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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Sounds like you have had a very productive life! Your son is very lucky.

    Encourage the education. But there are loads of good careers that don’t need university degrees.
    And all the while, he can try and achieve his dream.

    From personal experience, university wasn’t useful for me - other than giving me time to figure out what I don’t want to do, and meeting friends that are still friends to this day.
    But I could’ve easily done an apprenticeship, or gone straight into some industry/company. Some days, I wish I had. Other days, I wouldn’t want to be doing anything other than what I am atm.

    Dream case, he makes it.
    Best case, he figures out what he wants to do by 21.
    Worst case, he’s still figuring it out when he’s 25.

    I wasn’t making decent money until I was late 20s. Even now, I can’t guarantee I have enough work next year. It’s extremely likely, but I’m self employed so…
    Knowing my folks will still support me means I can continue pursuing interesting, useful and innovative things, even in my 30s - even tho the support is no longer required.

    Maybe talk to some of your contacts in the football industry.
    See if they have similar “football or nothing”, or if they had backup plans.
    Talk to some managers, coaches, sports scientists, medics etc.
    Ask them how they would get into pro football. Ask them what happens to pro-football aspiring players that don’t make the cut.
    Use your experience and connections to help and support your son. And be there if it doesn’t work out.
    You might know better, but he still has to learn. The best lessons are mistakes.


  • Did you go straight into being a pro footballer? Or did you have back up plans? Like “if this doesn’t work out, I’ll be an electrician” or something?

    I’ve never had super lofty goals, but my parents always supported me in what I wanted to do. They never tried to steer me, but they did ask pertinent questions about what I was planning at various points. Probably to hint at bad idea.
    I feel like I could have asked them for money/support at any point for any of my projects/ideas/whatevers, and - after making sure I was serious - would have helped out however they could.
    I have a very unique career at this point, and I am only in this position because of the eclectic experience I have. And it is completely unrelated to my dreams as a kid or what I studied at university.

    Ultimately, he is growing up. He’s going to have to make mistakes.
    I’d say you have to be prepared to support him as much as you can in his dream of being a pro footballer.
    Maybe he won’t be a pro footballer, but he might get a satisfying career out of being football-adjacent. Medic, science, coaching.
    Or maybe he will try it for 5 years and eventually realise it’s not gonna happen, and be an electrician.
    Or maybe he will struggle for 2 years, realise he needs to double down, and make the cut a year later.

    I had a friend when I was growing up that dreamed of being an RAF pilot. Everything he did was around that.
    Due to some unfortunate life circumstances, that dream was ripped away in the space of a week. Completely out of anyone’s control, but he could no longer qualify as an RAF pilot.
    He was heartbroken. He’s now an engineer/mechanic in the RAF and loves tinkering with cars.

    He shouldn’t find another dream.
    But he should be aware that dreams don’t always come about. And if this dream doesn’t, would he be happy in an adjacent career? Or something else entirely?
    Help him research the backup plan.


  • I moved to endeavouros. First time using a rolling release, and I was struggling with some webdev stuff cause node was on a recent non-lts build and a few other things.
    Not a problem for building, cause I already have that containerised. But things like installing packages was refusing, and obviously couldn’t run dev workflows.

    Until I realised I should just work inside a container.

    I know vscode is still Microsoft (and I’m sure I could get it to work with vscodium), but the dev container workflow is fantastic.
    Absolute game changer.
    And I know I can easily work on a different platform, os whatever. And still have the same dev environment.


  • You need to control a domain, so LE can verify you are the controller of the domain, then LE will issue you a certificate saying you are the controller of the domain.

    For a wildcard LE cert, you need to use the DNS challenge method.
    Essentially the ACME client (or certbot or whatever) will talk to LE and say “I want a DNS challenge for *.example.com”.
    LE will reply “ok, your order number 69, and your challenge code is DEADBEEF”.
    ACME then interacts with your public nameserver (or you have to do this manually) and add the challenge code as a txt record _acme-challenge.example.com. (I’ve been caught out by the fact LE uses Google DNS for resolution, and Google will only follow 1 level of NS records from the root authorative nameserver).
    All the while, LE is checking for that record. When it finds the record, it mints a wildcard certificate.
    ACME then periodically checks in with LE asking for order 69. Once LE has minted the cert, it will return it to acme.
    And now you have a wildcard cert.

    So, how to use it on a local domain?
    Use a split horizon DNS method.
    Ensure your DHCP is handing out a local DNS for resolving.
    Configure that local DNS to then use 8.8.8.8 or whatever as it’s upstream.
    Then load in static/override records to the local DNS.
    Pihole can do this. OPNSense/pfSense can do this. Unifi can do some of this.

    How does this work?
    Any device on your network that wants to know the IP of example.example.com will ask it’s configured DNS - the local DNS that you have configured.
    The local DNS will check it’s static assignments and go “yeh, example.example.com is 10.10.3.3”.
    If you ask you local DNS for google.com, it won’t have a static assignment for it, so it will ask it’s upstream DNS, and return that result.
    And it means you aren’t putting private IP spaces on public NS records.

    Then you can load in your wildcard cert to 10.10.3.3, and you will have a trusted HTTPS connection.

