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There aren't any operating systems capable of withstanding the internet for a year without updates and/or active management. Until this becomes possible, and wi

There aren't any operating systems capable of withstanding the internet for a year without updates and/or active management. Until this becomes possible, and widespread, the idea of self-hosting is going to remain niche. Furthermore, because no browser is totally secure, users are going to avoid non-popular links, perpetuating the walled gardens they already use. I fear our monoculture of operating systems has to be addressed first, before any of the rest can really take hold.

wswope 3y ago
Where’s that idea coming from? I’d wager >95% of LTS linux distributions released in the past ten years are still rock-solid if you’re just exposing 22, 80, and 443. Even PHP5 is still de facto bulletproof if you’re paranoid about not trusting user input. Vulns don’t come out of nowhere.
squigz 3y ago
> monoculture of operating systems There are several widely-used OS, one of which (Linux) has plenty of very different versions depending on your usecase. I'm not really sure that counts as a "monoculture"
toast0 3y ago
> There aren't any operating systems capable of withstanding the internet for a year without updates and/or active management. I regularly update my personal systems, but when I ran FreeBSD for work, we only did kernel and OS updates for important things. Most of our machines would turn on, build and install our latest tested and patched version and reboot, and that would be the last time it rebooted until it was time to recycle it 3-5 years later. Yeah, I looked at every update, and most of them weren't important enough to upgrade existing working machines; I guess that's active management: I did consider and most often choose to take no action, but it's still not many actions taken. That's not to say FreeBSD is perfect; it's not, there were certainly some updates that needed to go to all machines right quick. Some of the applications we ran on the other hand... It was a great day when we replaced Wordpress, because I was no longer on the hook to spend a day updating that with no notice. I would be ok leaving my current hosting for a year and confident it will be fine when I get back; other than it a disk encryption passphrase to boot after a power incident. Mostly Linux with minimal software that's mostly finished is fine too; although I won't run it personally anymore, except in OpenWRT and other embedded systems where I don't have much choice.

wswope 3y ago

Where’s that idea coming from? I’d wager >95% of LTS linux distributions released in the past ten years are still rock-solid if you’re just exposing 22, 80, and 443. Even PHP5 is still de facto bulletproof if you’re paranoid about not trusting user input. Vulns don’t come out of nowhere.

squigz 3y ago

> monoculture of operating systems There are several widely-used OS, one of which (Linux) has plenty of very different versions depending on your usecase. I'm not really sure that counts as a "monoculture"

toast0 3y ago

> There aren't any operating systems capable of withstanding the internet for a year without updates and/or active management. I regularly update my personal systems, but when I ran FreeBSD for work, we only did kernel and OS updates for important things. Most of our machines would turn on, build and install our latest tested and patched version and reboot, and that would be the last time it rebooted until it was time to recycle it 3-5 years later. Yeah, I looked at every update, and most of them weren't important enough to upgrade existing working machines; I guess that's active management: I did consider and most often choose to take no action, but it's still not many actions taken. That's not to say FreeBSD is perfect; it's not, there were certainly some updates that needed to go to all machines right quick. Some of the applications we ran on the other hand... It was a great day when we replaced Wordpress, because I was no longer on the hook to spend a day updating that with no notice. I would be ok leaving my current hosting for a year and confident it will be fine when I get back; other than it a disk encryption passphrase to boot after a power incident. Mostly Linux with minimal software that's mostly finished is fine too; although I won't run it personally anymore, except in OpenWRT and other embedded systems where I don't have much choice.