this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
48 points (98.0% liked)

Selfhosted

39893 readers
469 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Hello peoples,

I am looking for tips on how to make my self-hosted setup as safe as possible.

Some background: I started self-hosting some services about a year ago, using an old lenovo thin client. It's plenty powerful for what I'm asking it to do, and it's not too loud. Hardware wise I am not expecting to change things up any time soon.

I am not expecting anyone to take the time to baby me through the process, I will be more than happy with some links to good articles and the like. My main problem is that there's so much information out there, I just don't know where to start or what to trust.

Anyways, thank you for reading.

N

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Happy to help.

Going off of what you said, I am going to take what I currently have, scale it back, and attempt to get more separation between services.

Containerization and virtualization can help with the separation of services - especially in an environment where you can't throw hardware at the problem. Containers like Docker/podman and LXD/LXC aren't "perfect" (isolation-wise) but do provide a layer of isolation between things that run in the container and the host (as well as other services). A compromised service would still need to find a way out of the container (adding a layer of protection). But they still all share the same physical resources and kernel so any vulnerabilities in the kernel would potentially be vulnerable (keep your systems up-to-date). A full VM like VirtualBox or VMWare will provide greater separation at the cost of using more resources.

Docker's isolation is generally "good enough" for the most part though. Your aggressors are more likely to be bot nets scanning for low-hanging fruit (poorly configured services, known exploits, default admin passwords, etc.) rather than targeted attacks by state-funded hackers anyway.