You can’t really disable the root user. You can make it so they can’t login remotely, which is highly suggested.

The DNC could have run an iguana wearing an offensive trucker hat, and we still should have voted for the iguana when Trump was the alternative or stood a chance of winning again.

You don’t have to convince me of this. I completely agree. I’ve said only that the DNC has a responsibility to provide something better than an Iguana and for the past three election cycles, that’s what we’ve got and people are pissed. But every time you try to have meaningful discourse about how the DNC is only supplying Iguana people treat you like you’re some kind of turncoat who voted for Trump. And that’s just bullshit.

We need to be mad at non-voters, people who “lashed out” and voted for Trump, and people who let themselves be swept away by the lies of a grifter who we did nothing but warn them about. But we also need to be mad at the DNC… It’s not entirely the voters fault and fuck anyone who says it is.

Anyone who didn’t vote (or didn’t vote for the only candidate likely to defeat Trump) is responsible for his win.

Two things can be true at once. Voters not voting is bad, and it’s their fault. The DNC being incapable of finding pundits people want to vote for is also bad, and is also their fault. Pointing one out, has nothing to do with the other and both of these factors led to the election of Donald Trump not once, but TWICE.

Pointing out the DNC’s responsibility to find electable candidates doesn’t elevate the voters responsibility. But if the DNC were capable of finding pundits voters wanted to vote for no issue would exist. You wouldn’t have people refusing to vote, or voting for Trump out of some fucked up sense of “haha, I’m gonna stick it to you!”

Pretending like this issue is solely at the fault of the voters is so fucking disingenuous, disgusting and partyist its insane.

But if the Dems ran a better candidate…

This is completely valid criticism. Stop pretending it’s not. The DNC is in the habit of specifically going out of their way to choose unpopular pundits, and that’s not voters fault.

Voting for Trump, or not voting is their fault…

The entire point of selfhost is to host private services not available to the public. By literal definition, that’s allowing only local traffic to connect to your services. It’s infinitely more secure. A VPN allows you to extend those services over the clearnet to authorized devices via virtualized networks. You don’t have to worry about messing with inbound/outbound ports, or worrying about software failure or misconfigurations accidentally exposing you to the clearnet. You don’t have to worry about DDoS, or abuse. Being attacked? Bring down your VPN and that completely shuts down your issue. Your network is completely unreachable by anyone but a local host.

There’s simply no room for an argument. VPN is objectively better in all possible situations.

I don’t know what kind of firewall you use, but if my firewall is down there is NO traffic at all passing through!

Only a hardware firewall would do this. If it’s software, like implied in your post, no traffic is filtered and all connections are accepted.

VPN is the least amount of work for the most secure setup. There’s nothing to even argue, its superior in every way.

Just like everything else in life, it’s not a binary situation. You can’t say “either it is, or isn’t stealing! Circumstance doesn’t matter!” because circumstance always matter.

If you come at me with the intent to kill me, and I kill you in self defense, that’s not murder. It would be wholly ignorant to say “well you tried to kill the guy who was trying to kill you, so it’s murder! Circumstance doesn’t matter!” That would be the answer of a child.

The argument of Piracy has never been one of “oh, well, it’s not theft.” Of course its theft. You’d have to be in deep denial to make that argument. It’s not your IP. The argument of Piracy is that taking shit from corpos doesn’t fucking matter–no one is getting hurt. As soon as you stop taking from corpos and taking from the little guy, like indie artists, you’re just a fuckin’ thief. And that’s not moral.

There is. It’s called VPN Split Tunneling.

If you want to proxify your connection between you and a service, you enable the split. If you don’t care, or want to not use the VPN, then disable it for that application. So it’s effectively “proxify all connections to this app,” which is the same as your use case.

This is effectively the same damn thing with a single exception. If your VPN is down, there’s no access to your server. If for whatever reason your firewall is down, there’s unrestricted access to your server…

VPN is unquestionably the correct choice 100 times out of 100.

You may say that’s a good practice to separate things

You’re missing the point. VPN isn’t about separating anything… I’m not even sure what you mean by that. VPN is the accepted practice here. Unquestionably. You create private services, and for security you only expose them to the least amount of people possible. You authenticate via VPN connections. You only have to maintain a single database of users to access any number of services, even tens of thousands.

OP is specifically talking about hosting local content that they want to protect. VPN is the solution here.

Your use case, and OPs, are completely different scenarios. I can’t tell if you’re being purposefully disingenuous or just flippantly stupid.

What’s the weirdest one you’ve tried?

NixOS.

Most challenging?

NixOS.

Have you found any really cool defining features in any distro?

Flakes. lol

systemd

https://i.xno.dev/LGtr2.webp

Reread my post. You didn’t do a good enough job the first time.

Reread my post. You didn’t do a good enough job the first time.

Piracy isn’t theft though.

Why would you reply without reading my entire post? Like why? What do you get out of it?

Alpine is my daily driver. Been that way for 2-3 years now.

• AMD Ryzen 5 7600x
• 32GB DDR5
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060

It’s not just for underpowered hardware. 🤷‍♂️

IIRC (could be wrong) the closet was unlocked. So can we really call that “breaking and entering?”

Why not swap from nginx-proxy-manager to Caddy2, which can handle everything? SSL and reverse_proxy?

Correct. If space is such a big problem for you that it’s unconscionable to use a 4U mini rack (which again, like what the fuck), then mounting hardware on the wall is a completely valid option. It’ll take up zero floor space.