I was hacked years ago. I was hosting a test instance of a phpbb for a local club. Work blocked SSH, so I opened up telnet. They either got in from telnet or a php flaw and installed password sniffers and replaced some tools (ps, top) with tools that would hide the sniffer service they installed.

After that, I changed my model. My time lab is for learning and having fun. I’m going to make mistakes and leave something exposed or vulnerable and hackers are going to get in. Under this new model, I need to be able to restore the system easily after a breach. I have a local backup and a remote backup and I have build scripts (ansible) so that I can restore the system if I need to. I’ve had to do this twice. Once from my own mistake and one from hardware failure.

Same. I have spent way more time troubleshooting a pipeline than it saves. I like the idea of automation but laziness prevails.

For my own curiosity, how do you perform a build? Is it all done in pipelines, kicked off on change? Do you execute the whole infra build each time you release an update?

As others have said, a traditional off site backup will work. How do you plan to perform a restore, though? If you need the self hosted source repo, it won’t be available until the infrastructure is stood to creating another circular dependency.

I’m still in the early stages of exploring this, too. My solution is to run a local filesystem git clone of the “main” repo and execute it with a Taskfile that builds a docker image from which it can execute the ansible infrastructure build. It is somewhat manual but I have performed a full rebuild a few times after some Big Mistakes.

After breaking “prod” many times, I have a Dev (local machine), Test (small VM) and Prod (big VM). My test is just less RAM and space and I need to spin down certain K8s things to spin up others, but it’s a close mirror of Prod, just less.

Check out the overlay filesystem. I’m using it for one pi and have had the same SD card for years. I don’t know if it’ll work for pinole, but may get you thinking in a new direction.

Thanks for the feedback. I plan to do some reading on NFSv4 domain mapping this weekend.

Can you elaborate on your last sentence? Is the US more or less trustworthy than alternatives?

I’d be mostly ok with it because of noise canceling headphones, but when the neighbors rev it up and down and up and down, the headphones can’t keep up. When the other neighbor’s lawn service comes, they use it on high speed for 7.5 minutes, then go away and I barely hear it.

I think this is exactly what I’m looking to do. Thanks for such a detailed writeup!

I did some reading last night and think it lines up with what you’re saying. I found docker-mailserver with some configuration. The only thing I need to add is mail filtering to folders and I think that’s included.

I’d like to hide behind the service that I’m paying for without incurring extra fees for retaining it all. I can figure out the pull side by using fetchmail or something to a server that hosts dovecot, but the sending side is confusing since I’d need something that can receive my email and send it via the service. It’s only 1 email address, so I’m not looking for a mail relay, but something like a full caching mail proxy.

I started watching the video. I was not aware that LetsEncrypt supported wildcard certificates. Does this mean that your internal network uses the same domain name as your externally-hosted services?

I tried step-ca to start with, but my primary use case was for certs in the cluster, which cert-manager is more suited for natively. Maybe step-ca has improved, I was using it in the early days. My goal isn’t a short lived cert as much as it is to have an easy configuration and to learn.

I think it may support it, but it’s not well documented. I’ll need to read up a bit. I started with helm charts but like how operators, um operate. They upgrade on their own and are very stable. Honestly, though, it was mostly because I wanted to learn how they work.

I think this is what I’m going to do.

Yes, monthly is too fast. I’m using a K8s operator for cert-manager which defaults to a month. I think I can patch the CSV with an annotation that will bump that out, but when the operator updates the CSV then I need to repatch it.

I was polling the community to see if there’s something that is easy to use but I was not able to find in my searches. It seems like a common problem.

Part of my problem is that I chose to use a K8s operator for cert-manager which isn’t easy to configure. Had I used a helm chart, i’d have bumped the root cert to 10 years and forgotten about it.

OK, easy solution: don’t open outlook.

Most of the time that I’m in the office, my laptop is closed anyways, you know, for collaboration.

I wouldn’t doubt that. I just wanted to pretend for a moment that the thing they’re taking from us would result in the one thing that they seem to fear the most.

With all the employees back in the office, they’ll have plenty of time to hang around the water cooler and discuss all the ways to unionize. Leaving the company is great as an individual, it sends a message. Unionizing helps to restore the balance of power vs rights and is exactly what Amazon doesn’t want. This (IMHO) is how you “F them hard”. Additionally, it’d send a message to the other companies who want to flex on the people who make the company work.

Indent to find an article to back up what I remember and in 2020, a woman was held in contempt of court and jailed for refusing to provide a passcode. The case was later overturned.