What's the most ridiculous thing you've self-hosted?

mikho

We've had threads on what is low-end today and the oldest VPS that you still own ....

And we've all self-hosted the sensible stuff: VPNs, Nextcloud, media servers, monitoring, backups...

But what's the most ridiculous, unnecessary, or spectacularly overengineered thing you've ever put on a VPS or home server?

I'm talking about projects where, in hindsight, you probably could have just used an existing service — but instead decided to spend three weekends configuring Docker, reverse proxies, DNS, SSL certificates, and monitoring because “it'll be fun.”

Maybe you self-hosted something that had absolutely no business being self-hosted, used a $20 VPS to solve a problem that didn't exist, or built an entire infrastructure stack just to automate one incredibly trivial task.

Bonus points if:

• It consumed more resources. es than the actual problem deserved.
• You were the only person who ever used it.
• You forgot how it worked but were too scared to turn it off.
• The setup documentation is longer than the application itself.
• Your justification was. simply: “Because I can.”

So, what's your most gloriously pointless self-hosted project?

Confess your crimes against sensible infrastructure.

rcy026

I once had a blog. This was back when the internet was new and platforms like Movable Type and Blogger was all the rush, probably late 90's or early 2000. Blog services were plentiful and free and did everything they could to attract users so there were thousands to chose from. But not me, I had to self host.
So I wrote a blog in Perl. It worked well, supported publishing posts via email etc.
But, for some reason I decided that I wanted to post from my cellphone, I think it was a SonyEricsson, one of the first with a camera. Cellphones back then did not have internet and if they did it was only the wap protocol which sucked so this was a bit of a problem. Long story short, it all resulted in a cellphone connected via serial cable to a server running a plethora of services and scripts. This allowed me to send a sms to this cellphone and the server picked it up and posted it to the blog. I could even send a picture via mms and then later send a blog post via sms that referenced that picture and the server would fetch the mms from the phone, extract the picture and attach it to the blog post.
I spent several hundred hours on this, not to mention a second phone subscription which wasn't exactly cheap back then, and I posted a total of 9 posts on that blog before I let it die a decade later. I shit you not, I still have the backup, there are 9 posts on it and it probably had less then 50 views in it's lifetime.

AnthonySmith

Right... where to start.

1. In the early days of USB routers, we had some issues with the quality of care for some horses that were on someone else's property, so to add some accountability a camera went up in the stable, with its own USB power bank with passthrough as a UPS. The camera supported DDNS, but the 3G USB router was terrible (best at the time but terrible) so the IP changed all the time (ALL THE TIME), and for some reason the DDNS only updated automatically about once an hour, so I had a service running on 2host (remember them?) that got the IP because of the ftp upload from the camera hitting it, set to run every minute for pictures, was really just to get the IP address and published and then used an API to push the new IP to the DDNS service and also report it to me.

About 3 years after the horses were moved out of there, I realised I was still paying for that VPS haha.

2. Freedos so I can play games via VNC (html5) from anywhere; IIRC, iirc you even tested this @mikho when I was playing with it on an IH box. Prince of Persia?

3. A Windows 2000 server desktop with genuine CAL's on a dual pentium 2, 233 MHz RM Net station server, so me and a Belgian friend in the VERY early 2000's could play multiplayer Notepad to communicate about things more privatley, it was ridiuclous and hillarous, I miss that guy, oftern wonder what happened to him.

Sometimes there would be 5 - 10 of is communicating in a notepad document, it was crazy but we developed a system and it just worked.

looked like that but bigger and was running in my living room (doubled up as a very loud coffee table)

WSS

I had a SparcServer 1000e, a couple low end Amigas, some VAXStation 3100s and a handful of already aging tech running in my apartment. My bedroom sounded like an airport. This was in the early 2000s. The DEC Alphas burned themselves up when the ambient temperature got over 70 degrees.

@rcy026 basically echoes my sentiment in the late 90s/early 2000s. I made a WAP gateway for my Nokia so I could send MIDIs to it. I could have bought a cable, but no, I wrote a WAP gateway instead. I also created my own blog while teaching myself PHP. I basically had Digg, del.icio.us, and integration with a little daemon I ran on my Macbook to show what I was listening to in SoundJam. For the time, it was unheard of technology. Still is (it was very niche, nobody read it). People mostly used it to get my MacOS X ports of FOSS. (It still exists, mostly in archive format since I have archives from 1999 links on the front page, with my last article this past June.)

I also ran a serial cable from the bedroom to the bathroom so I could read USENET from the toilet on a vt220 in the late 90s. So, I was possibly the first legitimate shitposter.

mikho

@rcy026 said: wap protocol

And now there is a song about it

@AnthonySmith said: Freedos so I can play games via VNC (html5) from anywhere; IIRC, iirc you even tested this @mikho when I was playing with it on an IH box. Prince of Persia?

Yep .. a small KVM which loaded DOS (of some version) and then the game .... fun, one time ... then I totally forgot about it.
Now there are a plethora of websites where you can play those old retro games.....

I also had a blog (not that old) back when LEB only had promos for VPS on their frontpage. Tried to write more tutorials and stuff ... still online, can't really remember which VPS its on (auto-update on the Wordpress and plugins ... I hope its still working). https://lowendguide.com

oh, and I built a BBS on my work desktop. Company had double ISDN lines and I only had dialup at home... shared some good files back then.
On a forum called Filejunkies.net ... with a dutch guy ... can't remember his name. Think he moved to the US later on in life.

AnthonySmith

@mikho said: .. I hope its still working). https://lowendguide.com

oh wow I forgot about that! nostalgia!

@mikho said: oh, and I built a BBS on my work desktop. Company had double ISDN lines and I only had dialup at home... shared some good files back then.
On a forum called Filejunkies.net ... with a dutch guy ... can't remember his name. Think he moved to the US later on in life.

omg... LES needs a BBS!

mikho

@AnthonySmith said:

@mikho said: .. I hope its still working). https://lowendguide.com

oh wow I forgot about that! nostalgia!

@mikho said: oh, and I built a BBS on my work desktop. Company had double ISDN lines and I only had dialup at home... shared some good files back then.
On a forum called Filejunkies.net ... with a dutch guy ... can't remember his name. Think he moved to the US later on in life.

omg... LES needs a BBS!

you should build a modem emulator VPN connection

WSS

@AnthonySmith said: omg... LES needs a BBS!

There's a Linux version of WWIV. Don't ask me why I know this. https://docs.wwivbbs.org/en/wwiv53/linux_installation/

DrNutella

Backup system for floppies
Don’t ask

DrNutella

The passwords to Harvard servers when trying to hack into physical Mac Xservers sitting around for over a decade with passwords lost to time. We were not given pen and paper weirdly. But we had servers to put our notes on.

This is the mindless task I was given. I did figure out the passwords. It was incredible.

DrNutella

We found the most incredible things on those servers with basic 5 char password.

Infrared scans to ancient books lost in fires across Europe and WW2. Published for free for the world to study now.

Hidden faded text that researchers have no idea existed because they were the only ones to infrared scans the books along other lasers.

Things lost to time and history owned by the elite. Given back to the world because I found them sitting on a server no one could access. No one could care about.

And I had to host the passwords on another server as I had no where to put it. Fun

forest

For a home "server"... Using Linux an old Nintendo DS with a broken screen and 4 MiB RAM to control a network of sensors. Turns out 802.11b is still fast enough. Still running right now on a patched kernel 2.6 with no MMU at all.

@DrNutella said: Things lost to time and history owned by the elite. Given back to the world because I found them sitting on a server no one could access. No one could care about.

Did you put it on the Internet Archive? I'd love to see that.