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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • It is easier to think of the SSL termination in legs.

    1. Client to Cloudflare; if you’re behind orange cloud, you get this for free, don’t turn orange cloud off unless you want to have direct exposure.
    2. Cloudflare to your sever; use their origin cert, this is easiest and secure. You can even get one made specific so your subdomains, or wildcard of your subdomain. Unless you have specific compliance needs, you shouldn’t need to turn this off, and you don’t need to roll your own cert.
    3. Your reverse proxy to your apps; honestly, it’s already on your machine, you can do self signed cert if it really bothers you, but at the end of the day, probably not worth the hassle.

    If, however, you want to directly expose your service without orange cloud (running a game server on the same subdomain for example), then you’d disable the orange cloud and do Let’s Encrypt or deploy your own certificate on your reverse proxy.



  • In the old days, it used to be a problem because everyone just connect their windows 98 desktop with all their services directly exposed to the internet because they’re using dial up internet without the concept of a gateway that prevents internet from accessing internal resources. Now days, you’re most likely behind your ISP router that doesn’t forward ports by default, and you’re only exposing the things you’d actually want to expose.

    For things you’d actually want to expose, having a service on the default port is fine, and reduces the chances of other systems interacting with it failing because they’d expect it on the default port. Moving them to a different port is just security through obscurity, and honestly doesn’t add too much value. You can port scan the entire public IPv4 space fairly quickly fairly cheaply. In fact, it is most likely that it’s already been mapped:

    https://www.shodan.io/host/<your-ip-here>

    Keeping the service up-to-date regularly and applying best practices around it would be much more important and beneficial. For SSH, make sure you’re using key based authentication, and have password based authentication disabled; add fail2ban to automatically ban those trying to brute force. For Minecraft, online mode and white listed only unless you’re running a public one for everyone.


  • I’m not saying you’re wrong — I’ve even upvoted your earlier comments because I’m generally in agreement; you’re an instance admin judging by your handle, go and check the vote history yourself lol.

    I’m saying people shouldn’t force their janky unproven solo solution on to someone else who doesn’t have their level of distrust, and would just rather trust the multibillion multinational corporation, when all they want is something that’s been working fine for them for all they care.


  • There’s always the add more of everything so something could fail without impacting the stability aspect, and that’s great for a corporation needing the redundancy; but it’s probably prudent to not forget there’s also the “I’m interested in learning” aspect, where people running a home server to play with software side of things.

    You’re spot on in that we’d need to know what it is that OP would like to do with the system, but I’m getting the feeling that stability isn’t that high of a concern just yet.


  • Until the basement floods and the server goes offline for a few days; or botched upgrade that’s failing quietly; over zealous spam assassin configuration; etc etc

    It sounded like they were trying to archive things from Gmail to their own server, so just cut the middleman jank out, and let the wife continue to use her Gmail as intended.







  • I’m aware this is the selfhost community, but for a company of 20 engineers, it is probably best to use something commercial in the cloud.

    Biggest pain point was for our ops guy, who constantly had to stay behind to perform upgrades and maintenance, as they couldn’t do it during business hours when the engineers are working. With a team of at least 20, scheduling downtimes could get increasingly more difficult.

    It also adds an entire system to be audited by the auditors.

    The selfhost vs buy commercial kind of bounces back and forth. For smaller teams, less than 5 to 10 engineers, it might be a fun endeavour; but from that point on, until you get to mega corp scale with dedicated ops department maintaining your entire infrastructure, it is probably more effective to just pay for a solution from a major vendor in the cloud instead.






  • I think it would be a good idea to take a step back and ask what is it that you’re trying to achieve.

    Userbase, the service linked, is a backend as a service platform that offers you authentication and basic database that you can access via their api. You’d then code your own front end web app to interact with their service and store data there. You pay only per storage used by their storage tiers, which are frankly fairly fair priced. If that is something you’d need, that’s a good idea, but you’d be coding the front end yourself.

    If you’re only looking for authentication with OAuth, and then coding your own API backend, then something like Authentik would be a nice self hosted authentication provider. Others that commonly gets mentioned but I’ve got limited/no experience with worlds new keycloak, or fusionauth. Managed services here would be your Auth0, Okta, etc.

    If you’ve got a specific use case in mind, then it may be a good idea to say what service you’re thinking about, and the community may be able to suggest prebuilt solutions that good better and require less lift.


  • It’s not even that.

    By and large, most industry standard softwares are only available on Windows and macOS. Take word processing for example. It doesn’t matter if there are open source alternatives that gets it 95% of the way there. Companies by and large would not want to run the risk of that last 5% (1%, 0.01% doesn’t matter) creating a situation where there’s misunderstanding with another business entity. Companies will by and large continue to purchase and expect their employees to use these standard softwares. People will by and large continue to train themselves to use these softwares so they have employable skills so they can put food on the table.

    No one cares about how easy or hard it is to install something. IT (or local brick and mortar computer retailer) takes care of all that. Whether or not it is compatible with consistently making money / putting food on the table is way more important.

    Until we have Microsoft Office for Linux; Adobe Creative Suite for Linux; Autodeks AutoCAD for Linux; etc etc. not even the janky “Microsoft Office for Mac” little cousin implementation but proper actual first party for Linux releases, it is unlikely we’ll see competitive level of Linux desktop adoption.


  • Strictly speaking, they’re leveraging free users to increase the number of domains they have under their DNS service. This gives them a larger end-user reach, as it in turn makes ISPs hit their DNS servers more frequently. The increased usage better positions them to lead peering agreement discussions with ISPs. More peering agreements leads to overall cheaper bandwidth for their CDN and faster responses, which they can use as a selling point for their enterprise clients. The benefits are pretty universal, so is actually a good thing for everyone all around… that is unless you’re trying to become a competitor and get your own peering agreement setup, as it’d be quite a bit harder for you to acquire customers at the same scale/pace.