Episode: 2077
Title: HPR2077: libernil.net and self hosting for friends and family
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2077/hpr2077.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 14:02:07

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This is HPR episode 2007 to 7 entitled, Live and Ill.net and Self-hosting for friends and family.
It is hosted by Christopher M. Hobson and is about 18 minutes long.
The summary is, I talk a little about my network and how you can host services for your friends and family.
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Hello, once again, HPR. This is Christopher Hobson.
I figured I would record another episode this time. I wanted to talk a little bit about my little network that I run for some of the community here, what I do with it, and what you can do to host your own network.
You have to forgive me with the noise this time. I do not edit my audio, so I'm helping him in lowering the bar for production, but I've got a bit of an allergy thing going on, and I've got the windows open so you can hear the outside noise. Hopefully it's not too loud.
At any rate, I'll get right into it. So I run a small network that can be found at LieberNill.net, L-I-B-E-R-N-I-L.net.
I need to find a new name for it. That name is actually repurposed from a little group of friends and I from several years ago where we would get together and work on programming projects together and eat food.
We would just generally hang out and have a good time, but I had the domain laying around and I started to build this network, so I figured I would use that domain for the time being.
I guess a little bit about the network at the top of the home page. I've got a little text blurb that says LieberNill.net is an island of pseudo-freedom.
This project was established in order to pursue ideals of free software, free culture, ethically-sourced hardware, self-hosting, and sharing with others.
Generally, it consists of personal content, though some community resources reside here as well.
Well, that pretty well sums it up. I used to have an entire page describing all of the reasons I started it, but the basic idea happened when I started my own GNU social instance some time ago.
That instance no longer exists, mostly because I ran into some problems upgrading it and just didn't have time to keep up with it.
But for many years, I've been running my own little servers if you can even call them that in my home or in other people's offices and at one point in a former life I was a systems and network administrator for a very long time.
And I've always found it useful to just have servers laying around that I can build things on or use to host little network services for myself.
I also found that a lot of my family and some of my friends were paying pretty good prices to use virtual private servers and companies where other people owned the hardware.
They may not necessarily be running free software if they cared about that.
And the cost was sort of disproportionate to what they were using, so I thought, well, maybe I can host a few things for friends and family and help those people out.
And it's gone pretty well.
There's other networks and services like this that are much larger that some of them promote self-hosting, some of them don't.
One thing you about self-hosting was a tilde club somehow, I guess, using a terminal got kind of popular there for a little while and maybe the idea of small scale computing for lack of better words.
Got a little bit of popularity until the club kind of jumped up and it's people running their own little Unix networks with virtual servers and on their home machines.
Excuse me.
And it's a pretty neat little pre-baked package and community of people.
And then there's larger groups like SDF.org.
I was part of that community for a very long time and it is the, I can say it's the one thing I miss when I decided to use nothing but free software, leaving that community was tough, but they do have some proprietary software or at least less than free software.
And so I elected not to use their services.
When I left SDF, I had to, that's another reason why this exists. I had to find another place to host a lot of my things.
So lo and behold, this small network was built.
Another major reason that I built it, like I mentioned in the little text bit, is sharing with others.
I really believe that sharing computing resources is a good thing and we should all be doing it in one way or another.
So a little bit about the hardware involved in my network. It's grown from a single machine to three dedicated machines and a couple of extra ones that are not necessarily on the network proper at all times.
So the first machine is a little shuttle computer that has maybe a maybe two gigs of RAM in it and they hop in and all that you guys.
And it doesn't have much for a hard drive. It's still using spinning disks and helps us.
Alright, this machine we call Summer Night and it has a single core processor. I believe it's a two gigahertz processor.
It's only got two gigs of RAM in it. There's really not a lot of disk space.
It is, yeah, it's only got a 150 gig disk in it, I suppose.
Oh, I'm sorry, 250 gig disk. But this is the main machine on the network. I traded some records, some vinyl records to a friend for it.
And it actually works quite well. This was a machine that was considered to be useless or trash or not something that would ever be in production again.
But lo and behold, it's been running DNS and XMPPA for my little network for about two years now and seems to work just fine.
After that, I have a little looking at the model number here. Think PingOne machine right now. It's not the Pocket Wii. It is the PingOne Nano.
Oh, I guess I should go back and mention that the Summer Night, the recycled computer is running Trisco 7.
The PingOne Nano, wonderful little machine. I've got it nearly maxed out. It goes by April showers and it is running Debbie and Jesse.
The primary purpose here is to host a couple of domains for some of my family members.
I don't let people who are not family hop onto this machine very much because I did not pay for it. I don't control it, so I leave that up to them.
This is another good example of sharing your hardware resources with others. They purchased the machine and I configured it and put it on the network and it seems to work just well.
The last sort of solid machine that I have, I say solid, the last sort of semi-permanent machine on the network I have is a VPS I've just acquired with Tranquility.SC.
And that's Tranquility with two Ls. I'm probably butchering his name, but Michael over it Tranquility has wonderful service and wonderful response time and I'm really enjoying using his service for VPS to attach to that work.
It has Debbie and Jesse running on it as well and I'm going to butcher the name too, but the name for that machine is Aramete.
I don't speak Swedish, so you'll have to forgive me, but I believe that is Swedish for her.
So that's the hardware in general and I'm just using consumer equipment too. The router that I have here in the office is a think penguin router with labor CMC on it and the router at home is just a links his router running open WRT.
Both of those are running open access points, OpenWRList.org and before everybody out there screams at me for putting servers on an open network, they're in their own VLAN and they are also locked down pretty tight.
So I feel safe having the open network alongside them and I would also encourage everybody to take a look at OpenWRList.org and consider opening up your access points as well.
