It's 30+ degrees here in London as I'm writing this. Sweats and tears my friends. But anyYunohoo.
So yes, it's time to get that old super duper machine out. I'm referring to my old laptop with 32GB RAM and 2TB SSD. I know, plenty of RAM and drive storage to bring world peace etc..I must admit that it went better than expected and seriously better than first time. You may ask why bother in the first place. You had Syncthing all along and it worked perfectly. And it did. Honestly, I don't know. I felt bored one day and saw somewhere someone mentioning self hosting on Fediverse, so I got a bit FOMO.
I was a bit worried about my ISP blocking ports etc. but at the end it was only port 25 (the email one, you know) which I wouldn't really use anyway, so I'm like okkkk let's go. I fired up the old laptop (the Beast, as I call it due to its aforementioned specs), and formatted it with Debian 12 (stable). Remember, it was my back up laptop in the previous Syncthing configuration and it run Linux Mint (great distro btw!). For some reason, I tried to install Yunohost directly without installing Debian first, but for some reason the .iso file was corrupted and installation failed. Weirdly, I remember this happening in the first time me trying Yuno. Hmmmm.....
Here I was then with Debian in the Beast. I then used the terminal in the laptop to install Yunohost which only took a few minutes, and voila, my server is up. Well, with all the usual errors and warnings, but locally it's up. I followed the Yuno website instructions to initially configure my server. I opened the necessary ports in my ISP's router's webpage (the classic 192.168.0.1). 80 and 443 are the magic numbers and most basic ports you need to port forward in order to have a viable and reachable server. I didn't bother with the rest, which was email-related anyway. I figured I already have Proton and Tuta for my everyday mail, and re the server emails etc. I wouldn't probably get much from the system, as I'm aiming for a minimal server setup with only the essentials. Famous last words I know. Re port 22, I had opened initially for ssh access but then got some unusually BOT-related traffic so closed it almost immediately. Unnecessary risk in the first place.
I logged in my Yunohost server's page and met with the expected web admin page. All the DNS configuration was handled by Yunohost automatically and beautifully, so I didn't really have to do anything myself. I also got my Let's Encrypt certificate. I finally run the diagnostic tool. I got some warnings, and only a few errors. I ignored the ones that were irrelevant to my case, and everything looked green.
I went on to install my favourite apps. I chose the ones below:
- Nextcloud for my personal Cloud storage
- Monitorix for monitoring various aspects of my server
- Bludit for blogging
- Httpsh on ttyd for having a usable terminal on my main laptop (rather than having to constantly use my server laptop)
- Unattended-upgrades so I can go on being lazy and don't manually update all the time
My server is now fully operational. I put the server laptop aside somewhere in the living room and connected to the router via an Ethernet cable (don't even bother with WiFi). And here I am now self hosting my own piece of garden in the Internet!
Give it a try, whether you are techie or not. The documentation on the Yunohost website is more than enough and the installation guide is simple and well explanatory. Happy hosting...