Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Self-Host?

romanzipp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 269 posts

Re: Why Self-Host?

#191

Post by quesera »

thewebguyd wrote: post #144
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #27

20 years ago grandpa could go to limewire.com, download setup.exe and click next->next->next to install a fully functional file hosting server+client. It was so easy that 1/3rd of world's computers had limewire installed in 2007 [1]. ONE FUCKING THIRD! Today, to install even the simplest self-hosted software, one has to be effectively a professional software engineer. Use SSH, Use Docker, use tailscale, understand TL…

> No idea why self-hosted software isn't `apt-get install` and forget. Ubuntu tried to fix this with snaps but the whole Linux community raged and pushed back at them. Yeah, snap has its faults but it was designed initially for server-side apps. Snap install xyz-selfhosted-app was the initial goal. You can install nextcloud as a snap right now. Instead the Linux community let perfect be the enemy of good and successf…

I don't recall any of that narrative being why people didn't like snaps.

One of the early sticking points was switching Firefox from deb to snap. That doesn't fit into your characterization.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#192

Post by aborsy »

Self hosting is much more accessible today. The security issue has not been solved yet though. How do you make available your services to other people?

People won’t install VPNs. They are usually okay with authenticating to a web server, so you can put authentication with something like Authentik in front of your reverse proxy. But can you configure this front end security correctly and patch it, and are you sure it doesn’t have easy zero days?

Re: Why Self-Host?

#193

Post by thewebguyd »

quesera wrote: post #191
thewebguyd wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No idea why self-hosted software isn't `apt-get install` and forget. Ubuntu tried to fix this with snaps but the whole Linux community raged and pushed back at them. Yeah, snap has its faults but it was designed initially for server-side apps. Snap install xyz-selfhosted-app was the initial goal. You can install nextcloud as a snap right now. Instead the Linux community let perfect be the enemy of good and successf…

I don't recall any of that narrative being why people didn't like snaps. One of the early sticking points was switching Firefox from deb to snap. That doesn't fit into your characterization.

Right, it got a bad rep on the desktop which tarnished its reuptation overall as a packaging format entirely

Re: Why Self-Host?

#194

Post by Matumio »

oxalorg wrote: post #137
mikepurvis wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main thing that gives me anxiety about this is the security surface area associated with "managing" a whole OS— kernel, userland, all of it. Like did I get the firewall configured correctly, am I staying on top of the latest CVEs, etc. For that reason alone I'd be tempted to do GHA workflow -> build container image and push to private registry -> trivial k8s config that deploys that container with the proper port…

I left my VPS open to password logins for over 3 years, no security updates, no firewalls, no kernel updates, no apt upgrades; only fail2ban and I survived: https://oxal.org/blog/my-vps-security-mess/ Don't be me, but even if you royally mess up things won't be as bad as you think.

I've had password login enabled for decades on my home server, not even fail2ban. But I do have an "AllowUsers" list with three non-cryptic user names. (None of them are my domain name, but nice try.)

Last month I had 250k failed password attempts. If I had a "weak" password of 6 random letters (I don't), and all 250k had guessed a valid username (only 23 managed that), that would give... uh, one expected success every 70 years?

That sounds risky actually. So don't expose a "root" user with a 6-letter password. Add two more letters and it is 40k years. Or use a strong password and forget about those random attempts.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#195

Post by [deleted] »

codegeek wrote: post #21

"start self-hosting more of your personal services." I would make the case that you should also self host more as a small Software/SAAS business and it is not quite the boogeyman that a lot of cloud vendors want you to think. Here is why. Most software projects/businesses don't require the scale and complexity for which you truly need the cloud vendors and their expertise. For example, you don't need Vercel to deploy…

[deleted]

Re: Why Self-Host?

#196

Post by elevation »

aborsy wrote: post #192

Self hosting is much more accessible today. The security issue has not been solved yet though. How do you make available your services to other people? People won’t install VPNs. They are usually okay with authenticating to a web server, so you can put authentication with something like Authentik in front of your reverse proxy. But can you configure this front end security correctly and patch it, and are you sure it…

Your employees/contractors will install your VPN if it's a contingency of employment. If you don't need to serve to the world, this step dramatically limits your attack surface, though you should still use Authentik and TLS.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#197

Post by sksksk »

carlosjobim wrote: post #60
sksksk wrote: post #10

With self hosting email, if the digital sovreignty aspect is more important to you than the privacy aspect... What I do is use gmail with a custom domain, self host an email server, and use mbysnc[1] to always be downloading my emails from gmail. Then I connect to that email server for reading my emails, but still use gmail for sending. It also means that google can't lock me out of my emails, I still retain all my e…

The custom domain is all you need for complete e-mail sovereignty. As long as you have it, you can select between hundreds (thousands?) of providers, and take your business elsewhere at any time.

You risk losing your historical emails if you don’t back them up somewhere

Re: Why Self-Host?

#198

Post by mikewarot »

If I could host something on an actually secure OS, self hosting might make sense. Given the deliberately crippled choices we're all given, walled gardens with active management are the only somewhat sane options.

Self hosting remains untenable for most things because of the legacy of Unix and MS-DOS and the ambient authority model of computing.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#199

Post by esseph »

aborsy wrote: post #192

Self hosting is much more accessible today. The security issue has not been solved yet though. How do you make available your services to other people? People won’t install VPNs. They are usually okay with authenticating to a web server, so you can put authentication with something like Authentik in front of your reverse proxy. But can you configure this front end security correctly and patch it, and are you sure it…

front it with a cloudflare tunnel

waits for the pitchforks and torches

Re: Why Self-Host?

#200

Post by esseph »

turtlebits wrote: post #158
hamdingers wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of backup solution are you expecting? Every selfhosted app runs in docker, where the backup solution is back up the folders you mounted and the docker-compose.yml. To restore, put the folders back and run docker compose up again. I don't need every app to implement its own thing, that would be a waste of developer time.

That doesn't work for databases unless you stop the container. You'll likely end up with a corrupt backup.

Streaming replication to a read-only DB off-site.

Shut that one down and back it up from time to time.

Then copy that to a third site with rsync/etc

Post reply on HN