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Cake day: Jun 17, 2023

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If you get your domain from OVH, you get one single mailbox (be it with a lot of aliases, like a different email-address for every service/website you use) for free.


selfhosted service to share files to SSO-authenticated users ?
Hi all, Well, my question is in the title of of post. :-) Does somebody know if there exists an easy sollution to share files to users (e.g. members of an organisation), based on the fact that the user is known in a SSO (authentik) ? I know nextcloud would be an option, but that would create a nextcloud account for all the users, .. which is quite overkill for what is needed here. I know we can probably build something based on apache, PHP or so, .. but if there would be a ready-to-use service for this, that would be nice. (and probably a lot more secure then what I would build myself :-) ). Kr.
fedilink

What is your ‘deleted files’ policy? How long do you keep them? I had a similar issue but then found out that the nextcloud cron-process wasn’t running so files in the ‘deleted files’ folder where never really deleted.


Well, based on advice of Samsy, take a backup of home-server network to a NAS on your home-network. (I do home that your server-segment and your home-segment are two seperated networks, no?) Or better, set up your NAS at a friend’s house (and require MFA or a hardware security-key to access it remotely)


What was that saying again?

the biggest thread to the safety and cybersecurity of the citizens of a country … are managers who think that cybersecurity is just a number on an exellsheet

(I don’t know where I read this, but I think it really hits the nail on the head)


I have been thinking the same thing.

I have been looking into a way to copy files from our servers to our S3 backup-storage, without having the access-keys stored on the server. (as I think we can assume that will be one of the first thing the ransomware toolkits will be looking for).

Perhaps a script on a remote machine that initiate a ssh to the server and does a “s3cmd cp” with the keys entered from stdin ? Sofar, I have not found how to do this.

Does anybody know if this is possible?


Yes. Fair point.

On the other hand, most of the disaster senarios you mention are solved by geographic redundancy: set up your backup // DRS storage in a datacenter far away from the primary service. A scenario where all services,in all datacenters managed by a could-provider are impacted is probably new.

It is something that, considering the current geopolical situation we are now it, -and that I assume will only become worse- that we should better keep in the back of our mind.


I will put “multicloud” on my wishlist.

Looking at it from a infosec point of view, cloud-providers are an ideal target. All the customers who have just lost all their data now complaining to the cloud-provider are the ideal pressure-mechanism to get the cloud-provider to pay out.


In this case, it is not you -as a customer- that gets hacked, but it was the cloud-company itself. The randomware-gang encrypted the disks on server level, which impacted all the customers on every server of the cloud-provider.


The issue is not cloud vs self-hosted. The question is “who has technical control over all the servers involved”. If you would home-host a server and have a backup of that a network of your friend, if your username / password pops up on a infostealer-website, you will be equaly in problem!


Well, the issue here is that your backup may be physically in a different location (which you can ask to host your S3 backup storage in a different datacenter then the VMs), if the servers themselfs on which the service (VMs or S3) is hosted is managed by the same technical entity, then a ransomware attack on that company can affect both services.

So, get S3 storage for your backups from a completely different company?

I just wonder to what degree this will impact the bandwidth-usage of your VM if -say- you do a complete backup of your every day to a host that will be comsidered as “of-premises”


Hi all, As self-hosting is not just "home-hosting" I guess this post should also be on-topic here. Beginning of the year, bleeping-computers published an interesting post on the biggest cybersecurity stories of 2023. Item 13 is an interesing one. (see URL of this post). Summary in short A Danish cloud-provider gets hit by a ransomware attack, encrypting not only the clients data, but also the backups. For a user, this means that a senario where, not only your VM becomes unusable (virtual disk-storage is encrypted), but also the daily backups you made to the cloud-provider S3-storage is useless, might be not as far-fetches then what your think. So .. conclussion ??? If you have VMs at a cloud-provider and do daily backups, it might be usefull to actually get your storage for these backups from a different provider then the one where your house your VMs. Anybody any ideas or remarks on this? (*) https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/the-biggest-cybersecurity-and-cyberattack-stories-of-2023/
fedilink

First of all, thanks to all who replied! I didn’t think there would have been that many people who self-host a SSO-server, so I am happy to see these replies.

As a side-note, I have also been looking into making the setup more robust, i.e. add redundancy. For a “light redundant” senario (not fully automatic, but -say- where I have a 2nd instance ready to run, so I just need to adapt the DNS-record if it is needed), can I conclude from the “makeing a backup” question, that I just need to run a 2nd instance of postgres and do streaming-replication from the main instance to the backup-instance ?

Or are there other caviats I haven’t thought about?


