For example, something that is too complex for your comfort level, a security concern, or maybe your hardware can’t keep up with the service’s needs?
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Backups. Cloud services like Backblaze B2 are so cheap for the durability they offer, it just doesn’t make sense for me to roll my own offsite solution with a Raspberry Pi at my parents’ house or something. Restic encrypts everything before it leaves my machine.
Password manager- it’s too important and it’s the thing that has to work for me to recover when I break something else. I’m happy to support Bitwarden with a few bucks a year.
Email- again, it’s mission critical and I have a habit of tinkering with things and breaking them. And it’s just no fun. The less I need to think about email, the happier I am.
That’s what “1” in the “3-2-1” backup strategy stands for, a true offsite backup (preferably continent where you do not reside) For “2” I would still deploy a local offsite at someone’s house for quick disaster recovery.
Downloading your 10TB data from B2 (or even requesting a tarball HDD from them) is costlier than recovering from an offsite backup facility within an hour’s reach.
Re backups, to be clear it sounds like you’re specific referring to offsite backups.
I run my own local backup server using syncthing for replication and restic for snapshotting, but I also send offsites to cloud storage (in my case gdrive).
I self-host all those things.
I just have two portable drives, and I bring one home from work at a time to run an rsync backup job.
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Because the assumption is there’s very little throughput. Storage isn’t really that expensive, but bandwidth is and Backblaze is only cheap if you aren’t trying to get at your data regularly. That’s fine for backups because hopefully you never need them.
EDIT: I should say that for an individual user, getting data out of Backblaze isn’t that expensive, but it’s more expensive than cold storage. I think they charge $.01 per GB transfered, so a 10GB movie would cost you about ten cents to stream. It would cost you $100 to recover a 10TB backup from Backblaze (though for a fee than can mail you some of that on a hard drive, I think).
Anything that the family uses. Because when I cease to exist, my wife isn’t gonna take over self-hosting! So e-mail, chat, documents etc.
I told my wife when I die, she’s just going to have to throw it all away and start over.
We have separate email accounts and she knows how to get into my Keepass, so she should be able to get into whatever she needs to. I now have a daughter who is becoming interested in how these things work, so I’m hoping to slowly start training/handing off to her.
I gave my wife a laminated card with explicit instructions on how to access my keepass DB and encrypted backups. The rest can die when I do.
You know, I never thought about that
I hadn’t either until a few years ago. It’s something worth considering.
Dealing with the digital afterlife of a hacker - The Daily Dot
The main challenge was Michael’s tech footprint: His Gmail, Twitter, personal domains, rented servers, hosting business, home servers, and a huge collection of Apple tech.
“It was tough for Beth because she got home and she had a brand new phone and couldn’t even get on the Wi-Fi,” Kalat said. “Michael had done everything. Beth is very smart—she’s a scientist—but Michael had handled everything. A friend had to come over to reset the Wi-Fi password.”
Bitwarden has an option called emergency contact.
The emergency contact can request access to see all the saved passwords. If I don’t deny the request then the request is automatically approved after X days.
I feel like this would cover most of the issues in the article.
Tor exit node, public Lemmy instance.
Yes these. Essentially anything that an unidentified user could push data to that would land me in regulatory trouble. I would want to host these things, but I don’t want to become a distributor of anything that would get me a search warrant.
Lemmy instance for me as well. I have a specific community I miss from reddit that I want to replicate, I even have a domain sitting around that’d be good…I just don’t want to store data coming from complete strangers. I also have zero interest in any sort of admin/moderating. So I’ll just go without it and get over it lol
Weirdly for extremely similar reasons
Email. Way too complicated and lots of maintenance. Not to mention it you mess it up, there are huge downsides.
I find it funny that a bunch of the simple basics are nowadays considered complicated. I’ve been doing my own mail and DNS for over two decades now, and don’t see a reason for stopping. It is pretty low maintenance, and generally less headache than having someone else do it.
