Self-hosting world
A server at home
A machine running Arch Linux, at home, hosting what most people hand over to companies: family photos, files, backups. Maintained, encrypted, backed up.
Service status, live
Everything runs on a single machine at home, behind a reverse proxy with certificates renewed automatically. The server probes itself every five minutes and publishes the result here.
Services marked “private access” are not exposed on the standard port: their status is published, not their address.
What runs on it
- Immich for photos and videos, with face and place recognition — the open-source equivalent of Google Photos.
- An nginx reverse proxy that serves each service on its own subdomain, over HTTPS, with certificates renewed automatically.
- A 7.3 TB RAID 5: one disk can die without anything being lost.
- Virtual machines to test things without breaking anything.
- The AffûtOS distribution itself: image builds, file hosting, and the network boot service.
The machine
Ryzen 9 5900X
Twelve cores for image builds, virtual machines and Immich indexing.
64 GB
No error correction — a choice whose cost is described below.
RAID 5 — 7.3 TB
One disk can die without data loss. Running Arch Linux, like the rest of the house.
The price of autonomy
Self-hosting also means taking on what a provider usually handles. A concrete example: this server's memory is not ECC, the kind that corrects errors. One day a bit flipped on its own in the middle of a 2.8 GB system image — a single bit out of twenty-two billion. Without a checksum, the image would have shipped to production and caused baffling failures weeks later.
Since then, every release is verified by re-reading the data from disk and not from memory, and nothing is published if the check fails.