I do excactly this too. My personal domain has been around since 2008 and my setup has a few domains from friends too. I’m running ispconfig to manage the whole mess and it’s really not that difficult. Getting your server removed from blocklists every now and then is annoying but at least my emails aren’t feeding some marketing machine and, at least for the last 24 hours, my service availability is better than Microsoft can do.

Stalwart and other similar projects might be decent to use, but they lack one detail which is a deal-breaker for me: maildir format for storage. It’s really easy to move between installations and even between different servers, easy and efficient to back up, doesn’t require any fancy databases or anything to be in order and it just works. Sure, it might need few megabytes more memory and search times might be couple milliseconds longer but it just works. My personal maildir has been around from at least 2008 and it’s moved around between servers multiple times without any hiccups ever.

Is this a problem or does it not matter

It’s not a problem, but it does matter. With plain HTTP traffic everything you send and receive from a given site is unencrypted, so anyone in the chain delivering your package can read what you’re doing, collect your passwords and do all kinds of shenanigans. If it’s just your local network which is secured from the public internet then it’s pretty much just you who can intercept that traffic and it’s generally fine, as you already have all the passwords and such. And if you connect to the services via VPN that takes care of ‘secured from public interenet’ -part of the equation.

HTTPS is the same traffic, but encrypted with certificates. To achieve that you’ll need to have a server certificate and then browsers can use the public part of certificate to encrypt your traffic. With docker that’s commonly achieved either with docker-proxy or external proxy like nginx. Your computer already has a bunch of certificate authorities which it trusts and they are bundled in your operating system and/or browser. Without a trusted certificate your browser throws a warning about it, but if you proceed with ‘untrusted’ certificate the traffic will still be just as strongly encrypted as it would be with a ‘known’ certificate. The catch is that anyone can create their own certificates, so there’s no guarantee if the server actually is what it claims to be. For example I could sign my own certificate for gmail.com and offer that to users and steal their passwords. That would of course be trivial to figure out as the browser wouldn’t show the “good” lock symbol on address bar, but the certificate would be technically speaking a working certificate.

Now, to get a certificate for your own services you need to either build your own certificate authority and add that to trusted list of your devices or obtain a certificate from a already known authority like letsencrypt. With letsencrypt (and other similar services) you need to provide a proof that you own a domain which you’re obtaining the certificate for, so with those you can’t get a certificate for gmail.com or any other random domain name. Letsencrypt uses ‘certbot’ tool to validate certs, other services ask for spesific DNS entry or something else for proof that the domain is actually yours. But the main part is that all the ‘commonly known’ certificate authorities work only on publicly available services and domains (a bit simplified explanation, but that’s roughly it).

But once you have the certificate you’ll need to configure something on your network to use it. Actual best practice and configuration depends on the service you’re running. If your services run only on your local network and they are never allowed to public internet you’re likely fine to run everything without HTTPS encryption, but it’s still good to understand the differences and effects between unencrypted and encrypted traffic.

Um what are these things and who should care? That info would help a post like this.

Absolutely. For anyone else wondering: they are some kind of monitoring tools for your servers. No idea how good/useful they are, I’ve never head any of those before.

One might argue that USA isn’t what it is right now because of Trump. Trump is president because USA is what it is right now.

Of course not everyone living in there, just like not everyone living in Russia is a bloodthirsty murderer for their tzar. But USA as a global entity is really just that bat shit crazy right now. It might get better some day, but as the circus has been on full blast for years now it doesn’t seem too promising in the near future.

Well, they already slowed down Ukraines drones and communication with Musk, stalled information exchange about upcoming attacks and such and are actively giving money to Russia and breaking international agreements about oil export restrictions. And also they are (again) discussing about ending the war without Ukraine on the table.

They might not sell weapons to Russia (yet), but USA is absolutely supporting Russia on the war.

Not really. They are intentionally leaving Ukraine out, they didn’t forget.

I don’t know about long term, but it’s running on my pile of virtual servers and does it’s job just fine. The openmediavault itself is a pretty good web-interface on top of Debian and it’s just configuring the underlying operating system so you can get exactly the same setup by writing configurations manually for the services. OMV is just a convenient tool to manage simple fileshares.

I use it only for samba and wireguard, so can’t really say if it’s as solid with other extensions, but for me it’s been a decent tool for the job.

Resigning from schengen contract would also mean that swiss people couldn’t travel freely across the Europe. That would be way bigger problem than the potential handful of Russian tourists around there as it’s not that uncommon to go across country borders on your grocery shopping. I very much doubt that Swizerland would shoot itself on both feet, no matter how strong ties someone around there might have to Russia.

They are easily the dumbest superpower.

I wouldn’t say ‘easily’. Competition is pretty tough in these days.

Just for comparison, my VPS server has ~20 active email boxes (postfix,dovecot,spamassassin,clamav), a few small-ish active wordpress sites (apahce,php-fpm,mariadb), radicale and some other smaller services running with 2 cores and 4GB RAM and it’s mostly just fine. Occasionally, specially during heavier updates on wordpress-sites, memory tends to get pretty full, but it’s still just fine. Tweaking memory cache for php (or running something else than php) would increase performance by a lot, but even without optimization the 5€/month VPS is quite capable to keep your internet presence around and on your own hands.

