The amazing folks at @yunohost are running a fundraising campaign to cover their operating costs for 2026.

I personally make a monthly recurring donation to them but wish I could give more 🥲

If you use their services and you can afford it, please consider donating to their project. Every Euro / Dollar / Yen counts:

🔗 : https://yunohost.org/donate.en.html

#NotAllHeroesWearCapes #SelfHosting #empowerment #resist #YunoHost

Is this the moment where I get annoyed enough with state and quirks of configuration management tools, and switch my #OpenBSD boxes to somewhat more hands-off #NixOS ? 🤔

#SysAdmin #HomeLab #SelfHosting

Curious what kind of luck people have had running a single-user, self-hosted @gotosocial instance instead of joining a larger shared node.

With relays in GotoSocial, my feed is great—I can discover pretty much everything I care about. My bigger question is the *other* direction. I've heard some instances de-prioritize or outright limit federation from low-volume, self-hosted, or otherwise unknown nodes.

If you're mostly consuming content, I imagine it's a non-issue. But if you actually want to participate in conversations, are you giving up reliable interaction by running your own tiny instance?

Curious to hear real-world experiences. #Mastodon #Fediverse #SelfHosting #GoToSocial

I keep hearing friends on/off Fedi worry about aggressive AI/web scrapers or mention them hitting their servers.

I've been experimenting with different defenses for the last few months and want to share this setup, even if helps just one other person directly or indirectly. It has reduced the load on our servers usually by 80% by CPU as well as log entries.

https://sum.mit.edu/git/almonds/block_some

#SelfHosting #SysAdmin

Pretty funny that the most often requested file from my small kitchen-server is "/robots.txt". Pretty surprising, since a lot of LLM-bots usually ignores this file
The other requested files are just some js crap, which is obviously don't exist on my server — possibly some script-kiddies tried to find some entrypoint (see "config.js" and "env.js").

The funny part: the referrer URLs. Hope, the default content of NetBSD /etc/passwd from inside the sandbox was made someone happy

#selfhosting #NetBSD

Alt...

A cwm with 3 windows. On the top window there is an xterm with ssh client connected to the my server. Inside the window there are some lines from /var/log/nginx/ from inside sandbox (mostly the list of files and gzipped files in this catalog). On the middle window there is a GoAccess web interface with list of most-requested static files from my server. There are: /robots.txt (2.6 MiB of traffic), /config.js (1 MiB), /.env.txt (588 KiB), /env.txt (300.3 KiB), /app.js (316.4 KiB), /owa/auth/x.js (134.4 KiB).

Alt...

The screenshot of cwm with a Librewolf window on top. It displays the GoAccess web interface with a list of referrer URLs, from requests to my server. There are: https://MyIP/ (47078 hits), http://MyIP:443/ (25507 hits), https://MyIP (3018 hits), () { ignored; }; echo Content-Type: text/html; echo ; /bin/cat /etc/passwd (621 hits), https://MyIP/WebInterface/login.html (434 hits) and https://myhostname (291 hits). On the two other windows on the bottom there are: xterm window with ssh client connected to my server and an Emacs frame with log of actions made with server.

Anyone out there running a backup MX that I could add my domain to for a few days? My only internet connectivity right now is tethering my phone, and I can't route incoming email server connections that way (afaik). #selfhosting

European institutions seem to be all in when it comes to introducing age verification mandates for citizens in member states: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/commission-sets-out-common-approach-eu-wide-age-verification-technologies

I now have daily anxiety thinking about the future of the fediverse.

So how do I channel this fear and turn it into something constructive? I'm going back to writing #selfhosting guides for newbies.

It's a great distraction, which gives me a bit of hope. Especially the next guide, which will cover my favorite fediverse software - #GoToSocial (which is powering this instance) - and how to install and configure it. Your own little home on the fediverse! Lightweight and features-packed.

Surely something like this would fall outside the scope of regulation. Right? Right?

#MySoCalledSudoLife #YunoHost #VPS #AgeVerification #privacy #EUBigTech

@labellaragassa It's a bunch of tradeoffs. There are acceptable solutions where trust is warranted, but they're less convenient, and require more #SelfHosting skills. How far down the rabbit hole of inconvenience are you willing to go, to satisfy more of your ideals?

Doing a mastodon *minor* update is still a mess in 2026 requiring manual steps to trigger db migrations pre and post update. And that's using docker. Without containerization its even more steps to do. Just in case anybody is still wondering why people do not "just self-host"...

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.6.0

#selfhosting #fediverse #mastodon #docker

I haven't turned on this raspberry pi 4 8gb of ram in like 3 years. I've been feeling like resurrecting it and setting it up again.

What services should I install on it?
What casing or peripherals should I use?

#Hardware #RaspberryPi #PCB #Computing #SelfHosting

Alt...

A dusty raspberry pi

RE: https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@subnetspider/116758330967344651

Bastille makes a great self-hosting platform! Look at this absolute list of self-hosted software ⬇️

nsd, unbound, acme, adguard, gitea, haproxy, homebox, mail, netbox, nextcloud, plex, rustdesk, samba, syncthing, tor, unifi, vaultwarden, and more on one box.

