Lettuce eat lettuce

Always eat your greens!

  • 3 Posts
  • 277 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • Have you looked into Tailscale or an equivalent solution like Netbird?

    You could set up a tailnet, create unique tags for each machine, add both machines to the tailnet, and then set up each machine’s network interface to only go through the tailnet.

    Then you just use Tailscale’s ACLs with the tags to isolate those machines, making sure they can only talk to whatever central device(s) or services you want them to, but also stopping them from talking to or even seeing each other.




  • You know what’s funny about that? I can think of at 4 times in just the last year where a Microsoft outage caused significant downtime (at least 1 hour) for the company I work at.

    • Twice, Outlook/Teams was having major regional issues for hours, people at my company couldn’t log into Teams and weren’t getting emails.
    • Microsoft’s Dynamics platform, (which my company’s ERP software is built on) had some infrastructure issue that made it unusably slow for several hours.
    • Who can forget the lovely Crowd Strike kiss of death fiasco a few months ago?

    Meanwhile, the 12 year old janky Debian servers I had were running Ansible, Docker, OpenProject, and several other services without a hitch, same with all the Linux endpoints I had deployed.

    Centralization causes many of these problems and makes them more severe than they otherwise would be. When you are locked into a single vendor for everything you do, you’re completely at their mercy if anything breaks.

    The problem is that nobody, at least in the US, markets open source solutions. The big players corner the market, and IT just learn those big players. You should see the looks I’ve been given when I present IT directors with a quote from ix Systems for a TrueNAS solution to their storage needs. They have no idea who they are, even though they provide enterprise grade storage solutions at a fraction of the price of Dell or HP.

    The US tech environment is a cyber dystopia controlled by the Tech corpos of silicon valley. It’s so frustrating.





  • Ikr. I’ve got two 12 year old towers that have Debian on them. One is a Docker box and the other is just a raw Debian server.

    I installed KDE on both because I like my servers looking a little sexy lol. They run smoother and more stable than any of the Windows machines I support.

    They’ll probably be fine for another 10 years, maybe even longer.






  • If you’re very comfortable with containerization, networking, and security practices, plus you are a pretty decent full stack web dev, sure.

    It’s pretty trivial to set up a separate business internet line from your local ISP. Depending on the volume of traffic, a basic load manager and reverse proxy, combined with strong firewalls and container safety would be sufficient for most SMB needs.

    You don’t need much power to host a basic website. Setting up a local box with a low-impact distro, Docker, and some solid control-plane MGMT software should be plenty to host several dozen SMB websites.

    There are a lot of technical and even legal considerations though. Do these small businesses need a web app on their site? Do they need a storefront? What about member-only content locked securely behind an authentication layer? Does your local ISP have rate limitations? Does your city/state/country have restrictions on offering business services like that? What is your liability if your setup gets hacked and your client’s data is stolen/exposed?

    Ultimately, you have to answer the question: Why shouldn’t those businesses just go with an easy pre-made hosting solution like Squarespace, Wix, etc? Not saying there aren’t good answers to that, but from a business perspective, the businesses will want to know that.

    As with anything in business, ask yourself, what are you able to offer that they can’t get easily somewhere else? I used to work for a tiny MSP that offered in-house data backups. Our clients paid a good chunk of money to have us backup their data to our own servers. I didn’t say anything at the time, but our clients could have gotten much more secure and faster backup services for cheaper using something like Backblaze or Synology’s S2 cloud backups.

    Don’t find yourself unable to clearly and concisely explain to your clients what you can give them that they cannot easily get somewhere else. If it’s purely the principle of the thing, that’s totally valid, but make sure that’s what you’re selling to them, and also what they are looking for.