Standing up email might not be that hard… but it’s much harder to ensure that your mail will actually be delivered successfully. Plus it’s not a service you can typically afford to go down. Any emails you miss during that downtime are gone forever, whereas even if my Vaultwarden credential vault goes down I can access passwords from a device that has things cached at least while I fix things.
Plus the big providers just treat small mail servers with a lot more skepticism than they did 20 years ago.
Plus it’s not a service you can typically afford to go down. Any emails you miss during that downtime are gone forever
The sending server will retry a few times, so you have at least a few days to bring it back. And if you prefer an additional fail-safe - adding a secondary MX somewhere else which will just store mails until the primary comes back is trivial.
Nothing really. I’m comfortable hosting mail, chat, my passwords and important documents. However:
Hosting personal/important data for other people is a bit intimidating because you kind of guarantee for safety and availability.
And services that are likely to be misused for illegal stuff and would be too bothersome. Otherwise i might host an anonymous spam eating email-forwarder, maybe a tor exit-node and a forum where adults can practise free speech. But that kind of stuff just attracts the wrong kind of idiots.
Mail server, but mostly because deliverability in this day and age is a nightmare. If you’re some one off running your own mail server in 2023 be prepared to deal with many headaches around IP reputation.
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Been having a wonderful experience with mailcow on a small vps…
Mail, Bitwarden and Joplin. Too important stuff for my Raspberry Pi setup.
Second. I used to self-host Bitwarden. Then I realized it’d be too devistating to lose all my passwords, even with backups. So I moved to their cloud service and paid for my families accounts too.
Joplin tho, Joplin stays on the server with no backup. I should really, really make a backup this weekend.
I am hosting bitwarden myself (on a VPS) and I am not that concered about losing my passwords, because every device syncs all passwords locally regulary so that you don’t need internet to access them.
So to loose all your passwords not only do you have to loose your bitwarden server and all the backups, you also have to loose access to all your bitwarden clients synchroniously.
Because passwords are so critical I’d never give that to a third party.
Stuff like bitwarden is needlessly complicated, though - I nowadays have a vaultwarden instance for friends and family, but everything important is done via pass - which only needs a git server, which I have anyway.
I really want to use Bitwarden and I pay for the premium as well, but it’s starting to bother me that a lot of basic stuff is missing despite years of user requests.
- An Auto-fill UI for the web interface
- Credit card auto-fill
- A way to refresh from the auto-fill menu on the Android UI
I just tried Proton Pass (I have unlimited anyway) and it’s not better, but at least they seem to be working on these.
It has all of those though?
Okay, credit card autofill is there at least on the browser, my bad. But the other two, no. What I mean by auto-fill UI is an overlay like we see in LastPass, Proton, etc.
If you add an item on your desktop, make sure it’s synced and try to use the Android app to auto-fill it, it won’t be there yet. And if you use the basic auto-fill view (“Items for x”), there’s no way to refresh. The main app (not the “Items for” view) does have a refresh option though, so i end up closing everything, going back and refreshing from there.
Also, I like the way Aliases work in Proton. I’m still using both and really like both, and for now, both have its pros and cons.
all the features you listed are available though?
I have replied above: https://lemmy.world/comment/1988541
Hosting an email server is pretty sure a magnet for half the Chinese IP range… So I would refrain from hosting that myself.
I did host my email, but the problem wasn’t the spam but the bigger email providers. Best case was my mail was marked as spam. Worst case was that I was blocked until I jumped through hoops. Email hosting is unfortunately broken.
what’s that? a federated service isn’t immune from a corporate take over? colour me shocked.
I figured email would be a common theme. I’m just starting to dip my toes into all of this, so an email server is not on my to-do list (and may never be).
Google and other large scale providers have intentionally made it very difficult to self host your own email. It’s generally not considered a wise move these days and is very difficult to maintain.
