A simple question to this community, what are you self-hosting? It’s probably fun to hear from each-other what services we are running.
Please mention at least the service (e.g. e-mail) and the software (e.g. postfix). Extra bonus points for also mentioning the OS and/or hardware (e.g. Linux Distribution, raspberry pi, etc) you are running on.
Oh jeez… there’s quite the list. I have a Ceph cluster of 3 nodes with 15x HDD’s and 3 SSD’s… on that cluster I run some VM’s that in turn run a Docker swarm. All Ubuntu 22.04, all commodity hardware. Currently I’m running;
Then there’s a whole host of ancillary services; BackupPC, Unifi controller container, piHole on a couple of Raspberry Pi’s, ts-dnsserver for internal DNS management… probably a dozen other containers and tools I’m forgetting.
Oh yeah, and a Synology NAS as a backup target :)
I respect the enterprise-level IT operation you run for your family lol
What’s it like hosting your own mail? Been considering it for a while but Gmail features/spam filter/deliverability has been tough to beat.
Well, consider I’ve run my own mailserver on one of those domains since 2001 so I’ve had plenty of time to “grow” with it. I have no issues with GMail and the like but as I said my domain has been around a long time and so I may well be grandfathered in a lot.
Having said all that, even with my newest domain (less than a year old) I don’t have any issues so long as I make sure to comply with all the caveats around ensuring my MX records are good, making sure my DMARC, SPF, DKIM and even PTR and reverse DNS records are all in place (the latter is one a LOT of people forget when self-hosting but reverse lookups are a big deal with mail). The amount of mail that my mail server spam-buckets from domains with only forward lookups and no reverse is astounding. But having said that it’s a GREAT way to block spam.
Finally, mail on residential IP blocks or even a lot of cloud provider blocks are just plain not good for mail hosting. One of my MX hosts is on a Linode which gets blacklisted periodically in one of the less reputable blacklists, but it usually doesn’t affect mail flow all that much. I do subscribe to services to monitor for blacklist listings and delistings for my IP’s as well mostly to keep track but it’s handy to know if there might be something wrong with your mailserver.
Mail hosting isn’t for the faint of heart… but once it works it pretty much just works. My primary personal domain I haven’t changed anything in a couple of years… and I’ve had no need to change much with the mail server itself. It comes out of the box with some nice secure settings and it’s kinda nice to have two decades of mail I can refer back to on an IMAP server :)
Updoot for MeshCentral. I can’t believe how excellent and capable this free software is.
Fellow self-hoster, you mention Droppy – I can only find an archived repo (https://github.com/silverwind/droppy). Do you have any other source?
No, that’s what I’m using. Thankfully it works fine and I don’t worry too much about security because I just leave it turned off until I need it. The “/droppy” url directs to it but if it’s off then it just throws an error back.
Thanks a bunch!
Script kiddies these days got really fast. Configured a new subdomain, started droppy, within a couple seconds, all types of requests were visible in the log.