https://microcumul.us

Just chilling

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  • 40 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Personally I would strongly recommend learning how to do all of this. And then abandoning it for tailscale or something similar once you know what they’re doing behind the scenes. It’s incredibly useful knowledge but it’s also nice to have so much of the process automated and best practices like key rotation done for you. Plus unless your network is hugely crazy or enterprise, you can manage for the really great price of $0.

    And if you really really want to self host (which I understand) there’s headscale for a lot of the features.


  • Right, but if I can’t redirect (ISP just drops packets afaict) and you don’t explicitly type https:// or use an https link, and I don’t have something like HSTS preload configured for that domain, your browser will just hang if it’s on my system. You can’t just type “lemmy.stuart.fun” and have it work unless you happen to hit my hairpin, i.e. be on my network.

    Mostly I try to keep things I want publicly available on .dev and it just works thanks to the full .dev HSTS preload. But it’s still annoying.







  • I think the biggest reasons for me have been growth and professional development. I started my home cluster 8 years ago as a single node of basically just running the hack/ scripts on my Linux desktop. I’ve been able to grow that same cluster to 6 hosts as I’ve replaced desktops and as I got a bit into the used enterprise server scene. I’ve replaced multiple routers and moved behind cloudflare, added a private CA a few times, added solid persistence with rook+ceph, and built my ideal telemetry stack, added velero backups into Backblaze b2, and probably a lot more I’m not thinking of.

    That whole time, I’ve had to do almost zero maintenance or upgrades on the side projects I’ve built over the years, or on the self hosted services I’ve run. If you ignore the day or so a year I’ve spent cursing my propensity to upgrade a tad too early and hit snags, though I’ve just about always been able to resolve them pretty quickly and have learned even more from those times.

    And on top of that, I get to take a lot of that expertise to work where it happens to pay quite well. And I’ve spent some time working towards building the knowledge into a side gig. Maybe someday that’ll pay the bills too.





  • Yep, this is a root of trust problem. Your choice will ultimately come down to how much you want to invest and how much inconvenience you’ll put up with, measured against how secure you want it to be.

    Personally, I go for full disk encryption and then just store things on the filesystem in secure (to the OS) ways. File permissions and users and groups, etc. Most other things boil down to that though something like vault adds a layer of access control in that you can seal it off in the case of a breach (if you care) and can get granular with authz permissions in a centralized place, only managing authn in your distributed tools.

    There’s probably some ideal system out there like vault but with a plugin that can ping your phone for quick verifications that would likely be ultra ideal, but I haven’t seen that. Personally I’d love something like that.



  • The reason being that federation means other instances send you things. It’s not pull-only, or else you could likely get away with private instances sitting behind NAT. But since activitypub involves publishing to inboxes from source to destination, they need some way to reach you. And since we want to validate that connection and that some external authority can vouch for ita ownership, we use TLS Certs with the DNS hostname that matches your server name.