this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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Which guides to trust for novice / normie getting started? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 days ago by MrSulu@lemmy.ml to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I'm a good chemist, but not IT advanced. Started using Debian out of the box last year on miniPC. Running Jellyfin only on that local machine. Don't understand coding, but copy/ paste terminal instructions from trusted sites. Have 1TB music, films and documents. Want to move all photos from Google.

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[–] philpo@feddit.org 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You don't need many "guides", especially not on blogs. They are risky - often written by people who don't really know what they are doing fully and,more importantly, don't update their guides. Then things can become really really ugly fast.

If you managed to run jellyfin on a miniPC on Debian you are already doing a good job and very likely already quite a bit.

My personal recommendation: Get another miniPC (no ARM,so no Raspi) and put Debian on it. Then use the Proxmox Community scripts to expand your reach, BUT use them as an "understanding how shit works" base - they have their limitations and their quality has sadly dropped since tteck is no longer with us. (RIP :(

That should give you a pretty good insight into virtualisation, KVM, basic networking - and a plattform to play that you easily can revert to an earlier state if you fuck up.

Remember backups, remember documentation (a wiki,maybe netbox) and monitoring (Prometheus/Grafana or Zabbix are some of the multiple options).

If you want to, you can also look into bash scripts to automate a few things. I know people here hate LLMs but actually ChatGPT and perplexity are good for that. Let them write a bash script for some easy tasks (e.g. update the VM, download a configuration file, create two admin users, make them sudo, install zabbix agent, install this and that) and then let them explain step by step to you. They aren't too bad at it and actually help you learn basic scripting fairly well. (And then learn it properly with a e-course or something.)

As long as you don't operate any public facing services and proper backups the actual risk involved is fairly small

[–] MrSulu@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Thank you, especially so for the relative risk view.

[–] philpo@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Just another thing: Get proper,WORM(write once read many) backups. Get a M-Disc capable blueray burner (around 100 bucks) and burn the real important stuff in Archive capable Bluerays (normal ones degrade within years,these don't). You don't want to find out your datasets suffered from bit rot(yes,that is a thing) 5 years later and have no option to restore because you fucked up backups 2 years ago. For the real important data(everything that can't be redownloaded aka the personal stuff) it's worth it.

Ideally do put some of those discs somewhere else,away from your house.

[–] MrSulu@lemmy.ml 1 points 14 minutes ago

That would never have been something that I'd thought of by myself. Very grateful!, than you.

[–] ZonenRanslite@feddit.org 39 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Small advice, document everything.

[–] MrSulu@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 days ago (2 children)

You know what, I've been the guy that didnt in the past. Your reminder is spot on

[–] grue@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

With computer stuff, you can do even better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming

TL;DR: your documentation and your shell script (sequence of console commands you run to accomplish the task) can be the same file.

(Dunno what kind of chemistry you do, but you may have already come across this concept in the form of Jupyter notebooks or something like that.)

While I'm at it, I'd also like to mention Ansible and Git, for when you really want to keep good records and have a reproducible setup. Don't worry about them immediately as it's probably too overwhelming to learn all at once, but keep 'em in the back of your mind for later.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

I would like to reiterate the importance of taking notes. As a younger man, I never felt the need thinking, 'I can remember all that'. Wrong! So as a elderly man, taking profuse notes is paramount. So it's a good idea to get in the practice of taking notes while you are young.

I use NotePad++ locally, then transfer the notes to an encrypted Obsidian vault on my server. I can actually stand up a server, implement all the security necessary, install 30 or so apps, and be in production within hours just from notes. They house all my Docker compose files and everything. So it's kind of like painting by numbers.

Get in the habit of taking notes and refine them as well, as you galong.

[–] BestBouclettes@jlai.lu 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Preferably in an easy, maintainable way. Like markdown in a git repo.

[–] Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

everytime you copy paste a terminal command, try see if you can understand what it's doing with:

$ tldr mycommand (you need tealdeer installed)

and

$ mycommand --help

imo this is way more concise and beginner friendly than reading man pages

[–] theotherbelow@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 1 day ago

I believe putting in the effort to understand the man format is a great start. Man was made to be helpful and nearly universal.

I second the idea of breaking down the commands mentally and understanding how CLI really works. You don't need to go super deep but some stuff like $PATH and general bash or zsh will 100% make everything a breeze. These are tools like swinging a hammer you have to learn the motion.

[–] Fedegenerate@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

For all its flaws. Low level tech support, rubber duck, command explainer is something LLMs do really well. Kept my early mistakes off the web and got me where I needed to be most times.

[–] theotherbelow@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I haven't had that experience. More often than not I've found properly made software breaks in ways that tell you why. I seem to get stuck going in a circle of doom with llms.

[–] Fedegenerate@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I must have been having more basic problems than you. I found LLMs to present the most common solution, and generally the most common way of setting it up is the "right-way", At least for a beginner. Then I'd quiz it on what docker compose environments do, what "ports: ####:####" meant, how I could route one container through another. All very basic stuff. Challenge: ask gpt

what does "ports:

-####:####" mean in a docker compose?

Then tell me it doesn't spit out something a hobbiest could understand, immediately start applying, and is generally correct? Beginners, still verify what gpt spits out.

