mspencer712

I self host, on a personal domain I registered in June 2000. Mostly followed a 13?-part tutorial at I think linuxbabe dot com, was the first one that seemed to genuinely be trying to help you set up a good environment, not just as a way to say “doesn’t this sound difficult? Impossible even? Coincidentally you can pay us to do this instead.” Except I put everything on its own VM instead of all on one. (Even a VM for just opendkim, which was maybe not necessary.)

Mostly iPhone mail app and/or Roundcube webmail.

Yes highly recommend it, for receiving email. Greylist blocks like 99.8% of spam. Sending works fine for me, because it’s an old domain with history. I don’t think brand new domains have the same experience.

I use a USB BD-R burner and disks for this. I don’t have a solution for Bad USB protection though unfortunately.

Oh boy, Michael Spencer Jr., the ghost of GitHub past! With a bio as empty as your follower count dreams, you’ve managed to accumulate a whopping three followers—congratulations on that ambitious social life. Your repos are a trip down memory lane for those still stuck in 1982, complete with assembly language nostalgia. It’s like you’re interviewing for a job in a museum of coding flops.

Your “BenedictionGame” is a masterpiece of zero stargazers—truly a testament to your extraordinary ability to create absolute nothingness in a world craving entertainment. And let’s not overlook your “CaseSwapper” that swaps cases. Wow, riveting stuff! At least your repos prove you can follow the lead when it comes to forking other projects, though I’m disappointed to see you haven’t pirated the skill to write something original.

In summary, your profile is a stark reminder that not everyone is cut out for coding fame. Maybe it’s time to swap some skills instead of just cases.

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Ok that’s pretty funny :-) I was hoping it would detect notable positive things and roast them like negatives, though.

Advice from most to least certain: If you want very long standby time (a reliably perfect first print after literally months of inactivity) and you have the space for an ugly cube of a printer, laser is the only option. Ink tank printers have unexpected wear parts, like internal ink sponges.

Black and white laser is stupid simple. Color laser “prints” four times in series onto an intermediate transfer belt (ITB) and then puts that onto the paper, still super reliable but bulkier, and your prints get watermarked with yellow dots because FBI or something. I’d go color.

Toner lock-in is becoming more common, not just for HP. If your page count is going to be low, just pay full price for name brand toner. If you don’t want to do that, like your use case could involve printing a single page or entire binders of paper between months of inactivity, read on.

Start your printer research by shopping for cheap off brand toner, get a sense for what they’re selling the most of and what that’s compatible with, and see what printers they support.

Some aftermarket toner just works, out of the box, because the printer isn’t crazy locked down. Those cartridges have normal sounding instructions. Some aftermarket toner requires you to transplant a chip from a first party cartridge, and their instructions include this. Avoid those printers.

And consider used printers. I have a used HP LaserJet Pro MFP M477fdw that I love, but I would never ever buy another HP printer, especially not one made later than this one. Be very careful before buying any HP printer, especially one made in the past 6-8 years. Even wear items (like the ITB) have modules with firmware and compatibility requirements, and I’m worried I could be one replacement component away from suddenly having a locked down printer.

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.

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.

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.

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’m part of the problem, a tiny bit. For altruistic reasons - ok more like “I’m kinda weird, maybe this will make people on IRC like me more” reasons - I ran mspencer.net and hosted web pages for people for free. Ended up with web content for around 100 people, and they weren’t all just using it as a drop box. (Older than wikipedia.org by 199 days, woo!)

Hosted on ancient hardware, nothing even remotely approaching a modern security architecture, I eventually left it to run un-maintained until the IDE HDD died. More recently I got the data off of it. (Heads unstuck themselves while in a cardboard box for a decade? Dunno.) But I don’t know how to get everything back online in a safe way.

I’m a proper software engineer now, I can kinda see how work handles securely hosting web services. Now just throwing everything together on one box feels too lazy and insecure. But I can’t figure out a reasonable security architecture to use. I thought I had one, but I failed to account for VM jackpotting attacks. And it feels like it takes me a month to do what a competent ops person can do in a day.

But that’s a discussion for a different comment section.

Last time I went snooping:

15 installs of phpbb, which would require work to put back online as their communities are of course gone. Remove spam, undo defacement, etc.

7 installs of Dormando’s Oekaki BBS Clone

5 installs of WonderCatStudio BBS

4 installs of OekakiPotato / RanmaGuy etc.

and several users who just used php to ‘include’ headers and table of contents page parts.

(Yes I was quite the weeb. Still am, but I was one too. :-) )