I’ve experienced gatekeeping issues long before I got into self-hosting specifically. Years ago I wanted to learn C++ for Arduino and I was constantly talked down for asking questions.

“Why don’t you just do …” in response to a question feels very rude as a newcomer because it feels like I am being talked down to for not knowing what others already know. Even when I made an effort to show I was making an effort to learn on my own, I was still belittled.

I’m all for hearing different ways of approaching my issue but from the replies, it often feels like other people insist there is only one true specific way to handle an issue.

When I first got into self-hosting, people kept pushing Cloudflare on me. When I expressed concern over a large centralized corporation having that much control and how they might have service issues, I was mocked really hard. Half a year later and there was a significant outage and suddenly there’s all this talk about how centralized the internet is and how that is bad.

After that I took it upon myself to find alternative ways to protect myself without Cloudflare’s services but every step of the way has been an isolating experience. Every step of the way has been full of people saying that my efforts are pointless and that the bots will win anyways so I shouldn’t bother.

I decided to try to secure myself through multiple layers of obscurity and every question in that direction has been full of people saying that obscurity is not security, the bots will find you anyways!

I’ve stopped myself from asking too many questions now. I still keep learning in my direction. I feel like I’ve managed to find multiple solutions that both obscure and protect myself. I’ve constantly check my logs for months now and the bot is less than I expected in places I expect them to be and completely zero in other places I thought there would be some activity.

I want to share what I have learned and my experiences but I know I will receive backlash for deviating from the norm.

I’ve spent a lot of my self-hosting efforts trying to find ways to protect myself with minimal use of third party services, documenting as much as I could only feel afraid to share what I have learned.

This comment may not be about learning self-hosting as a beginner specifically but the vibe has been pretty damn consistent throughout me learning C++, self-hosting, linux and shell scripting. All things I enjoy but all so full of people ready to talk down to someone who wants to learn.

If someone likes me and wants to spend their time and money on me, that would not be an issue at all. They are doing that because they want to do those things for me.

I would feel guilty if they continually spent all that effort on me and I never gave anything in return. I would feel guilty because I am taking advantage of their generosity. I always make an effort to give back and it doesn’t always involve money.

I like to give back in simple ways. Like cleaning up for them. Listening to them. Treating them like they are an individual with the power to do things and make decisions for themselves. Doing things with them that they enjoy. Being there with them in the moment.

Love isn’t a money transaction. It’s something that has existed long before money became a thing that people created. It would continue to exist even if money disappeared all together tomorrow. It’s a feeling that varies greatly between each person and can’t always be described or defined.

I would like you to notice that I made no mention of women specifically in my comment because the other people that choose to spend time with you or myself shouldn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if they are male, female, or anything inbetween or out between that definition. They are simply people just like us.

Treat people like people and they will show you love and appreciation in their own way, be it buying you a meal or simply being there in the moment with you.

I have three backups. One is my laptop where all the backups initially start. Then that gets copied to a plugin USB SSD. Then another copy goes to my server which has another USB SSD. That means I don’t have an off site backup.

I don’t have a place to host an off site backup and I’m not comfortable or interested in using cloud services. Instead I just decided that if it all goes up in flames. So be it.

It’s just data and backups are just nice a convenience. I’ll be upset but there’s more important things in life to worry about.

I’ve always lived a life of minimalism and to me stuff is stuff. None of it mattered before I was born and none of it will matter after I die. That happiest and most free feeling I ever experienced was when I spent years travelling with only a 34 litre backpack and that’s kind of been my baseline for happiness ever since.

I’ve had so many people in the past abuse my trust and acceptance. They basically loved the way I treated them as individuals that are able to do things their own way but deeply hated me for being me. I don’t conform to their perspective of me and so they spent great amounts of time and energy trying to change me.

I’m really fortunate to have met people in the last 4-5 years who love and accept me just as I am. So now I have a stronger sense of what I want in a friend.

There are a few things I look for in a friend. Over a period of time, I want to see how they talk about and treat other people. How they talk about and treat themselves. I want to see if they have the ability to self reflect and make choices and changes in a way that betters themselves. I want to see if they treat me the same way they treat other people. I want to see how accepting they are about people are situations that are very different from their lived experiences. I also want to see how they treat animals and the environment around them.