Why do you say so? I’m not an expert in the fields, but isn’t a mail server pretty much the same as 20 years ago plus DKIM and SPF?
With DKIM and SPF, I’ve had zero problems in the last 15 years of selfhosting, most recently with Mailcow Docker on a residential IP. I don’t even have a reverse PTR to my mailserver hostname, just a PTR provided by the ISP that can be resolved.
I’ve added a few fresh, un-reputed domains to the server and had no issues.
I think many people’s problems with running email servers are self-inflicted. I remember even before there were things like blacklists, etc with large providers, many people had problems keeping mailservers running. It’s just not an easy task for a variety of reasons completely unassociated with the mega’s blacklisting you. I’ve been running mailservers at various scales for 20+ years so maybe it’s just second nature to me now.
Problem is, that most larger providers sort your mails to spam if the domain is not well known to them, which is not easy to achieve
Mmm…are you sure about that? I happen to buy some random domain and I’ve never had any problem sending email even right after the domain created.
There’s been a lot of write ups on this, such as this one: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.
But there are even people that still self host email server (have a look in the selfhosted subreddit for example). IP reputation is a thing, for sure, but I don’t feel that it’s been brought up by the big corp wickedly, it’s a good way to prevent spam to arrive to the server. There are thousands of email providers in the world that are not Google, Amazon, Microsoft or some other big corp. This means that is possible. Is it difficult? For me for sure!!! But I think that the rising difficulty has been a result of this fields over the years. Just my 2 cents.
Gladly, fail2ban exists. :) Note that it’s not just smtp anyway. Anything on port 22 (ssh) or 80/443 (http/https) get constantly tested as well. I’ve actually set up fail2ban rules to ban anyone who is querying
/on my webserver, it catches of lot of those pests.CrowdSec has completely replaced fail2ban for me. It’s a bit harder to setup but it’s way more flexible with bans/statistics/etc. Also uses less ram.
It’s also fun to watch the ban counter go up for things that I would never think about configuring on fail2ban, such as nginx CVEs.
Edit: fixed url. Oops!
Thanks for mentioning it, I didn’t know about it. Protecting against CVEs sounds indeed awesome. I took a more brutal approach to fix the constant pentesting : I ban everyone who triggers a 404. :D Of course, this only work because it’s a private server, only meant to be accessed by me and people with deep links. I’ve whitelisted IPs commonly used by my relatives, and I’ve made a log parser that warns me when those IPs trigger a 404, which let me know if there are legit ones, and is also a great way to find problems in my applications. But of course, this wouldn’t fly on a public server. :)
Note for others reading this, the correct link is CrowdSec
Password manager like Bitwarden. I’d rather they take care of it for me. The consequences would be too great if I messed it up.
I still don’t get why people want to have cloud-based password managers. Keepass works in all major platforms, it’s just one file, which it is super easy to sync and/or merge. It can integrate with your browser/Os if you want, but otherwise the surface attack is basically zero.
Oh man, that’s actually really good advice! I recently switched to Vaultwarden, but you’re right: If my server goes down, I can’t even restart it, because the password for my account is in there! Damn! Close call!
Usually the password are also stored locally.
I can definitely access all my passwords offline with bitwarden
Well with bitwarden/vaultwarden you can have a copy of your entire vault on your phone or computer or both… so even if your server was totally dead, you’d have access to your passwords. Solid backups is a must, I follow the 3-2-1 rule on super critical systems (like vaultwarden) and test that you can actually recover. Something as simple as spinning up a VPS, testing a restore, testing access, see if that could work in a pinch until you get your server back online, then tear it down. Linode is very cheap for this kind of testing, it’d only cost you a few pennies to run a “dr” test of your critical systems. Of course you still want to secure it, I’d recommend wireguard or tailscale instead of opening access to your DR node to the internet, but as a temporary test it’s probably fine if your running patched up to date versions of docker, vaultwarden, and I’d always recommend putting a reverse proxy in front like nginx.
