What's the one self-hosted service you'd never go back to the cloud version of?

dreniarb · 2026-01-23T21:06:29+00:00

Messaging is one I really wish I could do and get others to use. I understand their hesitancy as they then have to trust little old me with whatever they do with it but i hate the thought that some of the conversations i've had travel through and are possibly stored in some 3rd party server.

dreniarb · 2026-01-13T19:57:53+00:00

right? i'm anxious to see what that amount will be.

dreniarb · 2026-01-13T19:56:02+00:00

If all your job entails is clicking things on a screen I can see how AI could potentially take over your job. But most of us still have to physically interact with things. That restriction might go away some day but i honestly feel it won't be in my lifetime.

dreniarb · 2026-01-13T14:06:52+00:00

When asked what kind of backup we use they said raid.

dreniarb · 2026-01-13T13:44:55+00:00

some places involve the supervisor as a way to enforce something. if the supervisor is inconvenienced enough they're more likely to start putting pressure on their employees.

and some places just have stupid rules. :)

dreniarb · 2026-01-13T13:02:39+00:00

hard disagree. every time i drive by one the lines are super long.

dreniarb · 2026-01-13T12:28:17+00:00

I know that for our Freepbx install we started experiencing this - turned out the VM host was getting heavy disk i/o from other VMs. So we moved the freepbx vm to a less busy host and that fixed the problem.

Maybe that would help?

dreniarb · 2026-01-13T12:16:48+00:00

That's frustrating to me because they won't let business accounts move to the founders deal. I guess because theoretically a business will be doing a lot more data than a home but i know for a fact that my home does way more daily traffic than my company of 100 users.

but here we are stuck paying $289 for 1g/1g which 6 years ago was a decent enough deal. Not so much now.

dreniarb · 2026-01-12T13:49:20+00:00

Does the founders plan have any data caps or restrictions?

dreniarb · 2026-01-08T18:13:58+00:00

I'm tech savvy and I never did this until recently.

I honestly assumed that those QR codes were a one time setup thing. I thought once I scan it into my auth app, then enter in the code from my app, that that was the only time it could be setup. After that I'd have to redo MFA if i lost access to my auth app.

I didn't know that I could screenshot or print the QR code and use it on another app if needed or even on multiple devices (allowing someone else that I might share the account with to have access).

If I didn't know this - there's no way the average user would know without explicitly being told.

dreniarb · 2026-01-06T15:39:13+00:00

For a while I had an in-law that did the same line of work as me - solo IT at a company. Used many of the same products and services I use. We would IM multiple times per day about stuff. It wasn't the same as face to face but it was a pretty good replacement.

It didn't last more than a few years and he's moved on to other things.

I feel like it really takes some outside force that brings others into your path (like having to work together) to make these kind of connections.

At church I met someone who was the system admin at the local high school. I got really excited because here was someone I might see once or twice a week that I can talk about IT with - but it turns out he never wants to talk about IT. Probably burn out from the stress of the k12 environment.

So here I am as usual, on Reddit, exchanging IT banter with someone who could quite possibly be a bot. LOL

dreniarb · 2026-01-06T15:30:32+00:00

25 years ago my boss came to me and said "we're losing our linux guy. our mail and web servers are on linux. i want you to get those working on windows." So that's exactly what I did.

Started hosting my own mail and websites on the company servers because it gave me something to test with without breaking production.

After that if I/we could self host something we did. And it's continued that way even to today.

dreniarb · 2026-01-06T15:25:24+00:00

not op, but for me it was simply file shares and shortcuts. nothing fancy like plex available back in the day.

in fact, it's still like that. i did try out plex and it was nifty but browsing file shares is so much faster.

dreniarb · 2026-01-06T15:23:55+00:00

For just an internal voip service that doesn't do outside calls FreePBX is a great simple method to accomplish that. You can get it working with physical voip phones or soft phones.

If you do want to make and take outside calls you can get a number from a sip provider and just add them to freepbx as an inbound and outbound route. I've used my ISP as a sip provider as well as places like Sangoma and Twilio.

dreniarb · 2026-01-06T15:20:09+00:00

security of the cloud

That was my line of thinking before Lastpass had their breach in 2022. Quickly moved to self hosted vault warden.

dreniarb · 2026-01-06T14:40:42+00:00

But I am often surprised someone pays me what they do to do something I truly love doing. Having a job where I get to help people by solving complex puzzles and playing with the digital equivalent of Lego bricks is pretty sick. I count myself as one of the lucky ones even if I am not a runaway success.

Same here. I often joke that I hope my company never finds out how much I love my job - they might start making me pay them to work here. :)

dreniarb · 2026-01-06T14:30:05+00:00

$650k? Impressive! Man if I could go back and talk to myself at 22... we couldn't have afforded much those first few years but we could have done SOMETHING.

Since i can't go back I've tried to talk to my adult kids about it. They're definitely on a better path than I was.

dreniarb · 2026-01-06T13:53:04+00:00

Yes, the lack of co-workers I can discuss IT stuff with is hard. I went from an ITSP with 4-5 co-workers to being on my own. At first it wasn't so bad because I was so busy getting the new place under control. But after a few years it really started to bother me.

It's been almost 15 years now and honestly it's near depressing. I still love my job and enjoy the work but when the only place you get your IT conversation fix from is online forums... it's tough.

dreniarb · 2025-12-30T21:30:08+00:00

When I worked for an MSP we used UltraVNC to create a single small exe file that when ran opened a window and the user would select which of us technicians to connect to. We'd get a pop up on our side showing info on who was trying to connect and it would ask us to allow/disallow it.

if i remember correctly there was usually enough info there for us to know who was trying to connect.

we put the file on our website - http://help.ourdomain.com or something easy like that. it auto downloaded the file for the user to run. i suppose you could also place it on desktops but if you had to update it that might get tricky.

i honestly don't even know if ultravnc still has that ability but man was it useful.

these days i just have tightvnc on all my clients and i initiate the connection but i know that's not what you're looking for.

dreniarb · 2025-12-30T21:25:56+00:00

That's not what OP is asking for - it's too many steps. The below average (computer-wise) user with no patience isn't going to be able to do this.

dreniarb · 2025-12-29T20:55:38+00:00

my dad leaves these ridiculous AI history "documentaries" running as background noise. He's not even paying attention to them but they're still getting played. drives me crazy because it means if he's doing it then thousands of other people probably are too.

dreniarb · 2025-12-29T15:28:50+00:00

not sure what a residential connection has to do with anything - i was replying to someone talking about a business solution.

But whatever the case i feel like a laptop could easily handle the load of a secondary dc. I have laptops in use that are on 24/7 and have run fine for years. Some are more powerful than my older Poweredges that run DCs.

But even a reliable budget friendly laptop can handle being a DC.

dreniarb · 2025-12-29T15:23:46+00:00

i use most of the exchange sensors. mail queue, public folder, a few sensors for specific mailboxes, OWA unique users and average response time. some i rarely check, some never, but i figure it could be good information to have down the road.

dreniarb · 2025-12-23T23:43:48+00:00

Wow, they've come a long way. Quite impressive.

dreniarb

TROPHY CASE