jax

jax , 10 days ago

Currently using Nextcloud AIO and it's pretty decent, though I've got 16 vCPU and 32 GB of RAM allocated to it right now, though it's only using 10% CPU and ~7 GB of RAM at the moment.

I think it takes a while to warm up once you start adding data to it, especially depending on the plug-ins you add and amount of data.

jax OP , 12 days ago

Glad I could provide some insight! It’s not something I see talked about too much even on Reddit. Let me know if you have any questions or things I could flesh out more in the article!

I’m still relatively new to ActivityPub and Federated systems in general, though I’ve had my Lemmy and Mastodon instances for 8+ months now I don’t use them as much as I was expecting, sadly. Running your own instance can be very isolating and any content you put directly on your instance probably won’t gain much traction (at least on Mastodon, Lemmy seems to fair a bit better).

It’s one of a handful of blogs that I’ve run over the last couple of years, the other one that’s still online is HomeLab.Blog. I actually meant to run a federated blog platform like WriteFreely, but they don’t have a production docket image, and I saw that Ghost is planning on adding ActivityPub support.

This article might be more appropriate on that blog and an article about my experience with Federated systems might be more on-topic on this one. Oops.

jax OP , 11 days ago (edited 11 days ago)

Its possible that I estimated the timeline wrong 😅

I’ve added a note to the blog, thanks!

jax OP , 11 days ago

Not at all! I agree, and COVID didn't help at all. I do want to try and be accurate though :p

jax OP , 11 days ago

Yeah for sure! I like to post about both the positive and negative experiences. I find things like that to be a valuable learning tool.

From a security perspective, it’s important to understand the systems you’ve implemented and test that they are working as expected. I think in that example if I had tested user sign-up sooner I could have caught the configuration issue.

It's also important to have good observability into your system, both metrics and logs. Metrics to help detect if something weird is happening (increased resource usage could point to ransomware or crypto mining) and logging to track down what happened and see what systems are impacted.

From a technical controls standpoint, it's good practice to segregate your applications from other systems and control planes like IPMI and switching/routing admin interfaces. It's also good to try to limit holes in your firewall. In this cluster, I have Cloudflare Tunnels setup so that I don't have to open ports to access web servers, and I get access to their WAF tooling. You could do something similar with a VPS running WireGuard, CrowdSec, and a reverse proxy.

jax , 12 days ago

What's everyone's workflows with these systems? Do you catalog both physical and digital documents? Where do you store the documents?

jax OP , 14 days ago

Oh, I know I could get them to run with enough work. I just don't have that much time to spend on initial implementation and upkeep of the charts.

I'm using FluxCD, which I believe can do deployments of plain Kubernetes manifests, but that still requires a decent amount of overhead to keep up to date.

jax OP , 14 days ago

Yeah, that's the pain point - building and maintaining the charts.

Also, I know the charts likely wouldn't have to be super complex, but I'm used to working with Bitnami's charts that are massively complex - I just don't have the time to go that in-depth.

jax OP , 14 days ago

That's actually super helpful! I haven't done much custom Helm chart-ing, and was kinda lost where to start. That really helps break the process down, and the tip about skipping state to start is very wise.

jax OP , 14 days ago

I think both of the ones I mentioned have docker-compose files, which I think I can convert with kompose convert? I guess from there I would follow your steps and then start parameterizing it once it's running properly.

Thanks! I think I'll start trying out PixelFed tomorrow.

jax OP , 13 days ago

I've seen that around, but I prefer to run my own services instead of relying on a ready-built system like that. I find they don't offer that much customization options usually.

jax OP , 11 months ago

Ahh, I didn't get that far in the docs, but seeing as there are no (that I can tell) post limits, running a blog on Lemmy would work pretty well with a bit of a UI change.