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Ask HN: What are your favourite self-hosted tools?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your favourite self-hosted tools?

#101
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's precisely why I self-host. You can fix it yourself. Most people self-hosting GitLab will have a better uptime than GitHub.

I really want you to produce evidence for that. Everyone I know who selfhosts gitlab has much lower uptime than github.

I don't know about GitHub or GitLab, but in my entire professional career, I think my total downtime due to failures in locally hosted Git repos is zero. Likewise I don't recall ever having a problem due to locally hosted bug trackers or code review systems. This stuff isn't hard, and we've been able to do it reliably for a very long time.

What certainly has wasted a horrible amount of my time in recent years is working around build systems and package managers that are so badly designed that not only do they have a dependency on some online repository in the first instance, they also make it difficult or impossible to download and cache those dependencies in a supported way so that you can have 100% reproducible builds with nothing but locally hosted resources. Surely this is just about the most basic requirement for a robust software development process?

Re: Ask HN: What are your favourite self-hosted tools?

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, thanks to the stupid design decisions of most package managers, you will have trouble getting anything done anyway if github.com is down, even if you just get dependencies from there. If that problem affects you, then self-hosting your Git repo may just add a second point of failure.

You want to be setup so you can do a build completely offline of head or any tag. GitHub being down shouldn't make a difference. If the PM is getting in the way of that then dump it.

Rebuilding the entire toolchain of your language sounds like a colossal waste of time when you just wanted to avoid a few hours per year of developer downtime.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favourite self-hosted tools?

#105
post #92
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was cheap to set up, all the cost is in time to learn to implement in a secure and performant fashion Hardware actually cost money. Here's a breakdown: > 4 pcengines alix boxes for openbsd router/firewall appliances These were around $120 each with 4GB flash storage at the time. They're half that now. Low power, no cooling required, x86, 3 ethernet. You could buy APU2 now for more power > 3 supermicro Opteron serv…

Not original asker How do you secure your publicly accessible IP at home from the web. I see you use static IP's I guess it's no different than renting a sever? You probably have separate networks (local home vs. serving)

Looking at Netdisco I have 12 VLANs. ISP1, ISP2 (from Dad's house across the valley), OSPF backbone, DMZ, LAN, Guest, Cameras, Servers, Japan, Kids, Management and Test. Everything passes thru PF and only exposes services as required. The Guest VLAN, for example, has no way to get to the rest of the VLANs. Camera VLAN can only talk to the DVR software, etc.

The important thing with securing my public IPs (as with securing anything) is to understand the surface area and minimize risks. With the number of services I'm exposing, I have to be careful. First thing is to keep all OSs up to date. OpenBSD every 6 months and Debian on an ongoing basis.

Next, whenever possible use single-purpose proxies that have been well audited. In my case OpenSMTPD, Unbound and NSD protect the always popular mail and dns servers from attack.

Keeping complicated things off the internet is important. Big CMS packages are constantly under attack. I only run either static pages on my webserver, or very carefully audited custom PHP pages (written with an attacker's eye to exploit injection)

When I expose something more complicated like Guacamole or Citadel that might end up with a known hole in the login screen, I put it behind both SSL and an HTTP simple auth login prompt. It's ancient, and so well tested that it is unlikely to end up with an exploit against it. Or at least less likely than the app its protecting. I've actually been toying around with doing 2 factor auth on these services with a dynamically generated simple auth sent via SMS bridge or IFTTT...

On my internal network, I have my family running linux wherever possible, and keep Java and Flash off the windows PCs. Everyone runs with a nonprivledged account and the OS/software packages/PDF readers are all kept up to date. I think the wife and kid's PCs are probably the most likely things to be compromised on the network, so I keep a close eye on them.

I also take the reactive approach of log alerting, change monitoring and general diligence to the state of my network. If you know what has changed in the last 24 hours it tends to be a small enough dataset to eyeball, and will tend to tip you off when things are wonky. I also have enough logging and data sources (syslog, configs diffs, apache logs, nfsen data, mrtg data) that it would be exceptionally difficult for an attacker to wipe out all trace of their presence.

I do not know of a successful attack against my network, tho I'm not naive enough to think that it hasn't happened. I just haven't realized it if it has.

Its a great hobby if you like this stuff!

Re: Ask HN: What are your favourite self-hosted tools?

#107
post #25
post #5

I wish I had a success story to tell, but I've increasingly moved away from self-hosting. Whenever something breaks I have to pull myself away from the programming I'm enjoying and go fix it. And if something breaks when I've already had a long day working under a tight deadline for a client, it feels like a disaster.

That's precisely why I self-host. You can fix it yourself. Most people self-hosting GitLab will have a better uptime than GitHub.

You should generate your own electricity too! Sarcasm aside, every client will accept "Amazon is down, millions of programmers are affected". And then I get to head to the pub while the only finger you can point is at yourself. And then cost. I don't know your hourly rate, but an hour of fixing something myself pays for a year of most services out there.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favourite self-hosted tools?

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to be setup so you can do a build completely offline of head or any tag. GitHub being down shouldn't make a difference. If the PM is getting in the way of that then dump it.

Rebuilding the entire toolchain of your language sounds like a colossal waste of time when you just wanted to avoid a few hours per year of developer downtime.

No need to rebuild everything. Simply having the "DLLs" or equivalent checked in or in a maven/NuGet folder backed up would do the trick.

Your not just saving developer downtime. Remember that non incident a few months ago? Could be a security issue too.

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