I actually think Tailscale may be an even bigger deal here than sysadmin help from Claude Code at al.

The biggest reason I had not to run a home server was security: I'm worried that I might fall behind on updates and end up compromised.

Tailscale dramatically reduces this risk, because I can so easily configure it so my own devices can talk to my home server from anywhere in the world without the risk of exposing any ports on it directly to the internet.

Being able to hit my home server directly from my iPhone via a tailnet no matter where in the world my iPhone might be is really cool.

I was in another country when there was a power outage at home. My internet went down, the server restart but couldn't reconnect anymore because the optical network router also had some problems after the power outage. I could ask my folks to restart, and turn on off things but nothing more than that. So I couldn't reach my Nextcloud instance and other stuff. Maybe an uninterruptible power supply could have helped but the more I was thinking about it after just didn't really worth the hassle anymore. Add a UPS okay. But why not add a dual WAN failover router for extra security if the internet goes down again? etc. It's a bottomless pit (like most hobbies tbh)

Also (and that's a me problem maybe) I was using Tailscale but I'm more "paranoid" about it nowadays. Single point of failure service, US-only SSO login (MS, Github, Apple, Google), what if my Apple account gets locked if I redeem a gift card and I can't use Tailscale anymore? I still believe in self hosting but probably I want something even more "self" to the extremes.

> I am spending time using software, learning

What are you actually learning?

PSA: OP is a CEO of an AI company

Having others run a service for you is a good thing! I'd love to pay a subscription for a service, but ran as a cooperative, where I'm not actually just paying a subscription fee, instead I'm a member and I get to decide what gets done as well.

This model works so well for housing, where the renters are also the owners of the building. Incentives are aligned perfectly, rents are kept low, the building is kept intact, no unnecessary expensive stuff added. And most importantly, no worries of the building ever getting sold and things going south. That's what I would like for my cloud storage, e-mail etc.

There are so many NAS + Curated App Catalog distros out there that make self-hosting trivial without needing to Vibe SysAdmin.

I cannot say how happy I am configuring my own immich server on a decade old machine. I just feel empowered. Because despite my 9 years of software development, I haven't gotten into the nitty gritties of networking, VPN and I always see something non-standard while installing an open source package and without all of this custom guidance, I always would give up after a couple of hours of pulling my hair apart.

I really want to go deeper and it finally feels this could be a hobby.

PS: The rush was so great I was excitedly talking to my wife how I could port our emails away from google, considering all of the automatic opt in for AI processing and what not. The foolhardy me thought of even sabbatical breaks to work on long pending to-do's in my head.

In my experience, this approach works extremely well—I would not have been able to accomplish this much on my own. However, there is an important caveat: you must understand what you are doing. AI systems sometimes propose solutions that do not work, and in some cases they can be genuinely dangerous to your data integrity or your privacy.

AI is therefore a powerful accelerator, not a replacement for expertise. You still need to critically evaluate its suggestions and veto roughly 10% of them.

But Tailscale is the real unlock in my opinion. Having a slot machine cosplaying as sysadmin is cool, but being able to access services securely from anywhere makes them legitimately usable for daily life. It means your services can be used by friends/family if they can get past an app install and login.

I also take minor issue with running Vaultwarden in this setup. Password managers are maximally sensitive and hosting that data is not as banal as hosting Plex. Personally, I would want Vaultwarden on something properly isolated and locked down.

On self-hosting: be aware that it is a warzone out there. Your IP address will be probed constantly for vulnerabilities, and even those will need to dealt with as most automated probes don't throttle and can impact your server. That's probably my biggest issue along with email deliverability.

workdir/ ├── README.md ├── CLAUDE.md # Claude Code instructions ├── BACKUP.md # Backup documentation ├── .gitignore ├── traefik/ │ ├── docker-compose.yml │ └── config/ │ └── traefik.yml ├── authentik/ │ ├── docker-compose.yml │ └── .env.example ├── umami/ │ ├── docker-compose.yml │ └── .env.example ├── n8n/ │ ├── docker-compose.yml │ └── .env.example └── backup/ ├── backup.sh # Automated backup script ├── restore.sh # Restore from backup ├── verify.sh # Verify backup integrity ├── list-backups.sh # List available backups └── .env.example

No judgement, but wanting to tinker/spend time on configuration is a major reason why many people do self-host.

