Logcheck. It took ages to make sure innocent logs are ignored, but now I get an email as soon as anything non-routine happens on my servers. I get emails with logs from every update, every time I log in, etc. This has given me the most confidence that nothing unexpected is happening on my servers. Of course, one needs to make sure that the firewall is configured well, and that you use ssh keys etc., but logcheck is how I know I'm doing enough.

I wish :( The city centers are very walkable and there's plenty of safe bicycle infrastructure, but cars are still very clearly the dominant mode of transport. Every weekend there's queues to the parking garages in every part of the city.

Plasma is amazing. It has been my DE of choice for years now. So happy I'm donating to the project.

It does not seem like you heard the arguments presented in the article. It isn't about being offended by any left or right wing politics, but because women engineers and scientists were uncomfortable about it for a variety of reasons. In a field which struggles to attract and keep female talent, this is a pretty big thing. The model herself spoke out and asked to be "retired from tech".

Most open source vpn protocols, afaik, do not obfuscate what they are, because they're not designed to work in the presence of a hostile operator. They only encrypt the user data. That is, they will carry information in their header that they are such and such vpn protocol, but the data payload will be encrypted.

You can open up wireshark and see for yourself. Wireshark can very easily recognize and even filter wireguard packets regardless of port number. I've used it to debug my firewall setups.

In the past when I needed a VPN in such a situation, I had to resort to a paid option where the VPN provider had their own protocol which did try to obfuscate the nature of the protocol.

I recommend fastmail.com though they do have done shortcomings that you need to consider such as the fact that they're based in Australia (five eyes country) and have servers in the USA. Their advantage is a slick interface, fantastic app based on JMAP, and just generally being super convenient. They allow catch all addresses, masked emails, custom domain etc. I find them super convenient.

What about https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web?

Many open source projects are not developed by unpaid volunteers. The Linux kernel, for example, is primarily developed by professionals on paid time. I'm not convinced the Linux kernel development would continue without business contribution. I'm not convinced all open source projects could just continue without any payment.

My configuration and deployment is managed entirely via an Ansible playbook repository. In case of absolute disaster, I just have to redeploy the playbook. I do run all my stuff on top of mirrored drives so a single failure isn't disastrous if I replace the drive quickly enough.

For when that's not enough, the data itself is backed up hourly (via ZFS snapshots) to a spare pair of drives and nightly to S3 buckets in the cloud (via restic). Everything automated with systemd timers and some scripts. The configuration for these backups is part of the playbooks of course. I test the backups every 6 months by trying to reproduce all the services in a test VM. This has identified issues with my restoration procedure (mostly due to potential UID mismatches).

And yes, I have once been forced to reinstall from scratch and I managed to do that rather quickly through a combination of playbooks and well tested backups.

If it was just storage/RAM scraping then that could be solved with SSL pass-through though. That way the reverse proxy would not decrypt the traffic and would forward the encrypted traffic further to the home server. I was actually setting that up a few hours ago. However, since the VPS provider owns the IP address of the VPS, they can simply obtain their own certificate for the domain. After all, Let's Encrypt verifies your ownership of the domain by your ability to control the DNS entries. Therefore, even if the certificates weren't on the VPS, the fact that I am redirecting traffic via their IP address makes me vulnerable to a malicious provider.

The "hobby exercise" was just to indicate that this is not for work and that I'm interested in an answer beyond "you need to trust your provider" which I do :) I agree, these are important questions! And they're also interesting!

I already posted that I recommend fastmail elsewhere in this thread, but you raised so many good points that it reminded me of some extra points :)

Fastmail offers granular, per-app passwords – I have a single password which has read-only access to IMAP in order to back up all the data on a timer. This feature is missing from many (many) other email providers - using the 80/20 rule, if they even offer it it’s a single password with full access (Mailfence, for example)

Since this community is about selfhosting I think it's worth pointing out that this is AMAZING for selfhosting. I have all me selfhosted services sending e-mail via fastmail's SMTP. With per-app passwords I don't need to store my normal e-mail password and the apps can be limited to SMTP only (so no read access). And in case of compromise you can revoke permissions on a per-app granularity.

