Dark Arc

If it was BitWarden where I can see the client side code … and there wasn’t a better option, quite possibly.

I give my ISP and many other places my BitWarden vault all the time and I just trust they’re not recording the traffic and trying to decrypt it.

I recommend against hosting a password manager yourself.

The main reason is self hosted systems require maintenance to patch vulnerabilities. While it’s true that you won’t be on the main list if e.g. bitwarden gets hacked, your data could still be obtained or ransomed by a scripted attack looking for e.g. vulnerable VaultWarden servers (or even just vulnerable servers in general).

Using professional hosting means just that, professional hosting with people who’s full time job is running those systems and keeping people that aren’t supposed to be there out.

Plus, you always have the encryption of the binary blob itself to fall back on (which if you’ve got a good password is a serious barrier to entry that buys you a lot of time). Additionally vaults are encrypted with symmetric crypto which is not vulnerable to quantum computing, so even in that case your data is reasonably safe… And mixed in with a lot of other data that’s likely higher priority to target.

This is why you use fish shell and just type something vaguely similar to what you remember and hit the up arrow key.

ClamAV is mostly for filtering things on mail servers or uploads to a shared resource like a wiki.

You can also use it as a system virus scanner, but most viruses it detects are Windows viruses.

Plex is moving in the app direction… So Plex is probably moving away from what you want despite being one of the easiest options.

It would probably be helpful to know what you’re trying to accomplish beyond “what”. Like, why do you want to host your music and play it via a web browser.

So, the web uses a system called chain of trust. There are public keys stored in your system or browser that are used to validate the public keys given to you by various web sites.

Both letsencrypt and traditional SSL providers work because they have keys on your system in the appropriate place so as to deem them trustworthy.

All that to say, you’re always trusting a certificate authority on some level unless you’re doing self signed certificates… And then nobody trusts you.

The main advantage to a paid cert authority is a bit more flexibility and a fancier certificate for your website that also perhaps includes the business name.

Realistically… There’s not much of a benefit for the average website or even small business.

So the local machine doesn’t really need the firewall; it definitely doesn’t hurt, but your router should be covering this via port forwarding (ipv4) or just straight up firewall rules (ipv6).

You can basically go two routes to reasonable harden the system IMO. You can either just set up a user without administrative privileges and use something like a systemd system level service to start the server as that user and provide control over it from other users … OR … if you’re really paranoid, use a virtual machine and forward the port from the host machine into the VM.

A lot of what you’re doing is … fine stuff to do, but it’s not really going to help much (e.g. building system packages with hardening flags is good, but it only helps if those packages are actually part of the attack surface or rather what’s exposed to the remote users in someway).

Your biggest risk is going to be plugins that aren’t vetted doing bad things (and really only the VM or using the dedicated user account provides an insulation layer there – the VM really only adds protection against privilege escalation which is pretty hard to pull off on a patched system).

My advice for most people:

• Make a new user on the system to run each game you want to run
• Run the game using systemd and that user
• Use something like kopia + the root user’s crontab (easier than systemd timers, but systemd timers also work) to backup the files on disk

For Minecraft in particular, to properly back things up on a busy server you need to disable auto save, manually force save, do the backup and then enable auto save again after your backup. Kopia can issue commands to talk to the server to do that, but you need a plugin that can react to those commands running on the server (or possibly to use the server console via stdin). Realistically though, that’s overkill and you’ll be just fine backing up the files exactly as they are periodically.

Kopia in particular will do well here because of its deduplication of baked up data + chunking algorithm that breaks up files. That has saved me a crazy amount of storage vs other solutions I’ve tried. Kopia level compression isn’t needed because the Minecraft region files themselves are already highly compressed.

rclone or rsync is probably better but see my reply a few comments down (the very long one) about protocol aware cloning vs just cloning things at the file system

They do have versioning: https://docs.syncthing.net/v1.27.7/users/versioning

Of course, you actually have to use that, it has to work, and you have to have a strategy for reverting the state (I don’t know if they have an easy way to do that – I’ve never used the versioned side of things).

