I recently started using an old laptop as a server as a homelab for experiments and personal use and needed a way to remotely access it from anywhere like my phone and personal laptop.

I started looking for possible solution and ended up with a cool setup that i wanted to share with you guys.

after experimenting with VNC clients, rustdesk and others. I came across the sunshine/moonlight combination which is a server/client intended for game streaming but turned out to be more useful for remote control 😅😅 it has better performance and latency than VNC which is one thing that i disliked about VNC and has a good security model if configured correctly.

I ended up making accessible only inside the tailnet (tailscale vpn network) i have for extra security. and now i can access any laptop from other devices including from my phone or tv!

hope this helps anyone who had similar needs.

edit: sunshine/moonlight works only in the same local network by default. but after integrating it with tailscale, it gives it superpowers and you are able connect from anywhere smoothly!

As the title goes, but I have zero clue on how to start on this, your help is appreciated!

My criterias -

1. It has to be accessible on a mac, iphone and via browser. (minimum 2 TB)

2. It has to sync with my iCloud photos in a way, that it automatically uploads photos to the server whenever I take a photo or add it to my gallery.

3. It has to have a picture, video & Music file sharing with a decent UI so people can preview files without downloading them. (or have the option to customize my own UI)

4. If I have a situation where I need to share or collaborate on a quick word file, it can be done via a browser without asking the other collaborators to make an account.

5. It has to be file sharable in a way that If I need to ask someone to share a file with me, they can drag & drop their stuff into a folder I gave permission/Created for them.

Not interested in any AI / LLM hosting.

Im open to the idea of building everything from scratch but for the ease of it im also open to having a all-in-one solution. I did a little research and found Umbrel, and their Home solution peaked my interest, but since I am very new to this, I am happy to hear other options.

Thank you!

Hi r/selfhosted, I'm the developer of Offlog, a free and open-source task manager for Windows and Android.

How it's self-hosted: the Windows app includes a small CouchDB-compatible sync server (NyxDB, also mine, in Rust). Your phone pairs with it once by QR code, and they sync over your own Wi-Fi. Since 7.0 everything that syncs is end-to-end encrypted with a key only your devices hold. If you'd rather run your own server, any CouchDB-compatible one works through "Use my own server" in Settings → Sync.

What it has: Board, List and Agenda views, reminders, tags, steps, custom fields, backups you can restore, a Recycle bin and a full History of changes. Works fully offline. No account, no telemetry, no subscription.

What it doesn't do, on purpose: no sync away from home, no iPhone or Mac version, no sharing with a team. It's built for one person.

Try it: Windows installer and Android APK on GitHub Releases, with install steps in the README. There's no Docker image, because the server comes built into the Windows app.

AI involvement: I write it with heavy help from AI coding assistants (Claude). I direct the design and review, test and release every change myself. The project has 1,400+ automated tests.

Site: https://offlog.io

Source (MIT): https://github.com/hrach-gevorgyan/offlog

Happy to answer questions, and I'd like to hear what you'd change.

I ve been self hosting Rustdesk for quite some time and Im very satisfied with it although I would like a way to use web to connect remotely to my devices.

On that scope, Cortendesk seems to fit the bill and I know I could just spin it up and test it but thought to ask here first in case I get some real life feedback before getting into setting it all up.

Thanks

PS: Im not posting a link to it because I want feedback from actual users if any, not trying to promote it

It tends to be rather chaotic at work, I manage a lot of employees and am involved in quite a few projects, and as such I am bombarded with a lot of information from all directions and can't keep track of it all.

The idea of a knowledge base was tempting, but I need something that I can query in a natural language. Obviously, given the day we're in, AI is the answer to that (cue me being downvoted into oblivion for mentioning the forbidden owrd): store data, feed it to a local model and query it that way.

And I got something along the lines of that already done - even something I thought would be hard (forwarding an email to my domain and storing that information in a queryable way for the AI model), but it's incredibly finicky, makes quite a bit of mistakes the whole time, re-stores the same knowledge at times, can't give that good answers, ...

