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I used to self-host a lot of things: 1. My blog 2. My friends' blogs 3. BIND for all this 4. A mail-server on this 5. A MySQL database on this All this wa

I used to self-host a lot of things: 1. My blog 2. My friends' blogs 3. BIND for all this 4. A mail-server on this 5. A MySQL database on this All this was on a Hetzner server that was nominally set up to be correct on restart. But I was always scared of that because I built this up from when I was a teenager onwards and didn't trust my younger self and couldn't find the time to audit. 10 years afterwards, with 10 years uptime, and no consequences of data loss or theft (it might have occurred, just that nothing affected me or my friends) Hetzner actually warned me they were going to decomm the underlying instance and no longer supported that VPS. I backed everything up, copied it, and for the last 8 years have faithfully moved from home to home carefully transporting these hard-drives and doing nothing with them. When I finally set up everything again, I did it much more manageably this time, with backups to Cloudflare R2 for the database and resources, and Dockerfiles for the code. I restarted the machine and brought everything up. And now I use GSuite instead of my own mail. I use Cloudflare instead of my own DNS. There's a lot I outsource despite "self-hosting". It's just far more convenient. So the answer is that I had no BCDR on the old thing. Maybe I'll train my kids and have them be my BCDR for the new thing.

wahern 2y ago
The nice thing about OpenBSD is that HTTP, SMTP, DNS, and many other common services are bundled into and developed with the OS. Every 6 months a new release comes out, and each release comes with an upgrade FAQ with step-by-step instructions for any service that might require configuration changes. Sometimes major changes in popular ports/packages, like PHP or PostgreSQL, are mentioned as well. See, for example, https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade74.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade74.html. Note that it's a single page, and for a release with quite a few changes, fairly easy to read and understand--major changes within and across subsystems are planned to minimize the total amount of changes per release. This upgrade FAQ is priceless, and has accompanied each release for the past 20 years (since 3.5 in 2004). OpenBSD is deliberately developed for self-hosting all the classic network services. The trick to minimizing complexity is to keep your system as close to stock as possible, and to keep up with the 6-month cadence. Over the long haul this is easier with OpenBSD--most of the time your self-hosting headaches are some OpenBSD developer's self-hosting headaches.
- sgarland 2y ago
  Or you build golden images with Packer + Ansible or the like, and swap images out every N months. The work to get everything automated and configured can be a bit daunting, but I much prefer the end result over doing continual upgrades.

wahern 2y ago

The nice thing about OpenBSD is that HTTP, SMTP, DNS, and many other common services are bundled into and developed with the OS. Every 6 months a new release comes out, and each release comes with an upgrade FAQ with step-by-step instructions for any service that might require configuration changes. Sometimes major changes in popular ports/packages, like PHP or PostgreSQL, are mentioned as well. See, for example, https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade74.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade74.html. Note that it's a single page, and for a release with quite a few changes, fairly easy to read and understand--major changes within and across subsystems are planned to minimize the total amount of changes per release. This upgrade FAQ is priceless, and has accompanied each release for the past 20 years (since 3.5 in 2004). OpenBSD is deliberately developed for self-hosting all the classic network services. The trick to minimizing complexity is to keep your system as close to stock as possible, and to keep up with the 6-month cadence. Over the long haul this is easier with OpenBSD--most of the time your self-hosting headaches are some OpenBSD developer's self-hosting headaches.

sgarland 2y ago
Or you build golden images with Packer + Ansible or the like, and swap images out every N months. The work to get everything automated and configured can be a bit daunting, but I much prefer the end result over doing continual upgrades.