When I hear "I have nothing to hide" my response of "OK, just send me your browser history" is usually met with silence.
Start Self Hosting
181–190 of 625 posts
Re: Start Self Hosting
#182Self hosting is hard. You need to take care of security, backups, software updates, software installation and so on. Even on something like a QNAP (which can be compared to managed hosting) this can be hard. Flip the wrong switch and you expose something to the world. Missed a security update: your device is now vulnerable. While I host a lot of things myself I can understand self hosting is not for everyone.
> You need to take care of security Easiest solution is to just host stuff on a local network without access to the wider internet. E.g. running on an old laptop/raspberry pi/server in your basement. Sure, that means you can no longer access your self-hosted stuff when you're out of the house, but the tradeoff is peace of mind about your data leaking or worse.
That helps for external threats breaking into buggy network services, but it doesn't help for compromised apps/images/dependencies exfiltrating your secrets.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#183The world of Synology products is fascinating in this regard.
Take photos - They’ve got iOS and android apps that replace your photo app; a truly self-hosted server you run in your home with pretty easy to use DNS support tools. Even shared albums work without much fuss. I think they’ve invested in the UX in recent versions, and it shows.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#184Self hosting is hard. You need to take care of security, backups, software updates, software installation and so on. Even on something like a QNAP (which can be compared to managed hosting) this can be hard. Flip the wrong switch and you expose something to the world. Missed a security update: your device is now vulnerable. While I host a lot of things myself I can understand self hosting is not for everyone.
> You need to take care of security Easiest solution is to just host stuff on a local network without access to the wider internet. E.g. running on an old laptop/raspberry pi/server in your basement. Sure, that means you can no longer access your self-hosted stuff when you're out of the house, but the tradeoff is peace of mind about your data leaking or worse.
> Sure, that means you can no longer access your self-hosted stuff when you're out of the house, but the tradeoff is peace of mind about your data leaking or worse.
Lots of things I'd consider self-hosting are functionally useless if I can't access them from my phone while out and about.
I could put my phone on a VPN, but that's just another layer of complexity to add to the self-hosting process.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you have your own domain pointed at your server, the Let's Encrypt certbot can automatically pull in a certificate Yeah, but don't have a mistake too many times, or Let's Encrypt will block you for a week until your rate limit times out. I hit this. I understand why Let's Encrypt has to do this, but it's very annoying and you have no choice but to do nothing for a week. There needs to be something in between Let…
Use the LetsEncrypt staging server for testing. When you have a process that works, switch to prod.
That's a tautology saying "Don't make mistakes."
A DNS misconfiguration can cause your Let's Encrypt to do weird things on a configuration that was (and still is) perfectly correct.
That was how I hit it. I eventually figured out what people screwed up in DNS. But certificates still didn't clear. So I spent an extra couple hours staring at DNS trying to figure out what I missed when the issue was that we bumped into the rate limit at Let's Encrypt (which is REALLY low--I think 5 failures is enough to trip it) while the DNS was bad and the only thing we could do was sit around for a week with dead certificates.
Not fun.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#186The world of Synology products is fascinating in this regard. Take photos - They’ve got iOS and android apps that replace your photo app; a truly self-hosted server you run in your home with pretty easy to use DNS support tools. Even shared albums work without much fuss. I think they’ve invested in the UX in recent versions, and it shows. https://www.synology.com/en-global/DSM70/SynologyPhotos
Definitely pro-sumer, I think professionals are the primary audience, though as an individual this cuts most of the effort out of the process for me.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#187I've been working on https://markdownsite.com/ - the "Git Repo -> Website" type of hosting platform, and have completely opened sourced it so others can run it themself.
The installation and on-going configuration management are first class things, with documentation and graphs: https://github.com/symkat/MarkdownSite/tree/master/devops
Re: Start Self Hosting
#188Self hosting is hard. You need to take care of security, backups, software updates, software installation and so on. Even on something like a QNAP (which can be compared to managed hosting) this can be hard. Flip the wrong switch and you expose something to the world. Missed a security update: your device is now vulnerable. While I host a lot of things myself I can understand self hosting is not for everyone.
> You need to take care of security Easiest solution is to just host stuff on a local network without access to the wider internet. E.g. running on an old laptop/raspberry pi/server in your basement. Sure, that means you can no longer access your self-hosted stuff when you're out of the house, but the tradeoff is peace of mind about your data leaking or worse.
Tailscale makes accessing a Raspberry Pi in your basement from outside of the house genuinely easy, including from mobile devices.
I think Tailscale opens up all kinds of new opportunities for self-hosting.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#189Bringing self hosting to lambda users is _REALLY_ hard and Big Tech won't let you do it too easily. Many corp email smtp servers will IP block your email server (big thanks to spamhaus), or won't support no-DNS email address and servers (which is RFC from the start) or won't have the decency to handle grey listing or will send all your emails to their spam boxes (gogol) even though ppl did remove your emails from the…
> Many corp email smtp servers will IP block your email server (big thanks to spamhaus)
Nope.
Spamhaus doesn't block self-hosted email servers. Spamhaus just publishes a number of lists, which postmasters can use or not, whether for filtering or just for scoring. The PBL in particular is likely to catch people self-hosting from a retail connection, because it lists most residential IP address-space.
But it's the receiving mailserver that does the blocking, not Spamhaus.
And it's down to the policies of the receiver's postmaster what lists are used and how they are used. That requires judgement and research, and some postmasters lack the former or don't have time for the latter.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#190Self hosting is hard. You need to take care of security, backups, software updates, software installation and so on. Even on something like a QNAP (which can be compared to managed hosting) this can be hard. Flip the wrong switch and you expose something to the world. Missed a security update: your device is now vulnerable. While I host a lot of things myself I can understand self hosting is not for everyone.
> You need to take care of security Easiest solution is to just host stuff on a local network without access to the wider internet. E.g. running on an old laptop/raspberry pi/server in your basement. Sure, that means you can no longer access your self-hosted stuff when you're out of the house, but the tradeoff is peace of mind about your data leaking or worse.
That's not really a solution if you want to self-host mail, or a blog; those services only work if the wider internet can see you.