You can use git over ssh with no other infrastructure. It’s less work, and you’ll learn more from doing it.

Tailscale is a sort of VPN. So, yeah, treat it the same.

I’m mostly responding to add a little context to the security concerns. Probably the biggest inside-the-VPN concern is that someone on your VPN gets some malware. So, if this is your family network, and say, your kid’s phone or laptop gets some malware, now any non-encrypted traffic is potentially compromised. Basically, the VPN is only as secure as the weakest link. That’s the thing you’re protecting against with https for individual services.

If I were hosting vaultwarden, and had my bank login in there, I absolutely wouldn’t consider a VPN + http sufficient protection. With LLMs, if we don’t have malware that knows how to hunt around for valuable credentials in the wild already, it’ll be here soon. I personally run my Jellyfin server over https because I’ve gone to the trouble to set up a good system to use letsencrypt with nginx as a proxy for any service. But I wouldn’t be too worried about running Jellyfin over http.

If you’re not using https, then anyone who can see the traffic in your VPN can see everything you do.

Whether that’s a problem depends. In principle, as long as access to your VPN is restricted to people you trust, then http inside it is fine. In practice, if your security isn’t perfect, and someone gets access to your VPN, then https provides a meaningful second line of defense.

My recommendation would be to never use http for anything where a breach would be really painful. It’s good that vaultwarden is on https. Beyond that, https is absolutely the best practice, but if someone getting access to your service is only a mild inconvenience, then leaving it on http is fine as long as it’s only accessible inside your VPN - the risk is relatively low, and the consequences aren’t bad.

castle-nathan.gif

I don’t know why, but I always assumed that image was from Firefly. It’s the same color shirt and everything!

I don’t have any personal experience with self hosted webmail. I know there are a bunch out there and definitely both options that can sit in front of a maildir and options that can sit in front of a POP/IMAP server like Dovecot.

I did a little googling, and if I wanted to set this up, the first thing I’d check out is something like imapsync -> dovecot -> Roundcube.

Dovecot provides a really reliable maildir -> IMAP/POP conversion layer, and once you’ve got that, most things should work.

You can use imapsync to keep a local synced copy your email in maildir format. That, along with a domain you own, solves the “I own my own email sycned to my server” problem pretty much completely. Switching email providers is just syncing to the new server (which imapsync supports) and updating your MX records on your domain.

Some email clients (like aerc) can just operate on the maildir directly. That’s what I do, but there are lots of ways to do this.

One option is to just keep using your email client the way you are now talking directly to your mailserver, and just rely on the imapsync side to be your owned backup/migration path.

Alternatively you can run your own local IMAP or POP server like Dovecot backed by the local maildir. So that’s imapsync -> dovecot -> thunderbird (or similar). It’s a little more software to set up, but once it’s set up it should be very reliable and gives you total control over what email client you use and full ownership of your data.

100% agreed, though I’m in the “neither is ideal” camp. My favorite language, by a long way at this point is Rust.

It’s not functional, but borrows a lot of functional idioms while avoiding the pain points functional language usually hit in exchange for losing the purity of functional languages.

I’ve always treated my home server with public facing services as presumptively compromised. I don’t put any data on there I wouldn’t want to see become public, and any data I actually care about losing is backed up to the cloud with an append-only key. The NixOS config lives in a git repo not on the server. If something bad happens, I can wipe the machine clean, redeploy the image, restore my backups, and we’re back to the status quo.

So, my threat model hasn’t changed much!

note that you probably need to trust the remote household with your data

Probably not actually. Borgbackup (and any sensible encrypted backup system really), does client side encryption. So the data should be encrypted before it’s even sent down the wire. The remote household shouldn’t be able to access the data without the encryption key/password.

I mean, they will have to trust the remote household not to destroy the data, but that’s pretty much an unavoidable limitation.

[forget]
keep-daily = 10
keep-weekly = 4

Daily backups are cheap because of de-duplication. I keep a few weekly backups in case it takes me a bit to notice something went wrong. I don’t usually back up logs.

I could probably drop the weekly backups without much risk, but I’ve got the space.

It doesn’t even have to be only for known devices. Once you’ve compromised one device, you can just phone home to have a full powered LLM do your work.

The only real use cases for this would be on closed networks with no internet access, or networks where the traffic is closely monitored. Like, yeah, if I’m trying to hack the CIA, maybe I consider something like this. For the vast majority of devices and networks, this is inefficient and unnecessary.

I mean, it is kind of cool. But vanishingly few organizations have tight enough security that this is worth doing.

I think people are right that the solution here isn’t to try a different project.

Instead of being confrontational about it, though, I’d recommend a different aproach.

evelyn: .lol 😜

you: I know! I know. The branding is pretty silly. But this really is the right tool for the task. Unesco and Wikimedia use it. And we can do our own branding for $50/month. 🤷

A lot can be fixed by just acknowledging people. They’re trying to evaluate something they don’t understand, and having a reaction. It’s not even unreasonable. The right thing to do is just acknowledge and move on.

Usually that’s all it takes. Don’t let yourself be embarrassed when you’re being reasonable. If they won’t move on, that’s the point where I start thinking about job applications somewhere else.