Nothing wrong with good old ssh. My VMs are different enough that building and maintaining ansible playbooks or something similar would be a bigger task than actually doing it in the traditional way. Maybe I could benefit by building simple playbooks to populate user accounts, ssh keys, smtp relay settings and other common things, but I don’t really set up new servers that often that it would justify spending time to set up tools for that.

Here’s Finnish guide for this

It’s not specifically for war, but for any disruption the society might have. We’ve had winter storms which cut power for few days, wildfires or floods can leave you stranded for a while, a lot of snow might cut roads and so on. Being generally prepared to be self-sufficient for few days just makes sense. On a bigger scale it also helps rescue workers if everyone isn’t in immediate crisis after 24 hours without working infrastructure.

My ISP offers unauthenticated SMTP for their customer addresses. It’s pretty heavily rate limited, but well enough for the occasional status email my system throws out. At least around here they are pretty common for residential customers, so that might be an option.

Other possibility is to set up SMTP relay to your network and give it credentials to an actual email account (with SMTP support, which isn’t granted these days). It can take in emails from your network without credentials and throw them to the internet with your account. It’s pretty simple to set up, search for postfix + smarthost. Added bonus is that you can read the replies to that address too via your email provider services.

OrgAbuseHandle: ABUSE9107-ARIN

OrgAbuseName: ABUSE

OrgAbusePhone: +1-313-516-8908

OrgAbuseEmail: abuse@hostodo.com

OrgAbuseRef: https://rdap.arin.net/registry/entity/ABUSE9107-ARIN

They have options. No idea if they actually do anything for the reports, but it’s worth a shot.

I’m running Dahua cameras. They can pull new firmware straight over the internet, but they don’t rely on any cloud services. All kinds of flavours available and they do run on POE.

You should rotate the supply on your daily life. Get canned foods, eat them, replenish supply, rinse and repeat. That way the shelf life isn’t really any concern. Also it’s only for 3 days and for emergencies. If you have water and biscuits it’s enough to survive long enough that rescuers and volunteers have time to set up pre-planned places where people can gather with generators, gas/wood stoves and such so you’ll have more permanent shelter to stay in until the bigger problem is resolved.

Sure, it’s not glorius and you might miss a french omelette for breakfast couple of times, but if you have even something it’s way better than having nothing and being in immediate crisis if something happens.

Here in Finland we have a strong recommendation from the government that everyone should have enough supplies to last 72 hours. There’s guides available on what to have, how to do it and what to take into consideration. It’s far easier for everyone if something big happens (storm, flood, war, problems with electricity/water grid…) to the rescue workers if the whole population isn’t in an emergency after few hours. I think that’s becoming more and more important globally as the climate changes and global environment gets more and more unstable.

Another recommendation for storagebox from here. Cheapest option I’ve found and they are pretty reliable. I use proxmox backup server to sync my VMs there (encrypted of course).

There’s plenty more reasons than filesystem corruption to use clean shutdown and even just plain UPS without any status information to the host. I haven’t seen a full drive corruption due to power loss ever. Various levels of corruption, yes, but not ‘all the data is gone’ scenario due to filesystem being broken. But I have seen multiple hard drives which have died on host shutdown without any warning (no smart errors or such), after power loss they just refused to start again.

Just today we had multiple short (~30 second) power outages and without UPS that would’ve put considerable strain on my hardware. Gladly those are pretty rare and those were well short enough that my UPS kept the system running, without one that would’ve meant that my hypervisor would’ve crashed and that would’ve resulted on several unclean reboots for the VMs.

Also, back to filesystems, with selfhosting, some kind of hypervisor is often in the picture, so the drive activity is generally much higher than with single workstation and corruption on a single file or some part of filesystem is way more likely. Total data loss is pretty unlikely, but a corrupted VM image can be a pretty big deal, regardless if it’s filesystem or single file which is the main issue.

there’s no standardized mechanism for forcing applications to save

On Linux (and I guess BSD and other *nix variants) there is. SIGTERM is exactly for that situation. Sure, programs can choose to ignore it, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen at least any FOSS software which wouldn’t respect that. Of course the program might crash and cause loss of data, but the mechanism is there.

You’re of course generally correct about modern filesystems being more resilient to power loss, but they’re not immune to problems and also you’ve omitted a large chunk of other reasons why people like to have UPS on their system, with or without monitoring them.

For me personally the hardware is least interesting part of running a homelab. I’d happily run everything on VPS if there was no constraints on money or bandwidth (among other things). But as the limitations are there running things on my hardware is a necessary evil and for that an UPS or two are practically must to have to prolong life span of hardware and prevent data losses. Of course that’s just one box to check on the stack, but when planning for a home server setup for anything I’d say it’s a pretty vital part for the whole setup.