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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.




  • Completely agree with you on the news vs science aspect. At the same time, it is worth considering that not all science researches are evergreen… I know this all too well; as a UX researcher in the late 2000s / early 2010s studying mobile UX/UI, most of the stuff our lab has done was basically irrelevant the year after they were published. Yet, the lab preserved and continues to conduct studies and add incremental knowledge to the field. At the pace generative AI/LLMs are progressing, studies against commercially available models in 2023 is largely irrelevant in the space we are in, and while updated studies are still important, I feel older articles doesn’t shine an appropriate light on the subject in this context.

    A lot of words to say that despite the linked article being a scientific research, since the article is dropped here without context nor any leading discussion, it leans more towards the news spectrum, and gives off the impression that OP just want to leverage the headline to strike emotion and reinforce peoples’ believes on outdated information.



  • 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.