stonewall's comments

Seems like this is becoming the terminal phase of the FOSS lifecycle for many projects.

I wonder what makes some long-lived communities immune to this behavior...OpenBSD comes to mind.

It's been what, over twenty years now?

If a technology is useful, you don't have to shame people into using it. At some point we will have to admit we made a big mistake.

(Author here.) Sadly its a lot less interesting: my home ISP still doesn't support IPv6.

Do people not use Linux anymore? General Linux admin skills were common knowledge when I was in university ~10 years ago, and many people ran Linux as their primary OS. Most of my friends had their own VPS with little pet websites.

Has the cloud killed this skillset? Seems increasingly less common these days.

I regularly back up to some external HDDs that I keep outside the home.

For pictures specifically, I recently discovered M-Disc [0], which are (allegedly) archival-quality, writable Blu-Ray discs. I'm considering burning an M-Disc of each year's pictures and storing them in jewel cases at a family member's house.

[0] https://www.mdisc.com/

Thank you for the kind words :)

Your perspective resonates with me! I have 3 kids under 6 years old, and I can definitely see this easily creeping up in my future.

My family situation is partly why I just went with plain old VMs and a Linux Distro with a 10 year support cycle. Its easy to keep all the moving parts in my head, and I figure I can mostly coast for 10 years and then reevaluate.

Thanks for reminding me, I also need to replace my UPS battery...

Nope, that would totally work.

I have some automation that does a weekly archive of everything important to a ZFS-based NAS. Home directories are also stored there over NFS, with hourly/weekly/monthly snapshots.

Once a month or so, I plug in two separate 5TB external HDDs and run a backup script that rsync's everything to each one (2 is 1 and 1 is none). These are stored outside my home.

I should probably get some kind of cloud-based / encrypted backup thing going as well. I don't claim that my current backup system is very good.

1. Yes, most people will tell you not to host your own email, because its too complicated/difficult to get your mail delivered reliably.

A lot of this is FUD. Yes, email is a bit more difficult to get right than say, hosting a web app behind Nginx. It's an old protocol, with many "features" bolted on years later to combat spam.

I'm not sure how email is easier to "hack," unless there is a zero day in Postfix or something. Back in the day, lots of script kiddies would find poorly configured mail servers that were happy to act as an open relay...maybe the stigma persists?

To deliver mail reliably, you need 4 things (in my experience):

- A static, public IP address with a good reputation (ie, not on any spam blacklists)

- A reverse DNS record that resolves back to your mail server's IP

- A domain SPF record that says that your mail server is allowed to deliver mail

- DKIM records and proper signing of outgoing messages (DMARC records help too)

2. I have a residential cable internet connection, but pay extra for static IPs. You can probably get by with a dynamic IP and some kind of dynamic DNS service, as long as you don't want to send email. You could still receive email locally if your MX recorded pointed to some kind of dynamic DNS record.

Note that some ISPs explicitly block outbound traffic on port 25 due to spammers. You might need to check with yours.

3. The only things I expose to the internet are Postfix (to send/receive emails), XMPP (to chat with others), and my web server. Everything else (calendar/contacts, IMAP, Syncthing, etc) stays behind my firewall, accessible only to internal hosts. I use wireguard on my Android phone to access these services seamlessly when I leave the house.

I've never bothered to conceal my IP address. For awhile, I experimented with using Mullvad VPN for all my egress traffic. Unfortunately I spent all day solving CAPTCHAs...wasn't worth it (for me, anyway).

EDIT: I should add, that I also have a "normie" email address at one of the usual providers that I use for really important things like bank accounts / utility providers. If I get hit by a bus, I don't want my (very nontechnical) wife to deal with sysadminning on top of my early death.

For all our personal communications though, we use my selfhosted email domain.

I almost certainly don't save any money considering electricity cost. I have a dell r630 for compute and an r730xd that I use as a NAS. Then I have one switch for the rack and a POE switch for the house. Probably 3-5amps total?

If I started over, I would probably choose more efficient gear.

That said, I don't mind paying for the electricity too much. I enjoy the warm fuzzies of knowing my data lives under my roof.

I plug my cable modem into a server running the OPNsense firewall [0], which has a wireguard plugin.

I set up a wireguard VPN in OPNsense.

Then I downloaded the wireguard app in F-Droid, and pasted my credentials from the wireguard Android app into the wireguard configs on the firewall.

I set the VPN in grapheneOS as "always on," so from my phone's perspective, it always has access to my internal network, even when on LTE. All my phones internet traffic ends up going through my home internet connection as a result.

[0] https://opnsense.org/

I self-host literally everything (email, calendar/contacts, VOIP, XMPP, you name it) from by basement with used 1U servers from eBay and a cable internet connection.

It was probably more hassle than most people would want to bother with to get it set up. But, with everything up and running, there's very little maintenance. I probably spend a few hours a month tinkering still, just because I enjoy it.

I use a stack of Proxmox VMs, FreeIPA for authn/authz, and Rocky Linux for all servers and workstations. My phone runs GrapheneOS with a Wireguard VPN back to the house. I don't expose anything to the public internet unless absolutely necessary.

I recently anonymized and Ansibilized my entire setup so that others might get some use out of it:

https://github.com/sacredheartsc/selfhosted

I get the impression that sabre/dav markets itself more as a platform on which one can build their own CalDAV/CardDAV applications.

I run it standalone, because I wanted a CalDAV system that could integrate with my local FreeIPA domain via LDAP. The only other project that met this requirement was davical [1], but it seemed much less active.

I ended up writing my own FreeIPA/LDAP authentication and principal backends [2] for sabre/dav. I believe they have a PDO backend built in, if you want to store your users in a database.

Basically, you composer install sabre/dav and wire all the components together in server.php. You'll also want to redirect the /.well-known/{caldav,carddav} URLs with a rewrite rule in your webserver. Most of this is described in their documentation [3].

If you're looking for turn-key solution with an administration GUI, you probably want Baikal [4], which is based on sabre/dav.

[1] https://www.davical.org/

[2] https://github.com/sacredheartsc/sabredav-freeipa

[3] https://sabre.io/dav/gettingstarted/

[4] https://sabre.io/baikal/

That may be true for the older version of sabre/dav that Baikal seems to depend on, but the current version of upstream works just fine with PHP 7.

I'm currently running sabre/dav with PHP 8.0 with no issues, and previously ran it with PHP 7.4.

I self-host my family's calendar and contacts using sabre/dav, and I've been very happy with it. It provides CalDAV, CardDAV, and per-user WebDAV shares.

For clients, I use Evolution on Linux and DAVx5 [1] on Android.

I wrote a FreeIPA integration plugin [2] to do authentication and group memberships using my local IPA domain.

[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/at.bitfire.davdroid/

[2] https://github.com/sacredheartsc/sabredav-freeipa