I recently had a bunch of breakages and needed to port a setup - I had a complicated k3s container in proxmox setup but needed it in a VM to fix various disk mounts (I hacked on ZFS mounts, and was swapping it all for longhorn)

As is expected, life happens and I stopped having time for anything so the homelab was out of commission. I probably would still be sitting on my broken lab given a lack of time.

p0wnland. this will have script kiddies rubbing their hands

I share a lot of the same hesitations as others in the thread - using a giant US-based tech giant's tool for research as well as another US giant's tool to manage access, but it's really a game change and I'd be unable to find the time to do everything I want if I didn't have access to these otherwise.

I'm not even a software guy by engineering, my network is already complicated enough that learning and correctly securing things otherwise would simply just not be feasible with the time and energy I'd like to dedicate to it.

But I wanted decent deployments. Hosting a image repository cost 3-4x of the server. Sending over the container image took over an hour due to large image processing python dependencies.

Solution? Had a think and a chat with Claude code, now I have blue-green deployments where I just upload the code which takes 5 seconds, everything is then run by systemd. I looked at the various PaaSes but they ran up to $40/month with compute+database etc.

I would probably never have built this myself. I'd have gotten bored 1/3 through. Now it's working like a charm.

Is it enterprise grade? Gods no. Is it good enough? Yes.

It's not tariffs (I'm in Switzerland). It's 100% the buildout of data centers for AI.

(and no, this product is not against TOS as it is using the official claude code SDK unlike opencode https://yepanywhere.com/tos-compliance.html)

I just wish this post wasn’t written by an LLM! I miss the days where you can feel the nerdy joy through words across the internet.

But I want to host an LLM.

>I am spending time using software, learning, and having fun - instead of maintaining it and stressing out about it.

Using software, learning and having fun with with what? everything is being done by Claude here. The part of fun and learning is to learn to use and maintain it in the first place. How will you learn anything if Claude is doing everything for you ? You are not understand how things work and where everything goes.

This post could be written or at least modified by an LLM, but more importantly I think this person is completely missing the point of self hosting and learning.

Tbh I did the mistake of throwing away Ansible, so testing my setup was a pain!

Since with AI, the focus should be on testing, perhaps it's sensible to drop Ansible for something like https://github.com/goss-org/goss

Things are happening so fast, I was impressed to see a Linux distro embrace using a SKILL.md! https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/master/default/omar...

CC lets you hack together internal tools quickly, and tailscale means you can safely deploy them without worrying about hardening the app and server from the outside world. And tailscale ACLs lets you fully control who can access what services.

It also means you can literally host the tools on a server in your office, if you really want to.

Putting CC on the server makes this set up even better. It’s extremely good at system admin.

I have a 1U (or more), sitting in a rack in a local datacenter. I have an IP block to myself.

Those servers are now publicly exposed and only a few ports are exposed for mail, HTTP traffic and SSH (for Git).

I guess my use case also changes in that I don’t use things just for me to consume, select others can consume services I host.

My definition here of self-hosting isn’t that I and I only can access my services; that’s be me having a server at home which has some non critical things on it.

The structure is dead simple: `machines/<hostname>/stacks/<service>/` with a `config.sh` per machine defining SSH settings and optional pre/post deploy hooks. One command syncs files and runs `docker compose up -d`.

I could see Claude Code being useful for debugging compose files or generating new stack configs, but having the deployment itself be a single `./deploy.sh homeserver media` keeps the feedback loop tight and auditable.

In this case you will be completely unable to navigate the infrastructure of your homeserver that your life will have become dependent on.

But a homeserver is always about your levels of risk, single points of failure. I'm personally willing to accept Tailscale but I'm not willing to give the manipulation of all services directly over to Claude.

For example - I have ZFS running with a 5-bay HDD enclosure, and I honestly can't remember any of the rules about import-ing / export-ing to stop / start / add / remove pools etc.

