Self-Hosted Users Battle Unreliable Tech
28 posts across 10 communities in the last 60 days; 39% from r/selfhosted.
“I could see that becoming an issue. I have used pi for a few things and I like it. I use it sort of the same way in it's own VM or container depending on how much access I want to give it.”
“why not just put the 5G on the gateway router instead of the Pi? Then everything important at the site can have internet when there’s a problem with the main connection. thats what we do at 800 sites basically. Main circuit from whoeve, cradlepoint also attached with whatever…”
“You are right to call it out. This concern came up inside our own team before we ever talked about it publicly. It is a real prisoner’s-dilemma kind of problem: we need people to trust a node network enough to test it, but we have no right to ask for that trust before we can…”
Users of self-hosted solutions are experiencing frustration with instability, connectivity issues, and unexpected bugs. There's a recurring theme of troubleshooting and workarounds needed to maintain functionality, particularly around media streaming, networking, and hardware compatibility.
SOURCES (60)
“ive been running the linuxserver image for a while now and its fine for what it is. vnc is snappy enough on lan i forget its a web interface half the time, never tried it over mobile data though i imagine its a bit clunky.…”
“I use Plex to stream for my media server. It's pretty good overall, but I really hate how absolutely dog shit it is with live TV (IPTV). Very limited, Very spotty. Always frustrating. So...I just decided to make my own web app to replicate Plex, but add better IPTV capability. On top of that, I can also make custom 24/7 "channels" from my Plex content that continuously runs 'live'. Oh and I also connected it to some Sports APIs so my huge list of always changing IPTV sports”
“I am unsure if this have been requested before. I had heard from someone a while back that FTP would not be added due to adding WiFi to GM9 would be too hard as it is not documented. Well, I have gotten WiFi to work on a custom firm file. Adding FTP would not be hard. I could do it. I wont unless it is accepted. https://github.com/TeamAuroraOS/AuroraOS What I have working: Ping HTTP Upload and Download”
“Greetings fellow IT Ninjas! Miracast has always been sort of a unicorn for me. Very random when it works and not, and how well it works. I have a few meetings rooms at a customer where Miracast works very sporadically and started regularly requiring power drain of the Samsung TV's in the rooms. Also Bluetooth works HORRIBLY in those rooms - Got wireless keyboard and mouse (got BT and receiver options), bluetooth bad, receiver good/fine, also have Jabra Speak55 which also works really bad on”
“Oops, I may have overstated it; at the very least it happened once, dnSpy -> dnSpyEx . I thought there was an earlier abandon/resurrection also but there may not have been. [re: Plex is actively making its own product worse. Removing Watch Together is just another example of enshittification.]”
“Tbh, this is why I use pi entirely inside containers/vms in case something goes wrong.”
“so the server is basically the phones themselves, that's clever. i was messing with something similar using old tablets as video monitors for my shrimp tanks but gave up when the wifi kept dropping how's the call quality when both devices are on same network? i got some old androids in drawer that could use a second life”
“I could see that becoming an issue. I have used pi for a few things and I like it. I use it sort of the same way in it's own VM or container depending on how much access I want to give it.”
“wow, i’m surprised with this - the connector took ages for QM as well i’m glad i built the companion now”
“The 9b distill is trash. I set it up, invoked 3 separate prompts on it, and each one entered a doom loop. 2 of them had skills driving the process. Promptly uninstalled it.”
“eh in this case some are appliances, no accessible OS, so not a real server. I think I am just going to get a rpi and load up uptimekuma or something like that, low power and then I can just have my firewall or something else make sure it stays alive etc.”
“why not just put the 5G on the gateway router instead of the Pi? Then everything important at the site can have internet when there’s a problem with the main connection. thats what we do at 800 sites basically. Main circuit from whoeve, cradlepoint also attached with whatever cell carrier is best locally”
“One can run a local service - say home assistant - that does not need to be online. But it needs to be up for the smart home features to work. OP clearly states Internet drops and they need to know if a service, or call it a program so you understand, is working as intended, even if it's offline because the Internet dropped. It's really not that hard to grasp the general concept of wanting to know a certain program is doing what it's supposed to do without said program requiring an I”
“One of mine does work basically as a companion device to the rest of the homeland. It operates as a secondary DNS, so that when I’m rebooting the VMs I don’t lose resolution. It also runs ser2net to share out a couple of USB devices to a VM. As I run a mini cluster, the guest that uses them doesn’t have to stay on a specific host or go down when that host is rebooted anymore. I can just migrate my OpenHAB VM to another host and it can still access the Z-wave and Zigbee sticks, so my lights and s”
“If I had one I would use it to run uptime kuma, pihole, beszel, ddns client, etc,. Things that should stay up and running constantly even if I reboot my main (only) mini server.”
