if you don’t incorporate a backdoor

I’ve often thought about this, and since it has come up in convo, I’ll ask: If you were to implement a backdoor to your server, how would you go about that? Currently I have 3 vps and one rack in the closet. It is the vps I’m interested in the most. Only one vps offers a rescue ssh, and yes I can confirm, if you are not exceedingly careful on my setup, you can lock yourself right out. I run tailscale on everything and I often wondered if I could incorporate tailscale as a emergency backdoor.

(I’m not very good with the command line)

Me either so I take a lot of notes about commands and command sequences. Also, I find that Grok is pretty decent at explaining commands. AI is a wonderful tool, but you also need to do your due diligence in ascertaining whether AI has given you the correct information. I would not copy/paste random commands into a production server, but rather I have a small test server for that kind of stuff. Once I have the command, tested, and understand the command, I can then use that in a production environment.

In as much as I love a good WUI, you will have to learn some cli, it’s just inevitable, especially in a headless environment. It may seem daunting at first because there are literally thousands of commands and command sequences. I honestly doubt if even the geekiest nerds on the planet know all by heart. For each command sequence, there are probably hundreds of ways to compose the same command. I would admonish you to download Notepad ++ and start keeping notes on the commands you use. Later on, the fun part is looking back on your notes to see all the commands you now know and what they do.

Core utilities (like ls, cd, cat, etc.) from projects like GNU Coreutils provide around 100-200 commands. Additional tools from packages (e.g., grep, awk, sed) and system utilities (e.g., systemctl, iptables) can add hundreds more. On a system with many packages installed, running compgen -c | sort -u | wc -l in a Bash shell might show 2,000–10,000+ unique commands, depending on the setup.

I wish I had the confidence in my security provisions to self host my secrets on the internet. I do use bitwarden, but that is local to my machine. It works good for me, as my memory is shit. About the only thing I could say against Bitwarden is that the recent theme change was a huge mistake and caused a lot of people a lot of stress. Insomuch as the public outcry against the new theme was so great, they switched back to the old theme. Whoever created the new theme had to have been a sadist.

Anyway, what I wanted to know is why do people self host?

Wow. That’s a whole separate thread on it’s on. I selfhost a lot of my services because I am a staunch privacy advocate, and I really have a problem with corporations using my data to further bolster their profit margins without giving me due compensation. I also self host because I love to tinker and learn. The learning aspect is something I really get in to. At my age it is good to keep the brain active and so I self host, create bonsai, garden, etc. I’ve always been into technology from the early days of thumbing through Pop Sci and Pop Mech magazines, which evolved into thumbing through Byte mags.

Thanks

If a container uses Postgresql, you can’t auto update.

That’s interesting. I certainly will keep that in mind.

Thought I had answered you this morning, but apparently not. I did see the rate limit entry, but I thought that rate limits are like 100 pulls every 6 hours and I certainly haven’t exceeded 100. I just checked tho, and all but two have updated, so as you say, it’ll eventually get around to it. Thank you for the input.

Apologies. My bad…I misunderstood. Tags/Labels… To answer your question, no I am not running any tags. I just checked and all but two have updated, so it might be as a lot of people have suggested. It’ll get around to it. Sorry for my confusion.

If I have disabled labels in deployment, then I’m not using any labels, since I disabled them in deployment. Does that track?

WATCHTOWER_LABEL_ENABLE=false

I am running Portainer 2.21.5, and the latest version is 2.27.4.

The rest:

https://i.imgur.com/lhUPlPx.png

These are the Watchtower logs so far. https://pastes.io/watchtower

I didn’t see anything remarkable other than the error for Netdata but I got that fixed:

NFO[30906] Found new netdata/netdata:latest image (6376ffeda44a) 
INFO[30940] Stopping /NETDATA (a18a3e3409f3) with SIGTERM 
INFO[30942] Creating /NETDATA                            
ERRO[30942] Error response from daemon: the container-wide MAC address must match the endpoint-specific MAC address for the main network, or be left empty 

Man, I really appreciate all this info. Very helpful. It will take me some time to digest everything and put it into an action plan. I just thought, hey that would be cool and a nice project I can sink my teeth into and learn a lot on the way while deploying. Again, thank you for taking the time to give some direction and inspiration.

Thank you so very much.

The end result is that people understood common sense that it’s not admirable to be pathetic and weak. You should have been beaten as a kid by other kids, and weren’t.

Ahh yes. Violence always helps. I come from an entirely different timeline myself being 70 years old. I didn’t like bullies then, and I don’t like them now.

I was thinking more along the lines of Morty’s sex robot purchased at a intergalactic pawnshop.

Hmmm, well, I’m not one to judge a person’s proclivities, but I don’t see it as being much different than porn, assuming you are selfhosting a girlfriend for sexual release/companionship. I’m not sure I’d disclose this on a public forum, but maybe you feel a bit more comfortable than I.

The other consideration is that AI generally takes a pretty good chunk of resources to use effectively. I have selfhosted a couple of LLMs like GPTFree, Automattic111, and a couple more, however, as I mentioned, they take a lot of resources.

Might want to stock up

Unfortunately it’s been over a year

Dude, I feel that loud and clear. LOL

I can send you my docker compose when I get chance

That sounds like a lot of work, having to remove secrets and clean it up just for me. If you feel up to it, I would certainly love to have a look see. At your convenience of course.

Awesome! When you were putting it all together, did you find some resources/reading material/tutorials that helped you?

nix

This: https://nixos.org/?