I managed to remove all the kernels instead of all the old kernels. It was a good learning experience fixing it later, and now I pay much more attention when apt warns about "potentially dangerous operations".

I don't have a testing environment, but essentially all my services are on docker saving their data in a directory mounted on the local filesystem. The dockerfile reads the sha version of the image from an env file. I have a shell script which:

1. Triggers a new btrfs snapshot of the volume containing everyithing
2. Pulls the new docker images and stores their hashes in the env file
3. Restarts all the containers.

if a new Docker version is broken rolling back is as simple as copying the old version in the env file and recreating the container. If data gets corrupted I can just copy the last working status from an old snaphot.

The whole os is on a btrfs volume which is snapshotted regularly, so ideally if an update fucks it up beyond recovery I can always boot from a rescue image and restore an old snapshot. But I honestly feel this is extra precaution: in years that I run debian on all my computers, it never reached the point of being not bootable.

there is a feature request with a lot of good comments on their forum. The summary of the last time I checked it was on the lines: "it is a reasonable request but it is terribly hard to implement it correctly and since we currently have no capacity to do it we prefer leaving it not implemented instead of offering any alternative which could give a false sense of security"

My Synology has an auto block feature that from my understanding is essentially fail2ban, what I don’t know is if such a feature works for all my exposed services but Synology’s

I'd be surprised if it works for custom services. Fail2ban has to know what's running and haw to have access to its log file to know what is a failed authentication request. The best you can do without log access is to rate limit new tcp connections. But still you should know what's the service behind because 5 new SSH sessions per minute and IP can be reasonable 5 new http1.0 connections likely cannot load a single html page.

If you want to encrypt only the data partition you can use an approach like https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2023-10-25-my-all-flash-zfs-network-storage-build/#encrypted-zfs to ulock it at boot.

TL;DR: store half of the decryption key on the computer and another half online and write a script that at boot fetches the second half and decrypt the drive. There is a timewindow where a thief could decrypt your data before you remove the key if they connect your computer to the network, but depending on your thread model can be acceptable. you can also decrypt the root portion with a similar approach but you need to store the script in the initramfs and it is not trivial.

Another option I've seen suggested is storing the decryption key on a USB pendrive and connect it with a long extension cord to the server. The assumption is that a thief would unplug all the cables before stealing your server.

A more detailed guide for dropbear: https://www.cyberciti.biz/security/how-to-unlock-luks-using-dropbear-ssh-keys-remotely-in-linux/

If I remember correctly, the only outdated bit of information is that the IP configuration doesn't happen anymore in the initramfs configuration but you must pass a parameter at the kernel by editing /etc/default/grub and passing

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="ip=192.168.x.x:::::"

where 192.168.x.x is the IP address that you want at boot

I've been using CommaFeed for a while and I'm very happy with it. https://github.com/Athou/commafeed/ plus it is actively developed. I've reported a couple of small feature requests and the author implemented them very quickly.

As far as I know there are many third party android apps that you can use, but its responsive webUI is good enough, once you install it it is essentially as good as an app.

As other mentioned, an advantage is that it blocks ads on phone apps too. My other use case is to add extra DNS entries to name devices on my local network. Finally, after using pihole for a while I switched to blocky. It has similar features but it lacks the UI and the dchp server, but in exchange it uses much less resources. Since I didn't use either of these it sounded a good trade to me

Devices are named after characters from books I recently read, trying to match the name with the character of the book. But for virtual hosts for services I use their purpose (wiki, files, feed…) because I wasted too much time updating all the bookmarks last time I migrated to a new server.

I started using headscale (the opensource reimplementation of tailscale server) on a private vps. It is incredibly better compared to plain wireguard. I regret waiting so much before switching.

Something that really made my life easier: wireguard is poor at roaming: switching to and from my wifi created issues because the server wasn't reachable anymore from its public ip and wireguard didn't bother to query the DNS again to check the new IP. Also, configuration is dead simple because it takes care of iptables for you (especially good when you enables forwarding to a node).

Since the server just sends small messages for the control plane and all the traffic is p2p between the devices, the smallest vps with the smaller connectivity is more than enough to handle it.

Yes, but it is a different cron job that needs to run, and you need to monitor it for failures. Caddy does everything out of the box, including retries.

Nginx for my intranet because configuration is fully manual and I have complete control over it.

Caddy for the public services on my vps because it handles cert renewal automatically and most of its configuration is magic which just works.

It is unbelievable how shorter caddy configuration is, but on my intranet:

1. I don't want my reverse proxy to dial on internet to try to fetch new SSL certs. I know it can be disabled, but this is the default.
2. I like to learn how stuff works, Nginx forces you to know more details but it is full of good documentation so it is not too painful compared to Caddy.

I didn't find anything for syncing yet. But I settled with plain smb shares which works for 99% of my needs and https://www.filestash.app/ for a simple webUI which is more convenient when browsing files and photos from the phone.

Consider Ireland, it is not Shengen but it is EU, meaning that you can freely travel only after you get the citizenship. But you can get it after 5 years you lived in the country, as far as I know it is one of the easiest (if not easier) EU country to get it. Also you wouldn't have language issues. I'm not sure how difficult is to get a working visa tho.

I tired the same, but my router wants to be smart by filtering DNS responses that points to local IP. I guess whoever designed it considered it a security feature. It is a stock router from the ISP, its configuration interface is minimal, borderline to non existent.

awesome-selfhosted.net is a good start

I remember that I started by following these two guides.

https://fardog.io/blog/2017/12/30/client-side-certificate-authentication-with-nginx/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7768593/

something I'm not sure it is mentioned here is that android (at lest the version on my phone) accepts only a legacy format for certificates and the error message when you try to import the new format is totally opaque. If you cannot import it there just check openssl flags to change the export format.

If security is one of your concerns, search for "HTTP client side certificates". TL;DR: you can create certificates to authenticate the client and configure the server to allow connections only from trusted devices. It adds extra security because attackers cannot leverage known vulnerabilities on the services you host since they are blocked at http level.

It is a little difficult to find good and updated documentation but I managed to make it work with nginx. The downside is that Firefox mobile doesn't support them, but Firefox PC and Chrome have no issues.

Of course you want also a server side certificate, the easiest way is to get it from Let's Encrypt

There are plenty of zigbee options available on Amazon UK (and I would expect some wifi too, but I have already a zigbee network so I prefer it when possible). Do a quick search there, most of them have the wiring diagram in the photos. Some of them can be installed in the box, so you don't have to replace the switches (which may be ugly compared of the others you have). Also note that if both the switches you want to replace control the same light you just need to replace one of them.

You can configure caddy to use 80 and be a reverse proxy for both the services, serving one site or the other depending on the name (you will need a second DNS entry pointing to the same IP). about not exposing 443, I really doubt that caddy can automatically retrieve SSL certificates for you if not running on the default port. Check the documentation, if I'm right either you open an empty website on 443 just for the sake of getting SSL certs to run https, and manually configure the other port to do the same, or you get the certificates manually using the DNS verification (check let's encrypt documentation) and configure caddy to use them.