I’ve been struggling to wrap my head around a good security architecture for my mspencer.net replacement crap. Could I bug you for links?
I figured out a while ago to keep VM host management on a management VLAN, and I put each service VM on its own VLAN with heavy, service-specific firewalling and a private OS update repo mirror - but after hearing about ESXi jackpotting vulns and Broadcom shenanigans, I’ve gotten really disheartened. I’d love some safe defaults.
I think this needs to exist, but as a community supported system, not as a commercial product.
Pick a set of open technologies - but not the best, lightest weight, just pick something open.
Come up with a security architecture that’s reasonably safe and only adds a moderate amount of extra annoyance, and build out a really generic “self-hosted web hosting and VM company-like thingy” system people can rally around.
Biggest threat to this, I think, is that this isn’t the 90s and early 2000s any longer, and for a big project like this, most of the oxygen has been sucked out already by free commercial offerings like Facebook. The technical family friend offering to self-host email or forums or chat no longer gets gratitude and love, they get “why not Facebook?”
So… small group effort, resistant to bad actors joining the project to kill it, producing a good design with reasonably safe security architecture, that people can install step by step, and have fun using while they build and learn it.
Married, we both work from home, and we’re in an apartment.
First, all of my weird stuff is not between her work and living room pcs and the internet. Cable modem connects to normal consumer router (openwrt) with four lan ports. Two of those are directly connected to her machines (requiring a 150-ish foot cable for one), and two connect to my stuff. All of my stuff can be down and she still has internet.
Second, no rack mount servers with loud fans, mid tower cases only. Through command line tools I’ve found some of these are in fact capable of a lot of fan noise, but this never happens in normal operation so she’s fine with it.
Separately I’d say, have a plan for what she will need if something happens to you. Precious memories, backups, your utility and service accounts, etc. should remain accessible to her if you’re gone and everything is powered off - but not accessible to a burglar. Ideally label and structure things so a future internet installer can ignore your stuff and set her up with normal consumer internet after your business internet account is shut off.
Also keep in mind if you both switch over so every movie and show you watch only ever comes from Plex (which we both like), in an extended power outage situation all of your media will be inaccessible. It might be good to save a few emergency-entertainment shows to storage you can browse from your phone, usb or iXpand drive you can plug directly into your phone for example.
As a Flight Simulator / study-level airliner add-on enjoyer I want to point out / supplement the above, that the main point of a real-world airline transport pilot is handling exceptions and problems. Sure I can American-Truck-Simulator-Airbus-Edition my way through a flight from cold and dark at one gate to cold and dark at another. I do not know how to handle failures.
Makes for a fun shower thought. And a fun exercise in task saturation, going into the menu and triggering a bunch of random failures. You usually need a bunch for a fun challenge because, in a study level thingy, the list of potential faults is huge and most of them are just a reduction in redundancy, a “crew awareness” item, or loss of a convenience feature. But I do not belong on a flight deck under any realistic circumstance.
Gives you huge appreciation for how massively redundant airliners are, how much “we already thought this through and here’s what gives you the best chances at a safe outcome” research went into every checklist and procedure, and how much study and practice goes into training and maintaining every fight crew member, cabin crew included.
I think this was asked in good faith, but is unfortunately unlikely to produce useful discussion. The down-voters are right but the original poster shouldn’t feel bad for asking.
Short answer: it’s ok to say “maybe, we have no way to know, moving on” when something is unknowable like this.
Longer answer / topic hijack: as voters there are many contradictions in our system, and important and necessary information is often hidden from us. Doing the best we can might take various forms:
choose government ran by the least-evil people possible and trust the imperfect system formed by the structured interactions of those people
choose government that follows policies that align the best with your values or your ethical understanding of the world
choose government that is best able to reduce harms and injustices, in a practical and realistic way that anticipates the acts of other factions
choose government led by people you hate the least — no, this one is toxic, lazy, easy to manipulate with lies. Manipulators know the longer they keep people hot with emotion the less time people spend learning.
Please do not reply to this with hatred or calls for strong emotion. Leaders at any level can be deliberately evil, sure, but it’s never helpful to dehumanize entire clusters or demographics.
I still miss Naomi Wu’s tech videos.
Plagiarism should be part of the conversation here. Credit and context both matter.
How much stock ownership remains with the nonprofit Raspberry Pi Foundation? And will that be enough to hold off shareholder complaints that they aren’t being evil enough?
Could be a MUSIC/SP reference. (No I don’t remember how to use it either. I had a letter-letter-number-number %nemomus@academic.nemostate.edu email in college though.)
Ok that tears it. What firewall rules do I need to set so I get security updates and absolutely nothing else?
RIP to a fellow OpenVMS hobbyist.
$ SET PROC /PRIV=ALL $ REPLY /ENABLE=AFTERLIFE %OPCOM-F-VALUERR, error occurred while processing the command term “AFTERLIFE” -LIB-F-UNRKEY, “AFTERLIFE” is an unrecognized keyword $
Oh well, worth a try.
Thank you for your reply, but to be clear, I’m not looking for individual details to be spelled out in comments. What you said is absolutely correct, thoughtful, and very helpful. But emotions are running a little high and I’m worried I’ll accidentally lash out at someone for helping. Apologies in advance.
But do you have any links? Beyond just the general subjects of security architecture, secure design, threat modeling, and attack surface identification, I’d love to see this hypothetical “generic VM and web application housing provider in a box” come with a reasonably secure default architecture. Not what you’re running, but how you’re running it.
Like, imagine decades in the future, internet historians uncover documentation and backups from a successful generic hosting company. They don’t necessarily care what their customers are hosting, their job is to make sure a breach in one customer’s stuff doesn’t impact any other customer. The documentation describes what policies and practices they used for networking, storage, compute, etc. They paid some expensive employees to come up with this and maintain it, it was their competitive advantage, so they guarded it jealously.
I’d want to see that, but (a) a public, community project and (b) now, while it’s still useful and relevant to emulate it in one’s own homelab.
If I can get some of that sweet, sweet dopamine from others liking the idea and wishing for my success, maybe I can build my own first version of it, publish my flawed version, and it can get feedback.