Since no two people are the same, I have no strongly defined criteria. Instead I observe and try to view their words and actions as a whole. There’s a lot of ways to judge who is healthy for me and who is only interested in themselves.

I may only have a few friends now but I have a deep love for the friends that I have because they keep proving to me how caring and amazing they are to me.

apk seems to have some tricks in there that aren’t as well known.

I managed to catch in the IRC channel that apk add doc will automatically download any related man pages for packages with any future downloads through apk. That made life a bit more convenient instead of downloading all those packages separately.

My web facing server has just enough packages installed to (kinda securely) host a Caddy and Kiwix docker container to work with my domain name and make a comfortable work environment through SSH. My Pi for my HomeAssistant docker container has less because it’s locked down to just my local network.

I also wrote my own install scripts so reinstalling everything and getting it back to a running state would take about 15 minutes for each device.

And I also wrote my own backup/restore scripts that evolved over 3/4 of a year. I use them often so I have confidence in those scripts.

I personally don’t really care too much. I have multiple ways of dealing with issues for something that’s a hobby to me. Which is why I stick to simplicity.

I’m sure this is a thing for people to worry about when dealing with more complex setups. I just wanna vibe out in my tiny corner of the internet.

On Alpine Linux I update my two Pi servers at 2 in the morning daily. It’s simpler compared to Debian which needs unattended-updates. Just add apk update && apk upgrade to a cron job and you’re good to go.

I only have three docker services which is simple enough to update manually.

I like to keep things as simple as possible for my already chaotic brain.

I’ve read about that and I already have that in my notes as well.

It doesn’t really affect my needs because my ISP blocks incoming on those ports anyways. Also I’m choosing not to use a tunnel at the moment so I’ll be using a higher port anyways.

The last time I asked about it, a few people seemed to agree it was something to do with the firewall settings. That seems most likely since I was able to connect when I disabled my firewall. I’m not a fan of working with iptables. The language for that type of networking is gibberish to me.

I had also tried going from docker compose to rootful podman compose and ran into the same issue. Although I’m trying to work away from podman compose in the future, just taking it in steps.

Yeah, I mainly just want to move away to more open projects. When I first started, everyone kept suggesting using Cloudflare. After half a year using their service, I just felt icky the entire time.

In the past couple months I was able to move away and chose to protect myself by learning how to harden my server as well as hiding my server behind multiple layers of obscurity.

With my current setup, the only site traffic I get has only been myself and my custom ssh port only gets hit by bots about 3-10 times a week according to my logs. Only time will tell how effective my layers of obscurity will hold up but so far it seems to satisfy my needs better than I was expecting.

Once I get podman in a state I like, I’ll pretty much be all open sourced and all I’ll have to do for myself is be in maintenance mode unless I care to add a new service. I like to keep things simple so I don’t normally go crazy adding new services anyways.

Thank you for the offer. I still need a bit more more time to experiment and zero in on the issue again. Fortunately my setup is quite simple and the only bottleneck will be Caddy.

I basically run Caddy which redirects to a static generated blog, simple file server page and a Kiwix instance. I’m mostly making a self hosted reference site of materials for Linux and Scripting resources.

One day I may add a Forgeo instance but currently my entire workflow exists around rsync. I’m happy just having my single file scripts hosted as text files and don’t really need the power of git. At least not at the moment.

I’ve been making another attempt to replace Docker with Podman. The issue is I can’t connect to my server through a web browser. I think it’s a firewall issue.

Networking and networking troubleshooting is a bit confusing for me and that’s the least favourite part about self hosting for me. Turns out I actually enjoy writing scripts more and the challenge of writing POSIX scripts especially.

If I can figure it out, I’ll probably write a guide for setting up Podman and Caddy on Alpine Linux since there isn’t a lot of recent information out there from what I found in my searches so far.

I had what appeared to be two Orb Weavers living in my garden. One amongst the beans growing up my deck railing (https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/54351215) and another that lived in my tomato plant leaves (https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/53053891) in my other garden.

I accidentally damaged the web in the tomato plants and after that I made every effort to not damage it any further. It made for some interesting acrobatics trying to pick tomatoes from behind the web.

