How and Why I Self Host

def main():
    print('Hello World!')
    print('This marks my first post on this blog!')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Self-hosting is the practice of running and maintaining a website using a private web server. ()

Ridiculous origins

In 2017, in my final year of my university education in Computer Science, I was staying in the university hostel and I had a ton of extra time on my hands. I was the most senior in the hostel and I wanted my room to stand out among the rest. Being my narcissistic self then, I wanted to build something ludicrous and flashy that screams handsome and nerdy at the same time, something that screams, ME.

And so I bought 5 used Raspberry Pi 1Bs for cheap and assembled them into a cluster

I will go into details of my build process in another post, for now let's take it for what it is.

The Need for Space

With my confidence boosted from this monumental achievement, I started tackling the next problem at hand.

I was running out of space on my Dropbox.

My 25GB of free space from the Dropbox Space Race had expired a year earlier and since then I had been living on a couple of meagre gigabytes of space for all my academic files.

Dropbox Space Race?

For the uninitiated, the Dropbox Space Race was the hottest marketing campaign to rock universities in 2012, where students in each school contribute collectively to reach a stretch goal of a certain number of referrals and depending on their school's position on the leaderboard, they are granted each a certain amount of free space on Dropbox for 2 years.

Thus I searched for Dropbox alternatives and found , a multi-platform FOSS (Free and open-source software) cloud storage/file-sync. It also doubles as a photo backup solution allowing photos to be synced at full-size without the sketchy 'High Quality' compression of Google Photos.

Coincidentally, it runs on the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), exactly the same setup as Wordpress which I'm already familiar with.

Pain-point Discoveries & Patches

Some say self-hosting is an addiction, in that you tend to 'come back' for more after the first. I didn't understand it at first but as I reflected while typing this article, I saw why.

• Password manager:
• Github alternative:
• Bookmark stash:
• Network-wide Adblocker:

Before I knew it, my cluster grew from 6 nodes of Raspberry Pi 1B running apps on the bare-metal operating system, to a 10-node hybrid cluster of armv7 and arm64 SBCs running 56 containerized workloads on Kubernetes.

I'm the kind of person that gets a small kick out of giving the finger to those big corps by achieving what their products do at a fraction of the cost. Let's just say I'm the worst person to introduce self-hosting to.

How has it been for me?

To sum it up, it's an experience like no other.

Should you self-host?

You should self-host if:

1. You're still reading patiently at this point
2. You enjoy tinkering with stuff and fussing over minute details, spending many hours or at times even days at the tiniest of problems
3. You are a generalist who wants to learn anything and everything about computers
4. You like the cheap thrills you get from being able to achieve everything big companies do with their products at little to no cost
5. You want to own your data and web services

I cannot emphasize point #2 enough. Over the past 3 years of self-hosting, I've run into numerous problems and spent many days debugging the issue only to find that the problem was a typo in the configuration or worse, a yet-to-be-discovered bug with the FOSS software I was trying to host. I'll illustrate this with an example.

A painful typo you'll never spot

Just 4 weeks ago, I was trying to deploy OpenLDAP, a lightweight client-server protocol for accessing directory services, commonly used for storing credentials and user metadata. This was meant to be the core of my SSO service where users can just use a single username and password to access all my services. Have a look at my Kubernetes env configuration for , a dockerized implementation of OpenLDAP.

      containers:
      - name: openldap
        image: osixia/openldap-backup:1.3.0
        env:
        - name: LDAP_ORGANIZATION
          value: ikarus
        - name: LDAP_DOMAIN
          value: ikarus.sg
        - name: LDAP_BASE_DN
          value: 'dc=ikarus,dc=sg'
        - name: LDAP_ADMIN_PASSWORD
          valueFrom:
            secretKeyRef:
              name: openldap
              key: admin_password
        - name: LDAP_READONLY_USER
          value: 'true'

I struggled with why OpenLDAP did not pick up the LDAP_ORGANIZATION value from the environment variable for 2 days, deleting, redeploying, changing the order of the variables, and only when I actually dug into the code did I see how trivial this error was.

slapd slapd/internal/generated_adminpw password ${LDAP_ADMIN_PASSWORD}
slapd slapd/internal/adminpw password ${LDAP_ADMIN_PASSWORD}
slapd slapd/password2 password ${LDAP_ADMIN_PASSWORD}
slapd slapd/password1 password ${LDAP_ADMIN_PASSWORD}
slapd slapd/dump_database_destdir string /var/backups/slapd-VERSION
slapd slapd/domain string ${LDAP_DOMAIN}
slapd shared/organization string ${LDAP_ORGANISATION} ## THIS LINE 
slapd slapd/backend string ${LDAP_BACKEND^^}

The variable name should have been LDAP_ORGANISATION and not LDAP_ORGANIZATION

You should NOT self-host if:

1. You prioritize convenience and reliability of services over all else
2. You hate getting stuck at absolutely meaningless problems
3. You are not the least bit concerned about ownership of your data and web-services

Closing note

What's next for my blog?

Originally published at  on June 12, 2020.