    Here is a list of LE clients that will automate LE certs.
    https://letsencrypt.org/docs/client-options/

    Have a read through and pick your desired flavour.
    Dig into the docs of that flavour, and start playing around.

    If it’s all HTTPS, consider using something like Nginx Proxy Manager (https://nginxproxymanager.com/) as a reverse proxy in front of your services and for managing the LE cert.
    It’s super easy to use, has a decent GUI, and then it’s only 1 IP to point all DNS records to.


  • DNS and domains are just human-friendly IP addresses.

    You only have 1 public IP address.
    So, to access different services you need to use different ports.
    Or run a service on a single port in front of the other services that can understand the connections and forward the connections to the actual services - known as a reverse proxy. In the case of http/https, there are plenty of reverse proxies that can direct requests based on all sorts of parameters, subdomains being one of them.

    If you are just starting out, I’d recommend a docker compose stack and Nginx Proxy Manager.
    Learning containers & docker makes everything easier.
    NPM is a very easy to use reverse proxy with a nice GUI, so you don’t have to configure CertBot/ACME or learn the specific config language of Nginx.

    If you are unsure of domains and all that, you can try it out for free.
    Your computer has a hosts file (/etc/hosts on Linux, I think it’s in system32 on windows). This allows you to tell the computer “for the domain example.com use the IP 10.0.0.200” or whatever you want. You need a hosts file entry for each subdomain.
    What this means is that you can run up a docker compose stack on your computer and point a bunch of sub domains to 127.0.0.1, use self-signed certs, and play around with nginx proxy manager and docker.
    No money spent, no records published, no traffic leaving your computer.
    Zero risk.

    There are loads of tutorials out there on NPM and docker compose stacks. Probably some close to your specific requirements.


  • I was aware of kubernetes 6 months ago, but had never used it.
    I got a 3 node cluster running in a day, and was learning kubernetes.
    The only issues I’ve had were due to hardware failure causing etcd instability, and misconfigured operators generating terabytes of logs leading to pod eviction.

    I don’t know what would signify it being production ready. It had all the levers and knobs I needed. I haven’t yet needed to run a sysadmin debug container to poke around the host OS.
    It’s also great for learning. If you make a mistake, it’s very easy to wipe and reinstall and get back to where you were.





  • accessed from the internet

    Accessed only by you and close family/friends who you are also hosting services for?
    Or accessed by anyone?

    “Accessed by anyone” carries more risk.

    “Accessed by users you host for”, the risks can be eliminated (well, other than risks from those users) by using a VPN. As in, only the people authorised to be on the VPN can access the services.
    Wireguard is the go-to these days.
    Tailscale is much easier and free for 3 users and 100 nodes.

    If it absolutely has to be “accessed by anyone” I would look into a “reverse proxy over VPN/tunnel” or just straight tunnel style approach like chisel (or crowbar, or corkscrew), rathole, frp, or cloudflare tunnels.

    Basically, don’t point a domain at your home public IP and don’t forward ports on your home router/firewall





  • So you have local DNS set up?
    If you ping (or dig) speed.mydomain.local, does it resolve the same address as local_ip?
    Considering you are accessing local_ip:3000 and the domain on port 443, there is clearly a firewall somewhere redirecting packets or a reverse proxy on the domain but not on local_ip:3000

    Follow the port chain, forwarding, proxying etc. One of those will be bottlenecking. Then figure out why

    Edit:
    Just because your ISP speed is 100mbps and you are seeing 500mbps, doesn’t mean the connection isn’t hairpinning through your router via it’s public IP (as in, the traffic never leaves your router, but still goes through it)




  • Hmm, maybe I mean moral?
    Like, there is a correct way to go about something regardless of context.
    As opposed to doing something because of the context.

    Any exploit should be notified to the software/platform maintainers with a proper disclosure timeline to ensure it gets fixed in a timely way.
    That is the correct way.

    Abusing the shit out of a poorly implemented nazi government is the moral thing to do, but would go against a white hat’s ethics. Collectively a good thing to do, but not the correct thing to do as a white hat.

    Are gray hats more ethically and morally true?
    This is getting to deep for me.



  • Yeh, the difference between being high value (twitter) and an actual high value (government) target are entirely different. I bet many countries were salivating over the mere idea of these servers.

    I guess they will pass some laws about “hacking being illegal”, arrest some poor self-hosters that did nothing wrong, declare a victory, and change absolutely nothing - other than ruining people’s lives.

    I remember an article about a batch of compromised NICs from China that had backdoor firmware in them. You can harden your software system all you want, but when the literal hardware is backdoored, you are doomed.
    I think it was Supermicro. So am American company and not a small Mfr.
    I wonder if DOGE have reputable hardware, or if they cheapest out on servers.


  • Yeh, but they aren’t keeping control.
    They have been elected. They have 4 years.
    So far, it doesn’t seem that they have broken any laws or whatever, that would cause the system to reject their workings. They’ve rigged the courts, so the system is unlikely to reject their workings.
    I’d say it’s more of a constitutional coup. They are using loop holes to seize more power.
    I think it will be an attempted self-coup in 4 years.

    Regardless, it isn’t worth arguing about.
    It’s wrong. It’s a shit sandwich, the flavour of shit doesn’t matter.