Admiral Patrick

RCS is a whole can of worms. It’s presented like a carrier services (and carriers are in the mix, though often just for authentication), but it’s really a Google service. With Android, RCS connects directly to google’s mothership.

I believe on iOS those go to Apple’s servers which “peers” with google. Maybe search the RCS endpoint for Apple and see what comes up?

This is actually one of my New Year’s resolutions lol. Right now, my backups are local and my offsites are a hodgepodge of cloud services (basically holding encrypted container blobs of my stuff). Not ideal.

I’m looking at signing up for rsync.net since a lot of my backups are done via rsync anyway. Plan is to keep my local backups as-is and rsync them to rsync.net.

AI bots absolutely rip through your sites like something rabid.

SemrushBot being the most rabid from my experience. Just will not take “fuck off” as an answer.

That looks pretty much like how I’m doing it, also as an include for each virtual host. The only difference is I don’t even bother with a 403. I just use Nginx’s 444 “response” to immediately close the connection.

Are you doing the IP blocks also in Nginx or lower at the firewall level? Currently I’m doing it at firewall level since many of those will also attempt SSH brute forces (good luck since I only use keys, but still…)

Most containers default to UTC, and depending what you’re running, that may be fine.

I only mount /etc/timezone / /etc/localtime if I’m running a container where it needs to be on the same timezone as the host (DB containers, anything where I want the logs in local time, etc). Not all containers use the TZ env var, so bind mounting the timezone files from the host is a guaranteed way to sync them.

I always do some level of RAID. If for no other reason, I’m not out of commission if a disk fails. When you’re working with multi TB, restoring from a backup can take a while. If rapid recovery from a disk failure is not a high priority for you, then you could probably do without RAID.

Either way, make sure you test your backups occasionally.

Another way to put it: With RAID, a disk failure is like your Check Engine light coming on. You can still drive, but you should address the problem as soon as you can. Without RAID, it’s like your engine has seized up and you have to tow it for repair and are without your car until it’s fixed.

I like Joplin. Works offline and syncs with my Nextcloud.

How exactly are “communities offering services” a different thing than “hosted software”?

It’s a lot easier to ask Matt down the street to customize or add a feature than it is to ask Google, FB, etc.

Case in point: I’ve run my own email server since 2013 or so. I’ve got friends and family that use it. One of my friends asked if there was any way to setup rules to filter emails and such. I was like “yep” and added on Sieve to Dovecot and setup the webmail (Roundcube at the time) with the Sieve plugin.

Granted, that’s a pretty basic feature that pretty much all commercial email providers offer, but the point is someone asked for it and I made it happen for them.

I’ve self hosted long before the privacy/subscription nightmare of modern cloud/SaaS platforms was a thing. I do it because I enjoy it (and at the time I got started, I had crap internet so having good local services like offline Wikipedia was important).

Not everyone has to self-host. I run lots of services, mostly for myself, but friends and family who don’t know a kernel driver from a school bus driver also use them. So the expectation that everyone self host is and always has been “pie in the sky”. And that’s okay.

Privacy regulations are all fine and dandy, but even with the strictest ones in place, you still do not own or control your data. You’re still subscribing to services instead of owning software. You can’t extend, modify, or customize hosted software. Self hosting FOSS applications addresses all of those.

So rather than expect everyone to self-host, we should be working towards communities offering services to one another, pooling resources, and letting those interoperate with each other.

To make fun of an old moral panic in the 90s: “It’s 11pm. Do you know where your data is?” Yep, it’s down the street in Matt’s house.

Reddit is dead to me and blocked in my router, so I’m good sharing knowledge and cool stuff here.