Desktop: Windows XP

Linux: Probably Raspbian on a Pi 2 b

Tech has come a long way since then lol

Yeah it very adds some extra complexity and it’s more important for if you are hosting in public clouds anyways IMO.

That makes sense!

Have you played with anything like Istio to secure in-cluster communications? I think Hashicorp Consul can do something similar to encrypt service to service communications.

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!

I should look into how to do that on my instance probably. Pictrs always seemed like a bit of a security nightmare.

Ah okay that makes sense, you’re using the internal cluster domain to route to services

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.

Oh, dev namespaces are a good idea. Do you have a dev domain then too?

Thanks! I find most of the issues occur during upgrades to services, but that is to be expected.

My internet service is usually more of an issue than most services I run. Though some things take longer to get tweaked and running well and that can cause issues.

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

I disabled Pictrs around the time of CSAM attacks and have yet to bother enabling it again

Uhh… what?? When did that happen? I thought pictrs was a requirement also…

Huh, do you have your lemmy config documented somewhere? I keep running into issues with it and I’m not sure which component exactly is failing, but it’s annoying. I’m using this helm chart currently: ananace/lemmy It works, but I don’t have pict-rs setup in HA either.

They store the secrets in a file? Gross. What a poor way of handling that. Pretty sure environment variables would be more secure. Especially in Kubernetes.

Yeah, I used to host a Matrix instance - could do that for this one too.

The issue is more about setting up the Kubernetes manifests and templating them. I usually use the chart’s built-in postgres and redis config, though using an operator would make it more scalable for sure.

I’m using Authentik for auth, but I do also like Keycloak.

I’ve seen that around, but I prefer to run my own services instead of relying on a ready-built system like that. I find they don’t offer that much customization options usually.

I think both of the ones I mentioned have docker-compose files, which I think I can convert with kompose convert? I guess from there I would follow your steps and then start parameterizing it once it’s running properly.

Thanks! I think I’ll start trying out PixelFed tomorrow.

That’s actually super helpful! I haven’t done much custom Helm chart-ing, and was kinda lost where to start. That really helps break the process down, and the tip about skipping state to start is very wise.

Yeah, that’s the pain point - building and maintaining the charts.

Also, I know the charts likely wouldn’t have to be super complex, but I’m used to working with Bitnami’s charts that are massively complex - I just don’t have the time to go that in-depth.