Can you imagine how many fucks I give about what “services” like Microsoft drops?

POP and IMAP are still alive.

See that you get a solid VPN bridge, much better than trying to fix a ton of different services if things go awry.

Ask yourself: is there any service that really, really needs to be public? Or is this only about availability for you or a very limited group (family, friends), which could be implemented via a VPN solution?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Hell, no!

I completely folded all services to the “inside”.

Get a used PC. Absolute sufficient for a private NAS. Can be slighly outdated, needs no monster graphics card (or none at all if it has basic on-board graphics), and runs all the peripherals you’ll ever need.

Multiport Knock patterns.

I know that risk, but that has been mitigated by other means. There is no open port exposed to the net waiting to be hacked. It only opens on demand for a single connection.

I’d say yes to RAID in a NAS or server in general. Just see that you don’t purchase the disks in one go - that was the only RAID in the last 30 years to fail on me (five disks within 20 serial numbers, four of them failed in total, two within a night). Was a pain in the a… to restore stuff from tape, but at least i had them.

That is a separate issue. Hardening a single service that happens to offer a login is easier than hardening a whole bunch of services that were never intended to face the net.

What I did was setting up two routers. The outer one is a big filter, and the only packets coming in went through it.

If someone would have managed to take over this outer router, the next step would have been to probe the inner router. For this, they would send packets originating at the outer router to anything on the inside net.

This would trigger an alert on the inner router that switches a relay, cutting the power on the outer router.

If it’s on a card, ditch it and replace it with a better one. If not, and you’ve got a spare slot, buy a new card.

Let me put it this way: I have a removable harddisk with my files from the universities’ VAX 11/780 in storage. Long enough?

I just sort by Artist and Album.

“If it gets out what gets into the sausage we make, we’ll get into a place we won’t get out anymore.”

One place to look at are web sites dealing with company bankruptcies. They are good for purchasing electronics and tools.

Back when windows and office licenses were bound to a sticker with a key number, I bought a stack of broken laptops for 10€. They were leftovers from an auction - nobody wanted them. I removed and tested RAM and harddisks, and then cut out the bottom of those laptops where the license stickers were. I sold each set of licenses, Windows and Office, for 10€ each, making a good profit. And kept the RAM and HDs that worked for my own use.

A bit pricy for home use with 8-10k bucks…

If you have a RPi, install Mozillla Firefox, and Ublock. The only way to watch YT without going nuts.

The “faucet” was water literally streaming in through the broken window during a thunderstorm. One of my coworkers went outside and shielded the window with a wooden board to reduce the flow.