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Self-Host All the Things?

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Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#231

Post by sgt »

einhverfr wrote: post #198

At PGConf India, one of the keynotes addressed exactly this topic. The largest stock broker firm in India had made the decision to self-host everything. The CTO made a number of points that I think are missed in this discussion and article, namely: 1. You may think you are a software company, but HR, accounting etc are just as critical to your operations as the customer product. Therefore there isn't really a distinc…

Agreed fully. You might risk slightly more downtime, but the overall benefit of owning it yourself is well worth it long term.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#232

Post by Mordisquitos »

dijit wrote: post #84
the_af wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with your modern definition. Spam to me is unsolicited commercial emails. All email "ads" are spam. Newsletters I didn't subscribe to are spam. Anything trying to sell me something I didn't subscribe to is spam. You bet I'm going to mark it as spam and I hope it creates trouble for the sender. PS: I assume we all agree scams, "Russian singles", chain letters, "little Jessica is 4 and dying of cancer", etc,…

The annoyance I felt that I was a “good” postmaster and I was punished as a part of being from a tribe of bad postmasters. Google et al. can’t tell the difference when you hit spam. We never bought or sold any email lists, we went out of our way to ensure you wanted to be on the list- we made it single link with no extra checkbox or button to unsubscribe, we emailed only occasionally and above all we did our absolute…

> but why the hell are people marking the receipts for things they bought as spam?

I'm someone who often marks receipts for things that were bought as spam. Note that I said things that were bought—not things that I bought.

I have the rare privilege of having an e-mail address which is ${common_first_name}.${non_rare_last_name}@gmail.com, and I am sick and tired of businesses that do no e-mail verification of the addresses of their customers. I will simply delete good old "Click here to confirm your address", but I have no patience for the hundreds of emails I receive because either businesses keep asking customers with my same name who do not understand what email is for their "email address", or because businesses ignore the email confirmation/verification step out of sheer incompetence or out the product-cult of "conversion" rates. Those I mark as spam, because I want them to pay the price.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#233

Post by romwell »

flakeoil wrote: post #230

If you have a family and your family uses all this self-hosted stuff (backup, file storage, email etc), what would happen when you die or get a serious health issue? Do you think your spouse or kids can get the data out themselves? No-one will have a clue where the backups are, how the emails are stored, where those pics are etc. And even more difficult in case you have implemented some clever encryption and 2-factor…

> Do you think your spouse or kids can get the data out themselves? No-one will have a clue where the backups are, how the emails are stored, where those pics are etc.

As opposed to what, your spouse having no idea which cloud services you used for file storage, what login credentials you had, and having no ability to access those accounts?

> Even for someone competent it can be difficult to sort through the mess if it is not well documented.

The most difficult part is sorting through the mess, however it is documented.

It's been three years since my father's passing, and I have yet to open his laptop. I can't.

I don't need any credentials to access the box of old family photos to get them scanned, and yet it's still an item on the to-do list.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#234

Post by chillfox »

dijit wrote: post #222
chillfox wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) A lot of the things I buy are electronic, so yes, I get them immediately at point of sale. And if that's not the case then how about asking me if I would like an email with a tracking number when it ships? 2) I have never had to show an email as proof when returning something, usually they know damn well that I bought and paid for it. In general it seems like you are conflating all the different kinds of email as…

Im not understanding something here. if you buy something online, IE via an ecommerce site like aliexpress or amazon, how do you get a receipt if you dont have an account. returning an item requires a receipt in the majority of cases unless the product ships directly with a return label.

Is it even possible to buy anything from those two stores without opening an account?

Nope, not here. If you have to return something then you contact the company and they will verify from their records that you bought it, usually by looking up the purchase by the card you used.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#235

Post by KronisLV »

linsomniac wrote: post #190
KronisLV wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anything I deploy needs to have an upgrade plan. Ideally, something that provides a package (either on distro or a repo the package provides), so "apt update" will resolve it. Docker can be a good way as well, Sentry does a pretty good job at this. I wrote an article called "Never update anything": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/never-update-anything which in truth argued that while updates are necessary, they're…

Agreed, updates are probably at some point going to break things, and you're going to have to spend time fixing them, maybe even recovering from backups... As I said, an operations problem. Leaving things without upgrades is also a problem as well though, due to security problems.

That is very true, that's also why having (working) backups is so important, or even knowing what to back up and restore, so you don't end up overwriting old vendored packages/dependencies but can restore the configuration/data instead.