#FreeBSD #BastilleBSD #selfhosted #selfhosting

The webserver for my websites (https://blog.hofstede.it and others) is now runing on 15.1-RELEASE arm64 with PKGBase 🙂

Upgrade from 15.0 to 15.1was pleasantly boring:

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/cutting-edge/#pkgbase

- Creating a BE for the new version
- Mounting the BE to /mnt/upgrade
- Executing "env ABI=FreeBSD:15:aarch64 pkg-static -c /mnt/upgrade upgrade -r FreeBSD-base"
- bectl activate -t 15.1-RELEASE
- Rebooting the system

Everything working fine, all lights green

#freebsd #unix #selfhosting #arm64

It is surprisingly easy to get a locality domain.

I followed this guide and had one in 18 minutes:
https://fredchan.org/blog/locality-domains-guide/

#homelab #selfhosting

Kinda postmortem:

1) The maximal log size before rotation and count of gzipped logs to store should be increased in the newsyslogd configuration. This should be applied to any service, which is looking into the void^WInternet. So, I will not loss log records, related to the start of attack…

2) Also, Asterisk log should be added to newsyslogd configuration first. It weren't added here, so *.log files became too big (> 1 Gb) and of course fail2ban ate a lot of memory while parsing these big logs. If they were rotated properly, then fail2ban will not eat so much memory, parsing small enough files.

3) Since start of attack in logs were lost, then I could only imagine possible root cause of an attack. By default, any IP, which once failed to provide the proper credentials to login somewhere in my kitchen server, is banned immediately and forever.
But somehow those attackers managed to use just 2 IPs to make an attack and they weren't banned before manual intervention

According to fail2ban logs they were banned, but they were obviously not banned by npf. So, I think, they started attack right in time when my blacklists were successfully updated and npf was reloading — as a result their IPs appeared as "banned" in the fail2ban, but the fail2ban failed to ban them via npf, so "IRL" their IPs still weren't banned. Time to revisit my script to update blacklists

4) Looks like I need to install some Intrusion Detection System (possibly snort since it is mature enough). It isn't good to rely only on one mechanism (fail2ban + blacklists + npf) to protect my precious machine.

#NetBSD #selfhosting #fail2ban #npf

Oh fuck, I was mistaken — it was a real attack, not LLM bots — someone, using machines from French hosting, was trying to connect to my Asterisk box, using various SIP endpoints.

The attack was started at Monday's night and was found only because monit reported about too much memory eaten by fail2ban

Interesting, why fail2ban didn't banned attacker's IP, because it should do that right after failed attempt to login? Tine to revisit fail2ban jails configs…

#asterisk #pbx #hackers #selfhosting

Alt...

Screenshot of termux with opened console of my home server. There is an asterisk log in the console, showing various and constant attempts to login into my PBX via PJSIP.

Kinda postmortem:

1) The maximal log size before rotation and count of gzipped logs to store should be increased in the newsyslogd configuration. This should be applied to any service, which is looking into the void^WInternet. So, I will not loss log records, related to the start of attack…

2) Also, Asterisk log should be added to newsyslogd configuration first. It weren't added here, so *.log files became too big (> 1 Gb) and of course fail2ban ate a lot of memory while parsing these big logs. If they were rotated properly, then fail2ban will not eat so much memory, parsing small enough files.

3) Since start of attack in logs were lost, then I could only imagine possible root cause of an attack. By default, any IP, which once failed to provide the proper credentials to login somewhere in my kitchen server, is banned immediately and forever.
But somehow those attackers managed to use just 2 IPs to make an attack and they weren't banned before manual intervention

According to fail2ban logs they were banned, but they were obviously not banned by npf. So, I think, they started attack right in time when my blacklists were successfully updated and npf was reloading — as a result their IPs appeared as "banned" in the fail2ban, but the fail2ban failed to ban them via npf, so "IRL" their IPs still weren't banned. Time to revisit my script to update blacklists

4) Looks like I need to install some Intrusion Detection System (possibly snort since it is mature enough). It isn't good to rely only on one mechanism (fail2ban + blacklists + npf) to protect my precious machine.

#NetBSD #selfhosting #fail2ban #npf

Huh, looks like the new ASes, with LLM-bots attacking servers, just dropped

TLDR: there are AS12876 and AS16276 — both located in France (Scaleway SAS and OVH SAS). My Asterisk self-hosted box was attacked from the next IPs: 62.4.15.81 and 51.222.38.229.

Today, after I was checked my e-mail, I found three warnings from Monit about fail2ban exhausting limits in my small server in the kitchen (Intel Atom N2800 1866 MHz and 4 Gb of RAM). First e-mail warns about fail2ban ate 200 MB of RAM, next about 500 MB of RAM and the last e-mail warns me that fail2ban ate 2 GB of RAM

#AInt #LLM #selfhosting #bots

Alt...

Emacs Gnus with e-mail from Monit opened. In the e-mail Monit warns me about fail2ban ate 2.1 GB of RAM when the limit is 200 MB.

