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Introduction %SelfHost%

The goal of mac2net.com is to provide information, guidance and technical resources to enable an individual or small company to Self-Host edge services.

This basically means buying an affordable yet powerful Mini PC(s) and using it to provide services from your home or premises using Fedora Server installed on bare metal hardware to run virtual machines through Cockpit and other utilities.

Fedora and Cockpit are both sponsored by Red Hat, which is owned by IBM and aggressively enhanced. A new version of Fedora is released every six months or so and a new version of Cockpit is released every two weeks.

Bare metal

The bare metal machine will not run a GUI interface, know in Linux as a desktop environment. Instead if/when a monitor is attached to the machine, it will only display a command line interface. This keeps the hardware lean and mean. Instead, there will be a choice of desktop environments to use when logging in via VNC.

The Mini PC and services running on it will be mostly managed through the aforementioned Cockpit from a Mac – Intel or ARM, it simply doesn’t matter.

Fedora

As previously mentioned, Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat, which is owned by IBM. IMO, Fedora Linux is the most advanced Linux distribution available. As the saying goes…

Except, now this IBM software is free! Why?

It’s complicated. To keep it simple, Fedora sits at the top of a big commercial Linux food chain that includes it’s own Red Hat, Oracle, Centos, and RHEL compatible Suse, Rocky and Alma Linux. RHEL stands for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

By focusing on using Fedora and its RHEL descendants for Self-Hosted edge services, one can efficiently leverage knowledge across many use cases and software platforms. While I suggest using Fedora on the metal and wherever possible for virtual machine, it is simply not possible to avoid using other RHEL compatible distros as many developers prefer to release packages on the slower moving RHEL rather than Fedora.