“I use mine as a network watchdog, it pings my main server every few minutes and if its down for too long the pi cuts power to the outlet and turns it back on. saved my butt few times when server froze in middle of the night also runs a small dashboard on old tablet showing server stats, just pulls from prometheus api nothing fancy”
“I know this is an older thread, but I am considering using VM20s for remote cameras. What makes Nearstream so bad to deal with?”
“Sure, but that's strictly worse (complexity wise) than running it in network_mode host.”
“You are right to call it out. This concern came up inside our own team before we ever talked about it publicly. It is a real prisoner’s-dilemma kind of problem: we need people to trust a node network enough to test it, but we have no right to ask for that trust before we can show how abuse, operator risk, and resource limits are actually handled. We have zero tolerance for CSAM. Most of the people building Foldinglink are parents. We have kids. That does not prove anything by itself, but it mean”
“Who is this for? If it’s for non-technical users, it’s a non starter because why would I buy/setup a dedicated machine to use a worse version of a social media platform all my friends are already on? If it’s for a technical user, why wouldn’t I just run a mastodon server? Why are you starting with hardware instead of building out the platform first? Why open that can of worms before even validating anyone wants what you are building as a service? Why is your source code not public? Have you buil”
“That table is such bullshit some of the rows are cherry picked. For example why does Linux support matter if they're only using it for windows? HIDMaestro could've easily been extended to include keyboard, mouse, and touch but does it even need to be? Shouldn't those be handled already? Also libvirtualgamepad isn't in that table. They designed the table so they can say our driver checks all these arbitrary boxes we set.”
Ah, I had tested that one and it would just crash on repeat
“I run adblocked DNS straight on the router. Router is managing dns records anyways, and for me it's the logical place for it to live. Plus I don't touch the router as often as my hosting stack. (I run a beefy OWRT router btw)”
“I used DriveSync but first had to make Google drive accessible to my file manager in Linux I can't really tell you if it would have worked well (it worked tho dunno if it would last) bc I still can't figure out how to stop making Linux crash so I'm back to windows . But you could try that set up”
“I don’t think I could rely only on syncthing. That’s not enough backup / protection to me.”
“Underpowered is part of it, but on a four guest room it's usually the decoding that gets you rather than the encoding. Four incoming VP8 streams get decoded in software, and that happens before OBS composes or encodes anything. Two things that made the biggest difference for me. Put &codec=h264 on the guest links so the decode can go to hardware. And pull the room in as one scene link instead of four separate browser sources, because four sources means four copies of the whole WebRTC sta”
“The issue I ran into before, when using androids as cameras, was overheating. It just could not stand using the camera and streaming at the same time for more than a couple minutes. I am dealing with older phones, though.”
“I think you misunderstand. I meant to simply use it as a IP camera app, omitting any involvement with your backend. I'd expect this to already be a thing with many other apps, but it would be nice being able to migrate to and from such a setup with one app. Since you already so webrtc I'd imagine simply enabling the user to plug that directly into their own system to be relatively easily implemented is all”
“That “fine to me, robotic to everyone else” pattern is almost never Wi-Fi. Your local monitor plays the raw signal, but what gets sent to guests goes through the browser’s encoder. If something in that chain misbehaves, only the other side hears it. Usual suspects: browser hardware acceleration fighting your GPU, or a sample-rate mismatch between your OS and the browser (44.1 vs 48 causes exactly this). The iPhone was clean because it’s a different encode stack, not because the network changed.”
“Why do I have every time a 3GB download???? These shitters from TMobile are having bad internet and are dropping the connection during this layer download. And because the podman people never heard about continuing a partly downloaded file, it takes for ever. So this is an issue with all crappy providers that mess with their peering. Besides that, I don't even want to wait for it. I assume this is the cuda stuff nobody is interested in those changes. I am more interested in resolving communicati”
“I did something similar for streaming my own media, desktop app pairs the devices, then punches a secure connection through the network. Do you have to be on the same network for pairing to work? On ours the painful bit was reliably punching through across remote networks, we needed a service to point the connection.”
“I can 100% confirm it is not from the host. I actually had this issue a couple months ago and resolved it. DC1 (PDU Replica) syncs perfectly to DC2 (PDU Emulator) just for some reason the workstations will not sync to DC2. I confirmed reliable, and that Leap Indicator on DC2 is 0 with the correct source.”