I'd go as far as to suggest that updating is something that you must do while you have any sort of a stake in the overall outcome of the thing you're working on, given how destructive breaches and getting hacked could be. That also does mean that you will absolutely need to take the operations overhead into account and plan for it.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#236

Post by KronisLV »

dicknuckle wrote: post #181
KronisLV wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anything I deploy needs to have an upgrade plan. Ideally, something that provides a package (either on distro or a repo the package provides), so "apt update" will resolve it. Docker can be a good way as well, Sentry does a pretty good job at this. I wrote an article called "Never update anything": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/never-update-anything which in truth argued that while updates are necessary, they're…

Anecdote, I also had a container app fail, from a trusted provider that I assumed weighsy have plenty of testing in place, but maybe it was too synthetic. Sonarr from LinuxServer.io briefly changed to a dev build and boned the DB before switching back to a stable build.

You know, I thought that I'd actually provide a bit more information about my experiences as well, because while these are anecdotes, they are still something that happened and shouldn't be entirely ignored. These things do happen, sometimes because of the architecture and what's inside of the container in question. For example, that was largely the case with the GitLab Omnibus containers, because of them containing lots of dependencies, or the same with OpenProject.

GitLab: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/gitlab-upda...

OpenProject: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/openproject...

(I still think that both are good software, but not without their pain points, like updates in this case)

Then again, even something like Nextcloud or comparatively simpler systems like Grav still run into issues with upgrades, sometimes because going across major versions is too much, other times because the containers have vendor dependencies in volumes/bind mounts, which cause a plethora of issues.

Nextcloud: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/nextcloud-i...

Grav: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/grav-is-bro...

But it's a little bit odd when ever the operating systems we use have similar issues. Like that mention of a Debian update breaking GRUB prevented the server from booting altogether and that other time the exim4 package getting launched prevented my mail server from starting because of the port being bound.

Debian breaking GRUB: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/debian-and-...

Debian launching exim4: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/debian-upda...

Other times you get problems with upgrading across libraries, or language runtime versions, which I didn't mention in the original post, but which is no less of an issue. It's even harder than just regular package or software updates, because sometimes it might necessitate a major rewrite.

Example of Java 8 to Java 11: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/upgrading-j...

That said, I'm not sure how good the idea of documenting every software breakage out there is, because the folder with screenshots and information about things that went wrong just seems to be getting longer and longer for me. But hey, maybe it will serve as an insight into what things were around 2020s some day, when hopefully we've figured out how to upgrade software more safely.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#237

Post by cal85 »

Jedd wrote: post #140
triyambakam wrote: post #70

> which honestly kind of upset me a lot I've seen this language more and more frequently: minimized (kind of) + maximized (a lot) qualifiers. No real insight, just interesting.

In terms of annoying-once-you-notice-it idioms, should readers assume dishonesty on all other statements made by people that prefix only some small subset of their claims with 'Honestly ...' and 'To be honest ...'?

No, because they mean "honest" in the sense of "frank/unguarded", not "truthful".

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#238

Post by ashrafsam »

Axsuul wrote: post #22

Loving the "just right" labels. How does n8n compare to Activepieces? Also those who are looking to dive deeper into self-hosting should join us at /r/selfhosted on Reddit.

Creator of Activepieces here; we do our best to design for the simplest user so we keep our UX as straightforward and non-technical as possible. Our license is very permissive (MIT), and we encourage community collaboration on pieces which made us grow very fast to 41 pieces until today.

Here is our HN launch about a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34723989

And this is our /r/selfhosted launch: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/10pxkao/we_buil...

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#239

Post by dijit »

charcircuit wrote: post #101
Nextgrid wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, they can do that just fine regardless of whether you’re running externally-available services. Most untargeted, low-effort DDoS relies on filling up all your bandwidth with spam traffic, not exploiting some layer-7 vulnerability in an application you host.

Who does untargetted layer 3/4 DDoS? Why would an attacker waste money booting a website that gets 0 visitors?

By "untargetted" the parent almost certainly means "not tailored to take down the site".

Some people do smart things and find a page that is heavy for your computer to process and hit it a lot.

Some people decide they don't like your service (or you) and flood you.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#240

Post by rb666 »

maxboone wrote: post #138
stonewall wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some automation that does a weekly archive of everything important to a ZFS-based NAS. Home directories are also stored there over NFS, with hourly/weekly/monthly snapshots. Once a month or so, I plug in two separate 5TB external HDDs and run a backup script that rsync's everything to each one (2 is 1 and 1 is none). These are stored outside my home. I should probably get some kind of cloud-based / encrypted b…

https://www.rsync.net/ does ZFS receives, so you can send those encrypted / without unlocking.

That's minimum $60 p/m, a bit steep.
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