What repo?

That’s basically the problem, yet almost everywhere people make these look so essential and necessary

I’m not interested in Plex/Jellyfin or any other media service that this sub seems to be obsessed with.

I mostly deploy my own applications so I don’t get shortcuts and need to work most of the tools directly. That’s perhaps some of my frustration

I’ve always struggled to find good books. And as a broke student in college, the ones I find are either too expensive or unavailable in my region.

It’s also highly illegal and actually prosecuted to do piracy where I live, so I don’t want to do that…

Except using a VPS defeats the purpose of trying to learn how to deploy my own apps…

I don’t have a need but I do have a goal for the things I want to setup.

I got downvoted to oblivion for saying I didn’t even find what kind of software I could use to make an internal authoritative DNS service for example, where I want to create a custom internal TLD for my VPN.

But apparently people took offense I’d never heard of bind and assumed PiHole was proprietary…

Putting a server in front of my own defeats the whole purpose of self-hosting for me.

I didn’t say CloudFlare “bullshit” so aggressively for no reason.

I want to learn, because I feel like I should know how to deploy stuff and my uni is not teaching me.

That doesn’t even scratch the surface with the issues I face…

Quite the contrary, I’m stuck at finding a reverse proxy in the first place. If I didn’t know nginx had a reverse proxy, which is the only one I know about, where would I even start finding the docs? I can’t repeat this enough, but I rarely ever do tutorials, I find them basic and lackluster

I don’t think I need specifically a reverse proxy rn so I don’t really have a clue about that kind of service specifically, but even finding WHAT to use to do an authoritative DNS was a challenge in its own right that I only solved somewhere else in this thread.

I wanna preface this making something clear, I have probably never managed to follow a tutorial. I usually have an idea and try to run it. What I’m getting stuck at is precisely at the “what are my options”

I did say that I understand why docs expect you to be familiar with knowledge, I’m even complaining that I don’t need to read what something is a million times and sometimes I just need to get a solution to my problem.

My biggest issue here is lack of experience, but after two years in an IT education, I know some basics. I am familiar with countless topics and have a general idea of how things work in theory, but getting these ideas into a setup is what’s hard. Uni doesn’t help at all with this.

I think my problem is quite honestly the opposite of what you present, I need to know deeper knowledge than what’s enough and have trouble actually conceptualizing things that are presented as magic. For example, Docker presents itself as magic in most of the docs. Volumes, layers, and so much more are explained with how to make one and what to use them for rather than what they are. It might just be the way I memorize things is weird, or that I’m stuck with too little knowledge and way too deep.

I do mostly agree with your comment though, I just feel like I’m shit at explaining myself cause I’m clearly not getting my point across

While this post is a bit of a generic rant, I do know what I’m trying to do, and the issue is that as soon as you go into anything slightly more complex than setting up a VPN, you’ll be bombarded with a thousand words that barely mean anything, everyone and their mother has a different opinion on what’s optimal, minimal and desired and to top all of that, most resources out there focus on making you understand what things are rather than how to set it up.

My issue and what I was ranting is why is most shit on the internet so unhelpful, hoping to find someone who’s had a similar struggle and learn how to get better. And I’ve succeeded, many people have given me useful advice.

I never said anything remotely as vague as “computers are hard” I think my post clearly states my issue is with resources being unhelpful for complete beginners

It comes with experience I guess, I’ve got a bad habit of researching to the core and many times have a hard time grasping things like containers without understanding how it’s setup technically. Sometimes I find a decent explanation, but specially for libraries that do “magic” I gotta go diving into the source to understand what’s going on, else I have trouble understanding what I am doing and what I should be doing.

Which makes it so hard because networking is very low level and I’m very unfamiliar with this environment

Well, you’ve proven my point. In order to know how to setup an authoritative DNS server I need to read the docs for bind. But in order to know bind is the answer to my problem I need to read articles and blogs. There is no way to go from Authoritative DNS server to bind without reading some more on the internet in blogs and whatnot.

Once I know about bind, I can read it’s docs to set it up or to figure out if it’s the right thing for me, but I need to know about it first.

I only ever use something other than the docs when I’m either looking for something more specific than the docs, the docs suck or I can’t find it in the docs. Really not against reading through them at all.

But with a lot of programs that’s also an issue cause a lot of docs just expect you to be familiar with that area of knowledge (at least with some libraries I work with such as Spring in Java, which assumes constantly you know about HTTP and APIs when explaining how to set an HTTP API with Spring. Not saying it’s bad, you probably need that background knowledge anyway, and the doc writers cannot be bothered to bake it into the docs, but it gives people who are completely clueless like me more and more homework in a snowball that becomes quickly unmanageable)

When I say at a theoretical level I mean I’m familiar with it from University lectures and reading about what it is, but it is true I’ve never actually tweaked my networking in a practical sense enough to be familiar with it, which is exactly why I want to get into self-hosting.

As for the docs, I read them, I truly do. But docs are not where you find how to do something, is where you find how to implement it. By this I mean, if I wanna setup an authoritative DNS server, I need to find how I set one up. Once I know what software I need to use, I can read the docs to figure out how to wield said software. Just stuck on the step before being able to dive into the docs (or stuck on having too many docs to read, no middle ground)

I’ve read that repo a million times! My self-hosting needs are more esoteric and I mostly play around with it. I’ve no need for media services or 90% of what that repo offers yet!

I mostly want to end up self-hosting my own apps, but I need some foundational knowledge

I wish I could afford a Pi. Would be so cool. Unfortunately I’m stuck with my gaming PC from 6 years ago that I recently updated from. Much more powerful hardware but I can’t just swap out the drive or not worry about power usage sadly haha.

Still, I’ve had to reinstall the OS about 8 times last year alone haha, but we’re still learning (most because I forgot the password tbh haha

I seriously thought it was a product, rather than software tbf. The name always sounded so “corporate” I never considered it.

I definitely know more about the theory than the practice. I’m clueless as to what my options even are so I can’t argue with that.

But I did know about the Linux “inheritance” of distros if you wanna call it that, and I’m fully aware of what that entails.

Just honestly didn’t look at it twice cause I thought “there must be an FOSS option” without realizing what PiHole really is. Just a case of prejudice biting me in the ass I guess.

Honestly, I get they’re trying to be educational for beginners way more clueless than me. But after two years of an IT degree I know some stuff, and the sheer amount of internet text I’ve read just to find absolutely nothing new and no solution even though the title is exactly my problem is unreal

For me, I have that as the 4th result, after some Reddit and IBM which probably would’ve discouraged me from continuing my search. I’d have to read on it.

Also, TIL PiHole doesn’t necessarily need to run on a Raspberry Pi. I guess assumptions really do come back to bite me in the ass haha

Thanks for the suggestions! The algorithms keep feeding me people who just explain what stuff is and it drives me nuts. You wouldn’t believe the amount of videos, articles and blogs I’ve seen on setting up a DNS server just for it to be about either a cache or an explanation of how it works. I’ll look into these later!