An Almost Anonymous Blog

Setting up my own server

Preamble

After reading a couple of posts from Sylvia about setting up a server with self-hosted applications (so far just Syncthing and Miniflux), I thought it was time to set it up for myself as well. There are a few things that I've wanted to do that only make sense as a self-hosted option (some RSS readers, such as Miniflux, are self-hosted, or at least it's free if you self-host). This is my experience setting it up.

Guides used:

This all started maybe ~1-2 weeks ago when I first read Sylvia's guide and clicked through to Derek's Tech Independence page. Reading through that first guide got me curious about setting up my own server, because it seemed a lot simpler than I expected. I'm somewhat of a techy person, but I always figured this type of setup was beyond me. I also thought cost to be an initial barrier, but it's ~$6 a month for this basic setup.

I still don't understand the entire ins and outs of the process (Derek's very handy script takes care of most of the setup process), but I'm learning as I go. One of the helpful things for troubleshooting has been to examine Derek's ti.sh script (thanks Sylvia for the suggestion!) and see what's going on. I'm not sure what coding language it is, but it's very basic and I find it easy enough to follow.

The entire process took me about 3-4 days to get everything up and running. I had several setbacks along the way, mostly involving setting up Syncthing.

Syncthing & Other Issues

I followed Sylvia's guide step-by-step, although admittedly I jumped through it a little too quickly and had to backtrack a few times. Still, as near as I could tell, I got everything taken care of and set up. The only problem, when I got to the point where you access the Syncthing GUI to set up user authentication, I got this very unhelpful error message:

Host check error

I searched and searched and couldn't figure it out. That's when I consulted Sylvia by email. And I am not exaggerating when I say this, but to date our email chain through this entire process sits at 37 emails between the two of us. She has the patience of a saint1.

Somewhere along the way, not at all related to the Syncthing guide, I took down my own server and served up a 500 Internal Server Error. I think what I did was inadvertently emptied out my /var/www/ directory. Woops. I had to start over from scratch with setting up the server. New IP address and everything.2

But once I did that, I went through Sylvia's guide again, and successfully set up Syncthing. Now I've got that running, and I'm using my /pub/ folder to host IMG files (you can see an example of that on my NA beer review) instead of using ImgBB.

Email continues to be a problem. For a few days I couldn't figure out why SMTP2GO wasn't allowing me to register my URL; I eventually emailed their support and found out simply they don't allow newly registered domains to sign up. I guess it's a spam prevention thing, which makes sense! Anyway yesterday I was finally able to register, and went through Derek's script to get the inbox all set up. Everything was OK, except...somewhere in the process there was some sort of error and the script ended even though it wasn't finished. Every time I start it up again it finishes the script assuming everything is set up.

I looked through ti.sh for an idea of how it was attempting to set up the SMTP server and from what I can tell, I have everything set up correctly. I manually changed some DNS settings provided by SMTP2GO but I'm still unable to send emails - just receive. I think I'm going to have to contact support for this one - an ongoing project. I don't think there's anything more Derek or his script can do here.

What am I using this for?

I already mentioned I'm using it to host image files, but also the /pub/ directory will be for file sharing, if I have something to share with people. That's basically it for that side.

But one of the things I was excited to set up was Obsidian. Lots of people rave about it, and I see Lou talk about it a lot too. I haven't fallen down the rabbit hole just yet, but I'm teetering on the edge. I didn't want to pay the monthly cost just to get Obsidian Sync; technically paying for this server is more expensive monthly but considering I can get other uses out of it, the benefit is higher.

It took almost no time at all to set up Obsidian on my PC and Android. Unfortunately it doesn't work the same way on my iPad, but using Runescape I can write .md files and save them in my Syncthing Obsidian vault manually - and they do show up in my notes list after syncing. I wish I could get a web app for Obsidian so I can use it at work but I don't think it exists. That's where Sylvia comes in again - she's trying to get File Browser set up for a web interface to access the Syncthing directory. mgx was able to do it so that's the ideal outcome. She's hit a few bumps so hasn't posted about it yet. But if I/we can get File Browser set up on the server then in theory I could write some .md files in Notepad at work and upload them to my vault that way; and vice versa I can edit the .md files generated in Obsidian and overwrite them. We'll see.

In conclusion...

This was a fun process, even though it was frustrating at times. I think this falls under the "funstration"3 category of fun. rscottjones calls this "Type 2 fun". Would I do it again? Hopefully this was the only time I'll need to!

2025-03-20 14:54:00 EDT
Update: I got email working. It was a simple fix. I have no idea what I'm going to use it for, but it's there!

Reply by email   Share this post

Or if you prefer, find me on Mastodon. And there's also Bluesky!

  1. I asked her if she had a 'buy me a coffee' link so I could send her a little something for her time. She didn't when I asked, but now she does! I recommend you send something her way as well. Her link is here: Sylvia at Ko-Fi↩

  2. I did this several times before it stuck, actually.↩

  3. I don't think I've written about this here...or at least I don't feel like searching around my multitude of posts to try and find it.↩

#projects #technology