Basically, yes. You can configure most cron programs to mail task output to you (it’s usually done by setting the MAILTO variable in the crontab, provided sendmail is available on your system).
I use that to do things like:
0 9 11 10 * echo 'lunch with John Doe at 12:20'
It sends me a mail, and I can see the upcoming events with crontab -l. If it’s not a recurring event, I then delete the rule.
My favorite cost cutting tip is to avoid big webapps running on docker, and instead do with small UNIX utilities (cron instead of a calendar, text files instead of note taking app, rsync instead of a filehosting dropbox-like app, simple static webserver for file sharing, etc). This allows me to run my server on a simple Raspberry Pi, with less than 500mb of used RAM in average, and mininal energy consumption. So, total cost of the setup:
With that, I run all services I need on a single machine, and I have a backup plan for recovery of both hardware and software.
Getting used to a UNIX shell and to UNIX philosophy can take some time, but it’s very rewarding in making everything more simple (thus more efficient).
I’m using a pi4 8gb as my server, with a pi4 2gb as backup in case the first one dies. It’s a very classic server, running postfix/courier-imap for mails, lighttpd for web, bind9 for dns, ergo for irc, sqlite3 for databases. I also use fail2ban for IDS and cron to run tons of various task. All of that is hosted on a Gentoo linux OS.
The one thing I don’t want to use is docker. I love docker for development or for deploying the main app at work, but it makes managing updates a nightmare for handling multiple services on my server (most your containers probably contain vulnerable software due to lack of system updates), and it eats resources needlessly. Then again, it’s made possible because I avoid the big webapps that usually need it.
At the very least, it means the CEO doesn’t understand the domain. It may be because he sees this part of the business as secondary and less important, or because it was developed so fast he didn’t have time to grasp the concepts, probably he was not a driving force in that effort. I certainly hope the tech side is more aware. Without more proof of CEO implication, I certainly would not bet on that horse to survive in the distant future, though.
“Git hosting” would be more appropriate. Unless that by frontend, you mean specifically web frontend, but that would be weird, because forges also provide the web backend part.
Sourceforge was the biggest FOSS host in the 2000s, before GitHub (mainly because there was not much centralization to begin with). That train is long gone. :) Sure, the name and website Sourceforge still exist. Myspace, Digg and Yahoo do too. They are basically web ghosts, only an echo of what they once were.
Actually, I do use git bare repos for CD too. :) The ROOT/hooks/post-update executable can be anything, which allows to go wild : on my laptop, a push to a bare repos triggers deploy to all the machines needing it (on local or remote networks), by pushing through ssh to other bare repos hosted there, which builds and installs locally, given they all have their own post-update scripts ; all of that thanks to a git push and scripts at the proper paths. I don’t think any forge could do it more conveniently.
For me the main interest of forges is to publish my code and get it discovered (before GitHub, getting people to find your repos hosted on your blog’s server was a nightmare). Even for the collaboration, I could do with emails. That being said, most people aren’t on top of their inbox, in which mails from family are mixed with work mails and commercial spam in one giant pile of unread items, so it’s a good thing for them we have those issue trackers.
^^
Oh, my apologies, Sourceforge! Say hi to Myspace for me!
That’s the name we use to designate software like GitHub, GitLab and similar, which provide repositories hosting and tooling like issue trackers. It’s supposed to be named like that because of SourceForge, the oldest of such tools, although I didn’t hear the term “forge” before the last 5 years or so, long after SourceForge demise, so I imagine there is a bit of nostalgia in this name (not sure who is nostalgic of SourceForge, though 😂). The wikipedia page : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forge_(software)
There hasn’t been a new Git repo launch in almost a decade
Am I the only person annoyed they seem to mistake repositories for forges? It’s already annoying when casual users say “git” for “GitHub”, but those guys actually want to build a forge, explaining they’re going to do better than anyone else. Maybe start by properly using the terms?
The good news is that with ircv3 being worked on, it may soon(ish) be quite dusted. :) It adds features like reply threads, history from when you weren’t connected, message editing and deletion, and more!
I do have to say for the purpose of tinkering I love these bigger projects because you learn so much on the way. Now having read your answer I am even more exited to try it out :D
That’s awesome to hear! Welcome, and have fun! :)
I haven’t heard of most of your abbreviations/term till now
Oh, my apologies. Here is a definition list :
I guess slapping it on my local raspberry pi wouldn’t be enough no?
Oh no, that would be way not enough. :) Managing a mailserver is a sysadmin task by itself. While you don’t need to do much once it works (which often is a perk of sysadmin work, compensating for the fact that when it does not work, they may have to wake in the middle of the night to fix it), it’s notoriously difficult to get right : you have the configuration of the mailserver to get right first, so that you can send emails, but nobody else can and you don’t become a spam relay without knowing it. Then you have a lot of configuration to do to be able to retrieve your emails from your server, which uses other protocols that you must learn about. Then you have “optional” things that you must setup (SPF, DKIM and DMARC), which you won’t be able to send mails to gmail or outlook if you don’t set them up properly. And when you will have got all of that right, you will have enough experience to be hired as a sysadmin. :)
I can’t provide a good resource for learning it, I learned it 15 years ago when it was way more simple (before SPF and DKIM), and picked every addition as they appeared, but any course on how to manage a mail system will do. There is no difference in doing it for your self-hosted server and for a company (except maybe that for a company, they’ll make you handle users in a database, which you can forego for your own needs). I would recommend to learn how to use postfix first, then any imap server (courier-imap is a top runner), and when you’re comfortable with that, you can learn about SPF, then DKIM, then DMARC. But be aware before going through it that this is basically learning a new skill (sysadmin). You can find docker images that setup everything automatically for you, but I would recommend against that, because at some point, things will break and you will have no idea how to fix them. And if you try to fix them while not knowing well what you’re doing, that’s a good way to end up being a spam relay. Plus, those docker images are difficult to customize, which quite defeats the point of managing your own mail system to begin with.
