A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
Thanks for sharing, very cool stuff in there and great job ! Bookmarked !
While reading through your reverse proxy concept post, I think this statement is wrong:
As a sub-domain:
- Cons: require additional certificates for HTTPS/SSL for each sub-domain
There are actually wildcard SAN certificates where you can access all your subdomains with a single certificate:
https://*.mydomain.com
Or you can add all your subdomains in a single certificate.
Great work and thanks for sharing !
You are right and I would add that this is even a privacy and security measure, to make use of wildcard certificates. The reason is, those subdomains will be public because of websites like crt.sh which show all subdomains which have their dedicated certificate. Obfuscation can be helpful in not disclosing which are some services or naming schemes you use for yourself even if it is only meant to be for internal use.
Obfuscation can be helpful in not disclosing which are some services or naming schemes
The "obfuscation" benefits of wildcard certificates are very limited (public DNS records can still easily be found with tools such as sublist3r), and they're definitely a security liability (get the private key of the cert stolen from a single server -> TLS potentially compromised on all your servers using the wildcard cert)
Yes, you are right, I have updated the information.
using wildcards is really bad security practice. and at age of ACME absolutely unnecessary.
That's true. But it doesn't take away the possibility to use them in a selfhosted environnement.
Large enteprises like facebook and google still use them, but they have the backing to secure them safely.
Also, there is always the possibilty to add all subdomains in one certificate which takes away the wildcard subdomains.
Can you elaborate on why it is a bad security practice? It's the first time I'm reading about it and I'd like to read more about it. Thanks!
One of the risks associated with wildcard SSL certificates is the increased attack surface they introduce. If one subdomain becomes compromised, it opens the door for potential attackers to gain unauthorized access to all subdomains secured under the wildcard certificate. (first google link)
While this argument is valid for a larger domain, it doesn't really matter for the small selfhoster.
Using let's encrypt certbot is so easy and automated that I never bothered for wildcards anyway, so.
The advantage of wildcard certificates is that you don't have to expose each single subdomain over internet. Which is great if you want to have https on local only subdomains.
If you still use HTTP for cert verification on ACME, you are doing it wrong. Use DNS-01 only, there is no need to allow any inbound traffic to your servers. and HTTP will not give you wildcard anyway.
Yes, you are right, I already use DNS validation. But it is just it is easier to request a single wildcard certificate for my domain and have all the subdomains that I use for the local services defined only in my local DNS. I cannot fully automate the certificate renewal because namecheap requires to allowlist the IP that can call its API, and my ip is dynamic. So renewing a single certificate saves me time. Also, the wildcard certificate is installed on a single machine, so it is not the I increase a lot the attack surface by not having different certificates for each virtual host.
Fully agree
Is there a section about the wiki on the wiki? I was wondering what the wiki tool is.
As already stated, it's Dokuwiki. I tried a few and this was the best compromise between features and complexity for my needs.
I recently started something similar using bookstack as the software behind.
Still severely lacking in content but am willing for anyone who has time and something interesting to write in it as long it's connected to tech, preferably linuc and open source software.
Here is the link and if anyone want's to contribhte I'm more than willing to accept a couple editor to grow the content on it.
Now the big question is: are you an Arch or a Gentoo lover? Just joking.
Good job! Keep it up
At one point was arch lover, then I became a gentoo lover.
Now I'm on nixos because gentoo didn't have a good retroarch package.
Thanks a lot for sharing this. I'll keep it bookmarked for later reference, looks very cool!
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web |
| HTTPS | HTTP over SSL |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| SAN | Storage Area Network |
| SSL | Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption |
| TLS | Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL |
| nginx | Popular HTTP server |
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
[Thread #556 for this sub, first seen 29th Feb 2024, 10:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
nginx isn't an acronym lol bad bot
Quite useful... Thanks for sharing
Good work. Added to favorites.
Might be worth adding a section for web UIs that make managing certain things easier. For example, Cockpit or Nginx Proxy Manager.
I think NPM is useless (in my use-case...) and can get things more messy, but I plan to check on cockpit later on indeed.
NPM isn't bad in itself, but NGINX configuration is basically static and IMHO don't require a dedicated GUI.
What lead you to believe NPM is useless/messy?
Yeah, i kind of wrote badly. I mean NGINX configuration is simple enough and static enough not to need a dedicated service for my use case. I don't feel the need to mess with NPM. I have a neat folder structure under nginx config so that adding one service is pretty clean and simple and editing one too.