confusedpuppy

I don’t understand how it’s suspicious if I am sharing my address with a custom port to people I know. I even take time to explain why I do it and in a way a nontechnical person would understand

The connection is still encrypted because I have a proper domain cert. There’s no warning or any other issue. I have spent more time securing my hardware/operating system/software than anything else, often taking priority over hosting more services

Do I really need to take all these extra steps like a VPS or a login for a basic blog generated from markdown files and a basic file server that has copies of my git repositories? Seems excessive when I already found a solution for myself that takes less effort and works to my satisfaction

I think there’s value in experimenting outside the current set standards and norms. Especially since corporations and states are obviously abusing the trust of these standards and norms for their own personal benefit

I personally feel like a small web/indie web can find their own their place again on the internet with a little creativity and a will to break away from the current norms. Trying to do more of the same will eventually lead to issues like burnout or ever growing frustration

I’m doing this for fun and for myself above all else. Experimenting with different, low effort approaches to the crawler/scraper issue is fun for me. Involving more outside services or adding more internal software does not sound like fun to me. It doesn’t sound like much fun for other people in this thread or by the original blog post either

I share my site with only with people I know personally and they don’t seem to have any issue accessing my site

They don’t seem too bothered adding :8000 to the address. Also they are usually connecting at home or on their phone and are not frequently visiting it so the inconveniences are minimal

I found that using a wildcard domain cert for HTTPS and an uncommon higher port number works just fine to avoid crawlers and scrapers. I also hide my ssh port behind WireGuard because I got annoyed with the bots filling up my logs with failed attempts. I’ve been doing that for nearly a year now and I have had no more issues with bots

I’m going off the assumption that the people who run crawlers and scrapers are going for known common ports for quick ease of access

I don’t feel the need to run anything extra such as Anubis either. The inconvenience of using an uncommon higher port number has been minimal and I still get to enjoy my tiny corner of the internet

Here’s the blog post from Codeberg regarding their stance on AI/LLM usage:
blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-fr…

And at the very bottom:

However, we also need to be honest about certain use cases that might no longer be welcome on Codeberg. If you see yourself on this list, you don’t need to move right away, but there might be other places that better fit your needs:

Projects that are created by LLM "agents" in autonomous ways
Projects written and maintained with heavy use of LLMs
Projects where the amount of resources (e.g. storage, CI/CD) is significantly larger than what the involved amount of people could have created by hand
Projects heavily tied to the LLM ecosystem, e.g. LLM-written tools to ease LLM usage
Users sending LLM contributions in violation of project's custom policies

The end goal at the moment is to have the script setup a minimal environment that would host a forum. That way people can organize themselves based on local community needs.

My current and more manageable goal is to create a script to setup a minimal environment for a basic blog. At the very least someone can make posts for their community or themselves. Once I have that baseline, then I’d work towards the larger goal if that’s still how I feel after getting there.

I’m also interested in exploring different ways to be able to share local community servers/sites. It may look ugly, and may add slight inconveniences but it would be nice to have alternatives to big tech offerings. I’m leaning towards a small web concept. A focus on local communities helping themselves and neighbouring communities.

I don’t like bloat or AI/LLMs and I focus more on minimalism to reduce surface attack areas while still focusing on security. There’s nothing flashy about how I plan to approach this project. It’s going to look ugly.

My main focus is to help create communication for local communities and not create tech that enables control over other peoples freedom.

I highly doubt my project will ever leave my community and that’s fine, I’m not interested in making a name in an already crowded space.

I’m currently in the process of writing yet another script. This time my aim is to make one that will setup a server from a fresh Operating System install.

I want to do this for two reasons. The first is so that I have an alternative to backups. It would also help with major Operating System updates because sometimes those are a bit messy.

The second reason is because I want to help other people setup a simple, minimal and more secure setup for a home server as well.