Smart move, unless you really know what you’re doing and have redundancy. When I first made the switch from Lastpass to Bitwarden I had tried to host the vault myself instead of using the cloud version, which worked fine right up until the moment I had a server outage and lost access to all my passwords.
I’ve managed to keep my KeePass database for almost 20 years going back as far as when I was a dumb teenager. Back then it was as simple as having a couple extra copies on usb drives and Google Drive, but now I keep proper backups.
My take is, I’d rather control it myself, I am responsible enough to take care of my data, and I actually wouldn’t trust someone else to do it. That’s a huge reason I selfhost in the first place, a lack of trust in others’ services. Also, online services are a bigger target because of the number of customers, and maybe even the importance of some of their customers, whereas I’m not a target at all. No one is going to go after me specifically.
Eh, the clients all cache your vault. It shouldn’t be a huge issue for it to be down even for a few days.
But I do upload encrypted backups of the server every 6 hours to cloud storage
I feel like I’m having a change of heart on NextCloud… Every time some little thing breaks I have to figure out how to fix it
Really? Nextcloud has been pretty set-and-forget for me.
Okay, but do you run it in containers or on bare metal?
Bare metal (using the NixOS module, so the manual stuff like database upgrades after an update and such is automated). Only containers that go on my servers are Pterodactyl because it requires it ;)
It largely is, but yesterday the Recognize app broke and I have no idea how to fix it. I think the environment got messed up from an apt-get upgrade? Its little things like that I have to figure out how to fix
Nextcloud AIO has officially hit the 1 year mark for me without any issues. The truck has been to use it as a real Dropbox replacement not a Google Drive with word and all these other integrations. I had it break 3 times due to weird updates because of that the prior year. Using it to mirror/backup files is pretty nice.
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Ouch, that’s awful. Yeah tbh I wouldn’t quite trust it to do encryption well. I haven’t had any actual problems with Nextcloud but it does feel like it’s held together by duck tape.
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I think someone else already mentioned it, but just to reiterate… Anything for other people who aren’t my wife and future kids.
Password manager, file backups, photo backup, whatever.
If something happens to me, or I pass away, wifey has instructions on shutting everything down (probably should write instructions on how to save all the important stuff).
But I don’t want to deal with other peoples stuff. I like tinkering with my server and different docker containers, etc. So I don’t want someone complaining they can’t access their photos because I wanted to try something new. Also, just don’t wanna be responsible for storing their photos and important documents.
- My own search engine (a meta search engine like searx-ng would be fine though)
- a tor exit node, because don’t want to deal with the legal hassle (i run snowflake on multiple machines though)
- a SMTP relay (recieving email is easy. Sending email is a pain in the ass)
Sending email is super easy as well. Making sure everyone can receive it is such a pain though.
A public Matrix server. Its just a never ending black-hole of ever increasing storage requirements and the software is too buggy to not become a maintenance hassle.
I do run a Synapse server for bridging purposes, so I am not just talking in theory.
XMPP is safer and lighter anyway
And so damn easy to self-host in general. Ejabberd is batteries included down to offering stun/turn for audio/video calls, Erlang is just unrivaled when it comes to hot reloading so updates are effectively zero-downtime (unsurprising considering all the business critical environments it’s deployed).
At first (and especially because I went with Matrix originally) I wouldn’t think of self hosting all my instant messaging, but in retrospect, ejabberd is one of the easiest services I’ve got to maintain. I highly recommend everyone to give it a shot, especially to all the matrix refugees to whom it was a surprise/disappointment.
In the early days it was cloud and mail, since Mailcow works really good, it’s just the cloud. Because nextcloud is too much hassle, all this php stuff… I have a managed nextcloud at hetzner and I am really happy this is something I haven’t to worry about.
I check ocis from time to time, if it is usable the same way, I would selfhost my cloud again. NC on selfhost? Only if they do the same steps ocis already made. Because ocis is a simple single binary without php.