I suppose that's topic for another show. So I guess I could talk a little bit about what services I'm running and who uses what on the network.
So across all three machines, some of my friends and family members have shell accounts where they can host their personal websites or there's probably about a dozen users.
They can host a personal website or they just use it for file storage or trying out different programming languages, whatever they want to use a shell account for.
As I mentioned, we provide some, we, a couple of people help me work on it too, but web space is provided both with domains.
My, I'm a member of a local lodge, I'm a free Mason and my local Masonic lodge, their website is hosted on the network, keylog7.org.
And my personal web space is there, though there's not much to see.
My wife who produces music is has her website, charismabsmusic.com on there.
The Affordable Housing Association or Affordable Housing Authority of Arkansas, AHA-I-N-C.org is hosted there.
So we have several websites that are hosted.
I'm running Prozity with an XMPP server and far more people have jabber accounts than have shell accounts, but that's mostly by choice.
Not, not my choice, but the end user's choice.
So I do give people jabber accounts from time to time and encourage the use of OTR.
We have several different XEPs implemented and everything's running smoothly there.
We have had a couple of conferences, but people don't tend to use the conferences as often. They're more ad hoc these days.
There are a couple of IRC bots running on the network, keeping channels in order and storing factoids.
There is an experimental media goblin instance at mediagoblin.liberdil.net.
It's closed registration and only myself and another person are using it right now.
I'm not entirely convinced I want to keep using it, but it's there for the time being until I decide not to.
In the future, I hope to host some game servers, maybe.
Maybe like a doomserver, like a freedom server, or busy flag, or mine tests, something like that that my son can connect to.
And I can connect to and a couple of his friends can and we can all play games together.
I'd like to host my own email again. It's been many, many years since I've done that, but it's something I'd like to try again and hopefully not get blacklisted.
I would like to have some sort of data aggregation service for things like local weather and machine information.
We're already running Munin on the network, and you can see that at Liberdil.net slash Munin, I believe.
Yeah, that's the right location, and two of the machines are on the right now.
I still have to get Aramit attached to that as well.
But more sort of, I don't know, weather data. There's two physical locations for the network.
One is in my office that I lease in a place that we politely call the manner.
It's also been called Neckbeard Manor and Freebeard Manor in the past.
A few programmers who have leased offices here, and it's an old Victorian home, really nice place.
So it would be neat to gather environmental data here as well as from my home.
There are a couple of non-permanent machines attached to the network at my home that handle automating of backups and stuff.
The users generally do not have access to those machines, however.
Beyond that, I would definitely like to get a new name for the service or for the network.
I would like to utilize maybe the dot space domain. I haven't quite figured out that yet.
I would also like to set up a PBX with a couple of DID lines.
But those are all sort of pipe dreams right now. I have not really had the time to put it together.
Just things to consider.
Once in a while we also have little community events. They're not necessarily under the name, I believe we know,
because the users are generally local friends and family.
Sometimes we get together for different things. I say recently last year we had a crypto party, which was a lot of fun.
This year I would like to organize a free-dume LAN, which is another reason why I want to get a game server running.
But it's good to get little events organized and get people together, especially, so they can see the hardware they're running on and make more use of it.
That's pretty much it for the network.
The main reason I wanted to make this podcast is to sort of demystify or encourage people to sell post.
It's not that hard, and I do have a lot of experience in networking systems administration, but it's really not that difficult.
It is a little time consuming, but usually once you set stuff up it just runs.
As long as you have good backups, everything's fine.
So I guess the big question then is just how do you pull this off? Well, first you need to find a machine somewhere.
I mean, in my case, I just described a few minutes ago what summer night is running.
It's a single core rig with two gigs of RAM in it. It is not a fancy machine at all.
You could dredge something like that out of a dumpster.
Or you could use a Raspberry Pi. It's not totally free hardware, but it's doable.
It's even better if you go bump black. Get a machine.
And then I would choose a good GNU Plus Linux distribution to use on it.
I personally like to use Debian. You use what you like to use.
It's an excellent way to learn about configuring a distribution.
So go ahead and install your distribution on there.
And if you can, acquire a static IP address from your ISP.
If that's possible, I have a business account in my office, so I'm able to get static IPs.
But if you don't, set up dynamic DNS.
Dine DNS.org is where I used to do that.
I believe afraid.org might still do a free dynamic DNS.
And there are several other locations that provide that provide dynamic DNS.
So from there, once you've got that set up, and you don't have to go totally crazy with your DNS,
like what I've done, I've got secondary DNS and Sweden and up in Chicago.
It's not the best practice in the world, but you can operate without secondary DNS for a while.
And if anybody's setting up their own cell posting, I would be happy to provide secondary DNS for them.
So once you've got all that done, you're pretty well set.
And you can start putting your own network services on there.
And maybe a host web page or host a game server or host a chat server.
There's projects like Freedom Bone and Freedom Box that make some of this a lot easier for you.
But a lot of these services are just as simple as installing the package with your distribution package manager
and configuring it and telling it to go, it's about it.
So yeah, that's all I can think of for my network and how to get started.
If anybody has questions, I'll put my email address in my XMPP address in the show notes.
If you are cell posting and you want secondary DNS, reach out to me.
I'll be happy to try and host that for you.
If you need a Java account, let me know.
Or if you have any questions about getting started with cell posting, let me know that as well.
To help, the last thing is, again, I want to encourage people to record HPR episodes.
I am doing this easily with a Rockbox Enable or with Rockbox installed on a Sans Eclipse.
And it takes no time at all to just sit down, explain something, write some show notes and upload it.
It's super easy.
Please contribute episodes if you're a listener.
Thank you so much for your time and enjoy the rest of your day.
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