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"A newbie's guide to self-hosting with #YunoHost. Part 2: installation & setup"

🔗 : blog.elenarossini.com/a-newbie…

with a special shout-out to @shollyethan and @ilja who, a year ago, encouraged me to try self-hosting. And of course immense gratitude to the @yunohost team for making all this possible ❤️

I hope this guide may inspire others to try it, too. The path to digital independence and empowerment is easier than you thought...

#selfhosting #FOSS #empowerment

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in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

Thanks, that looks similar to the way I tested it a few days ago on my local dev machine in Qemu, but I haven't set up firewall and DynDns yet.

So for now I can only test .local installations like searx, yacy, piped, peertube, anarchism etc.

I'm glad I didn't tried to install it on my regular machine, that would make it unusable, with freedombox a parallel setup seems possible.

At the end I want to have two Peertubes, one at home and one for production.

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

One thing I discovered when first installing Yunohost : you can use a free Yunohost domain name, but chose your name carefully, because you can only pick one free domain name.
in reply to Michel Patrice

@MichelPatrice good point! I didn't mention free domain names because I believe owning your own domain name is far more empowering - than depending on an external free service.

I personally do domain name registrar hopping: get a great deal, then if prices increase the next year, I change registrar because you can always find cheaper deals... but that's just me. gotta run out now, thanks Michel!

in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

And thank you for this guide, I will use the part about installing your own domain name.

I use the free Yunohost domain name, but when I wanted to set my own domain name, the instructions were a little ambiguous.

So I will go over your guide, à tête reposée, to finally set up my own carefully nerdishly picked domain name.

in reply to Michel Patrice

@MichelPatrice yay! let me know how it goes Michel... and I'm curious about that domain name 😊
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

Je regarderai ce problème de nom de domaine probablement dans le temps des fêtes, j'aurai probablement un peu de temps libre.

Setting a separate admin.yourdomain.com is a nice idea.

in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

Premier essai. Étape 4, mon admin est déjà créé, je clique sur l'onglet DNS et ça ne se passe pas comme prévu.

Yunohost me propose une configuration automatique (voir la capture d'écran). Je suis le lien pour les instructions pour obtenir le jeton d'authentification, mais la documentation n'est pas à jour, l'interface de Gandi a changé. Je galère sur le site de Gandi, et je ne trouve pas.

in reply to Michel Patrice

@MichelPatrice ah je fais toujours la configuration manuelle (même quand l’automatique est proposée) - et ça se passe toujours bien (avec la manuelle), même si elle prend plus de temps
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

Dès que j'ai un peu de temps, je vais configurer ça manuellement, mais je vais devoir bien reviser toute la documentation de Yunohost (et de la tienne).

(Je l'avais déjà fait pour un Wordpress il y a deux ou trois ans et il me semble que ça avait été plutôt simple.)

in reply to Michel Patrice

@MichelPatrice ça peut être utile: easydmarc.com/blog/what-is-dns…
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

Je me rabats sur les instructions de Yunohost pour faire ça manuellement et je me souviens de pourquoi je ne l'avais pas fait. Je n'y comprends pas grand chose.

Tes instructions sont plus simples, mais la correspondance entre ce que je devrais voir sur Yunohost et chez Gandi n'est pas évidente.

Je vais devoir y revenir plus tard. Je dois me préparer pour demain. Je laisse tomber pour l'instant...

in reply to Michel Patrice

@MichelPatrice merci Michel ! Peut-être j’écrirai un article sur les configurations DNS (comment créer un « record ») parce que c’est compliqué effectivement et ça dépend du domain name registrar. À venir, promis !
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

Ma soeur a déjà essayé d'écrire pour ma mère toutes les instructions pour enregistrer son soap opera avec le VHS (ça donne une idée de mon âge...)

Bref, c'est pas évident d'évident d'écrire des instructions et elle n'a pas enregistré son soap...

in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

great guide and screenshots for everything

Get free SSL certificate, estimated time 1 minute - how cool

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Bradley

@bradley thank you Bradley. I have to say, YunoHost's own guide is amazing but I wanted to write something super visual for true newbies... the kind of stuff I wish was around a year ago when I was researching self-hosting.

