Treczoks

POP and IMAP are still alive.

See that you get a solid VPN bridge, much better than trying to fix a ton of different services if things go awry.

Ask yourself: is there any service that really, really needs to be public? Or is this only about availability for you or a very limited group (family, friends), which could be implemented via a VPN solution?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Hell, no!

Strange. The Xyloni is basically a toy to learn FPGAs, and the Titanium 180 is indeed a big fish FPGA. But there are loads of different chips and series in between.

They do have a sales representative in Turkey, though: www.kuantek.com.tr/en/ but as that page is Turkish, I’m lost from there…

Where the heck are you that you don’t have access to Efinix products?

Have you tried Efinix?

What features bind you to those particular chips?

The point is while you can do generic verilog or VHDL development on free tools, as soon as you want to implement it, you’ll need the vendor’s proprietary tools, regardless where you turn to.

Xilinx with Vivado is by far the worst. If you think Windows and Office play the vendor-lock-in hard, Xilinx plays it way harder. Once you develop with their stuff, you’ll have a hard time getting anywhere else. And Xilinx is rather unfriendly to smaller shops. Yes, if you buy millions of chips or you are at a university, they blow sugar in your ass. Outside that, they happily fuck you over.

If you want to be as free and open as possible, Vivado is by far the worst choice you could do.

I completely folded all services to the “inside”.

Get a used PC. Absolute sufficient for a private NAS. Can be slighly outdated, needs no monster graphics card (or none at all if it has basic on-board graphics), and runs all the peripherals you’ll ever need.

Multiport Knock patterns.

I know that risk, but that has been mitigated by other means. There is no open port exposed to the net waiting to be hacked. It only opens on demand for a single connection.

I’d say yes to RAID in a NAS or server in general. Just see that you don’t purchase the disks in one go - that was the only RAID in the last 30 years to fail on me (five disks within 20 serial numbers, four of them failed in total, two within a night). Was a pain in the a… to restore stuff from tape, but at least i had them.

That is a separate issue. Hardening a single service that happens to offer a login is easier than hardening a whole bunch of services that were never intended to face the net.

What I did was setting up two routers. The outer one is a big filter, and the only packets coming in went through it.

If someone would have managed to take over this outer router, the next step would have been to probe the inner router. For this, they would send packets originating at the outer router to anything on the inside net.

This would trigger an alert on the inner router that switches a relay, cutting the power on the outer router.

If it’s on a card, ditch it and replace it with a better one. If not, and you’ve got a spare slot, buy a new card.

Let me put it this way: I have a removable harddisk with my files from the universities’ VAX 11/780 in storage. Long enough?

I just sort by Artist and Album.

Have you tried puttting in a wired power supply instead?

One place to look at are web sites dealing with company bankruptcies. They are good for purchasing electronics and tools.

Back when windows and office licenses were bound to a sticker with a key number, I bought a stack of broken laptops for 10€. They were leftovers from an auction - nobody wanted them. I removed and tested RAM and harddisks, and then cut out the bottom of those laptops where the license stickers were. I sold each set of licenses, Windows and Office, for 10€ each, making a good profit. And kept the RAM and HDs that worked for my own use.

A bit pricy for home use with 8-10k bucks…

If you have a RPi, install Mozillla Firefox, and Ublock. The only way to watch YT without going nuts.

The “faucet” was water literally streaming in through the broken window during a thunderstorm. One of my coworkers went outside and shielded the window with a wooden board to reduce the flow.

Not selfhosting, but I remember standing in a server room with a hands’ width of water on the ground (and rising), and hastily shutting down servers where the water was already in the case. It were big towers (Compaq Proliant, if anyone remembers), and luckily the board, drives, and PSU were in the top part of the big tower cases, the drive bays at the bottom were empty.

We got all equipment out safely, and we did not get electrocuted, either. We left with the last equipment when the water level was approaching the knees.

I think it is important to also include hardware in this group, as hardware for selfhosting is different, both from user PCs as they are discussed elsewhere, and from large, professional hosting hardware, which is usually outside the range of selfhosters.

I support striking that part from rule 3.

If it randomly locks up, try memtest86. It can often be found as a boot alternative in Linux installation images, but it is probably available solo.