Yeah for sure! I like to post about both the positive and negative experiences. I find things like that to be a valuable learning tool.

From a security perspective, it’s important to understand the systems you’ve implemented and test that they are working as expected. I think in that example if I had tested user sign-up sooner I could have caught the configuration issue.

It’s also important to have good observability into your system, both metrics and logs. Metrics to help detect if something weird is happening (increased resource usage could point to ransomware or crypto mining) and logging to track down what happened and see what systems are impacted.

From a technical controls standpoint, it’s good practice to segregate your applications from other systems and control planes like IPMI and switching/routing admin interfaces. It’s also good to try to limit holes in your firewall. In this cluster, I have Cloudflare Tunnels setup so that I don’t have to open ports to access web servers, and I get access to their WAF tooling. You could do something similar with a VPS running WireGuard, CrowdSec, and a reverse proxy.

Not at all! I agree, and COVID didn’t help at all. I do want to try and be accurate though :p

Its possible that I estimated the timeline wrong 😅

I’ve added a note to the blog, thanks!

Glad I could provide some insight! It’s not something I see talked about too much even on Reddit. Let me know if you have any questions or things I could flesh out more in the article!

I’m still relatively new to ActivityPub and Federated systems in general, though I’ve had my Lemmy and Mastodon instances for 8+ months now I don’t use them as much as I was expecting, sadly. Running your own instance can be very isolating and any content you put directly on your instance probably won’t gain much traction (at least on Mastodon, Lemmy seems to fair a bit better).

It’s one of a handful of blogs that I’ve run over the last couple of years, the other one that’s still online is HomeLab.Blog. I actually meant to run a federated blog platform like WriteFreely, but they don’t have a production docket image, and I saw that Ghost is planning on adding ActivityPub support.

This article might be more appropriate on that blog and an article about my experience with Federated systems might be more on-topic on this one. Oops.

What’s everyone’s workflows with these systems? Do you catalog both physical and digital documents? Where do you store the documents?

Your best bet is going to be a 4U chassis. You can get 2U chassis with consumer PSUs, but they are going to be more expensive and very limited in terms of parts that will work. You can easily find 4U chassis that support regular ATX internals with proper mounting holes for the PSU and mobo standoffs.

There are some small SuperMicro servers that use Xeon-D (I think? Very low power Xeons that are passively cooled), but you’re pretty vendor locked in with those.

Do not use external drives for this. TrueNAS doesn’t support it, and you’ll be limiting your speeds to that of the USB bus, which is not nearly as fast. Pointless going SSDs if you are using external drives.