And yes, the speed of SSL certificate installation is incredible!

in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

if I have a personal domain I use for email with Proton, do I need a different domain for self hosting photos, files, etc?
in reply to Timelime 🐸

@TimeLime no! Example: I use elenarossini.com for my Wordpress-powered blog (hosted outside of YunoHost)... but then I set up the subdomains photos.elenarossini.com for my self-hosted Pixelfed and videos.elenarossini.com for my self-hosted PeerTube 🤗
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

@TimeLime just one quick addendum: in your case I wouldn't edit/tweak TXT and MX records for your top level domain, since they're connected to Proton. But it's a good idea to ask in the forum what to do
in reply to Timelime 🐸

@TimeLime
It might help to think of your domain name like your house. Your house address is myhouse.net

Now, each room is like a service you want have, lounge = self_hosting_files and kitchen = self_hosting_photos.

If you invited me to your house, you to see your photos you can give me your address as kitchen.myhouse.net

We call the first part the 'host name' and just like kitchen is different to lounge in computers a different server/PC

You can make up your own host names

in reply to Steve Root

@TimeLime
To tell me where kitchen.myhouse.net is you add the details to DNS, this is the A or AAAA record and a lot of numbers/letters that tell the computer where to go.

Email, and your proton address, uses the same system but typically the postman puts everything through one letterbox.

Instead of A and AAAA for the address, you use MX, and this tells the email where on your building the letterbox is.

For resilience, you can have more than one postbox. (multiple MX rows)

in reply to Steve Root

@TimeLime
and finally, most of the time we take email for the whole house into one server and don't have a specific room for it to go to, so your DNS for proton will be @ MX (protons details) where @ means this whole domain, myhouse.net

You can have more than one email server, so mail@myhouse.net goes to proton and mail@kitchen.myhouse.net goes a different place. You often see businesses separate their email like this (info@france.example.net vs info@uk.example.net)

in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

Thanks
and thank you for sharing a newbie guide. We all had to start somewhere and I think we can both agree it's great knowing we have helped others
in reply to Steve Root

@Sroot indeed!

And thank you for the kind words, I'm always super intimidated to share these guides here because I'm still very much a newbie who knows very little.

Sysadmins have all my respect and admiration 😊

in reply to Askan 🇪🇺

@askans awww 🥰 thanks again!

I wish more institutions and non-profits would jump on the self-hosting bandwagon and quit Big Tech apps... they could adopt YunoHost and donate to it... it would be a win/win

in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

I don't quite get the domain name market.

1 euro for a domain at Ionos. I pay something like 20$ for mine. I don't get how and why the price changes over time. Etc.

I checked Ionos, in Québec, I see 1$ per year, which is even cheaper than 1 euro...

Anyway, for a few bucks per year, why would we not have a domain name?

in reply to Michel Patrice

@MichelPatrice I do domain name registrar hopping... not sure if I mentioned this before to you or someone else.

Like, over a year ago I got elena.social super cheap on Namecheap. But then the renewal fee was $45/year... too much IMHO.

So I looked into how much it would cost if I switched registrars and sure enough, by hopping to a different one, the price went down to $9/year.

It's quick and painless and I will be doing this in the future whenever the issue arises...

in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

It was the first solution I explored when bought my VPS, unfortunately I discovered my Ubuntu version was too new for yunohost, or some obstacle like this.
in reply to deny

@sposadelvento YunoHost runs on Debian not Ubuntu… that’s probably why. V12 more specifically…

@shollyethan @ilja @yunohost

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Elena Rossini ⁂

@l3o you don’t have to install Debian on a VPS… you choose it (v12) as your distro and then when you log into the VPS you have it right there. It’s literally a one click selection

@sposadelvento @shollyethan @ilja @yunohost

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Elena Rossini ⁂

@l3o yes absolutely - if you’re running it on a home server the easiest way is to flash the YunoHost disk image.

Thanks for the kind words and happy self-hosting!

@l3o
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

Thanks a lot, and I will probably spend some time during the holidays considering what Yunohost can do for me!

...and now the inevitable addition by someone who got burned by manual syncing to portable media:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncthin…

Runs on my PC, laptop and phone. Whenever two of them find each other online, they sync a set of folders that I want to have available (KeePass store, current files or documents, GPG keys ...), amongst themselves, without me having to do anything. If the same file changed on different devices in between syncing, you get a warning and can resolve it yourself. It can also keep backups of previous versions.

Nextcloud can provide the same function (and more!) but needs a trusted server (admin can read/change the files!)

@shollyethan @ilja