Anyone else just sick of trying to follow guides that cover 95% of the process, or maybe slightly miss a step and then spend hours troubleshooting setups just to get it to work?
I think I just have too much going in my “lab” the point that when something breaks (and my wife and/or kids complain) it’s more of a hassle to try and remember how to fix or troubleshoot stuff. I lightly document myself cuz I feel like I can remember well enough. But then it’s a style to find the time to fix, or stuff is tested and 80%completed but never fully used because life is busy and I don’t have loads of free time to pour into this stuff anymore. I hate giving all that data to big tech, but I also hate trying to manage 15 different containers or VMs, or other services. Some stuff is fine/easy or requires little effort, but others just don’t seem worth it.
I miss GUIs with stuff where I could fumble through settings to fix it as is easier for me to look through all that vs read a bunch of commands.
Idk, do you get lab burnout? Maybe cuz I do IT for work too it just feels like it’s never ending…
Honestly, this is the kind of response that actually makes me want to stop self hosting. Community members that have little empathy.
I work in IT and like most we’re also a Windows shop. I have zero professional experience with Linux but I’m learning through my home lab while simultaneously trying extract myself from the privacy cluster fuck that is the current consumer tech industry. It’s a transition and the documentation I find more or less matches the OPs experience.
I research, pick what seems to be the best for my situation (often most popular), get it working with sustainable, minimal complexity, and in short time find that some small, vital aspect of its setup (like reverse proxy) has literally zero documentation for getting it to work with some other vital part of my setup. I guess I should have made a better choice 18 months ago when I didn’t expect to find this new service accessible. I find some two year old Github issue comment that allegedly solves my exact problem that I can’t translate to the version I’m running because it’s two revisions newer. Most other responses are incomplete, RTFM, or “git gud n00b”, like your response here
Wherever you work, whatever industry, you can get burnt out. It’s got nothing to do with if you’ve “got what it takes” or whatever bullshit you think “you’re in the wrong field of work and you’re trying to jam a square peg in a round hole” equates to.
If it’s that easy, then point me to where you’ve written about it. I’d love to learn what 100 services you’ve cloned the repos for, tweaked a few files in a few minutes, and run with minimal maintenance all working together harmoniously.
You’ve completely misread everything I’ve said.
Let’s make a few things clear here.
My response is not “Git gud”. My response is that sometimes there are selfhosted projects that are really cool and many people recommend, but the set up for them is genuinely more complex than it should be, and you’re better off avoiding them instead of banging your head against a wall and stressing yourself out. Selfhosting should work for you, not against you. You can always take another crack at a project later when you’ve got more hands on experience.
Secondly, it’s not a matter of whether OP “has what it takes” in his career. I simply pointed out the fact that everything he seems to hate about selfhosting, are fundamental core principals of working in IT. My response to him isn’t that he can’t hack it, it seems more like he just genuinely doesn’t like it. I’m suggesting that it won’t get better because this is what IT is. What that means to OP is up to him. Maybe he doesn’t care because the money is good which is valid. But maybe he considers eventually moving into a career he doesn’t hate, and then the selfhosting stuff won’t bother him so much. As a matter of fact, OP himself didn’t take offense to that suggestion the way you did. He agreed with my assessment.
As you learn more about self hosting, you’ll find that certain things like reverse proxy set up isn’t always included in the documentation because it’s not really a part of the project. How reverse proxies (And by extension http as a whole) work is a technology to learn on its own. I rarely have to read documentation on RP for a project because I just know how reverse proxying works. It’s not really the responsibility of a given project to tell you how to do it, unless their project has a unique gotcha involved. I do however love when they do include it, as I think that selfhosting should be more accessible to people who don’t work in IT.
Most of them TBH. I often don’t engage with a project that involves me cloning a repo because I know it means it’s going to be a finicky pain in the ass. But most things I set up were done in less than 20 minutes, including secure access from the internet using a VPS proxy with a WAF and CrowdSec, and integration with my SSO. If you want to share with me your common pain points, or want an example of what my workflow looks like let me know.
I’ve misread the tone, I agree. I apologize for that. However, I find that his complaints were not about things that are always “fundamental core principals of working in IT”. For some, sure, but where I work I’m by far the employee with the most familiarity with CLI/powershell and scripting. Almost everything is done via a GUI or web interface if it can be. I would tell any of my coworkers that maybe IT isn’t for them.
I also, in a rush to finish, misremembered and incorrectly reread some of your words too quickly. You did not recommend the “clone a repo” solutions, you advised against them. Again, I apologize. I still am suspicious of this massive collection of self hosted services that work perfectly with each other after like 20 minutes of tweaking and little maintenance. That was what I was trying to imply with that section. I’ve lost close to a dozen 6-10 hour sessions on Saturdays pulling my hair out because I can’t seem to find out how to do some specific things that it seems like I need to do to make some “easy” new service to work with my setup. It’s like that Malcom in the Middle (?) clip of the dad 5 projects deep at the end of the day trying to fix some simple problem in the morning.
I’ll try to document some of my issues this weekend. I would honestly appreciate any help or recommendations.
I don’t mean this in a disparaging way because I too got my start in an environment like that, but that’s a very legacy environment. When I talk about core principles of working in IT, I mean the state of IT today in 2026, as well as where it’s headed in the future. It sounds like your workplace is one of those SMBs that’s still stuck in the glory days. Thats not what IT is it’s what IT was. And so unless you’re currently end of career, you’re going to have to give that up and embrace this new paradigm or be washed out eventually. So when I say “It isn’t the field for you” in the context of OP I just mean that it isn’t going to get better. It’ll be less and less like the way you know it every day, and more and more like the way OP doesn’t like it.
For example you say you are the most familiar in your entire workplace with “powershell and scripting”, however I literally got teased just the other day by solving a niche problem with a powershell script. “How very 2010 of you”.
I don’t say this to belittle you, as I was the same guy as you not too many years ago. And I get that you’re banging your head against this new paradigm, but this is the stuff you really do want to stick with IF it’s your goal to grow in IT long term. It will click eventually given enough time. I am definitely willing to help you with any questions you might have or perhaps if I have time I can try and demonstrate my workflow for a standard container deployment.
Some questions I would ask you are
why. it was not telling that they should quit self hosting. it was not condescending either, I think. it was about work.
but truth be told IT is a very wide field, and maybe that generalization is actually not good. still, 15 containers is not much, and as I see it they help with not letting all your hosted software make a total mess on your system.
working with the terminal sometimes feels like working with long tools in a narrow space, not being able to fully use my hands, but UX design is hard, and so making useful GUIs is hard and also takes much more time than making a well organized CLI tool.
in my experience the most important here is to get used to common operations in a terminal text editor, and find an organized directory structure for your services that work for you. Also, using man pages and --help outputs. But when you can afford doing it, you could scp files or complete directories to your desktop for editing with a proper text editor.
That was what set me off. I was having a bad morning and misread the tone to be more dismissive than it likely was.