Just a few minutes ago, the following post scrolled past me in my Fedi timeline:

Anybody self host their blog on their sbc or pc at home? Is there a good tutorial I can follow? I’m especially concerned about opening up ports or exposing my home ip to randos.

I read that post and immediately thought: Running my blog on an SBC at home? I’m doing that! Concern about opening ports and “exposing” the home IP to the wider internet? I’ve certainly got opinions on that!

So I hit the “reply” button. And froze. What the hell am I going to say?

“Well, after you’ve created your five-node k8s cluster…”

“Alright, once your Ceph S3 is up and running…”

“Next up: Creating a bastion host and properly isolating it from the rest of your network…”

🤷

And don’t get me started on my opinions about “exposing my home IP” or “opening up ports on my home network”. I never understand why anybody would think either of those things are bad. And then again I wouldn’t trust any router provided by the average ISP at all. They probably have UPnP enabled by default and half a dozen open ports. I mean, just look at your average home router firewall log.

But that’s not really what frustrated me. What really frustrated me when I sat in front of that empty reply field was myself. And the fact that, after some rather careful consideration, I had nothing to say. Not a single useful thing. I didn’t even have a post from somebody else I had some trust in at hand, because in the past couple of years, I’ve only ever skimmed Homelab beginner posts, if that.

I’m just rather frustrated about that feeling of utter uselessness. I’ve written a lot of posts on this blog over the years. But unless you’re actually running or planning to run a Kubernetes-based Homelab, none of it is even remotely useful for beginners. And the same is true for the Homelab blogs I read. And which, just to make that perfectly clear, I quite enjoy. But none of them contains anything useful for the author of the post I quoted above.

And this situation is starting to feel a frustrating. The example I quoted above isn’t the only one I come across in the Fediverse where I’m thinking: I should be able to say something on this, but I’ve got nothing. And then the only thing I do is boosting the post, hoping somebody else has some good and up to date advise.

Perhaps it’s finally time to break open my strategic Raspberry Pi reserves and try to setup a fresh machine using nothing from my main Homelab. No Ceph storage, no Woodpecker CI, no Ansible and certainly no k8s. Hm, or perhaps I can have just a small k3s single node cluster? 😅

I should also have a look at stuff like YunoHost to see whether I’m willing to propose it to newcomers.

But overall I feel like I really want to stop just freezing when there are beginner questions because the best I could come up with starts with “Once the k8s control plane is up and running…”.