Post · bonfire.cafe

Dear Fedi friends,

Happy Thursday from rainy northern Italy 🌧️

In case you missed it: I've spent the past two weeks doing all kinds of #selfhosting explorations, as I strive to learn #Docker to move my Ghost site there (it's recommended for Ghost v6 and going forward).

Yesterday I shared a blog post about the peaches (highs) and pits (lows) in #MySoCalledSudoLife adventures.

I'm hoping my mistakes can be useful for fellow newbies 😅

🔗 : https://news.elenarossini.com/my-so-called-sudo-life/my-so-called-sudo-life-month-8-peaches-pits/

#blog #VPS #newbie

Alessandro Scapuzzi

@dado70@mastodon.uno replied · 3 weeks ago

@_elena Apprezzo le doti comunicative di Veronica, ma resto un tradizionalista: siamo proprio certi che informarsi sui social o “laurearsi” su YouTube sia la scelta migliore? A me sembrano strumenti che veicolano una cultura al ribasso.
Attenzione: non sto criticando te che seguo volentieri, ma il sistema. Io rimango affezionato ai vecchi how-to, alle man page, ai wiki delle distro… e, perché no, ai cari vecchi libroni 👋

The Chris Dantes

@thechrisdantes@social.linux.pizza replied · 3 weeks ago

@_elena
I love the phrase peaches and pits. I've never heard it before.

Elena Rossini ⁂

@_elena@mastodon.social replied · 3 weeks ago

@thechrisdantes thank you! I heard it years ago as a good dinnertime habit for families, sharing "a peach and a pit" from the day... I will definitely implement it for my family in the future, once my little one is a tiny bit older

primalmotion

@primalmotion@antisocial.ly replied · 3 weeks ago

@_elena it's nice to see where enlightened noobs are having troubles with stuff that look obvious to us! I'm not sure about changing SSH port. A simple scan will find the server's port. It does not change anything much. The rest (key auth and nopasswd) is on point though :)

Also I did not understand why they would shutdown your account after a single day. None of what you describe seems to be problem for the hosting company.

Elena Rossini ⁂

@_elena@mastodon.social replied · 3 weeks ago

@primalmotion re: the SSH port, I hear you, but since changing it the reported failed attempts captured by fail2ban went from 1700+ to 0... for all my VPSs 🤷‍♀️

and the shutting down after less than a day was probably because they may have thought I had malicious intent, keeping my Docker exposed --- which triggered a hack within hours

primalmotion

@primalmotion@antisocial.ly replied · 3 weeks ago

@_elena oh it really got hacked... well yeah you got quite the crash course :)

PhillyFan

@gjholmes@mastodon.social replied · 3 weeks ago

@_elena Thanks for you new Peaches & Pits post. As a newbie I learn so much from your experiences that you share and it motivates me to try new things on my own. Keep up the great work!

Elena Rossini ⁂

@_elena@mastodon.social replied · 3 weeks ago

@gjholmes thank you! 🥰 I'm been playing around with Hetzner this morning and I'm loving it. It's so easy to just delete a server and start over and see charges for just usage. Like, I decided to start over with another server with Docker pre-installed and saw that the usage for my old server was something like 0.01 cents.

Conversely, with other providers once you set up a server, that's it - you can't make changes / start over.

Warning: it can be a little addictive 😅

Daniel de Kay

@daniel@friendica.tangoverse.org replied · 3 weeks ago

@_elena@gjholmes Of course, you don’t need to start a new server for every app you try out…

ozzie :this_is_fine:

@ozzie@masto.pt replied · 3 weeks ago

@_elena Love your article. But VPS is really not the same as #selfhosting. Getting your own machine and connecting it to the outside world spares you the kind of aggravation you got from OVH. Also makes you learn networking stuff. Maybe consider that as your next stage? Keep on writing, it makes me not feel alone in my own misadventures. 😎

Elena Rossini ⁂

@_elena@mastodon.social replied · 3 weeks ago

@ozzie oh I'm actually self-hosting my own GoToSocial, Pixelfed, PeerTube, NextCloud, LinkStack instances... as well as my Ghost site. That's why I have all these VPSs 🤗

Guillaume Rossolini

@GuillaumeRossolini@infosec.exchange replied · 3 weeks ago

@_elena @ozzie self hosting on your own hardware at home, is several orders of magnitude different from self hosting on cloud infrastructure

Both are valid and with different pros and cons

Elena Rossini ⁂

@_elena@mastodon.social replied · 3 weeks ago

@GuillaumeRossolini indeed! Thank you Guillaume.

My home connection is super unreliable (frequent cutoffs) and even if I have a Raspberry Pi 5, I decided to go with a VPS - far more reliable and efficient, as I travel quite a bit between my home, my parents' and my in-laws'.

I see the appeal of home servers but they're just not for me.

@ozzie

Guillaume Rossolini

@GuillaumeRossolini@infosec.exchange replied · 3 weeks ago

@_elena @ozzie indeed you just hit on one aspect: the reliability of your connection

Which might have a fix (let’s call that a plural, fixes), but it’s going to cost more: having several lines, and a way for your network to automatically switch (that’s already expensive + not easy), and publish the DNS changes etc

And as you can imagine, there are more hidden latent issues. One that I’ve seen occasionally was my ISP bungling interconnection with other specific ISPs, meaning all routes from (for example) Free to Orange were lost, and only these visitors were unable to visit. Good luck explaining that to your ISP.

So yeah. I don’t imagine you wanted to know this 🤣 sorry about that

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