It will all be POSIX portable too so it won’t be limited by extra requirements. I’ve already made a lot of progress with it because I started doing the same with my personal computer. I’ve been able to focus on that because my home server is super simple and I’ve been able to ignore all the recent vulnerabilities.

I think I find it hard to be sympathetic about the user’s blog about getting banned from r/java.

They did something against the rules, intentionally or not, and faced the consequences. Instead of accepting what happened, they went on to completely dismiss hand written code in a few ways and constantly insist AI code is better than hand written code. They also insist AI is an inevitability.

It appears to me that there was no self reflection into understanding why there is harsh criticism about AI/LLM usage. No attempt to understand anything. Just straight to playing the victim and belittling anyone who chooses to write code by hand. I wouldn’t be surprised if this kind of reaction gains a label in the future because this reaction seems to be a trend that happens quite often.

The post also seems to have completely avoided any mention of the environmental devastation caused by using or enabling the usage of AL/LLM’s. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised about that though… Personal convenience, productivity and a sense of self satisfaction is far more important than our silly little spaceship called Earth.

My public facing server uses a wildcard domain cert plus it’s hosted on an uncommon higher port. It only serves static pages. My SSH port is hidden behind a WireGuard connection. I keep it extremely simple because simple is easy to maintain.

I generally have Operating System backups that are stored on the same drive. Those backups are immediately copied to 3 different devices, my computer and two other drives

The backup on the local drive is useful for when I’m tinkering, making adjustments, adding or removing stuff. Restoring from that local backup is far more convenient than using the remote backups

I don’t use anything with a database so all my static media files and wiki’s don’t go to the local backup. I handle them separately but they are still spread across the 3 other devices in my network

Further down this comment chain I explain why I feel AI is causing so many issues.

The blog post linked but the user lepire does an even better job explaining how AI destroys online communities.

Personal convenience should not come at such a deep and destructive cost.

I’ve been on the internet since 1998 and I’ve watched slowly as big money and bigger tech companies slowly destroy everything that made the internet inclusive and weird. I’m sure people who have had access to the Internet for longer than myself would have even more to say about the current state of the internet.

It’s completely overwhelming how many new projects there are that are full of AI/LLM code and documentation. AI has also crept into existing projects, including those that deal with security or encryption. It’s even in Linux now. This is all incredibly troubling from an outside perspective.

It’s dangerous to live on top of so many layers of abstraction. If we don’t understand our tools and machinery, they will not be useful to us when they eventually break. And all things eventually break. Just because it exists and is available, does not mean it is good, acceptable or safe to use.

It’s very saddening that the ethical issues about the use of AI is constantly being pushed to the side of every conversation. It’s frustrating to deal with people who are Pro-AI that are consistently rude and condescending. It’s frustrating for Pro-AI people to consistently ignore a person’s question to aggressively push more AI products on other people. This behaviour has killed any sense or feeling of community.

This technology didn’t always exist. This technology doesn’t need to have such complete control over our future. It is completely acceptable for people to seek AI free alternatives and not be treat like they are troublesome idiots.

All the rage and insecurities in the world won’t erase people’s desire to feel community and express their humanity. It’s a shame that the few who are angry and insecure are also incredibly fucking loud.

I’ve lost all motivation to continue any sort of self-hosting. AI/LLM has crept into every corner of the internet. It’s killed the community vibe I once grew up with. There’s a certain lifelessness with these projects and the internet as a whole that’s hard to describe but it’s just not fun anymore.

I’m in the progress of changing my hobby to be more offline. Writing my own code for my own purpose and entertainment. I’ll still host my code on Codeberg. Codeberg, this Lemmy account and that one bash focused discord server will be my entire online presence going forward. Whatever happens, happens and I won’t feel a loss about losing access to any of those things.