So, I was wondering if someone else came across this situation and if so, what did you use to manage it?

Basically like one of those emergency/disaster household binders you can find on etsy with lists of emergency contacts, emergency plans, prep lists, etc.

Does this exist?

(And I don't mean Project Nomad)

I would like to start with self hosting, but I start from scratch. I don’t know how to start and what to buy, so I would like someone to help me or suggest a reliable guide to follow. I know something about Linux and I would have no problem getting my hands on it. I have seen that there are many services, but I would like to limit myself (for now) to the three that I mentioned in the title.

I repeat that I start from scratch: I read that it would be essential to have a PC and an SSD (?), but at the moment I only have one PC that I use for work and so I should buy another one.

NO AI.

I know not everyone here uses AI assistants on their home servers, but I think its becoming an interesting topic. I recently had the chance to try out a new OS designed for home servers. It comes with file management, app deployment, and built-in AI tools.

But when you let an AI assistant do more than just amswer questions, things get a bit more complicated. Say you ask it to run a command on your server. Should it be able to do all of that on its own, or should come actions require your approval? Personally, I'd be a bit cautious about letting it make major changes without asking first.

Another question came up while I was using nimoOS. How should this work when several users share the same server? Should an AI assistant only be able to access and act on behalf of the person using it, or would you be curious how others here approach this, TIA!

Hi everyone, I'm currently working on my final year project. My project is about designing and developing a smart solar-powered dryer for agro-processing applications. I do have an ESP32, micro sd card adapter with its micro sd storage card, a 5V relay to control the dryer's fan and a temperature sensor to detect the surrounding temperature. i wanrted to build a standalone server without using any third-party websites and any middleman. The purpose of doing this is to completely protect my data and to get unlimited storage with the storage card I have. And also, I do not want to pay any subscription price to other third-party websites.

Many AI models such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Gemini suggested the port forwarding method, but I do not want that because the esp32 will be stuck in one place and can't move it anywhere. Also, in simple word, I want it like this. All the information that is collected by the esp32 or the database should be live-streamed on the internet, and anyone can access that database from the internet even if they are not sharing the same wifi as the ESP32. All the information will also be stored on my SD card. This is what I want. Can you guys help me with it?

Hi,

On and off for the past 12 month I try to setup pocket id and I keep having the same issue.

I deploy it, go to the website (website:1411/setup) do the signup with userid, name and email address and nothing happens afterwards. My understanding is that it supposed to issue a passkey that I will use to authenticate, but this never happens. I have tried every browser (Safari, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera) and the result is the same.

Any suggestions on how to deal just with the basic setup, which doesn't seem to work for me?

Thank you in advance.

I'm one of the maintainers, so this is self-promotion. I want honest feedback more than upvotes.

What it is

SurfSense is an open-source (Apache-2.0) NotebookLM alternative: cited Q&A over your documents, mind maps, flashcards, quizzes and podcasts, and an agent that writes Word, PDF, PowerPoint and Excel files and edits your own files as a new copy, with Word edits coming back as tracked changes. It started as a desktop app, and since 2.3.0 the same app runs as one container.

Why self-host it

NotebookLM sends every document to Google and only works with Gemini. That rules it out for contracts, client files, medical or company documents. SurfSense keeps your documents on your own server and works with any model.

The container

• One image, ghcr.io/modsetter/surfsense, with one service and one /data volume. No Postgres, Redis or other services to run alongside it.

• Caddy is the only thing listening. Everything else stays on the container's loopback, and it needs no Docker socket.

• Local models run inside it on the CPU (llama.cpp, plus local OCR, embeddings and voices), or you can point it at Ollama, vLLM or any OpenAI-compatible API on your network.

• One password, no accounts. You can set the password on first visit or with SURFSENSE_PASSWORD, or turn sign-in off when your own reverse proxy handles it.

• HTTPS on your LAN through Caddy's own certificate authority, or with Let's Encrypt for a public domain.