I have to write many clear notes, and store them in a place where future me will find them - otherwise the system gets very flaky through my inability to remember what's active and what isn't. Running the service and having total control is fun, but it's a responsibility too

Took a couple hours with some things I ran across, but the model had me go through the setup for debian, how to go through the setup gui, what to check to make it server only, then it took me through commands to run so it wouldn't stop when I closed the laptop, helped with tailscale, getting the ssh keys all setup. Heck it even suggested doing daily dumps of the database and saving to minio and then removing after that. Also knows about the limitations of 8 gigs of ram and how to make sure docker settings for the difference self services I want to build don't cause issues.

Give me a month and true strong intention and ability to google and read posts and find the answer on my own and I still don't think I would have gotten to this point with the amount of trust I have in the setup.

I very much agree with this topic about self hosting coming alive because these models can walk you through everything. Self building and self hosting can really come alive. And in the future when open models are that much better and hardware costs come down (maybe, just guessing of course) we'll be able to also host our own agents on these machines we have setup already. All being able to do it ourselves.

From to time, test the restore process.

For now I'm just using Cloudflare tunnels, but ideally I also want to do that myself (without getting DDoS)

We've gone a step further, and made this even easier with https://zo.computer

You get a server, and a lot of useful built-in functionality (like the ability to text with your server)

What I've found: Claude Code is great at the "figure out this docker/nginx/systemd incantation" part but the orchestration layer (health checks, rollbacks, zero-downtime deploys) still benefits from purpose-built tooling. The AI handles the tedious config generation while you focus on the actual workflow.

github.com/elitan/frost if curious

And until now without AI, but I'm kind of curious but afraid that it will bring my servers down and then I can't roll back :D But perhaps if I would move over to NixOS, then it would be easy to roll back.

Maybe viable if you have a bunch of spare parts laying around. But probably not when RAM and storage prices are off the charts!

(In)famous last words?

Is it just a single docker-compose.yml with everything you want to run and 'docker compose up'?

Agents are powerful. Even more so with skills and command line tools they can call to do things. You can even write custom tools (like I did) for them to use that allows for things like live debugging.

The tailscale piece to this setup is key.

I wonder if a local model might be enough for sysadmin skills, especially if were trained specifically for this ?

I wonder if iOS has enough hooks available that one could make a very small/simple agentic Siri replacement like this that was able to manage the iPhone at least better than Siri (start and stop apps, control them, install them, configure iPhone, etc) ?

But I wouldn't give the keys of the house to Claude or any LLM for that matter. When needed, I ask them questions and type commands myself. It's not that hard.

I route it through a familiar interface like slack tho as I don't like to ssh from phone or w/e using a tool I built - https://www.claudecontrol.com/

And ideally doing it via lxc or vm.

Extra complication but gives you something repeatable that you can stick on git

https://runtipi.io/

Then someday we self-host the AI itself, and it all comes together.

Is there a replica implementation that works in the direction I want?

There are a few important things to consider, like unstable IPs, home internet limits, and the occasional power issue. Cloud providers felt overpriced for what I needed, especially once storage was factored in.

In the end, I put together a small business where people can run their own Mac mini with a static IP: https://www.minimahost.com/

I’m continuing to work on it while keeping my regular software job. So far, the demand is not very high, or perhaps I am not great at marketing XD

I am writing a personal application to simplify home server administration if anybody is interested: https://github.com/prettydiff/aphorio

I had a 30-year-old file on my Mac that I wanted to read the content of. I had created it in some kind of word processing software, but I couldn’t remember which (Nexus? Word? MacWrite? ClarisWorks? EGWORD?) and the file didn’t have an extension. I couldn’t read its content in any of the applications I have on my Mac now.

So I pointed CC at it and asked what it could tell me about the file. It looked inside the file data, identified the file type and the multiple character encodings in it, and went through a couple of conversion steps before outputting as clean plain text what I had written in 1996.

Maybe I could have found a utility on the web to do the same thing, but CC felt much quicker and easier.

Granted, that's rarely enforced, but if you're a stickler for that sort of thing, check your ISP's Acceptable Use Policy.

