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

blog.alexgleason.me

101–110 of 141 posts

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

#101

On the other hand, ThePirateBay seems to be able to stay up.

Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi (‪@brokep‬) 1/10/21, 03:05 "The pirate bay, the most censored website in the world, started by kids, run by people with problems with alcohol, drugs and money, still is up after almost 2 decades. Parlor and gab etc have all the money around but no skills or mindset. Embarrassing. The most ironic thing is that TPBs enemies include not just the US government but also many European and the Russian…

It's probably easier to host a website serving a bunch of .torrent files. There's dozens of those around.

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

#102
post #13

I doubt running your own server is always the right solution.There are pros and cons for and against hosting yourself. A small company without dedicated security team may get hacked and all customer data exposed, for example. Contrary to what this article insinuates, the vast majority of companies do not have to worry about violating the terms of services of cloud providers and other external services, because they d…

The same happens with poor management of cloud services.

So many companies got 'hacked' simply by having open S3 buckets with customer data hanging around.

A cloud service doesn't shield against incompetence.

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

#103
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.

Yeah... and the crazy thing is that people on the big clouds or even just using Firebase have experienced outages as a result.

I've had zero downtime due to running on a Digital Ocean VPS the past few years and very, very brief outages due to my own decisions around various upgrade and backup decisions. I spend less, I get full control and there's zero risk of a surprise bill.

I think the key thing is that most customers won't blame you if your service goes down due to an AWS outage.

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

#104
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...

The difference is that flour has been completely commoditized, while cloud hosting has only recently started becoming commoditized and isn't all the way there yet.

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

#105
post #44

This made me realize that one reason many of us use cloud hosting is that our home internet is lacking, whether through caps or the lack of fiber deployment. It was easy for Congress to railroad the rights of private property owners and cities for 5G but they can’t seem to do it for fiber... Maybe this can get Conservatives to realize that unfettered broadband access lessens the power of the hosts.

The physical network itself evolved away from peer -> peer back to client -> server. With IPv6 I'd hoped we would today be living in a world where I could send my friend the url fe80::1ff:fe23:4567:890a/cat.mov and they could download a video directly from my phone. No matter where my phone happens to be in the world. People could host "micro services" on their personal devices and the whole world could access them.…

This so much. People don’t realize how much ubiquitous NAT has eroded individuals’ online capabilities and freedoms and shifted the internet from what it was meant to be (much more bidirectional than it is now)

I shudder when tech folks themselves insist on NAT as a core security tenet - sure it might be a convenient extra layer but it’s so sad what’s been sacrificed in its name

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

#106
I'm picking up a weird sentiment from these articles about parler.

Something like... shoving someone so they fall and break their teeth, and then trying to blame them and saying, "it's your own fault for having such poor balance". A coping strategy for guilt? I just meant to harm you a little bit?

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

#107
post #44

This made me realize that one reason many of us use cloud hosting is that our home internet is lacking, whether through caps or the lack of fiber deployment. It was easy for Congress to railroad the rights of private property owners and cities for 5G but they can’t seem to do it for fiber... Maybe this can get Conservatives to realize that unfettered broadband access lessens the power of the hosts.

[flagged]

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

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have worked for companies in the past with horrible datacenter partners (one of them did not know that one of the two switches they routed our traffic through was completely dead), so I definitely agree with you on that. On the flip side, I wonder how much better the support from a cloud provider is if it's an isolated problem and not something that's setting twitter aflame. If it takes a cloud provider in the orde…

You make me feel so underpaid, is 300k the going rate for being a DevOps Engineer that knows the old ways of CGI/LAMP and can leverage running Exchange/IIS nowadays? I don't even know if these salaries are truthful now.

I don't actually know if that's the going rate TBH. That was the range our ops (not devops, he managed our datacenter ops) guy was hired away for almost a decade ago

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

#109
post #24
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Personally I trust my ISP DNS a hell of a lot more than Google/Cloudflare. Why would I want to give them even more data about me?

Wow, where do you live?! Across the US and UK, I’ve consistently found home-ISP-supplied DNS to be slow, spammy and unreliable.

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

#110
post #106

I'm picking up a weird sentiment from these articles about parler. Something like... shoving someone so they fall and break their teeth, and then trying to blame them and saying, "it's your own fault for having such poor balance". A coping strategy for guilt? I just meant to harm you a little bit ?

I think your analogy breaks because it represents the people "shoving" Parler and the people talking about this afterwards as one, which is not the case.

A better analogy would be: Parler likes to hang out with the school bully, even though everyone told them not to. One day, the bully shoved Parker and it broke it's teeth. Should the bully's conduct have been allowed? Almost certainly not, and that's a problem. But at the same time Parler was warned about the bully and yet they disregarded all warnings, believing that it wouldn't happen to them.

Parler can make a stand, saying "it is the school's job to keep bullies under control" (which is true) and live it's life as if there were no bullies because that's what life should be. Some people do precisely that for worthy causes, knowing full well what the consequences are (see: Rosa Parks). Or they can do what most of us did in school and stay away from the bully. Less principled? Sure. But our dentist bills are a lot cheaper as a result.

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