Both spiders got crazy fat because I made an effort to plant lots of pollinator attracting plants as well as letting local “weeds” grow with my crops. Both spiders were well fed.

I was very happy to have both spiders plus an additional, very fat and fluffy bunny living in my gardens this year.

Nice to see more spider friends out and about :)

I use rsync for many of the reasons covered in the video. It’s widely available and has a long history. To me that feels important because it’s had time to become stable and reliable. Using Linux is a hobby for me so my needs are quite low. It’s nice to have a tool that just works.

I use it for all my backups and moving my backups to off network locations as well as file/folder transfers on my own network.

I even made my own tool (https://codeberg.org/taters/rTransfer) to simplify all my rsync commands into readable files because rsync commands can get quite long and overwhelming. It’s especially useful chaining multiple rsync commands together to run under a single command.

I’ve tried other backup and syncing programs and I’ve had bad experiences with all of them. Other backup programs have failed to restore my system. Syncing programs constantly stop working and I got tired of always troubleshooting. Rsync when set up properly has given me a lot less headaches.

Yeah, a few weeks ago a achieved my state of “secure” for my server. I just happened to notice a dramatic decrease in activity and that’s what prompted this question that’s been sitting in the back of my mind for weeks now.

I do think it’s important to talk about it though because there seems to be a lack of talk about security in general for self hosting. So many guides focus on getting services up and running as fast as possible but don’t give security much thought.

I just so happened to have gained an interest for the security aspect of self hosting over hosting actual services. My risks for self hosting is extremely low so I’ve reached a point of diminishing returns on security but the mind is still curious and wants to know more.

I might write up a guide/walkthrough of my setup in the future but that’s low priority. I have some other not self hosting related things I want to focus on first.

I think I am already doing that. My Kiwix docker container port is set to 127.0.0.1:8080:8080 and my reverse proxy is only open to port 12345 but will redirect kiwi.example. com:12345 to port 8080 on the local machine.

I’ve learned that docker likes to manipulate iptables without any notice to other programs like UFW. I have to be specific in making sure docker containers only announce themselves to the local machine only.

I’ve also used this guide to harden Caddy and adjusted that to my needs. I took the advice from another user and use wildcard domain certs instead of issuing certs for each sub domain, that way only the wildcard domain is visible when I search it up at https://crt.sh/ . That way I’m not advertising my sub domains that I am using.

I started with a local scan first, something like nmap 192 168.40.xxx for a specific device or nmap 192.168.40.0/24 for everything in your current network.

Nmap is quite complex with lots of options but there’s a lot of guides online to help out with the basics. You can press enter in your terminal while the scan is running and it should give a progress report.

My ISP blocks incoming data to common ports unless you get a business account. That’s why I used Cloudflare’s tunnel service initially. I changed my plans with the domain name I currently own and I don’t feel comfortable giving more power and data to an American Tech company so this is my alternative path.

I use Caddy as my reverse proxy so I only have one uncommon port open. My plans changed from many people accessing my site to just me and very few select friends of mine which does not need a business account.

I get that.

I was generally (in my head) speaking about all my devices. If someone stole my computer, the full disk encryption is more of a deterrence than the idea of my data being fully secured. My hope is that the third party is more likely to delete than to access. If I catch the attention of someone that actually wants my data, I have bigger issues to worry about than security of my electronic devices.

I agree with the last point, I only mentioned that because I don’t really know what other setting in my SSHD config is hiding my SSH port from nmap scans. That just happened to be the last change I remember doing before running an nmap scan again and finding my SSH port no longer showed up.

Accessing SSH still works as expected with my keys and for my use case, I don’t believe I need an additional passphrase. Self hosting is just a hobby for me and I am very intentional with what I place on my web facing server.

I want to be secure enough but I’m also very willing to unplug and walk away if I happen to catch unwanted attention.

Thanks for the insight. It’s useful to know what tools are out there and what they can do. I was only aware of nmap before which I use to make sure the only ports open are the ports I want open.

My web facing device only serves static sites and a file server with non identifiable data I feel indifferent about being on the internet. No databases or stress if it gets targeted or goes down.

Even then, I still like to know how things work. Technology today is built on so many layers of abstraction, it all feels like an infinite rabbit hole now. It’s hard to look at any piece of technology as secure these days.