Re: [Userops] Some userop experiences

[Bob Mottram]

On Sun, Apr 19, 2015 at 03:05:39AM +0200, Laura Arjona Reina wrote:
> Hi everybody
> First, thanks for thinking, discussing and acting about the topic.
> 
> I've written a blogpost with my userop experiences until now
> 
> https://larjona.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/
> six-months-selfhosting-my-userop-experiences


That's an interesting post, and similar to my own experience in
some ways. I'm a long time software developer (but not of web
systems), and it's only within the last few years that I've
started to self-host internet services.

Thus far I've failed to install Mediagoblin - having made a few
attempts. It does install, but crashes whenever I try to upload
audio or video files.

In general I find that the biggest weakness of internet systems
is poor installation documentation. PHP based systems are typically
the easiest to set up. Things written in Python or Ruby are the
most problematic, and the instructions are often vague,
contradictory or long out of date. I would characterise the
deployment of Python or Ruby web apps as being "a zone of fail".
Compared to distro based packaging language based packaging
seems incredibly flaky and tends to fail more often than it
succeeds. From a user point of view language based packaging
seems like a step backwards.

So I agree with your point about levels of confidence and
Debian packages. As for email, it's true that it's hard to
set up although it's definitely possible to self-host an
email server and have a dynamic IP address. The main issues
I've had with email are spam lists such as spamhaus, which
indiscriminately blacklist IP ranges. This means that it's
not possible for me to send email to certain domains, but
I now have a sufficient range of self-hosted communication
options that if email doesn't work then another method
likely will (such as Bitmessage or XMPP).

For some guidance on installing an email server on Debian
see the functions called configure_email, create_procmail,
spam_filtering, configure_imap and email_client here:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bashrc/freedombone/master/src/freedombone