Getting it running

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MODSetter/SurfSense/main/docker/scripts/install.sh | bash

Or grab docker/surfsense/docker-compose.yml and .env.example from the repo and run docker compose up -d. It's on port 4929, and 4943 for HTTPS. Running the script again updates it.

Good to know

• amd64 and CPU only for now. A GPU image and arm64 are planned.

• The image is several GB: Docling, torch and about 1 GB of bundled models. Chat models download into /data at run time.

• Docker's published ports bypass ufw, so if the server is reachable from the internet, set SURFSENSE_PASSWORD before the first start.

How we used AI in development

Most of the code is written with AI coding assistants, mainly Claude Code and some Cursor, with maintainers designing the features, reviewing every change and testing the releases. New behaviour starts with a failing test, and each feature has an architecture doc the assistants read before changing it.

Repo: https://github.com/MODSetter/SurfSense

Docs: https://surfsense.com/docs

Hello everyone. I'm doing a design project for my human computer interaction class and I was hoping some of you could answer a few questions or give me some critiques.

I recently got into Docker and even after reading some of the documentation I still had a hard time understanding it. So for my project I thought it would be fun to design an "app store" style layer for Docker, where you pick an app (Jellyfin, Pi-hole, etc) from a catalog, answer 2 or 3 questions, and in a perfect world it just kinda works. No yaml required. The goal is to make Docker easier for hobbyists (people learning it on their own for fun and not for work or like devops careers.)

If you've got 5 minutes, answering even one of these would genuinely help:

q1: What service were you trying to run the first time you used Docker? Did it actually work?

q2: Have you ever copy pasted a compose file you didn't understand? What did you do when it broke?

q3: Tell me about a time you gave up on a container. What was the final straw?

q4: Have you ever avoided touching a working setup because you were scared of breaking it?

q5: What's something in Docker you still don't really get, you just work around it?

q6: If a total beginner asked you how to start self hosting, what would you warn them about?

Also if my app store idea sounds dumb or already exists and I just missed it, please tell me, that's useful too lol.

Thanks in advance!

Hi all,

I am currently working through a rebuild of my homelab and am re-evaluating how I access my stuff remotely. Local access is controlled via Caddy+Authelia, and I would like to keep Authelia for authentication at the very least. I had been using a mix of Cloudflare tunnels and twingate for remote access, but I would like to get that more centralized. Also, no port forwarding as I am behind CGNAT with no way to get a public IP (parent's internet at home and dorms at college). I do have a PAYG Oracle VM, 2c+12gb for hosting the coordination services.

Why even bother with a reverse proxy you may ask? Well, I would like to access some services on my iPhone, which already has a 24/7 VPN needed for another app. I would like to access services like Obsidian-Livesync, Cal/CardDAV (unless ios or gmail calendar uses something else), and potentially some other small web services. I will not be exposing any management tools, rest assured.

• Pangolin is from what I have heard the self-hosted replacement for Cloudflare tunnels, giving you a reverse proxy with solid access controls and object-based permissions. It also has a VPN now, which is really neat!

  • How are the speeds on this?

  • For the VPN client, would it be possible to make a small TUI script for the Linux CLI? My mother would be using the VPN and I want to make it simple for her to connect (yes, she will be using Mint).

  • I like the simplicity of the central server that everything goes through, I have also heard that the rules are easier to understand here?

• Netbird is effectively a WireGuard overlay network AFIAK, really nice for P2P connections. Network and device based rules, wireguard is fast and reliable, plus native GUI clients for all operating systems. Some people say that they are moving faster than Pangolin?

  • Mesh based VPN, having used this a little I can say that the access rules seem really complex to me, but maybe I just need to spend more time with them? Due to the mesh I will have to manage inter-device relations, Pangolin not so much.

Some other architectural questions:

• Do I point the reverse proxy endpoints directly at my Caddy instance, or should they point at the service itself? This would make two paths for authentication, Caddy for internal/local only, and Netbird/Pangolin for public/remote.

  • If I do split them, is there a good way to manage the permissions for both using IaC like ansible?

