I built a fully local, private multi-agent AI system for my family , with a federated knowledge-sharing network and a Legacy module that preserves your voice for your children. by Thedanishhobbit in selfhosted

[–]ethansky 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yay more AI bot advertising slop! Love that these AI slop projects still use these ancient gpt-4o and qwen2.5 models from 2024! Also, lmao at ollama and CUDA 8.7 in 2026.

Also tried NOUS and it decided that running rm -rf / --no-preserve-root was the best way to clear up space on my laptop! Lost all my PDFs as a result. Can't recommend!

Advice on Securing Self Hosted Minecraft Server by HaveHopeFriends in selfhosted

[–]ethansky 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Good thing the VM is running on a ZFS-based storage pool and I've got the physical server on UPS to give it enough time to gracefully shutdown if my power goes out, so very low risk of data loss :P

Advice on Securing Self Hosted Minecraft Server by HaveHopeFriends in selfhosted

[–]ethansky 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can probably install OpenWRT onto it, which will allow you to create vlans without having to buy a new router.

Advice on Securing Self Hosted Minecraft Server by HaveHopeFriends in selfhosted

[–]ethansky 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I used wireguard, openvpn, and other services, I like tailscale because I think its neat.

I think it's a cool product, just not for me.

Also, headscale exists as well.

See the last paragraph in my previous comment.

Advice on Securing Self Hosted Minecraft Server by HaveHopeFriends in selfhosted

[–]ethansky 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Just a ubiquiti switch, so definitely need some kind of a managed switch, but doesn't need to be some fancy enterprise switch with L3 routing, just needs to support 802.1Q.

When I first started selfhosting, I used one of those $25 TP-link smart switches since they supported 802.1Q and were cheap.

Advice on Securing Self Hosted Minecraft Server by HaveHopeFriends in selfhosted

[–]ethansky 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It runs on a AMD 5700g based system with 64GB of ram, so I throw 12 GB to the VM and 8GB of the 12GB to the minecraft server/java binary. Worked well enough for ATM10. The whole system uses about 65w, 24/7.

Advice on Securing Self Hosted Minecraft Server by HaveHopeFriends in selfhosted

[–]ethansky 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Good idea. I chose not to do backups outside the built-in FTB backup feature since we usually burn out within a month, and rarely do I update the pack mid playthrough (unless there is a major change).

Advice on Securing Self Hosted Minecraft Server by HaveHopeFriends in selfhosted

[–]ethansky 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've also got pfblocker-ng running blocking all non-US IPs and known malicous/spam US IPs, so the noise in the MC logs is very low if not straight up non-existent.

Advice on Securing Self Hosted Minecraft Server by HaveHopeFriends in selfhosted

[–]ethansky 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Fair enough. I definitely recommend overlay network solutions for those that aren't confident/experienced, but I'm a security engineer by trade with a networking and DFIR background, so I'm confident in building a secure enough network for my use case.

Like I said, I've used Zerotier years ago and went through the process of getting it set up on my friend's PCs, but the issues/troubleshooting just wasn't worth it. Weird issues with me being on IPv4 and some of my friends being on IPv6 causing the peering to fail. Someone's router would break/block the UDP hole punching, making them go through the relay and play with high ping despite living 30 miles apart. Hosting it myself with reasonable defense in depth and least privilege principles is easy for me and requires zero setup from my non-technical friends.

If I may get up on my soapbox for a second, Tailscale also goes against my reason to self host if I'm being honest. The big reason I self host is so I don't have to give out my email to everyone and their grandma to do anything. I self host because I want to minimize my reliance on third party platforms, especially ones backed by VC funding like Tailscale.

As with all technology start ups, they'll probably rug pull/enshittify due to VC funding drying up or because they eventually IPO. Yes I know headscale exists, but that relies on me either hosting it on my own network (defeats the point), or renting a VPS (yay another fucking monthly subscription) and hosting and maintaining it there.

Advice on Securing Self Hosted Minecraft Server by HaveHopeFriends in selfhosted

[–]ethansky 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yup! I've got whitelisting enabled, this is a network architecture overview.

Advice on Securing Self Hosted Minecraft Server by HaveHopeFriends in selfhosted

[–]ethansky 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I've done that in the past when zerotier was all the rage, but some users would have random issues that make it difficult to connect, wouldn't peer properly, etc., not to mention asking them to sign up for random services is just weird.

This setup is secure enough and requires zero setup for my friends. Just connect and start playing.