“If you need someone to properly stress it I've got a homelab with a handful of VLANs and a Proxmox cluster sitting mostly idle. Three nodes is easy enough to spin up, I can throw them behind a keepalived VIP and see what falls apart under load. My DNS is already split between a couple of subnets so swapping in something new won't break anything critical. What's the logging look like when a node drops off the face of the earth mid-lease? I'll poke at it this weekend and send whate”
“How do you turn on and off the thinclient? You wouldn't have to think about it with a smart tv, however with the thinclient wouldn't it take some time to boot up when you turn on? Or is there a way to keep it on standby with minimal power consumption”
“Exactly the type of thing I’d pay someone not to deal with. It’s like media streaming vs piracy. Even though I could get a nice local setup with plex and have higher quality streams with free pirated br rips, I just don’t want to deal with it.Maybe I could use codex or whatever to set that all up nowadays, but it was such a pain doing the initial setup and getting it all running and finding sources of media yadda yadda like a decade ago when I last tried lol”
“yeahhhh same. i switched to NN and am trying it out tentatively. i like it so far but im not sure”
“I don't think you can run tautilli local only. Maybe if you have Plex set for local too? It's all a pain these days.”
“this isn't really a feature flag problem, it's a storage adapter problem put one interface in front of file storage (upload, download, delete, geturl) and write an azure blob implementation and an sftp implementation behind it. pick which one loads per client via config/env var at deploy time, not a runtime toggle that way your core app code never cares which backend a given client is on, and when you sign client #3 with yet another storage setup, you just add another adapter instead of”
“Fair enough. Your point is valid. I will say im not as versed in embedded/etc type tech so I feel we're discussing similarly valid points from different skill sets. I do love low power machines tho. Working on finding my Pi 1 a good use case!”
“RPi 3 - too slow for Nextcloud RPi 4 - acceptable, but still not ideal for Nextcloud, unless it's a small instance. RPi 5 - I don't know. I've never used one. From my experience, RPi is good for small services which consume little RAM and CPU. If you want Nextcloud, I'd advise you to get a mini-pc.”
“And yet you are the one hating on arr on a post where OP is using it. So you're the one being negative about his setup, take your own advice, if someone is hosting something you dislike, instead of commenting how you hate it or don't use it, maybe just don't comment?”
“I mean it works fine. If you don't want to pay. Just note it does have a second of lag or two and you have to remember to have the Proton drive app open to.sync”
“I'm using ResilioSync and have a home server that is always up. Works with zero problems. Sync thing wasn't a pleasant experience for me resilio is just better. Using it for other workflows too.”
“Although as someone just mentioned a pi isn't cost effective, I went that way because of space and pi is just beside my routerc acting as so many things but really performant. My obsidian setup, might not be the smarter one but it works seamlessly regardless the devices I connect, or if 2 devices works in the same file. I got the pi 5 with an SSD, which has dockerized couchDB, and my API. So I built a custom obsidian MCP. When couchDB doesn't receive any input in 2 mins it commits and pu”
“You could just use a small $5 VPS or something like that. But avoid raspberry pi. They are not cost effective anymore, after buying power supply, sd card, case, fan, etc you are better off getting an N100/N150 minipc like https://s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_EIyUFem .”
“what hardware you use for selfhosting? I looked up raspberry pi and ugreen, not sure which route to take”
“I have wireless Keychron keyboard and mouse at my desk... both wired. For whatever reason wireless devices have a hell of a time staying consistently connected on my desk and I quickly got tired of swapping batteries.”
“I tried it, it's so much heavier than what I use, which is minidlna, but then again I don't expect anything to be as light as minidlna.”
“> there's no way to make that one connection that works wellReally? With unlimited ability to tamper with the stuff below the sockets layer, you couldn't make a reliable network? I'm surprised.”
“I read the post. But PiHole may not be as infuriating. And they didn't specify which DNS server.”
“He said "wireless mesh node". Your node is wired. Good for you, but if you don't use wireless backhaul it's not really a mesh node anymore. Just a regular AP.”
“The real-time pings every 30 seconds are gonna wreck battery life if apps actually implement that. And my offline listeners might as well not exist.”
“For homeproject or learning this is still useful hardware. But I agree, for productive environments this shouldn't be no where near.”
“Do you run into any update issues (in regard to stability)? Or does it just update and restart when you’re sleeping? What version of windows do you run for your media server?”
“[Airtable] ★★ 2/5 (v10.42) — I wouldn’t have needed to replace it with memento if I could see my stuff without a signal. Legit madness. I’m a contractor in basements all day. What if people want to see their stuff on a plane? You can’t. Totally worthless because of this one small thing.”