This.

My units and integration tests are for the things I thought of, and more importantly, don’t want to accidentally break in the future. I will be monumentally stupid a year from now and try to destroy something because I forgot it existed.

Testers get in there and play, be creative, be evil, and they discuss what they find. Is this a problem? Do we want to get out in front of it before the customer finds it? They aren’t the red team, they aren’t the enemy. We sharpen each other. And we need each other.

Love this, 100% accurate. QA people are amazing, protect us from ourselves in so many ways we didn’t even think of.

I hope they explain further. Honestly I don’t think the “oh crap I need to know if it’s good or bad right now!” camp is really going to care, but it still feels a little uncomfortable. (As opposed to the “this could be either way, I don’t have enough evidence to decide right now, and I’m ok with holding that uncertainty in my brain until new evidence moves my needle” camp)

Are forked builds possible with third party service references neutered?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Remove these blank lines.

I’m not seeing unit tests for this.

Unnecessary comment.

BLAM

Ow! Also, this could’ve been a smaller calibur.

Thank you for your reply, but to be clear, I’m not looking for individual details to be spelled out in comments. What you said is absolutely correct, thoughtful, and very helpful. But emotions are running a little high and I’m worried I’ll accidentally lash out at someone for helping. Apologies in advance.

But do you have any links? Beyond just the general subjects of security architecture, secure design, threat modeling, and attack surface identification, I’d love to see this hypothetical “generic VM and web application housing provider in a box” come with a reasonably secure default architecture. Not what you’re running, but how you’re running it.

Like, imagine decades in the future, internet historians uncover documentation and backups from a successful generic hosting company. They don’t necessarily care what their customers are hosting, their job is to make sure a breach in one customer’s stuff doesn’t impact any other customer. The documentation describes what policies and practices they used for networking, storage, compute, etc. They paid some expensive employees to come up with this and maintain it, it was their competitive advantage, so they guarded it jealously.

I’d want to see that, but (a) a public, community project and (b) now, while it’s still useful and relevant to emulate it in one’s own homelab.

If I can get some of that sweet, sweet dopamine from others liking the idea and wishing for my success, maybe I can build my own first version of it, publish my flawed version, and it can get feedback.

I’ve been struggling to wrap my head around a good security architecture for my mspencer.net replacement crap. Could I bug you for links?

I figured out a while ago to keep VM host management on a management VLAN, and I put each service VM on its own VLAN with heavy, service-specific firewalling and a private OS update repo mirror - but after hearing about ESXi jackpotting vulns and Broadcom shenanigans, I’ve gotten really disheartened. I’d love some safe defaults.

I think this needs to exist, but as a community supported system, not as a commercial product.

Pick a set of open technologies - but not the best, lightest weight, just pick something open.

Come up with a security architecture that’s reasonably safe and only adds a moderate amount of extra annoyance, and build out a really generic “self-hosted web hosting and VM company-like thingy” system people can rally around.

Biggest threat to this, I think, is that this isn’t the 90s and early 2000s any longer, and for a big project like this, most of the oxygen has been sucked out already by free commercial offerings like Facebook. The technical family friend offering to self-host email or forums or chat no longer gets gratitude and love, they get “why not Facebook?”

So… small group effort, resistant to bad actors joining the project to kill it, producing a good design with reasonably safe security architecture, that people can install step by step, and have fun using while they build and learn it.

Married, we both work from home, and we’re in an apartment.

First, all of my weird stuff is not between her work and living room pcs and the internet. Cable modem connects to normal consumer router (openwrt) with four lan ports. Two of those are directly connected to her machines (requiring a 150-ish foot cable for one), and two connect to my stuff. All of my stuff can be down and she still has internet.

Second, no rack mount servers with loud fans, mid tower cases only. Through command line tools I’ve found some of these are in fact capable of a lot of fan noise, but this never happens in normal operation so she’s fine with it.

Separately I’d say, have a plan for what she will need if something happens to you. Precious memories, backups, your utility and service accounts, etc. should remain accessible to her if you’re gone and everything is powered off - but not accessible to a burglar. Ideally label and structure things so a future internet installer can ignore your stuff and set her up with normal consumer internet after your business internet account is shut off.

Also keep in mind if you both switch over so every movie and show you watch only ever comes from Plex (which we both like), in an extended power outage situation all of your media will be inaccessible. It might be good to save a few emergency-entertainment shows to storage you can browse from your phone, usb or iXpand drive you can plug directly into your phone for example.

Plagiarism should be part of the conversation here. Credit and context both matter.

How much stock ownership remains with the nonprofit Raspberry Pi Foundation? And will that be enough to hold off shareholder complaints that they aren’t being evil enough?

Agreed. Use your experience to shape the direction your teammates are moving in. Be an architect, and let them handle your light work.

Ugh, this makes me want to “slash slash slash.”

Clearly my comment annoyed you. What should I have done differently? Apart from switching away from Windows, what plan or idea should I have attempted to rally support for?

Ok that tears it. What firewall rules do I need to set so I get security updates and absolutely nothing else?