I still struggle with letting go of writing code and becoming only a full-time reviewer when it comes to AI agents doing programming, but I don't struggle in the slightest with assuming the position of a reviewer of the changes CC does to my HA instance, delegating all the work to it. The progress I made on making my house smart and setting up my dashboards has skyrocketed compared to before I started using CC to manage HA via its REST and WS APIs.

All those fancy GUIs in Mac and Windows designed to be user friendly (but which most users hate and are baffled by anyway) are very hostile for models to access. But text configuration files? it's like a knife through butter for the LLMs to read and modify them. All of a sudden, Linux is MORE user friendly because you can just ask an LLM to fix things. Or even script them - "make it so my theme changes to dark at night and then back to light each morning" becomes something utterly trivial compared to the coding LLMs are being built to handle. But hey, if your OS really doesn't support something? the LLM can probably code up a whole app for you and integrate it in.

I think it's going to be fascinating to see if the power of text based interfaces and their natural compatibility with LLMs transfers over into an upswing in open source operating systems.

Its comedic at this point.

Claude and Gemini have been instrumental in helping me understand the core concepts of kubernetes, how to tune all these enterprise applications for high latency, think about architecture etc...

My biggest "wow, wtf?" moment was ben I was discussing the cluster architecture with Claude. It asked: want me to start the files?

I thought it meant update the notes, so replied 'yes'.

It spit out 2 sh files and 5 YAMLs that completely bootstrapped my cluster with a full GitOps setup using ArgoCD.

Learning while having a 24/7 senior tutor next to me has been insane value.

Thanks

related "webdev is fun again": claude. https://ma.ttias.be/web-development-is-fun-again/

Also the "Why it matters" in the article. I thought it's a jab at AI-generated articles but it starts too look like the article was AI written as well

Lol, no thank you. Btw do your knees hurt?

Historically, managed platforms like Fly.io, Render, and DigitalOcean App Platform existed to solve three pain points: 1. Fear of misconfiguring Linux 2. Fear of Docker / Compose complexity 3. Fear of “what if it breaks at 2am?”

CLI agents (Claude Code, etc.) dramatically reduce (1) and (2), and partially reduce (3).

So the tradeoff has changed from:

“Pay $50–150/month to avoid yak-shaving” → “Pay $5–12/month and let an agent do the yak-shaving”

I suspect it may have been related to the Network File System (NFS)? Like whenever I read a file on the host machine, it goes across the data-center network and charges me? Is this correct?

Anyway, I just decided to take control of those costs. Took me 2 weeks of part-time work to migrate all my stuff to a self-hosted machine. I put everything behind Cloudflare with a load balancer. Was a bit tricky to configure as I'm hosting multiple domains from the same machine. It's a small form factor PC tower with 20 CPU cores; easily runs all my stuff though. In 2 months, I already recouped the full cost of the machine through savings in my AWS bill. Now I pay like $10 a month to Cloudflare and even that's basically an optional cost. I strongly recommend.

Anyway it's impressive how AWS costs had been creeping slowly and imperceptibly over time. With my own machine, I now have way more compute than I need. I did a calculation and figured out that to get the same CPU capacity (no throttling, no bandwidth limitations) on AWS, I would have to pay like $1400 per month... But amortized over 4 years my machine's cost is like $20 per month plus $5 per month to get a static IP address. I didn't need to change my internet plan other than that. So AWS EC2 represented a 56x cost factor. It's mind-boggling.

I think it's one of these costs that I kind of brushed under the carpet as "It's an investment." But eventually, this cost became a topic of conversation with my wife and she started making jokes about our contribution to Jeff Bezos' wife's diamond ring. Then it came to our attention that his megayacht is so large that it comes with a second yacht beside it. Then I understood where he got it all from. Though to be fair to him, he is a truly great businessman; he didn't get it from institutional money or complex hidden political scheme; he got it fair and square through a very clever business plan.

Over 5 years or so that I've been using AWS, the costs had been flat. Meanwhile the costs of the underlying hardware had dropped to like 1/56th... and I didn't even notice. Is anything more profitable than apathy and neglect?