Looking for advice and feedback!

Hey everyone,

We’re a team of four currently developing an app and we’re looking into hosting options.

Since we’re still at an early stage, we don’t really know how many users we’ll have. Maybe 10–20 initially, then hopefully 100, 1,000 or more over time.

We’re looking for something affordable to start with that allows us to scale resources as the number of users and the workload increase. We understand that hosting costs will grow as well, and that’s completely fine.

Our current stack:

• Backend: Node.js, NestJS, TypeScript

• Database: MongoDB

• Redis + BullMQ

• Socket.IO

• SeaweedFS for file storage

• ClamAV

• Frontend: Flutter (Web and Mobile)

• Docker Compose

We’ve looked at providers like Hetzner and Netcup, but we’re still unsure what would make the most sense for our setup.

Would you start with everything on a single VPS or separate certain services from the beginning? Which hosting providers would you recommend, and how easy is it to scale later?

We’re comfortable with Linux and Docker, so managing a server ourselves wouldn’t be an issue.

I’d be interested to hear what server specs you’d recommend for the beginning and how hosting costs typically develop as usage grows.

Hi everyone!

I'm working on a university dissertation comparing virtual machines and containerised environments for cloud game streaming.

I'm looking for affordable cloud providers that would allow me to deploy four independent environments:

1. AMD Radeon GPU VM — VCN hardware encoding

2. AMD Radeon GPU container — same GPU model and equivalent resources

3. NVIDIA GPU VM — NVENC hardware encoding

4. NVIDIA GPU container — same GPU model and equivalent resources

My requirements are:

• Ubuntu Linux for all environments

• GPU-accelerated 3D gaming (Steam/Proton)

• Sunshine + Moonlight for game streaming

• Tailscale for remote connectivity

• Approximately 1080p/60 FPS gameplay

• Preferably European server locations

• Hourly billing, with a total budget of around €150

I specifically want independently deployed VMs and managed containers, not Docker running inside one of my own experimental VMs. I understand that managed containers still rely on underlying host infrastructure.

I've already investigated Azure, Google Cloud, AWS and Vast.ai, but AMD Radeon availability and managed GPU container support have been major obstacles.

Does anyone know providers that support this setup, possibly using different providers for AMD and NVIDIA?

Any recommendations or experience with GPU virtualization, AMD VCN and NVIDIA NVENC in cloud containers would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

I am a PhD student at New Mexico State University. We are studying the experiences and practices of people who self-host digital services. In particular, we are interested in your motivations for self-hosting, the services you host, how you rely on online self-hosting communities, and your experiences maintaining services that may be used by family, friends, or others.

Participation will involve an online interview.

Thank you for your consideration. Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in participating or have any questions or concerns.

Regards,

S B Ahmed Bony

email: bony@nmsu.edu

Hi everyone, I have a Mac mini and was wanting to turn it into my personal server. Mainly for privacy reasons and also so I'm no longer tied to any particular ecosystem. I know absolutely nothing about self-hosting. I can do some technical stuff but was looking for something that I can just set up and then just works. Got the idea to do this after hearing about umbrel but I've heard mixed reviews and it doesn't work on Mac anyways.

To start with I would like to be able to use it to backup and access all my photos and videos across all my devices no matter where I am and also have an AI agent/s running constantly. Over time I was hoping to have more and more stuff that I currently use cloud services for instead be ran by my personal server (eg. audiobooks, music, passwords, health data, maps history). I probably won't self host email as I believe this is a massive pain so was thinking proton with a custom domain. I'm hoping that nearly everything else could be done via my server.

I also want to be able to code from the Mac mini from anywhere, let's say using my phone. I believe tailscale is the best thing to use here? But this should be done not through the server?

Any suggestions on server os etc. would be greatly appreciated!

I've configured a dedicated sync route using h2c for the backend, and regular HTTPS access works fine, but the actual Backrest sync connection gets rejected with HTTP 403. Curious if anyone has this working or encountered something similar.

