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mspencer712

@ mspencer712 @programming.dev

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Comments
159
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • What skills are needed to self host without too many headaches?

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  • I feel like objecting to the “General advice about email is don’t” thing but I don’t know if I understand the objections well enough to refute them. I self host email for mspencer.net (meaning all requests including DNS are served from hardware in my living space) and I have literally zero spam and can’t remember the last time I had to intervene on my mail server.

    On one hand: My emails are received without issue by major providers (outlook, gmail, etc) and I get nearly zero spam. (Two spam senders were using legitimate email services, I reported them, and got human-seeming replies from administrators saying they would take care of it.) And I get amusing pflogsumm (summarizes postfix logs) emails daily showing like 5 emails delivered, 45 rejected, with all of the things that were tried but didn’t work.

    On the other: most of the spam prevention comes from greylist, making all new senders retry after a few minutes (because generally a legit MTA will retry while a spammer will not) and that delays most emails by a few minutes. And it was a bear to set up. I used a like 18 step walkthrough on linuxbabe dot com I think, but added some difficulty by storing some use and alias databases on OpenLDAP / slapd instead of in flat files.

    But hey, unlimited mail aliases, and I’m thinking of configuring things so emails bounce if they seem to contain just a notification that terms and conditions are updated somewhere. I don’t know, cause some chaos I guess.

    And I have no idea if my situation is persuasive for anyone because I don’t know what the general advice means. And I worry it’ll have the unfortunate side effect of making self hosting type nerds like me start forgetting how to run their own email, causing control of email to become more centralized. And I strongly dislike that.

  • A tautology is a tautology.

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  • I’m surprised I’m the first comment saying this, but all I see is a user who needs help expressing their needs but who is not getting that help. Sure they don’t have our experience with decomposing problems and anticipating technical issues, but that’s normal and expected.

  • Anyone else here self-hosting on absolutely shit hardware?

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  • Yep, mspencer dot net (what little of it is currently up, I suck at ops stuff) is 2012-vintage hardware, four boxes totaling 704 GB RAM, 8x10TB SAS disks, and a still-unused LTO-3 tape drive. I’ll upgrade further when I finally figure out how to make proper use of what I already have. Until then it’s all a fancy heated cat tree, more or less.

  • The Secret of Happiness

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  • I don’t think they meant to bite at anyone. I feel compassion for anyone who has been beaten down by our system and doesn’t have any fight left. I still have a little, and I take that statement as encouragement to keep fighting. Despair and depression are brutal and I’ll keep fighting for both of us.

  • Often not even worth explaining...

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  • Agreed, one of those “technically correct but deliberately missing the point” statements. Not sure why you’re so heavily downvoted so I want to explain why I support your statement.

    The original statement doesn’t suggest they fail to understand words are constructed for sharing meaning, it asserts that the statements don’t communicate anything useful because the speaker made them up.

    The statement is wrong, it needs a response, but “all words are made up” is not a useful response. It’s technically correct but fails to meet the speaker halfway by understanding their position and building towards it. See also: “all lives matter.” Technically correct but not useful, and deliberately avoids trying to understand the speaker’s position.

  • Water

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  • I couldn’t find the clip, but first thing that came to mind was the StarTalk Live with Buzz Aldrin and John Hodgman.

    Hodgman: “maybe they’ll find H 2 2 2 2 O!”

    Edit: crap, I have to call myself out. I failed to read completely, thought the screenshotted poster accidentally changed one part of the comparison, instead of deliberately changing both parts. If the original was molecules in a cubic inch of water vs stars in the observable universe, I read this post as atoms in a molecule vs stars in the observable universe.

    Apologies, I discovered I was a fool and was excited to share my discovery.

  • "We guard against unnecessary care"

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  • Dear God do I hate how true that is. Not sure if intentional or not, but either way I’m with you. And I think they’re working to a plan.

    I had a call center job while finishing college, but I’m currently a professional software developer. The difference in coverage is crazy. Dental crowns went from 25% to 75% coverage. My annual maximum out of pocket for healthcare is so low I keep hitting it by accident and wondering why things are suddenly free.

    Why? I think it’s a deliberate plan to make life pretty good for like 51% of us, so we won’t vote against the way they absolutely wreck the other 49% of us.

    I hope it stops working soon.

  • when did you stop using dial up internet?

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  • Same. Went from radiks.net dial-up to US-West business DSL. Registered my domain at the same time, mspencer.net

  • What Linux software is good for managing a household budget?

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  • I don’t know what people call this, but I’m curious if you also need future balance prediction, basically “here’s how much left over you’re going to have this payday, next payday, etc”. I might switch from my homegrown spreadsheet to one of these recommendations if they also support that.

