• 7 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Well, in principe I do not see that much different between ‘curl | bash’, ‘sudo apt-get install’ or installing an app on your phone. In the end, it all depends on trust.

    Considering how complex software has become and on how many libraries from all over the internet any application that does more then ‘hello world’ depend, I do not see how you can do if you are not prepared to put blind trust into some things.

    Concerning CrowdStrike, I am just reading an book on human behaviour (very interesting for everybody who is interested in cybersecurity), and I am just on the chapter about the fear of deciding with unknown parameters vs. the fear of not deciding at all. Any piece of software will brake at some point, so will you wait forever to find something that will not have any vulnerabilities?



  • The problem is here is this: how is a user supposted to know if the official website of an application is organicmaps.app, organic-maps.app, organicmaps.org or github.com/organicmaps?

    And even if she/he knows, hackers do ways to make you look the other way. The funny thing in this case is that the original author complained that the app was removed from google playstore, and did so on the fosstodon mastodon-server. Although I guess this was not at planned, he made the almost perfect social-engineering post. :-)









  • I have been thinking the same thing.

    I have been looking into a way to copy files from our servers to our S3 backup-storage, without having the access-keys stored on the server. (as I think we can assume that will be one of the first thing the ransomware toolkits will be looking for).

    Perhaps a script on a remote machine that initiate a ssh to the server and does a “s3cmd cp” with the keys entered from stdin ? Sofar, I have not found how to do this.

    Does anybody know if this is possible?


  • Yes. Fair point.

    On the other hand, most of the disaster senarios you mention are solved by geographic redundancy: set up your backup // DRS storage in a datacenter far away from the primary service. A scenario where all services,in all datacenters managed by a could-provider are impacted is probably new.

    It is something that, considering the current geopolical situation we are now it, -and that I assume will only become worse- that we should better keep in the back of our mind.





  • Well, the issue here is that your backup may be physically in a different location (which you can ask to host your S3 backup storage in a different datacenter then the VMs), if the servers themselfs on which the service (VMs or S3) is hosted is managed by the same technical entity, then a ransomware attack on that company can affect both services.

    So, get S3 storage for your backups from a completely different company?

    I just wonder to what degree this will impact the bandwidth-usage of your VM if -say- you do a complete backup of your every day to a host that will be comsidered as “of-premises”



  • First of all, thanks to all who replied! I didn’t think there would have been that many people who self-host a SSO-server, so I am happy to see these replies.

    As a side-note, I have also been looking into making the setup more robust, i.e. add redundancy. For a “light redundant” senario (not fully automatic, but -say- where I have a 2nd instance ready to run, so I just need to adapt the DNS-record if it is needed), can I conclude from the “makeing a backup” question, that I just need to run a 2nd instance of postgres and do streaming-replication from the main instance to the backup-instance ?

    Or are there other caviats I haven’t thought about?




  • For me, the first goal is to simply understand the setup. I now have been able to create a setup with two frontend jvb-instances and one backend. In the end, the architecture setup of a jitsi-server is quite nicely explained, and -by delving a little bit into the startup scripts of the docker-based jitsi setup, you do get some idea of how things fit together.

    From a practicle point of view, I think I’ll go for the basic setup (1 backend, 2 frontends) natively on two servers, and -if the backend server would go down- just have a dockerised backup-setup ready to go if it would be needed.

    Thanks!