"Self Host All The Things"

Posted: 01 May, 2024

Thanks to the Welsh Government, I have what can best be described as a “Big Fat Pipe” directly to my office. Finland speeds, if not quite Finland prices. It’s been rock-solid since we moved in, late last summer, which got me thinking… Rather than maintaining virtual private servers at Hetzner and Digital Ocean, maybe I can bring everything under my own roof? I have bandwidth to spare, it’ll be less resource intensive, and probably cheaper. So I started shopping around.

The obvious solution would be something like a Raspberry Pi, but the company’s started to give me the heebie-jeebies. Their hardware’s powerful enough for what I need (several websites, Nextcloud, Perforce and Git), but I wanted to see if there was something else, in the ballpark, that had a little more head-room.

One option I seriously considered, was upgrading my Framework laptop to the new AMD setup, then using the old motherboard in an enclosure. I may still go this route, as and when I naturally upgrade, but for now the initial cost put me off. It’d take a long time to pay back.

Then, by magic, a friend mentioned the Firebat T8.

Firebat T8

The T8 is an Intel N100 based machine. It’s tiny. Silent. Idles somewhere around 4w. It’s well specc’d. Mine came with 16G of Ram and a 512GB SSD, and it’s got more ports than you can shake an external SSD at. Handy for Perforce.

I ordered through AliExpress, and it arrived within a week. It didn’t come with a UK plug, so I had to grab one off Amazon, but otherwise, no problems. Out of the box it had Windows 11 installed, which was surprisingly snappy, but I opted for a wipe. Single booting into Debian, which installed with no issues. Everything was detected, and worked. No extra configuration. Well, apart from me adding an external SSD to the fstab.

Rather than go the Docker route, I opted to set up everything by hand. I know I won’t remember all the configuration steps, but I can be sure there’s nothing on the machine that I’ve not put there myself, and I feel better knowing that configuration isn’t strewn across multiple containers.

After a lot of hunting, I opted for dynamic DNS through Afraid.org, a reassuringly old-school service that doesn’t look close to being enshittified any time this millennium. Backups go to Backblaze, who I used many moons ago on the Mac, and never had any problems with. (Although, I don’t like the fact that Duplicity uploads blobs, meaning I can’t search through the B2 Buckets for individual files. I might look to change that at some point…)

It’s early days, but for ~100 earth pounds, the T8 is an impressive bit of kit. I may buy a second (as a clone of the first) and leave it on the shelf as a backup.

Why Bother?

Yeah good question, and there’s more than one answer. In terms of work; hosting an external Perforce server, where the repo size is tens/hundreds of gigabytes, gets pricey, quickly. And I have two active projects. It’s definitely cheaper for me to have a terabyte drive hanging off a local machine, that’s backed up remotely, than it is for me to run a backed-up, remote VPS.

The rest is a mix of control, trying to avoid late-stage-capitalism, and a desire to make my own corner of the web again. And what better way to do that than actually run it out of my office?

So I’ve nearly come full circle. 25 years ago I ran everything off an old PC under my desk. Now it’s a tiny silver box on top of my NAS.

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