Well, they have – I think. When you download an edited image, it supposedly downloads an image with edits applied. The original is optionally available too.

If you download the edited image, this is effectively equivalent to the status quo of image editing.

Disabling su is stupid because you always need some form of privilege escalation, restricting sudo to apt offers no security benefit whatsoever as apt allows arbitrary file modification, disabling root ssh provides no benefit when the unprivileged user has sudo access – I could go on.

Yikes, lot’s of bad advice in this thread.

My advice: Go develop an actual threat model and find and implement mitigations to the threats you’ve identified.

If you can’t do that, that’s totally okay; it’s a skill that takes a lot of time and effort to learn and is well-compensated in the industry.

You will need to pay for it. Either through an individual assessment by someone who knows what they’re doing, managed hosting services where the hoster is contractually liable and has implemented such measures, by risking becoming part of a botnet or by not hosting in a world-public manner.

My recommendations:

• Pay for proper managed hosting for every part of your system that you are not capable of securing yourself. This is a general rule that even experienced people follow by i.e. renting a VPS rather than exposing their own physical HW. There are multiple grades to this such as SaaS, PaaS and IaaS.
• Research, evalue and implement low-hanging fruit measures that massively reduce the attack surface. One such measure would be to not host in a manner that is accessible to the entire world and instead pay for managed authenticated access that is limited to select people (i.e. VPN such as Tailscale)
• git gud

Wow is that ever a load of snake oil.

I see this kind of guide as actively harmful because it creates a false sense of security.

That’s for encrypting your data to protect against an untrusted storage back-end.

They also have e2ee for users though where the server cannot see the plaintext either.

https://nextcloud.com/encryption/

Thanks for the explanation!

Though it ought to be possible to only respond with the new self-signed cert when LE does the challenge and with the previous, properly signed cert otherwise.

I found https://codeberg.org/neilpang/acme.sh/wiki/TLS-ALPN-without-downtime which demonstrates one method to achieve that but I lack practical experience judge whether that’s optimal.

Forgive my ignorance but why would that incur a downtime?

The only way I can think of for downtime to happen if you switched certs before the new one was signed (in which case …don’t) or am I missing something?

It also strikes me as weird that LE requires 80 but does allow insecure 443 after a redirect. Why not just do/allow insecure 443 in the first place?

There’s also the option of just leaving an offline disk at someone’s and visiting them regularly to update the backup.

Having an entirely offline copy also protects you/mitigates against a few additional hazards.

If you don’t process any user data beyond what is technologically required to make the website work, you don’t need to inform the user about it.

I doubt most user have any need for great nc performance.

I also doubt those “super performant nextcloud flakes” are actually any faster than a plain old default nc deployment; especially for our use-cases.

Using NixOS is a good recommendation though. Just don’t do flakes unless you actually understand what problem they intend to solve and how catastrophically bad they are at it.

I’d suspect the bots would just try again with a masked user agent when they receive a 403.

I think the best strategy would be to feed the bots shit that looks like real content.

I wouldn’t go ARM unless you really like tinkering with stuff.

I bought a used Celeron J4105-based system years ago for <100€ and it’s doing just fine. The N100 is its successor that should be better in every way.

Don’t be afraid to buy cheap used hardware. Especially things like RAM or cases that don’t really ever break in normal usage.

Two 4TB HDDs for 120€ each is a rip-off. That’s twice what you pay per GB in high capacity drives. Even in the lower capacity segment you can do much better such as 6TB for 100€.

If you have proper (tested!) backups and don’t have any specific uptime requirements, you don’t need RAID. I’d recommend getting one 16TB-20TB drive then. That would only cost you as much as those two overpriced 4TB drives.

after a week of runtime it told me 2.5kwh average. could be average per hour

If it gives you kWh as a measure for power, you should toss it because it’s obviously made by someone who had no idea what they were doing.

If this was over an hour, yes. Though you’d typically state it as 100W ;)

I was drawing an average of 2.5kWh after a week of monitoring my whole rack

That doesn’t seem right; that’s only ~18W. Each one of those systems alone will exceed that at idle running 24/7. I’d expect 1-2 orders of magnitude more.

Have you heard of peertube?

It’s slightly overkill for your purposes but it is basically a self-hosted Youtube with a similarly nice UI and everything.

Without knowing what you’ll use it for, neither.

Both don’t sound ideal though w.r.t. power consumption.

Oh absolutely; I would never advocate against verifying your data’s integrity.

I think I’d split that into two machines; a low power 24/7 server and a on-demand gaming machine. Performance and power savings don’t go well together; high performance machines usually have quite high idle power consumption.

It’d also be more resilient; if you mess up your server, it won’t take your gaming machine with it and vice versa.

putting all the components together to be a step up in complexity too, when compared to going pre-built. For someone who is comfortable with building their own PC I would definitely recommend doing that

I’d recommend that to someone who doesn’t know how to build a PC because everyone should learn how to do it and doing it for the first time with low-cost and/or used hardware won’t cause a great financial loss should you mess up.

Interesting. I suspect you must either have had really bad luck or be using faulty hardware.

In my broad summarising estimate, I only accounted for relatively modern disks like something made in the past 5 years or so. Drives from the 2000s or early 2010s could be significantly worse and I wouldn’t be surprised. It sounds like to me your experience was with drives that are well over a decade old at this point.