Hi,

I know this is quite impossible to diagnose from afar, but I came across the posting from lemmy.world admins talking about the attacks they are facing where the database will get overwhelmed and the server doesn't respond anymore. And something similar seemed to have happened to my own servers.

Now, I'm running my own self-hosted Lemmy and Mastodon instances (on 2 seperate VPS) and had them become completely unresponsive yesterday. Mastodon and Lemmy both showed the "there is an internal/database error" message and my other services (Nextcloud and Synapse) didn't load or respond.

Login into my VPS console showed me that both servers ran at 100% CPU load since a couple of hours. I can't currently SSH into these servers, as I'm away for a couple of days and forgot to bring my private SSH key on my Laptop. So, for now I just switched the servers off.

Anyway, the main question is: what should I look at in troubleshooting when I'm back home? I'm a beginner in selfhosting and I run these instances just for myself and don't mind if I'd have to roll them back a couple days (I have backups). But I would like to learn from this and get better at running my own services.

For reference: I run everything in docker containers behind Nginx Proxy Manager as my reverse proxy. I have only ports 80, 443 and 22 open to the outside. I have fail2ban set up. The Mastodon and Lemmy instances are not open for registration and just have 2 users each (admin + my account).

Hi there, I'm trying to set up AdGuard home and it doesn't seem to work properly. Maybe I'm getting it wrong on how it's supposed to work, but I'm kinda confused right now and it seems to me than Win11 is lying to me about my DNS entries ...

Here's my setup: as I have a VPS server already, I wanted to try and use it for Adguard as well. Installation there was straightforward enough and I have it up running and it has a static IP that I would use now as a DNS server, routing my traffic through it.

Now, all tutorials say that one should set the DNS entries on the router that connects to the Internet, but this option is not enabled on my router (more about this later on).

I thought, no worries, I will deal with the router situation later and just see how Adguard works with a single computer. So I went into network settings of my Win11 machine and configured my IP settings manually. Gave me a fixed IP in my home network and used the static IP from my adguard server for DNS entries. But this didn't seem to do anything. Still got ad's everywhere although my Adguard dashboard showed a lot of blocked domains (clearly identifiable as ad-servers by their name).

Ok, I went to troubleshooting and here's the first weird thing I noticed: When I sutdown Adguard (as in stopping the docker container it's running in on my server), I still can connect to the internet on my Windows machine. This shouldn't be happening, no? I set both DNS entries (main and fallback) to the same IP, where no DNS server should be running and I still got to browse the web?

So, is Windows lying to me and has a secret fallback DNS somewhere that get's used when the entries don't work? Do I not understand how this all should work?

Or - and here my specific router/modem comes into play - my hardware get's around DNS entries. I do have a "hybrid modem" which connects to the internet using both fiber DSL and LTE at the same time to get extra bandwith and speed. The customer support forum of my ISP revealed that due to the nature of this "dual line internet connection" DNS entries are fixed on the router and cannot be changed by the user.

I still think the settings in Windows should take precedence, but admittedly I have no real understanding how this is all supposed to work in detail.

So, question: how could I get Adguard to work on a VPS without being able to set DNS entries on my router? Would using a second router get around this (i.e. using the router of my ISP just as a modem and do my home network/wifi from this second router)? And why would Win11 still connect to the internet with supposedly broken DNS entries?

Hi, I figured out how to get docker containers to join an existing network with putting "networks" into the respective sections of the docker-compose.yml

If I want to also give them fixed ip's on this network, what would the syntax look like in the docker-compose.yml?

This is a slow learning process for me and some of you already helped me a lot to figure out reverse proxies in general. However, I'm not there yet ... so:

How can I set up Lemmy (and Mastodon down the line) behind my existing reverse proxy? I'm trying to install from docker and the docker compose files come with templates for reverse proxy configuration, but these are (probably) only valid, if I'm installing on a dedicated server with nothing else running there.

I tried commenting out the stuff for the proxy configuration, but I can't seem to get it to work. The Lemmy install ends up with 5 docker containers (lemmy, lemmy-ui, ....) and I'm not sure which of them need to be adressed by my proxxy setup. Just getting the lemmy-ui container addressed by nginx didn't work out.

I'm probably way out of my league with what I'm trying here, but if any of you have some useful tips I'd be really grateful.

So, I have some idea on what a reverse proxy does and will be using nginx (with the neat proxy manager UI) for my setup.

However, I'm not completely clear what exactly I want it to do and how I cn use it to run different services on one machine. I'm especially unclear on the ports configuration .... tutorials will say things like "change the listening port to xxx for that service and to port yyy for the other service"

How does this work, which ports can I use and how do I need to configure the respective services?

EDIT: thanks everybody, your replies did help me a lot! I have my basic setup now up and running using portainer + nginx + fail2ban.

Hi, this is a follow-up on the 502 question earlier, which I think I got a step closer to solving. However, if I try to connect to my lemmy instance now, it results in a time out. Now, I have set up the ufw firewall to allow nginx http - do I need to allow anything else to get to connect? Or is my timeout error something else?

Hi, does anybody have an idea what the reason could be? I installed a lemmy instance on a VPS using the docker images. Beforehand I installed nginx and got a letsencrypt - certificate (which seems to have worked). I downloaded the nginx.conf file from github and made the configurations, also in the lemmy.config and docker-compose.yml files. However, I'm unsure if there's anything else I should look at. Any tips are welcome :)

Hi, I'm new with self-hosting but managed to set up my own Lemmy and Mastodon instances on a VPS recently. However, I ran into an issue with disk space quite rapidly (which I had way too few, because I started with the cheapest, smallest package for my VPS).

Now I prepare a new setup, where I'll be able to dynamically scale disk space as needed, but this can get expensive quickly. Therefor my question: How much disk space do I typically need for private (1-3 user) instances of Lemmy and Mastodon? Are there settings, where I can limit the disk space utilization (at the cost of older stored content being overwritten)?

I would be fine with needing up to like 30-40 GB, but any more than that would be getting kinda expensive ....

Out of curiosity I'm currently considering to self-host a Lemmy and a Mastodon instance. Just for me (and maybe 2-3 close friends) privately. The proposition of having full control over my social media sounds appealing to me.

However, I'm not a software developer and I have next to no experience in self-hosting anything. Also, I don't plan to make self-hosting a hobby of mine.

Given these circumstances - how much time investment do you think is needed to keep everything running smoothly. I wouldn't mind spending 1-2 hours a week, but if it's more like 1-2 hours a day, I would stay clear.

Also, are there resources for troubleshooting available? I found the installations guides and some seem to be quite good for a layperson, giving step-by-step advice, however where to go if it doesn't work?

I'm trying to make up my mind if it would be worthwhile to try or if I set myself up with wasting a lot of time :) So, any advise is welcome.