out and you can't access your personal cloud for a bit, it's likely not a big deal, so you don't need the level of redundancy that a data center gives you. On the flip side, the premium you pay for professionally hosted storage is enormous compared to buying a hard drive.
I priced this out somewhat recently, and the lowest price I could get renting a server with >=2TB of storage is $11/month using the OVH Eco line, and that's without ECC (which I consider to be non-negotiable), FS-level compression (IIRC you can't change file systems with OVH), or redundancy in case the server/disk fails. I'm currently working on a DIY setup with two nodes equipped with 8GB ECC memory, 2TB of storage (with Btrfs compression to get even more storage out of it), and considerably more processing power than the OVH servers. My total up front cost is going to be about $400, with an estimated $25/year in electricity. The most comparable OVH offering would cost $403 in the first year (with RAID but without a second node), so my DIY solution basically pays for itself after that, and I can upgrade the hardware anytime I want.
Of course, there is an obvious argument to be made that my time is worth more than the cost savings, but I've been learning a lot so I instead consider it a free education. :)
They could offer a service that backs up your local Umbrel server to their central servers. This would provide reassurance that your data is backed up, and give them a revenue stream.
I believe part of the solution-- that big tech hates-- is AI bots that pretend to be us and provide so much noise they make the signal difficult to find. An example would be browser plug ins that "click everything". If an AI bot clicks on every ad and signs you up for every free service and fills a lot of forms with incorrect data the value of surveillance is much lower.
The problem with this is Google in particular hates it. If they think you are using bots in this way they will ban you from all of their services. I have heard that. I don't know if it is true but don't want to risk it.
> If they think you are using bots in this way they will ban you from all of their services.
If you're self-hosting everything like the person above recommends, then the only services that they can ban you from are the services that show you ads, which sounds like a win.
I like what Umbrel[0] is doing. They're essentially expecting that just like computing was able to move from centralized mainframes to homes, servers are poised to make the same migration.
I think they really need to solve redundancy, though. If I'm to self-host anything important on a home server, I need to know I'll have some way to use it even if my home server fails, especially if I'm not at home when it happens.
I'd love to see some kind of system where I could partner up with other Umbrel users for backups/the ability to restore connectivity. If I knew that in an emergency, I could call my friend in town or my brother out of state and there was some procedure that would allow me to connect to an encrypted backup of what I'm needing, I would feel a lot better about taking responsibility for my own system.
[0] https://umbrel.com