farcaller

First on how to get an ASN: you can buy it for reasonably cheap from a LIR. Some will even toss a free /48 with that. Happy to offer names in private so that there’s no advertising. Expect a budget quoted above.

Once you have an ASN, you need to get an upstream - actually two as RIPE mandates at least two (otherwise why’d you need an ASN). Some LIRs would offer transit with ASN purchase. You can upstream via your ISP, if they allow you to (that’s very rare). Another option is a tunnel (there are free and paid ones) or a VM somewhere (some cloud providers offer to set up bgp with VMs they host). Generally, free ones are enough for basic stuff. Not much bandwidth and oftentimes IPv6 only, but you don’t pay anything either. Besides, you can ask around in various network related chats. Practically, I can offer ip transit with some marginally low burstable bandwidth, and that’s pretty common. You can look/ask around https://discord.gg/ipv6 for example.

For getting ASN to your homelab you’re looking at a tunnel option, most probably. Great if you have static ipv4 - allows you to use more common tunnels, but is still doable with a floating IP (e.g. check bgptunnel).

BGP anycast person here. If you have any presence in the region RIPE operates in then the pricing is within the homelab reach. ASN and a block of /48 would be about 70 EUR/year.

Alternatively, something like route64 would happily tunnel you IPs they announce for about 2 EUR/month.

I’ve used VM in my homelab for a while - it’s genuinely a smaller ram footprint, especially on the ingress path. You can even scale query separately if required.

I’d suggest VictoriaMetrics over pure Prometheus - better ram footprint is pretty useful nowadays.

I’ll chime in: simplicity. It’s much easier to keep a few patches that apply to local OS builds: I use Nix, so my Mastodon microVM config just has an extra patch line. If there’s a new Mastodon update, the patch most probably will work for it too.

Yes, I could build my own Docker container, but you can’t easily build it with a patch (for Mastodon specifically, you need to patch js pre-minification). It’s doable, but it’s quite annoying. And then you need to keep track of upstream and update your Dockerfile with new versions.