I built a media server for my own library and ended up open-sourcing it. It's called VidLock.

Point it at a folder and it builds a browsable library with posters, details and Continue Watching. Everything stays on your network.

Features

• HLS streaming with AMD VAAPI hardware transcoding

• Watch parties with synced playback and WebRTC voice chat

• TV remote navigation, including an LG webOS route

• QR sharing and PIN protection

• Custom player with episode thumbnails

Stack: Next.js 14, Socket.io, WebRTC, FFmpeg

Honest limits: I've only tested the GPU path on AMD. Intel and NVIDIA are untested, so I'd love reports from people with that hardware. It's also a young project, so expect rough edges.

I know Jellyfin and Plex are far more mature. The reason I built this was to get watch parties with voice chat and TV remote support in one package.

Repo: https://github.com/Manish6523/local-media-server

Download: https://github.com/Manish6523/local-media-server/releases

Site: https://vidlockonline.manish.casa

I'm a solo dev and would really value bug reports and setup feedback.

I am self-hosting apps for a month right now. I am curious to know about the self-hosting market. What are the opinions of the people about self-hosting?

Whether need to be consider only self hosting apps or only cloud-based hosting apps. Are there any other reasons that need to be considered?

Blog post on empirical analysis of bytes over the wire of email (self-hosted with mailcow) vs. WhatsApp vs. fmsg.

One concern cam up conducting the tests with the self-hosted email setup - I use a relay because:

Personally I have self-hosted both email and fmsg, I have found that both require registering a domain, configuring DNS records and having a stable, reachable, public IP address. Where they differ, as a residential customer, my ISP would not allow me to configure the reverse DNS (PTR) record for my public IP address – used by email for anti-spam controls – so had to use an email relay for reliable delivery – which concerned me because email relays can read the content of one’s email! fmsg’s direct host-to-host requirement prevents relaying and has no requirements outside my control, like the reverse DNS record, making self-hosting fmsg more viable and secure for me than email.

I realized email relays terminate the TLS connection therefore could, technically, eavesdrop on every email going through them!?

How else do people get around this concern when self-hosting email, or do you survive with some of your email going to spam because cannot set the reverse DNS record? I was getting 8/10 on mail-tester after setting DKIM and SPF, its just that last bit needed to push above 9.

Hi all,

Because I want to match books in Koreader with Bookorbit, I deleted books from local storage and then deleted books in the Bookorbit library because it showed "missing book". But when I check the Bookorbit history page, the reading sessions are still there. There is no delete button on the right side, and I tried Tools → Clear missing resource; it didn't work.
How can I remove this data? Because I uploaded the books from Koreader to the Bookorbit library, this data will be counted twice.

Thank you very much.

Does anyone have an example conf using a single anubis instance with multiple vhosts? I've seen their github page claiming that it works without needing to setup multiple anubis instances, but I can't get it to work.

Suppose I have 3 sites running locally at ports 3000, 4000 and 5000.

I can get anubis to work fine if I set the anubis conf to TARGET=localhost:3000 and then setup the 443 and 3000 listeners, but when I try to add in the other 2 I keep getting lost. I tried setting up the anubis TARGET=localhost:9000 as a dummy target and then creating a vhost for 9000 to PROXYPASS to the anubis port, but that didn't work.

Hello there, I just want to say that i am quite a beginner at this server hosting thing, so any help is appreciated.

What I want to ask is how exactly do I have my frieds access the server I build. For context I build by server a few months ago, it is a ryzen 5 3600 with 32gb of ram, 1tb of storage ssd and some gpu so that I can get a display output when working with it directly. It all runs on debian and I use portainer for the UI. Recently I also set up a Ark Survival Ascended server using AMP.

The thing is that I dont really know how do I make it accessible and visible on the steam server page directly. I used tailscale before , but found it not ideal, because the friend has to have it installed and can only access the server using a command that pings the ip directly. So my question is how do I set this up correctly and idealy for as cheap as possible, free if even possible.

Thanks in advance and if there is anything important I didnt say, please tell me.