Well I didn’t want google to read my mails
Sadly, it only works if no one in the recipients of the mail is on gmail (or if everyone use pgp, which I would tend to think is even more rare).
I host my own mailserver as well, and I would add as benefits:
username+something@host). That also makes routing/filtering mails way more easy, you just have to match the recipient address.Oh, I see. Totally makes sense. :)
I guess it depends on the country, but here in France, yes, most landline ISPs provide static IPs (maybe all? there are a couple I haven’t try ; mobile IPs are always dynamic, though). It was not always the case, but I haven’t had a dynamic IP since the 2000’. I feel you, dealing with pointing a domain to a dynamic IP is a PITA.
Ahah, yeah, I protected myself against accidentally banning my own IPs. First, my server is a Pi at home, so I can just plug a keyboard and a screen to it in case of problem. But more importantly, as I do that blacklisting through fail2ban, I just whitelisted my IPs and those of my relatives (it’s the ignore_ip variable in /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf)., so we never get banned even if we trigger fail2ban rules (hopefully, grandma won’t try to bruteforce my ssh!). It allowed me to do an other cool stuff : I made a script ran through cron that parses logs for 404 and checks if they were generated by one of the IPs in that list, mailing me if it’s the case. That way, I’m made aware of legit 404 that I should fix in my applications.
Oh, ok, you whitelist IPs in your firewall. That certainly works, if a bit brutal. :) (then again, I blacklist everyone who is triggering a 404 on my webserver, maybe I’m not the one to speak about brutality :P ) You don’t even need a VPN, then, unless you travel frequently (or your ISP provides dynamic IP, I guess).
I’m not sure about the feasibility of this (my first thought would be that ssh on the host can be accessed directly by IP, unless maybe the VPN software creates its own network interface and sshd binds on it?), but this does not remove the need for frequent updates anyway, as openssh is not the only software that could have bugs : every software that opens a port should be protected as well, and you can’t hide your webserver on port 80 behind a VPN if you want it to be public. And it’s anyway a way more complicated setup than just doing updates weekly. :)
If you do not neglect updates, then by all mean, changing ports does not hurt. :) Sorry if I may have strong reaction on that, but I’ve seen way too many people in the past couple decades counting on such anecdotal measures and not doing the obvious. I’ve seen companies doing that. I’ve seen one changing ports, forcing us to use the company certificate to log in, and then not update their servers in 6 months. I’ve seen sysadmins who considered that rotating servers every year made it useless to update them, but employees should all use Jumpcloud “for security reasons”! Beware, though, mentioning port changing without saying it’s anecdotal and the most important thing is updates, because it will encourage such behaviors. I think the reason is because changing ports sounds cool and smart, while updates just sound boring.
That being said, port scanning is not just about targeted pentesting. You can’t just run nmap on a host anymore, because IDS (intrusion detection systems) will detect it, but nowadays automated pentesting tools do distributed port scanning to bypass them : instead of flooding a host to test all their ports, they test a range of hosts for the same port, then start over with a new port. It’s half-way classic port scanning and the “let’s just test the whole IP range for a single vulnerability” that we more commonly see nowadays. But they are way harder to detect, as they scan smaller sets of hosts, and there can be hours before the same host is tested twice.
The best you can do to know if it was an attack is to inspect the logs when you have time. There are a lot of things that can cause a process going wild without being an attack. Sometimes, even filling the RAM can cause the CPU to appear overloaded (and will freeze the system anyway). One simple way to figure out if it’s an attack : reboot. If it’s a bug, everything will get back to normal. If it’s a DDoS, the problem will reappear up to a few minutes after reboot. If it’s a simple DoS (someone exploiting a bug of a software to overload it), it will reappear or not given if the exploit was automated and recurring, or was just a one-shot.
The fact that both your machines fell at the same time would tend to make think it’s an attack. On the other hand, it may just be a surge of activity on the network with VPSes with way not enough resources to handle it. Or it may even be a noisy neighbor problem (the other people sharing with you the real hardware on which your VPSes run who will orverload it).
However Port 22 should never be open to the outside world.
Wat. How do you connect with ssh, then? You can bind openssh to an other port, but the only thing it changes is that you have less noise in your logs. The real most important security measure is to make sure your softwares are always up to date, as old vulnerable software is the first cause of penetration (and yes, it’s better to deactivate password login to only use ssh keys).
That’s the same thing. :) If you reduce computing load, you reduce the need for costly hardware and you reduce the need for energy, thus you reduce the amount of money needed to build and run your setup. There’s a saying in (software) engineering : “reducing energy consumption and increasing performances requires the same optimizations”. Make your code faster (by itself, not by buffing up hardware) and it consumes less energy. Make your application simpler, and it will run faster, and it will consume less energy. It’s not an absolute truth (it sometimes happen that you make your code faster and it consumes more energy), but it’s true most of the time.