pmk

It’s not stealing when you willingly allow someone to use it however they want. OpenBSD writes: “We want to make available source code that anyone can use for ANY PURPOSE, with no restrictions. We strive to make our software robust and secure, and encourage companies to use whichever pieces they want to.” If your goal is to polish something like OpenSSH until it’s as good as it can be, the world is better off when robust and secure software spread, also into proprietary systems. When companies use OpenSSH, it does not take away anything from OpenBSD, they are not competitors.

This has been my experience with self-hosting too. There are so many different areas of concepts that need to form a cohesive whole. Following a how-to and pasting some commands can lead to something running, but then there are worlds of knowledge to actually understand it. Especially when complexity seems to increase exponentially.
Funny thing is that for every low-level concept I actually learn, the more I appreciate my OpenBSD computer that I mostly play around with otherwise.

My general advice at this point is, if you haven’t already, to document the setup for your future self. It quickly gets out of hand with the amount of passwords, credentials, certificates, firewall settings, docker containers left and right, configs, workarounds, custom shell scripts, ansible scripts, git repos, backup locations and passwords, etc. Right now everything is fresh in your mind, but 6 months from now you may need to restore from a backup or an OS upgrade goes wrong, and then you’ll appreciate being able to remember the details.

If clouds are far away, then self-hosting could be “fog”? Clouds at ground level that you walk around in.

Interesting, do you remember which didn’t work? I recently set up a simple service (navidrome) as rootless podman with an ansible script, but it was… there were some hoops to jump through, mainly with the uid/gid and machinectl to get it to work.

Always nice to see podman used well! Do you have a dedicated user or is it rootful?

Almost 20 years ago, Theo de Raadt (founder of OpenBSD) said: “you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can’t write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes.” I would like to think that we’ve figured out the security holes since then, but… you know…

There is even an IANA RFC for three-letter acronyms (TLAs) (RFC5513), which says:

"For our usage, we also allow digits within a TLA. Thus, P2P is an
acronym meaning Purchase to Pay [URL-P2P]. The digits 2 and 4 are
specially used by clever people who have noticed that, when spoken,
they sound like the words ‘to’ and ‘for’. Whether this is helpful
may be left as an exercise for the user considering the brief
conversation, below.

A - Do you use the Internet Streams Protocol?
B - Yes. Do you use ST, too?
A - No, I use ST2.
B - That’s interesting. C uses ST2, too.
A - I have a car horn application called Toot-toot.
B - Really? Do you use ST2 to Toot-toot, too?"