Comment by Grombobulous
3 days ago
> After a few instances of my wife saying “X isn’t working” and needing to restart a service manually
This seemed like a good point of the article to mention that when self-hosting you need to consider bus factor.
Can your wife retrieve the family photos off of Immich if you die suddenly? If you die suddenly these will become even more important than they are now.
This is why my self-hosting is mostly for my own needs and not something the whole family depends on. I still use a cloud hosted photos service (Ente photos) and mostly use the NAS for a self-hosted backup.
If I die my family can just unplug my junk and get AT&T to turn the router/modem back to normal WiFi mode and throw my OpnSense box in the estate sale.
I set up a 'Karpathy-style' llm wiki for this purpose. I had a local model help me build a dataset which included links to all of my self hosted services, how they operate, how they are maintained, and common free and commercial alternatives if they stop and my partner is unable to get them going again. It includes everything needed to keep the system running (if desired) were anything to happen to me. It includes a lot of other information that is only in my head also, less relevant to this article, like contact information and things that I take care of routinely.
This took less than a few hours to set up, and resulted in a nice organized obsidian vault, easy for a non-technical person to access, that will hopefully make the first year or two after I am gone easier on those I leave behind.
https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519...