Bitsii VS yunohost

I just can't do it, using Bitsii, I get to download all the stuff and DuckDns, but when on the setup page i need to enter an account for itsii, the site doesn't load on any of my devices, i tried something else but i doesn't work.

Of course - first you install Bitsii Bridge. If your network is a "residential ISP" style arrangement and you have UPnP enabled on your home router and it has a public IP "on the outside" you are good to go at that point from the network perspective. If not you can also setup a bridge instance on a vps (including a free google cloud instance) and the Bridge can expose ssh via an ssh tunnel on the vps which will tie back to your local ssh instance. Once you have the bridge setup you can tell it to forward a port into your ssh service (or other services)

Hello - I wanted to share my project which tries to make selfhosting accessible to everyone. Please check it out here and if you're feeling brave try it out and share your feedback...

Well - my project Bitsii Webcam might be an option as it doesn't try to do real time video - it takes snapshots (to compressed image files, which it can roll hourly into an mjpeg). Likely needs a lot less bandwidth than solutions that want to send you video - might be OK on your slow connection...

Cloudflare is a nice way because it gives you a "free dynamic dns to a domain you own" option. You can sometimes do this with other registrars that have api's but cloudflare is pretty easy and is supported by different ddns clients. Taking a step back - this is assuming it's not hosted on a vps or something with a fixed address? If the latter you can potentially just add a dns entry (a record) at your registrar (most give you free dns hosting) to your webserver address. If your webserver does not have a fixed address you can enable cloudflare with a "free" plan, tell your registrar to use cloudflare's name servers, then use cloudflare dynamic dns to set it (you can also set cloudflare to a fixed ip - but it's probably not worth bothering with cloudflare unless you need the dynamic dns). If you want something that wraps this up with let's encrypt certs, etc, you could try my project - it supports this cloudflare-your-own-domain configuration I'm suggesting here....

My Project - Bitsii Bridge is meant to be exactly this - easy for inexperienced folks to get started with. It doesn't support all of the software options of the others - partly because it's limited to ones that seem to have a low-barrier to entry technically speaking, and also because it's new :-) If you decide to try it out let me know how it goes...

So this is one of the capabilities of my project Bitsii Bridge - spoiler alert, the Files UI is a little rough but it let's you (and others) up and download pretty much any file over the web, you can just create accounts for folks and add shared folders, all from the ui. Runs on windows/mac/linux/pi, will setup ssl/let's encrypt and put itself on the internet from a typical home connection with upnp. It also let's you install a webdav server but then it isn't all in the web ui - you have to tell folks now to connect up webdav (but then it's in their native file manager on pretty much any os, so possible option...).

You can do this (pretty easily) with Bitsii Bridge (disclaimer - my project) - it actually runs the nginx instance locally, not on the vps, and uses an ssh tunnel to the vps to open the connection on the internet. Mostly, this is easier :-) it has the disadvantage of not allowing nginx/web apps to know the real remote ip, so I've been thinking of adding a mode where the proxy runs on the vps - but haven't yet. Depending on your needs that may not matter a great deal...

Bitsii Bridge does this automatically (and setups up nginx reverse proxy and let's encrypt ssl) - you give it your account, cloudflare api key, the domain, and the name for the dns entry, and it will create and maintain it (includes the dynamic dns functionality...)

Pull that old laptop from the closet, the one with the broken screen and keyboard which made you so sad to put it to pasture since it did have plenty of memory and CPU to keep up. Install Debian on the thing followed by Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) [1]. Since you have 16GB of RAM in that laptop (or 8 but 16 is nicer) you should be able to run a number of containers [2].

Here's an idea, more or less based on a number of servers I configured for friends and family, based on 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 hardware with 2/4TB USB SSD. Your laptop will offer better performance.

- Create 4 or 5 containers and name them 'auth', 'serve´, 'base', 'backup' and 'mail' (if you want to run your own mail that is, otherwise skip that one). Their functions are:

> auth runs LDAP, Kerberos (if you want that), a central letsencrypt instance which takes care of all your certificate needs and anything else related to authentication and authorisation

> base runs databases, that means Postgresql, Mysql/Mariadb, Redis, RabbitMQ and whatnot - all depending on what you need.

> serve runs services, that means nginx or another web server which is used as a reverse proxy for the other web-related things you want to run: 'cloud' services like Nextcloud with everything that comes with it (e.g. Collaboraoffice or Onlyoffice to replace whatever web-based office things you currently use), communications services like XMPP, application-specific proxies like Invidious/Nitter/Libreddit, media services like Peertube/Airsonic/Ampache, a Wiki like Bookstack, search services like SearxNG, etc. - the size of your server is the limit.

> backup runs Proxmox Backup Server and is used to backup everything to some external drive and to some outside repository.

> mail runs mail services, only if you want to run those. I always say 'do it' but many people have an irrational fear of running their own mail services. That fear is not grounded in truth, running mail is not hard and offers many advantages over hosted solutions.

While it is possible to separate all the mentioned services out into their own containers I think this adds needless complexity for little to no gain. Separating out database services makes sense since those can end up quite taxing and as such might well be moved to their own hardware in some (possibly not too distant) future. Separating out authentication services makes sense since that lowers the attack surface compared to running them together with externally available services. The same goes for mail services which is why I put those in their own container.

Once you've got this up and running you can create a few more containers to play around with. If you just want to try out services something like Yunohost [3] or Caprover [4] can come in handy but I do not see these as viable alternatives to installing and running services which you intend to keep around for a long time.

Of course you can do most of this on a VPS as well but I prefer to keep thing in-house - the fewer dependencies, the better.

[1] https://proxmox.com/en/

[2] containers perform better and take less memory than VMs but if VMs are your thing that is possible as well

[3] https://yunohost.org

[4] https://caprover.com/

Yunohost is one of those mature projects, that's fully open source.

YunoHost, although not Docker-based, is still nice and quite mature.

If you want something like that, then CasaOS is pretty great and i can recommend it, especially for a beginner. There is also Cosmos and Tipi. Yunuhost too but a bit different approach. Oh and Umbrel is a thing...

However you quickly reach the limits of what Umbrel can do, its very basic in its abilities. Of course it depends all on what you (or anyone else) wants to do with it. There is also CasaOS which is very similar to Umbrel but last i compared, Casa offered a bit more features like for example adding your own docker projects easily. There is also Tipi which i must admit i havent taken a closer look at yet. And there is Yunohost which i guess aims at a similar audience but achieves these things differently, still worth mentioning tho.

This looks exciting and definitely something to look out for as an option fkr self-hosting.

Similiar and a little bit more mature is also YunoHost, https://yunohost.org/, or for professional environments, UCS https://www.univention.com/.

I use https://yunohost.org on my Pi, mostly for monitoring other stuff but you can get Nextcloud running just fine with it!