I know, I know, clickbaity title but in a way it did. It also brought in the situation in the first place but I’m just going to deliberately ignore that. Quick recap:
I came home at 3pm from the city, my internet at home didnt work.
checked multiple devices, phones worked out of wifi, I figured I need to restart the router
I login to the router and it responds totally normal but my local network doesnt. (Its always dns, I know)
I check the router log and see 100s of login attempts over the past couple of days.
I panic and pull the plug, try to get into my server by installing an old monitor, works, many errors about dns
Wife googles with her phone, seems I had https login from outside on and someone found the correct port, its disabled now
Obviously, local network still down, I replug everything and ssh into the server which runs pihole as dns
pihole wont start dns, whatever I do
I use history and find I "chmod 700"ed the dns mask directory instead of putting it in a docker volume…
I check the pihole.log, nothing
I check the FTL log, there is the issue
I return it to 777, everything is hunky dory again.
Now I feel very stupid but I found a very dangerous mistake by having my lan fail due to a less dangerous mistake so I’ll take this as a win.
Thanks for reading and have a good day! I hope this helps someone at some day.
One word of advice. Document the steps you do to deploy things. If your hardware fails or you make a simple mistake, it will cost you weeks of work to recover.
This is a bit extreme, but I take my time when setting things up and automate as good as possible using ansible. You don’t have to do this, but the ability to just scrap things and redeploy gives great peace of mind.
And right now you are reluctant to do this because it’s gonna cost you too much time. This should not be the case. I mean, just imagine things going wrong in a year or two and you can’t remember most things you know now. Document your setup and write a few scripts. It’s a good start.
I get your point. Ansible is quite interesting too. I do document most of the things I do but I have to admit I have been slacking a bit, recently. There is just so much stuff that needs doing and a lot of interesting projects to learn about that sometimes stuff gets forgotten.
My personal impression of the linux space is still that folks get dumped on by the community for not being immersed in the nitty gritty though.
Thats neither fun nor will it work to get more people interested in linux. People make mistakes, learn to help without judging.
I know what you mean. Most people mean well, some are a bit too aggressive, but probably also mean well. I honestly sometimes roll my eyes when I start reading about tailscale, cloudflare tunnels etc. The main thing is not to expose anything you don’t absolutely need to expose.
For access from the outside the most you should need is a random high port forwarded for ssh into a dedicated host (can be a VM / container if you don’t have a spare RaspberryPi). And Wireguard on a host which updates the server package regularly. So probably not on your router, unless the vendor is on top of things.
Regarding ansible and documenting, I totally get your point. Ten years ago I was an absolute Linux noob and my flatmate had to set up an IRC bouncer on my RPi. It ran like that for a few years and I dared not touch anything. Then the SD card died and took down the bouncer, dynDNS and a few other things running on it.
It takes me a lot of time to write and test my ansible playbooks and custom roles, but every now and then I have to move services between hosts. And this is an absolute life saver. Whenever I’m really low on time and need to get something up and running, I write down things in a readme in my infra repository and occasionally I would go through my backlog when I have nothing better to do.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !selfhosted@lemmy.world
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:
Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
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.
Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
One word of advice. Document the steps you do to deploy things. If your hardware fails or you make a simple mistake, it will cost you weeks of work to recover. This is a bit extreme, but I take my time when setting things up and automate as good as possible using ansible. You don’t have to do this, but the ability to just scrap things and redeploy gives great peace of mind.
And right now you are reluctant to do this because it’s gonna cost you too much time. This should not be the case. I mean, just imagine things going wrong in a year or two and you can’t remember most things you know now. Document your setup and write a few scripts. It’s a good start.
I get your point. Ansible is quite interesting too. I do document most of the things I do but I have to admit I have been slacking a bit, recently. There is just so much stuff that needs doing and a lot of interesting projects to learn about that sometimes stuff gets forgotten.
My personal impression of the linux space is still that folks get dumped on by the community for not being immersed in the nitty gritty though.
Thats neither fun nor will it work to get more people interested in linux. People make mistakes, learn to help without judging.
Have a good one.
I know what you mean. Most people mean well, some are a bit too aggressive, but probably also mean well. I honestly sometimes roll my eyes when I start reading about tailscale, cloudflare tunnels etc. The main thing is not to expose anything you don’t absolutely need to expose.
For access from the outside the most you should need is a random high port forwarded for ssh into a dedicated host (can be a VM / container if you don’t have a spare RaspberryPi). And Wireguard on a host which updates the server package regularly. So probably not on your router, unless the vendor is on top of things.
Regarding ansible and documenting, I totally get your point. Ten years ago I was an absolute Linux noob and my flatmate had to set up an IRC bouncer on my RPi. It ran like that for a few years and I dared not touch anything. Then the SD card died and took down the bouncer, dynDNS and a few other things running on it.
It takes me a lot of time to write and test my ansible playbooks and custom roles, but every now and then I have to move services between hosts. And this is an absolute life saver. Whenever I’m really low on time and need to get something up and running, I write down things in a readme in my infra repository and occasionally I would go through my backlog when I have nothing better to do.
Thanks for elaborating! This is very helpful and I appreciate it. Will definitely check out ansible.
I think i‘m probably on my way there anyway as I‘m setting up my own git forge and starting to use proper versioning.
Then I‘ll probably try out ansible on some vm or new device. Have a good one!