I have had some situations where Syncthing seems to get confused and doesn’t do its job right. I ran into this particularly with trying to sync runelite configurations and music. There were a few times I had to “force push” … and I vaguely recall one time where I was fighting gigs of “out of sync” in both directions on something and just destroyed the sync and rebuilt it to stop … whatever it was doing.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great tool for syncing things between computers; but I would not rely on it for backup (and prefer having a backup solution on top of the synced directories). There are real backup tools out there that are far better suited to this sort of thing. I suggested Kopia, you should get some integrity checking using its builtin sync (as it won’t be able to figure out what to sync if your origin is corrupted); you won’t get that with a straight up rsync or a syncthing, they’re not application-aware enough to know they’re about to screw you over.

Restic has a similar feature but I’ve always found Restic’s approach much more frustrating and not-at-all friendly for anyone less than a veteran in systems administration. Kopia keeps configuration in the repository itself, has a GUI for desktop use that runs jobs for you automatic, automatically uses the secrets manager appropriate for your operating system, etc … Restic you kind of have to DIY a lot of basic things and the “quick start tutorial” just kinda ignores these various concerns.

Even if you plan to just use cron jobs, Kopia will do sane things with maintenance. Restic last I checked you still need to manually run maintenance tasks and if any job maintenance or otherwise fails, you need to make sure to unlock the repository (which if you haven’t set up notifications … well now you’ve got a silent backup failure and your backups aren’t running).

I just kept running into a sea of “oh this could be bad” footguns with Restic that made me uncomfortable trusting it as my primary backup. I’m sure Restic can be a great tool if used in expert hands with everything appropriately setup; but nobody tells you how to do that … and I get the feeling a lot of people are unaware of what they’re getting into.

The folks making Kopia … they seem like they really know what they’re doing and I’ve been very happy with it. We’re moving from rsnapshot to Kopia at work now as well (rsnapshot is also fairly good you’ve got a bunch of friends with NASes that support hard links and SSH, but it’s CHATTY and has no deduplication, encryption, data integrity verification is basically left to the file system – so you better be running ZFS – etc).

Duplicati’s developer is back too, so that might be something to keep an eye on … but as it stands, the project has been bit rotting for a while and AFAIK still has some pretty significant performance issues when restoring data.

You could use kopia for this (but you would need to schedule cron jobs or something similar to do it).

The way this works with kopia… You configure your backups to a particular location, then in-between runs there’s a sync command you can use to copy the backup repository to other locations.

Kopia also has the ability to check a repository for bad blobs via its verify function (so you can make sure the backups stored are actually at least X% viable).

Using zerotier or tailscale (for this probably tailscale because of the multithreading) would let you all create a virtual network between the devices that lets them directly talk to each other. That would allow you to use kopia’s sync functionality with devices in their homes.

Syncthing is not a backup tool and may very well destroy all your data on its own (though this is rare).

Huh, TIL…

Why specifically are you a fan of XFS for network mounts?

Yeah, so in that case I’d just use ext4 or, if you want checksums, btrfs (though this doesn’t matter too much as btrfs currently doesn’t support raid in any real sense, so it can’t actually correct the data, just tell you it’s bad).

ZFS can do the checksums with RAID and error correction, but getting that on Linux (without using a specialty distro like TrueNAS Scale) is still a pain.

“*arr apps”?

In theory you could use Telegram X and reimplement the tdlib API to create such a client. It wouldn’t be the main Telegram Android app, but Telegram X is in someways even nicer.

If you don’t strictly speaking need XMPP, you might want to checkout Jami which is a peer-to-peer based chat app with a fairly polished UI. It still definitely feels like beta software at times though, so more of a “be aware of it and check in on it” than “actively use this for all of your chats” sort of thing.

I’m surprised, I was pretty sure anything with Battleye flat out rejected virtualization.

I thought Destiny used Battleye but I must be mistaken on one of these points.

AFAIK, Windows firewall is perfectly fine, usable in commercial spaces, etc. You’re probably going to be getting into more “hobbyist” firewalls even if you do find one … and a firewall isn’t something you particularly want that with. You want something that’s well designed and well maintained.

(I say this as a guy that has run Linux on basically everything for … over a decade)

If you’re going to use Windows … just use Windows firewall. There’s no real reason that I can think of anyways to replace that one component with something FOSS.