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Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

blog.alexgleason.me

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Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#71

Post by duhast2020 »

rbanffy wrote: post #32
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #14

I’m not sure running their own hardware and relying on an ISP or colocationg at a datacentre would help Parler compared with renting services/VMs from someone like Amazon. Just about all ISP have terms and conditions that prohibit use that they find offensive. Data Foundry, mentioned in the article, acceptable use policy is below and I’m sure could be used to kick out Parler https://www.datafoundry.com/legal/aup

It's possible to hide one's presence from the datacenter by a shell company and a CDN.

How? It would take one minute for a dude with some sniffer on his wifi to find the DNS entries and CDN used. Go to the press with "Parler is being hosted out of domain Foo w/ CDNfront" and viola.

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#72

Post by nacs »

julienfr112 wrote: post #67

Nice post and inspiring, but one small point bother me: "I feel GREAT not living in FEAR". Well, you just traded the fear of being shut down by big corpo for the fear of having your hard disk or memory or fan or whatever fail.

Most rackmount servers double up on everything like power-supplies. Harddrives should be on RAID so a single drive failure shouldn't be a problem and you would have some time to goto the colo and switch out the hard drive.

CPU and RAM last a very long time so it shouldn't be a problem (I've had literally 1 RAM stick failure in over a decade of hosting and the datacenter swapped out the bad memory stick in less than 30 minutes -- it also didn't bring down the server either, the kernel log started showing a bunch of ECC issues and a quick memory check pointed to the stick that had the problem).

And of course you can just get double or triple the amount of servers with IP failover and such to be even more resilient to hardware failures.

This article is just showing how to get started. Throw more servers at it for more redundancy and scaling as needed.

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#73

Post by TameAntelope »

acover wrote: post #70
TameAntelope wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole, “they’re faceless greed machines” works both ways, though, doesn’t it? You’ve got to do something pretty universally terrible to have a blood sucking corporation actually turn down your money...

Not really. When a corp has billions in revenue, your $2000 is nothing compared to any possibility of jeopardizing a fraction of their revenue. Imagine a corp optimizing click through. Any negative news could dampen that and require immediate action. You have to be perfect or too big to remove.

And yet I’m neither of those things and I’ve never been kicked off of a platform, so clearly there’s something off with what you’ve said, otherwise people would be getting deplatformed for saying or doing anything at all that might go against popular sentiment.

Parler wasn’t removed from AWS because it was a conservative site, it was removed because it wasn’t willing to handle the legally troubling volume of potentially criminal activity. You can post your thoughts on any conservative idea you want on Twitter, no one is getting banned for that. The only reason anyone has been removed from any popular social media (or AWS) is because they became unwilling to recognize the fact they owe more than nothing to their fellow man, which includes not trying to silence others through intimidation.

Ideas have not been and are not still the problem, is the refusal to think carefully about how to express oneself.

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#74

Post by nacs »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #63

This article is kind of depressing, when did hosting your own server become a lost art? One of parler’s problems was they didn’t scrub headers which made it very obvious they were using AWS and which AWS services they were using. AWS is just a bunch of APIs - they could have colo’d their front end or put a bunch of varnish servers in front if it at a colo and nobody would have been the wiser they were using AWS on th…

Yep, the amount of incompetence in Parler's case is just mind-boggling.

Their failure to make it cloud agnostic being 1 (even though they claimed before they went down that their app could run without AWS without issue).

Their failure to be incapable (still) to get it running again on non-cloud hardware..

And of course their inability to, as you suggest, move the frontend routing to a CDN/Cloudflare/DDosguard type service and have all the heavy lifting continue to be done via AWS/Azure/Google till you can run 100% on your own hardware.

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#75

Post by Balgair »

542458 wrote: post #7
rhencke wrote: post #4

I grew up in an era where running your own servers was just generally accepted practice. It's been fascinating watching how dramatically that viewpoint has shifted over the years to the point where it is now a novel idea to do so.

I switched my personal website to a Raspberry Pi 4 in my basement a while ago, with cloudflare caching and roll-your-own DDNS - I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how easy the whole thing was to do (although my requirements are far from exotic).

Any good resources to share?

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#76

Post by angelbar »

Jochim wrote: post #61
rhencke wrote: post #4

I grew up in an era where running your own servers was just generally accepted practice. It's been fascinating watching how dramatically that viewpoint has shifted over the years to the point where it is now a novel idea to do so.

I wonder how much of this is just the industry maturing/specialising. We don't think it's weird that most people don't mill their own flour when they bake bread, so long as the quality of the flour is good enough we're happy for someone else to do it for us. In the same way most people/companies don't really need to care what hardware their application runs on, only that it meets some bar of quality/cost that's appro…

If you need to have your baked goods constaltly, you will be better prepared with many flour providers in case of that one provider does NOT LIKE YOUR RECIPE and stop selling the ingredients to you... Or get your own flour mill.

So, not a ideal analogy...

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#77

Post by wging »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #63

This article is kind of depressing, when did hosting your own server become a lost art? One of parler’s problems was they didn’t scrub headers which made it very obvious they were using AWS and which AWS services they were using. AWS is just a bunch of APIs - they could have colo’d their front end or put a bunch of varnish servers in front if it at a colo and nobody would have been the wiser they were using AWS on th…

AWS publishes which IPs it owns, so scrubbing headers is not enough for secrecy. (Not that doing something that relies on secrecy is a smart plan for a business, anyway.) https://isitonaws.com/

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#78

Post by rhencke »

angelbar wrote: post #76
Jochim wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much of this is just the industry maturing/specialising. We don't think it's weird that most people don't mill their own flour when they bake bread, so long as the quality of the flour is good enough we're happy for someone else to do it for us. In the same way most people/companies don't really need to care what hardware their application runs on, only that it meets some bar of quality/cost that's appro…

If you need to have your baked goods constaltly, you will be better prepared with many flour providers in case of that one provider does NOT LIKE YOUR RECIPE and stop selling the ingredients to you... Or get your own flour mill. So, not a ideal analogy...

I think your underlying point is fair, but I'd like to see you post a more constructive explanation of where it would be useful for the analogy to capture a truth about cloud services that is not true for, say, flour - switching cloud providers is incredibly difficult due to vendor lock-in.

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#79

Post by TheRealSteel »

542458 wrote: post #15
TheRealSteel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely it'd be trivial to increase the user's speed to Netflix servers if they've visited Fast.com in the last three minutes or similar?

Thanks to TLS, Netflix and Fast are indistinguishable. All your ISP knows is the IP address you’re talking to. They’d only know that you visited Fast in particular if you were using your ISP’s DNS, which you shouldn’t be using anyways :)

Makes sense, networking was never my strong point. To be fair, alot of people will be using their ISP's DNS, but at least this is avoidable, even if you have to specifically take steps.

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#80

Post by ampdepolymerase »

Running on a shoestring budget is not very interesting. What would be interesting is running a well funded production level data center in a completely hostile political environment with every other commercial entity trying to refuse business with you.
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