    (I’m talking about something where you input your known scheduled debits and credits, especially for people with biweekly paychecks but monthly debits, and then you match recent actual activity with what’s expected. So you get “current balance is $1800 but it’ll get as low as $300 before you get paid next” type info to keep you from over spending.)

  • Child safety org launches AI model trained on real child sex abuse images

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  • I think image generators in general work by iteratively changing random noise and checking it with a classifier, until the resulting image has a stronger and stronger finding of “cat” or “best quality” or “realistic”.

    If this classifier provides fine grained descriptive attributes, that’s a nightmare. If it just detects yes or no, that’s probably fine.

  • Is there a way to guarantee a mobile device or tablet can only access my own services and block all other traffic?

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  • I have an iPhone and a gl.inet gl-e750 portable cell router, and my SIM card stays in the router. I don’t actually restrict my phone the way you’re talking about, but this gives me vpn to my home network without needing the vpn running on each client device. And if I wanted to block connections to big tech company services, I could do that.

  • shopping issue

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  • Payment card transactions can be disputed or reversed. Cryptocurrency transactions cannot be easily reversed. Reversal is an important capability because sometimes customers or merchants lie, or they can have problems fulfilling their obligations.

    When the buyer and seller are in the same country, or are in countries with legal and criminal justice systems which cooperate, transaction risk is lower so fees can be lower.

  • Self-hosting a mail server with zero-access encryption for all emails, similar to Protonmail

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  • Not really, it’s been pretty effortless. Every couple months I have to make sure my renewed LetsEncrypt certs really got imported, but I don’t think I’ve had to intervene manually for anything in a long time.

  • Self-hosting a mail server with zero-access encryption for all emails, similar to Protonmail

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  • I do, and I agree about their utility. My users and aliases are in OpenLDAP but it’s pretty easy to add new ones.

    Separate accounts are preferable if you’re actually going to be responding to messages. I’ve had some embarrassing encounters where I’ve given an alias to a business that I didn’t realize was going to actually use it for real email conversations with a human. By default roundcube web mail lets you hit reply anyway and the reply goes out with your real address, which can lead to confusion.

  • Self-hosting a mail server with zero-access encryption for all emails, similar to Protonmail

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  • I host my own for mspencer dot net, used this 15-ish step walkthrough from linuxbabe dot com. Only maybe three instances of spam in two years, gmail and outlook receive my messages just fine, etc. (Successful spammers were using legitimate services, and those services took action when notified. Greylist delays emails by a few minutes but it’s extremely effective against most spammers because they never come back to retry messages after a few minutes, while legitimate senders will.) I don’t know if I would accept blanket advice against self hosting.

    Fundamentally if your mail server can see the addressee, it can see the content. SMTPS encrypts both in the same channel. So at the point where you accept messages and store them in a mailbox, the messages have to be readable.

    Encrypting them at rest isn’t something I currently do, but if you’re going to later serve those messages to an email client that expects to receive clear text, your server needs both the keys and the messages. They can be stored in different places.

    Most of your needs could be met with full disk encryption on the box hosting Dovecot. If you’re worried about being compelled to decrypt, there’s always the deck of cards trick: The pass phrase for full disk encryption consists of a memorized portion plus the letters and numbers of the top N cards in this deck of cards you keep by the server. If someone were to shuffle that deck of cards, and the server were powered down, the encrypted volume would be impossible to recover.

    I’m eager to learn what other Dovecot tricks people can recommend to improve security.

  • Reddit is profitable for the first time ever, with nearly 100 million daily users

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  • Deceased users’ estates still haven’t agreed to the new terms, have they?

  • Advice needed for networking/architecting

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  • Are you going to be hosting things for public use? Does it feel like you’re trying to figure out how to emulate what a big company does when hosting services? If so, I’ve been struggling with the same thing. I was recently pointed at NIST 800-207 describing a Zero Trust Architecture. It’s around 50 pages and from August 2020.

    Stuff like that, your security architecture, helps describe how you set everything up and what practices you make yourself follow.

  • People still working in IT, thoughts on IPv6?

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  • Mostly I’m scared I’ll write a firewall rule incorrectly and suddenly expose a bunch of internal infrastructure I thought wasn’t exposed.

  • can I opt out of credit agencies?

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  • In a general sense, you are discussing a way to control other people and organizations, and to make them stop talking about you. (Communicating and storing your information) This isn’t always possible or practical.

    If you pay a merchant with your payment card, that merchant is allowed to know your payment card number. If you call a toll free number, the recipient of your call is allowed to know your phone number.

    If they decide to share what they learn about you, and they do so legally, there’s not a whole lot you can do to stop them. I’m not saying this to antagonize or hurt you. I invite you to think differently about what you can control and what is worth worrying about.