Great thanks! (also thanks to Mike … you have some valid points)


authentik … how to backup ?
Hi all, Short question. Does somebody here run authentik as single sign-on provider? (dockerised?) I'm looking for information on how to best backup a authentik server? Just do a backup of the postgres database and the docker-compose file? Something else? How crucial is the dump.rdb file of the redis container? Kr.
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For me, the first goal is to simply understand the setup. I now have been able to create a setup with two frontend jvb-instances and one backend. In the end, the architecture setup of a jitsi-server is quite nicely explained, and -by delving a little bit into the startup scripts of the docker-based jitsi setup, you do get some idea of how things fit together.

From a practicle point of view, I think I’ll go for the basic setup (1 backend, 2 frontends) natively on two servers, and -if the backend server would go down- just have a dockerised backup-setup ready to go if it would be needed.

Thanks!


jitsi … redundant setup ?
H all, Somebody here selfhosting jitsi meet? I am working on a jitsi-meet setup for an organisation, now looking at the options for redundancy. I have noticed you can configure multiple XMPP servers on the jitsiivideobridge. What is the exact goal of this? Can you connect a jvb to multiple jitsj servers (domains)? or is this only for making the jitsii backend redundant? Kr.
fedilink

Hi,

Good idea!

And once you have you domainname, you can do the following:

  • set up a reverse reverse proxy (apache, nginx) in front of nextcloud
  • in the configuration of apache/bginx use virtual hosts.
  • make sure that the default virtualhost (in apache, that is the the one that does not have “ServerName”) first in the configuration. Point that to a local website with just an empty directory
  • then, AFTER the default virtual host, add the reverse-proxy configuration of your nextcloud instance.

What this does, is that if somebody addresses your website with a URL that does not contain the exact hostname of your nextcloud, the webquery will go to the empty website and simply return a 404. A hacker who does a webrequest to “https://your-ip-address/login” will just get a “404 not found” and not reach your nextcloud instance.

This keeps people who just scan the internet for vulnerable systems and try out all kind of URLs to try to get in out of your nextcloud.

Of course, this only works if you keep the full hostname of your instance to yourself and do not post it somewhere (including social media, mailing-lists, …)

Good luck with your nextcloud server


for the nextcloud instance on my local LAN , I use the .local domain (multicast DNS). Just enable avahi on your server and you can use hostname.local on your network without having to deal with local DNS on your router and so on.


Hi,

What is the reason you do not want a domain? it is not that DNS-domains are that expensive these days. The cheapest option I found is .ovh (which is one of the major cloud-providers in France), which is 3 euro / year (+VAT). You can then put as much hosts or subdomains under it, and it supports dynamic IP.

Agreed, .ovh is not the most “professional” looking domain, but it depends on what you want to do. If your goal is simply to have something for yourself / family / friends, then this is good enough.

BTW. Having your own domain for a nextcloud instance has additional advances: you can get a real https/tls certificate from letsencrypt, and -if you put a reverse proxy in front of your NC- it shields you from people who just scan the complete IP-space of the internet but who do not know your domain.


Hi, I have it running as of today. apache reverse-proxy native on the server and “stable-8922” in docker.

I have been wondering if it makes sense to move the jvb from docker to the server. I guess that is the part of the system that pulls most of the traffic. I don’t know if this make any real difference for performance or not.

Anycase. All, thanks again for the help. Appriciate it. :-)

Kr.


Hi Neutrom, I don’t know this one. I’ll check it out. Thx! 👍


Hi all. Thanks for the feedback. Very much appreciated 👍. … I will set it up in docker.


Selfhosting jitsi meet ?
With jitsi meet now requireing registration (something I do understand, .. but I just happen not to have a google, MS or meta account), I am looking at selfhosting a jitsi meet for personal use. Has somebody already done this? What are your experience? What are the hardware requirements? Docker or native? Linux or other OS? (FreeBSD)?
fedilink

A /48 is quite overkill for a home customer. Do you have 65536 LANs at home? Here in Belgium, we get a /56.


Australia looks like an interesting case. Iknow that in some countries, ISPs have to provide service to both urban and rural customers at the same price, which means that urban customers actually subsidize people living in rural areas. In some other cases, the gouvernements help pay for this.

Isn’t there a project in Australia that the federal gouvernement is subsidizing the role-out of fibre?


just out of interest … somebody here on satellite? I am interested to know the prices for sat services out there?


Hi,

I have also been thinking about selfhoating a jisti-meet server. Just how easy / difficult is it to selfhost it? Do you run it in docker or natively? Linux or some other OS (FreeBSD)?

Kr.