By the time I wanted to do non-standard stuff I was better equipped with the fundamentals of hobbiest deployment and how to coax an LLM into doing what I needed. It won't write an Nginx config for you, or an ACL file, but with the documentation and an LLM you could teach yourself to write one.

Goes without saying I'd take the output of the LLM to Google for verification, then back to the LLM for a hobbiest's explaination, back to Google for verification... Also, all details are place holders: don't give it your email, api-keys, domains, nothing. Learn to scrub your input there and it'll be a habit here is a bonus too.

Properly made software has great documentation and logs. If you know how to access those logs and read documentation (both skills in themselves)... Not to mention not all software is "properly made" some of it is bare bones and just works(tm). Works it do, absolutely not a criticisms for FOSS projects, I love your stuff keep making it, and I'll keep finding ways to teach myself to use it.

[–] theotherbelow@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 1 day ago

Fair enough. LLMs and even Google have nuanced drawbacks, I personally try to give the creator of software some say into its usage simply because the intended usage is better tested than any changes I may need in the future.

At the and of the day learning is key.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm somewhat of a chemist too, tho, it was back in the 60s.....and in my basement....but yeah.

[–] MrSulu@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

A secret laboratory!

[–] iii@mander.xyz 13 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I find that digitalocean (which is a VPS provider) has great tutorials.

I often tend to search "how to X site:digitalocean.com", despite hosting almost everything on my own hardware.

[–] MrSulu@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 days ago

Much appreciated. Have bookmarked this now

[–] grue@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Honestly, I don't think it's possible to get by just trusting any particular guide without developing at least some actual understanding of the concepts underlying what you're doing. The field is just too wide and rapidly changing for any source of info to be authoritative (and stay authoritative indefinitely after the guide is written), so it's super important to develop the skill of looking up multiple different and possibly conflicting approaches to the task, thinking critically about them, and then synthesizing your own approach that works for your specific situation.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

without developing at least some actual understanding of the concepts underlying what you’re doing

I realize lemmy hates AI, but I use Grok a lot to explain commands, command sequences, etc. Those go in my notes as well, after I've refined them, and conformed them to my application. Of course, all the precautions one should take with any online tut in place, and pulling knowledge from multiple sources helps verify. Grok helps me out a ton.

[–] mmhmm@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

https://trash-guides.info/

[–] MrSulu@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

Ooh, very interesting, bookmarked, thank you

[–] theotherbelow@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 1 day ago

Don't worry, its made for you to pick it up as you go. Make sure you familiarize yourself with the 3-2-1 backup principles first. The idea that your data survives regardless of anything that may happen is important. You (and I trust me) will bork things and accidentally erase precious data. Be prepared to recover from that. Simple solutions you understand and test > complex info secondhand.

You ddint ask but I will mention you shouldn't encrypt anything yet that you dont have to. Also use as little software as possible I.e. stay away from github repos.

[–] Theoriginalthon@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The traditional way is man pages and howto guides, which contain loads of information. You can get man pages in terminal or html (but I can remember how).

Next up is online tutorials like you are using, however with complicated setups, like a full mail server, the info gets very specific and can often go out of date.

Then we have readthedocs, which are the project specific instructions which tend to be very good.

How ever my personal favourite is the arch wiki, you'll need to know how to change commands to Debian based systems, but it does give a lot of info and insight that is up to date.

For moving from Goole photos look at photoprism, immich and nextcloud, there are others, but these are the ones that made my short list

[–] MrSulu@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago

This is valuable, thank you

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I like YunoHost. That's an all-in-one solution to do the selfhosting for you. So you won't learn a lot about the intricate details of the tech, but you can install things with a few clicks. That's nice if you just want to use stuff. And that project has some track-record. I'm using it for years to self-host Peertube, Immich a Nextcloud and a few other things.

[–] MrSulu@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Thanks, bookmarked and depending upon my ability to learn, plus time available, this, or something like it may be the way for me.

[–] 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

+1 for yunohost, though it can be a slow solution. However it will get something up and running easily, provide certs etc. and let you start out on self-hosting. With a half decent old pc you can host a load of services. You could run your own lemmy instance for example. However a lot of newer things are often broken or fail to work in Yunohost (funkwhale and discourse are a couple of things that are beyond redemption)_

[–] 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com 1 points 1 day ago

I take it back. Funkwhale is working again.... Discourse is gone for ever though as Discourse themselves only want docker installations moving forward

[–] Baschdl578@feddit.org 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The guides on Perfect Media Server are also pretty good

[–] MrSulu@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago

Thank you! Bookmarked

[–] 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

To move your photos from google I recommend Immich. Is available as a docker container, or yunohost though don't use the official yunohost version there is a better version that supports HEIC and some other formats. You can find that here though

https://codeberg.org/Loowiz/immich-docker_ynh

It is still easily installed using yunohost but upgrades are manual

[–] philpo@feddit.org 1 points 1 day ago

But for gods sake use proper backups. The tendency for immich to break things is the reason I nowadays recommend photoprism to people who start with selfhosting - it's worse in a lot of ways but way more stable most of the times.

[–] MrSulu@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 days ago

I thought / expected this, and hopefully, I can learn as I go. Grateful for your confirmation