Then, I logged into my box and found that fail2ban, Asterisk and PostgreSQL aren't feeling well. The system load and the traffic amounts was unusual — the parameters are completely differs from which I used to see since server installation.

I checked fail2ban logs and found that it is still parses the data from Asterisk log which were happen at near 5 hours ago And there were total mess in the Asterisk security.log (see screenshot) — some dumb (as it programmers ) LLM-bots were constantly trying to connect to my Asterisk server with HTTP protocol, evaluating it as a web-server, I dunno

And the Asterisk logs became enormously big — while newsyslogd wasn't invoked — they eat at near 4 GB . I didn't specify the maximal size of Asterisk logfiles in the /etc/newsyslog.conf, because I wasn't expected a lot of lines in the PBX logs, which is in use only for my relatives.

#Asterisk #selfhosting #AInt #LLM

Alt...

top output in the terminal of NetBSD server, showing three CPU-consuming processses: python3.12, postgres, asterisk.

Alt...

Excerpt from failban log showing how it processes events from asterisk logs, happened 5 hours ago.

Alt...

Video with as fast scrolling lines -- there is a tail -f security.log for my Asterisk installation. Each three lines is an unsuccessfull attempt to break into my Asterisk from LLM bots.

Alt...

ls -lh in the /var/log/asterisk. Size of asterisk.log: 1.2 Gb, queue.log: 4.4 Kb, security.log: 2.5 Gb.

Some graphs from #Munin with LLM-bots attacking my kitchen server.
Graphs spans to the whole week, so on the left there is a normal state of my server. And on the right — attack is happening.

#NetBSD #LLM #AInt #selfhosting

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Graph of CPU usage, which going high after LLM bots attack (at near 08 Jan Monday). At near 2 CPU cores were used by LLM bots, trying to abuse my PBX as an Web-server.

Alt...

Graph with main network interface bits per minute — before attack there were almost no data receivin/transmitting, only some cron jobs at night. But after attack there are at near 20 Mb per minute both receiving and transmitting.

Alt...

Graph with PostgreSQL connections. Active connections has green color. Before the attack there are almost no active connections, but after attack there are a lot of them, since Asterisk using PostgreSQL as a main backend.

Alt...

Load average for my server. After attack it increased at near 4 times.

It's currently just a simplified version of my existing blog, but I'm hosting this website on my Raspberry Pi Zero for testing purposes:

https://fsck.lol

We will see how things go over time, then possible port over the "real" thing 😛

#raspberrypi #nginx #alpinelinux #selfHosting

Wait, you guys are paying people to host your private data?

#selfhosting #diday

There is no Cloud!
Only someone else’s #selfhosting

We were without power for ~18 hours yesterday, but I’m still determined to eventually switch hosting my personal blog over to my local Raspberry Pi Zero

https://hermes.btxx.org/

#alpinelinux #raspberrypi #selfHosting

If you run your own local DNS servers at home, do you: (select all that apply)

Comment with your preferred DNS stack and privacy friendly DNS providers.

#FreeBSD #Linux #selfHosting #DNS

TFW you realize you've had your MX entry set wrong for over a month.

Yet somehow I've still been getting (some) mail? 🤔

#SelfHosting

Is there anyone out there running an AMD 5650GE based system running Linux or BSD?

Can you tell us your CPU and GPU idle power numbers as displayed in btop?

Maybe this is an "easy button" of sorts to reduce power on an existing AMD AM4 system without going through the machinations of new mobo, ram, etc., etc. Get most of the way there?

#Linux #RunBSD #AMD #5650GE #PowerConsumption #Power #HomeLab #SelfHosting #SelfHosted #SOHO

Is there anyone out there running an AMD 5825U based system running Linux or BSD?

Can you tell us your CPU and GPU idle power numbers as displayed in btop?

#Linux #RunBSD #AMD #5825U #PowerConsumption #Power #HomeLab #SelfHosting #SelfHosted #SOHO

Pleased to announce another edition of Cloudbreak, taking place May 28.

For those that don't know already, this is a 6hr fully-supported live training opportunity leading participants with no prior experience in system administration through the process of building up their own #sovereign & secured cloud server.

Hosted in the EU on renewable energy, the finished server also offers both Zoom & Google Docs alternatives.

Info & signup here:

https://courses.nikau.io/cloudbreak

#selfhosting

Alt...

The title image for the Cloudbreak training, featuring that word in white and in caps, in a sans serif typeface, against a grayscale photograph of a cumulus cloud structure

👩‍💻​ My So Called Sudo Life - day 500: still a newbie edition 🆕​

Dear Fedi friends,

Today marks the 500th day of my self-hosting adventures and I'm celebrating it with... a slice of humble pie:

🔗​: https://blog.elenarossini.com/my-so-called-sudo-life/my-so-called-sudo-life-day-500-still-a-newbie-edition/

Also: please remember to update your Linux system to patch the critical vulnerability that has been found.

#Linux #CopyPaste #security #MySoCalledSudoLife #SelfHosting #YunoHost