Capitalism and the forces that promote or enable capitalism just exploits everything until there is no life, fun or joy left…

I use Alpine Linux so yeah, I am using something by Linux

It’s not ideal but I don’t have the time to find alternatives for everything all at once, just one thing at a time which is the pace I am going. I’ll deal with it when the time comes but it’s in the back of my mind

I don’t expect perfection out of anyone. I would not make friends if I held them to such high standards or expectations. Everyone learns, adapts and grows at their own pace and I would do better to support them along the way through their journey

Myself and the people around me are doing our best in this situation we are in with the tools that are currently available to us

I don’t believe trying to reduce the complex human experience to 100% right or 100% wrong will lead to any useful discussion when there’s so much in the middle we could be discussing

That’s true, it CertBot seems to be quite mature

It was a bit overwhelming for me when I first started into self hosting, there were a lot of concepts that I had to wrap my head around first before I could look into using CertBot itself

Awesome, thanks so much, this is a big head start for me

I have a good idea how I want to organize things now

I definitely expect this path to be a bit of a challenge

I was looking at lighttpd as well. That was the only one on the list that sounded familiar to me. I may check it out and see if it can fit me needs. I do run a very minimal setup so I might just be enough.

I also make use of Caddy’s built in file server to serve static pages so this is good to know about HAProxy

Thank you, I’ll have a look at lego-acme, it looks interestingly. I prefer to use cron so this is could be something I would consider using.

This is great, thank you for taking the time for this write up :) The provided scripts are a huge help to me

So far my only question I have is about the directories you use. I was wondering if you could provide the directories you use or even just an example so I could better understand the file tree. I’m very particular with my files and have a whole system dedicated to maintaining neat and organized files

I agree about not using /etc for server related stuff. I keep all my server/container related stuff in /srv so it’s easier for me to manage

I’ve used NPM before and it is quite simple and easy to use, however I do have a preference for CLI tools

Impossible? There are people who still write code by hand. There are people who oppose AI, some more actively (or destructively) than others.

Harder to avoid seems like a more reasonable take.

However I am coping, by actively seeking, talking about and supporting alternatives with the hope of spreading that knowledge to those who would like to avoid the use of AI or enable those who support AI.

Human creativity has a much longer and far more interesting history when compared to AI or machine learning. AI hasn’t always existed and does not need to have complete influence over our future.

I personally feel like taking money from an AI sponsor is enabling behaviour. From that perspective, I do not want to support that type of behaviour.

I don’t think you are in the wrong here. You clearly stated your wants and so many replies here have simply ignored what you have said. The response to your post has been strange

How would trace the echo reply in the output chain? I tried adding meta nftrace set 1 directly to the ICMPv4 rule as well as making a chain postrouting rule but I can’t seem to figure it out.

The default policy for output is accept so I’m assuming I don’t need to explicitly add ICMPv4 rules to the output chain. As a test I did add the ICMPv4 rules to the output chain and I still have the same results as before.

I can confirm that the server is receiving the ping requests but my computer sending the pings loses the ping packets.

Aah you did mention that, my eyes just decided to skip that when I read your post.

This reminds me of another issue I ran into but I use Alpine Linux so I don’t know if it’s a distribution specific issue. I’ll share the issue and workaround solution anyways as something to consider.

Networking on Alpine Linux is controlled by a process called networking and for reasons I don’t understand and can’t see by any logs, it just stops working. I can’t ssh or access the reverse proxy port. I don’t remember if ping was working or not as it’s been a while since I dealt with it now.

My work around was to have a script on my server ping a known location and restart networking if it couldn’t ping out. If a second ping after restarting the process failed, it would then restart the device. This script would run every 15 minutes.

It’s a bandage solution that doesn’t solve the problem but it does keep my server running. However it seems like pings still work with your server so you might need to get creative in how you test your server’s connectivity.

It sounds to me like ssdh may have stopped working. That may explain why you can’t ssh into your server but pings still respond. I have a Raspberry Pi4 and a Pi5 and have had similar issues in the past.

I would probably approach this issue by writing a small script that checks every so often if the process sshd is still alive and if not restart sshd. Maybe SystemD can so something similar but I am not familiar with SystemD.