12mo ago

Any open source host solution for private users?

Situation: we live in europe, there's PRISM and Privacy Shield and all that, to which selfhosting is the solution. Now, my sister, mostly on Apple, got concerned with all the hacks and privacy violations over the years. She's a tech noob, so i can't really recommend her prism-break.org

There's a bunch of hosted solutions geared towards small to medium business, like Univention Corporate Server, NethServer, etc.

Are there similiar bundles for private use, basically Apple cloud alternative? With services like cloud storage, cloud office, media share, maybe chat, videocall?

Or should i let her wait until i got my box up, VPN her over? I'm only semi-professional tho.

37 comments

- I made this mistake and hosted my mom's webpage and email.
  Anytime anything happened, she was on the phone to me complaining about how horrible it all was.
  Email bounced because she got the address wrong? My fault. All the spam she got? My fault. Images were the wrong size on her webpage? My fault. Typo in a PDF she was sending to a client? My email server must have messed it up.
  I could continue, but jesus christ, it was a disaster.
  Never, ever, ever, ever host for family members unless you're willing to put up with that kind of shit, because that's what always happens.
- Yep. I don't recommend shit anymore to family members because it's either:
  a) not what they want (the proprietary service was better)
  b) you will be doing damage control for the rest of your life
- I don't know. I run a Nextcloud instance for myself and I let my gf tag along. Why do you think people shouldn't help their families out?
  
  I think this sums it up nicely.
- Sad that people with the knowledge won't even consider the great opportunity it is to teach that knowledge to a family member.
  
  As I am teaching myself right now maintainable selfhost setups using popular apps (admittedly with Kubernetes vs something minimal in functionality like Docker Desktop), there is a lot of complexity involved in getting these services both functional and maintainable while also having to consider the security implications of various setups.
  While I agree the concept of self-host is a good thing to advocate, I think the complexity and difficulty involved not just to do it, but to do it right is going to be a straight cliff of a learning curve for those not already technically inclined in databases, networking, and filesystems/block storage.
  Honestly, taking the burden of being IT for a reasonable subscription cost for your efforts is a better way to go, especially if the setup allows for expanding your offerings to other members in a localized community.
Host solution for what?
Each service you want will probably have a different set of options.
When you say Apple cloud, that could mean all sorts of things.
Specificity in tech is crucial.
You may want to start with one type of service, and go from there. You're about to head down a deep rabbit hole that includes things like Security Posture, Risk Management, etc.
Tell her to pay for Proton. Easy way out
Someone else wrote about how you’ll have a problem creating feature parity and integration like apple services. They’re right.
A better idea is the thing everyone always says: make a threat model.
The easiest thing to do for an Apple user is to simply make an iCloud recovery key, turn on advanced data protection and remove any account recovery method other than the key.
I would also gently counsel against trusting prismbreaks recommendations without research as they still point people at federated services where any bad or coerced administrative actor federated with the target users platform has access to a huge swath of data that most users would put in the category of “private”.
OwnCloud and Yunohost are the two that comes to mind. I will let you Google them.
yep: https://yunohost.org/#/
- just found out about this! why isn't this more widely known/used (assumption)? just because of the lack of fine grained control?
  brief question, as I couldn't find it in the docs after a quick scroll through: if I create a user in the yunohost interface, is that user then able to login to the yunohost admin interface or will they get a user in every service that is and will be hosted, or would one have to manually create that user in every hosted app?
You should setup a yunohost server for her.
But you should be upfront about being a teacher for her not being a helper.
For the others in the topic, yes teaching people to be autonomous with the digital is a lot of work (and a lot of phone calls), but it's also really rewarding for both you and "the student".
Cloudron is also an option. More polished than Yunohost, created by a German company. Very low rate of admin interaction required. But not for free if you need more than two Apps.
- Thanks, i'll take a look.
I've been using infomaniak for a while which suits my needs pretty well. It's mostly intended for businesses but it's very usable as an individual. Lots of storage for a decent price too and has all the functions you mentioned. Hosted in Switzerland.
NextCloud
- It takes time and skill to maintain. Totally worth it but don't jump in without expecting some hurtles.
  Side note: make sure you backup the database as well as the files. I've scene a lot of people lose data because they didn't backup the database.
- I guess you don't want e2ee
  
  Technically it does support it. However, why would you bother.
Why would you expect that your self-hosted solution is less-likely to be hacked than a hosted solution with literally teams of people paid to secure and update them?
- Because it isn't public facing.
  
  If it's available over the internet, it's a target.
So what are you wanting?
Yunohost seems what i look for. Thanks!

37 comments