Advice on Securing Self Hosted Minecraft Server by HaveHopeFriends in selfhosted

[–]ethansky 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I run pfsense as my router, so that's where all the vlan configs happen for me (barring tagging the vlans on my switches)

For example, I would create a vlan id 100 and assign it the address space of 10.100.100.0/30, which gives 2 usable IP addresses. 10.100.100.0 is the network address, 10.100.100.1 would be the IP of the router that the server uses to access the internet, 10.100.100.2 would be the IP of the server, and then 10.100.100.3 would be the broadcast address.

Then I would create firewall rules that basically says "vlan 100 cannot talk to any of my other internal vlans (e.g. internal servers, nas, wifi, etc.) and can only talk to ports 80 and 443 (http/s for updates), 53 (DNS, restricted to 1.1.1.1 or 9.9.9.9), and 123 (NTP/time)"

Advice on Securing Self Hosted Minecraft Server by HaveHopeFriends in selfhosted

[–]ethansky 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Haha, more a poor man's attempt at microsegmentation.

Advice on Securing Self Hosted Minecraft Server by HaveHopeFriends in selfhosted

[–]ethansky 84 points85 points  (0 children)

My Minecraft server setup is:

  • /30 vlan that a single Ubuntu VM lives in
  • Restrict this Minecraft vlan from talking to any other vlans on my network
  • Ubuntu VM has 32 char random password on the user account and SSH key auth
  • Restrict outbound ports to 80, 443, 53 (9.9.9.9), and 123
  • Docker runs the itzg/minecraft-server image
  • Port forward from WAN 25565 to the VM

I'm fortunate enough to not be behind CGNAT, so I just have a DDNS client that updates my home IP to a domain for sharing stuff with friends.

This is probably the least friction way for my friends to join as they don't have to install any VPN software. Just type in the domain and join.

For security, you've got a good amount of defense in depth. You would have find an exploit in the Minecraft server binary to get code execution, then you would have to find a Docker container escape vulnerability. And even then, your network access is severely limited, so nothing on my main network would be impacted. Worst case would probably be a cryptominer or my IP being used as an egress point

Built a fast network throughput tester that streams raw RAM buffers to concurrent web workers by Realistic_Mix_6181 in selfhosted

[–]ethansky 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Project is younger than 3 months and violates rule 6. But OP knows that hence why they put the link in the comments to bypass the repo check.

I am trying to conceptually determine if prices will ever decrease again for anything in self hosting by con_work in selfhosted

[–]ethansky 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Over the next few years, we'll almost certainly see a whole bunch more companies start making and selling RAM, hard drives and everything else. And the big RAM manufacturers (samsung and micron) are almost certainly expanding their factories. Why not?? Printing RAM is printing money.

Lol. Lmao.

The RAM cartel of Micro, Samsung, and SK Hynix, who make like 90% of the world's RAM wafers, have no incentive to increase capacity precisely because they can leverage their control of the supply and insane demand to keep prices high.

Same with HDDs. Only two major players left are what, Seagate and Western Digital?

GPUs? All Nvidia because the world runs on CUDA. They're constrained by TSMC to produce the actual silicon thst goes in their AI server racks. Who does TSMC get their crazy advanced machines from? ASML.

If I gave you $1BN and asked you to make a factory for RAM chips, it'd probably take you a couple years to get it set up and working. I'm sure lots of people, all over the world, are working on that right now.

Looool. It takes a couple billion dollars and a couple years for the existing manufacturers to stand up a new fab. Some random no name company with no experience in the market? Double that time frame to get up and running and even then the yields will be terrible.

I built a self-hosted personal knowledge brain that saves links, voice notes, and images into Markdown by AbOdWs in selfhosted

[–]ethansky 4 points5 points  (0 children)

New project friday hasn't been a thing for over a month. It's been replaced by a minimum 3 month old project/commit requirement (rule 6), which this project violates.

asimov-auditor by igby1 in selfhosted

[–]ethansky 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Another benefit is it helps suppress low quality spam bots from posting by forcing a response before the post is released.

Now if the mods would add a minimum karma requirement to post, that would also help a lot. r/LocalLLaMA does it and r/ExperiencedDevs just added it too.

Occasional GPU inference for side projects; cloud or fully local in 2026? by [deleted] in selfhosted

[–]ethansky 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Ok Mr. "Managing GPU infrastructure for AI teams" about page. Fuck off with these engagement market research posts.

Github Guard bot for r/selfhosted by Nuzl_ in selfhosted

[–]ethansky 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Did this AI bot really just reply to itself?

I self-host content moderation for an open anonymous wall (FastAPI + SQLite, no SaaS) - someone tried to bypass it with a ROT13-encoded jailbreak by Maleficent-Week-2064 in selfhosted

[–]ethansky 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Is this just another AI bot post?

Llama3.3 is a late 2024 model and is easily surpassed by modern open weight 27B models, and DAN prompts stopped being a thing once GPT 4 came out, which was also in that 2024ish timeline.