Hello. I’m considering hosting a 1-person instance for my personal use. I’m trying to run on my own hardware, and I have used *nix for quite a long time and maintaining it wouldn’t be much of a problem. However, I’m not quite sure what kind of hardware should I run it on.

How powerful should my hardware be? Say, would it be OK on a old PC with Northwood Celeron and 512mb of ram with 384GB HDD? Or maybe an android phone running postmarketOS (Alpine Linux) with MSM8916 and 2GB of ram with 32GB eMMC?

Also, my ISP does not allow opening common server hosting ports, and I’d also prefer not doing so due to security problems. Which ports do I need opened to operate a lemmy instance for my personal use (i’m only going to be connecting from home)? Can I use CloudFlare’s cloudflared/Argo Tunnel to do this? (I do know CloudFlare is not great and has problems but I’m not aware of any other similar service, I’m not really able to pay for external servers but if there’s an alternative service I’m open to suggestions)

Thanks for reading the post, and hopefully answering.

    • hexagonwin@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      So the only ports required to open for proper lemmy operation are HTTP/HTTPS ones (80, 443)? Argo tunnel didn’t seem to support a whole lot of protocols (I couldn’t find a way to enable telnet for a BBS for instance) and I was wondering if theres additional port needed for ActivityPub.

      • eric5949@lemmy.cloudaf.siteEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        All you need to do for your tunnel is install the cloudflare service and connector using the command they give you when you create the tunnel and then set a public hostname for the tunnel that points to https://localhost and you should be good to go. For your firewall the only rules I have are for Nginx HTTP and HTTPS so yeah 80 and 443. You might have to point it to http://localhost I’m honestly not sure what the requirement is when you’re using lemmy but cloudflare will take care of the encryption and send it over HTTPS either way as far as I know, I have tunnels which use both and they all come via https.

        Edit: telnet uses TCP and you can use that in your public hostname section, idk how that relates to bbs though. I am very much a novice at this stuff, I’ve just spent a lot of time since the great culling of third party apps learning to host my own stuff. I’m using the tunnels through the zero trust section if there’s another.

      • hexagonwin@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I’m not sure what parent commenter uses exactly but cloudflared / argo tunnel can be used for free though they don’t have some enterprise oriented functions. The daemon running on the server, cloudflared is also open source, available on Gihub.