Fastmail offers full CardDAV (contacts) and CalDAV (calendar) access, which makes plugging it into any other app that supports this very easy - their DNS wizard helps you set up the service records. I use “DavX5” on my Android to sync all Contacts and Calendar outside of using the Fastmail app (which is a self contained app on Android, it’s not too bad)

Fastmail has become my contacts app now - it's really great to have all your e-mail and contacts in the same place. The contacts don't even need to have an e-mail address - I have a lot of contacts stored for whom I only have a phone number. I sync to android using the same DavX5 app and then immediately have these contacts in whatsapp and signal.

Wireguard easily supports dual stack configuration on a single interface, but the VPN server must also have IPv6 enabled. I use AirVPN and I get both IPv6 and IPv4 with a single wireguard tunnel. In addition to the ::/0 route you also need a static IPv6 address for the wireguard interface. This address must be provided to you by ProtonVPN.

If that's not possible, the only solution is to entirely disable IPv6.

I expose my services to the web via my own VPS proxy :) I simply run only very few of them, use 2FA when supported, keep them up to date, run each service as rootless podman, and have a very verbose logcheck set up in case the container environment gets compromised, and allow only ports 80 and 443, and, very importantly, truly sensitive data (documents and such) is encrypted at rest so that even if my services are compromised that data remains secure.

For ssh, I have set up a separate raspberry pi as a wireguard server into my home network. Therefore, for any ssh management I first connect via this wireguard connection.

Apparently yes! Based on another comment in this thread: https://certificate.transparency.dev/monitors/.

Very interesting project! However, I can't help shake the feeling that whilst you pitch it as a platform for sharing DRM-free games, it will get used for sharing games against the licenses and wishes of publishers. I don't really care about the publishers, but do you not think there is a great risk that once your app gets enough attention, it will draw their ire and force you to shut down? Perhaps not directly, but e.g., removing you from the windows store etc.

Well, that's just not true. WSL indeed is not Linux, but it does have several of the advantages of Linux.

It is not good if you want a home desktop solution, because that's not what it's there for. However, if you need to use Windows for something, e.g., at work to have full outlook MS office compatibility (access through the web is not great) but need Linux for dev work then WSL is great.

In short, I'd say WSL is there if you want to do dev work on Linux, but everything else on Windows.

As others have said, with an incremental filesystem level mechanism, the backup process won't be too taxing for the CPU. I have ZFS set up which makes this easy and I make hourly snapshots using sanoid which also get sent to another mirrored pair of connected drives using syncoid. Then, once a day, I upload encrypted daily snapshots to a bucket in the cloud using restic. Sounds complicated, but actually sanoid/syncoid and restic do all the heavy lifting. All I did is automate their schedules using systemd timers and some scripts to backup the right directories.

A few simple rules make it quite simple for me:

• Firstly, I do not run anything critical myself. I cannot guarantee that I will have time to resolve issues as they come up. Therefore, I tolerate a moderate risk of a borked update.
• All servers run the same be OS. Therefore, I don't have to resolve different issues for different machines. There is then the risk that one update will take them all out, but see my first point.
• That OS is stable, in my case Debian so updates are rare and generally safe to apply without much thought.
• Run as little as possible on bare metal and avoid third party repos or downloading individual binaries unless absolutely necessary. Complex services should run in containers and update by updating the container image.
• Run unattended-upgrades on all of them. I deploy the configuration via Ansible. Since they all run the same OS, I only need to figure out the right configuration once and then it's just a matter of using Ansible to deploy it everywhere. I do blacklist kernel updates on my main server, because it has ZFS through DKMS on it so it's too risky to blindly apply.
• Have postfix set up so that unattended-upgrades can email me when a reboot is required. I reboot only when I know I'll have some time to fix anything that breaks. For the blacklisted packages I will get an email that they've been held back so I know that I need to update manually.

This has been working great for me for the past several months.

For containers, I rely on Podman auto update and systemd. Actually my own script that imitates its behavior because I had issues with Podman pulling images which were not new, but which nevertheless triggered restarts of the containers. However, I lock the major version number manually and check and update major versions manually. Major version updates stung me too much in the past when I'd update them after a long break.

I subscribed. I use navidrome since it has a slick UI and supports the subsonic API. Having both in one is great.

You can limit which CA’s will offer certificates for your domain with the CAA record in DNS.

Yea, I already have that.

You can also at least detect if someone else creates a certificate for your domain if you watch the certificate transparency logs.

Did not know this before today, but now I have it switched on!