Nothing stops them, but that’d be fine. If they buy the hardware they should be able to do what they want with it.

Okay, fair enough, any thoughts on what a good ‘management service’ might look like?

Is that just a dig on TrueNAS, or is it just a particularly daunting hill in the march up the difficulty curve?

Thanks, yeah, there’s a lot of work for us to do in testing hardware and understanding what a common workload (if such a thing exists) would need.

Do you have any particular evidence that causes you to think the audience would be niche or wouldn’t want to pay subscriptions? I can understand if this is just an opinion you hold, but if there’s data or experience behind it, that would be good to know.

If we did, would you be comfortable giving the company a root SSH login to manage your system, or would you prefer a more limited method of access?

Sorry, got off rambling there. I guess I’ve been down the home lab hardware/software wormhole for too long these last few weeks.

Not at all, I found your comment insightful. What you’re describing to me sounds more like a business of consulting with people rather than getting access to a knowledge base. One of the things I’m curious to learn is if there is a body of people out there that give up with self-hosting because they don’t want to learn everything, but just want to create something that works, and our resource are optimized for training professionals.

There would have to be some very clear benefits for that price.

Agreed, it would need to be very clear, and additionally we’d need to plan that a certain percentage of customers would grow out of a basic support offering, either by becoming experts or by growing their install size and complexity.

$20 per month would be enough to discourage me. It’s another relatively costly computer-related subscription and I already feel like I’m losing a battle to keep those minimal.

Understandable. Is there a price you think would be reasonable? What would you want for that price?

Would you rather pay a higher price per single instance ($100 to fix something you broke on accident) or pay a lower constant price ($10-$20/month) like insurance?

Would you rather get help in the form of a conversation, a custom script someone wrote for you, or by giving admin access to the company to directly fix things?

Isn’t that basically just a commercial NAS?

Is it? I haven’t bought one, nor have I built a TrueNAS box. I’ve heard from folks that run applications on a NAS, particularly VMs and containers, but my understanding is that your price-per-unit-compute is really high since that’s not what it’s optimized for. I’ve got an old Zyxel NAS, it’s quite low-end, and I can’t run anything beyond NFS/Samba/audio streaming.

you can just plug the NAS in anywhere and you’re golden.

Do they have some kind of VPN or TURN system? I’m expecting that customers will want to access the device outside of their LAN.

For me, a tiny x86 server isn’t going to cut it, because I want a beefier CPU to run CI/CD for my programming projects, so a beefier, modern CPU is quite valuable

How beefy? Multiple CPU? If you could buy 4 boxes and have them load balance would that be interesting, or do you have a strong preference for single-box compute?

I could absolutely be wrong here, that’s just my $0.02.

Thanks, your $0.02 is exactly what I’m looking for!

I’m not aware of a script alone that could do it, assuming you bought some hardware that came with Windows and wanted to run Linux. Is it possible these days to install Linux from within Windows? I’ve been flashing via disks for too long now.

I do know that some routers are scriptable, but not all routers are, so it may not be possible to do things like expose a port on the Internet with just scripts on whatever router they have.

How will you provide long term maintenance of their server for a one time payment of 150$?

My current thinking is the margin on the hardware would be intentionally low, essentially the cost of the hardware %+10 for configuring it a bit, installing NixOS, etc.

The business would survive on support and hosted services. Something like $20/month which gets you access to support to answer questions, help configure applications, troubleshoot issues, etc. Possibly rolling upgrades of your installed software on your behalf. Alerts on urgent security vulnerabilities. Could also handle tricky things like custom DNS (email servers, certificates) and off-site backups. I’m not totally sure what all would be included, but the goal is to make money while providing value, not build a garden or rent-seek.

I think this needs to exist, but as a community supported system, not as a commercial product. … The technical family friend offering to self-host email or forums or chat no longer gets gratitude and love, they get “why not Facebook?”

I think this is a great point, it doesn’t help much to create a business that ends up with the same incentives and the same end-game as the existing systems.

So… small group effort, resistant to bad actors joining the project to kill it, producing a good design with reasonably safe security architecture, that people can install step by step, and have fun using while they build and learn it.

That is precisely what I’m looking to build. I don’t want to get rich, I want people without 10 years of industry experience to get some of the benefits we have all been able to build for ourselves.