Is there any benefit to host my own instance?

  • UselesslyBrisk
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Yeah how familiar are you with linux?

    You dont run the ansible stuff on the instance itself. You do it from your personal machine or something with ansible installed.

    Though I guess in theory you could run it on itself if you dont have another linux box, or something with ansible installed. https://www.middlewareinventory.com/blog/run-ansible-playbook-locally/

    But I am happy to walk you though the basics of setting up a securing the box.

    • JCreazy@midwest.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      2 years ago

      I’m not super familiar with Linux, I’ve installed it on machines in the past, I know some very basic command line stuff. I’ve done raspberry pi stuff. I have a mini PC running Ubuntu right now that I am not using for anything so I can use that to run ansible. I probably won’t be able to work on it until after this weekend but once I get an moment to set down and do it I will shoot you a message if I have any questions. I really appreciate your help and I am excited to be a part of the fediverse.

      • UselesslyBrisk
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        that would be perfect.

        WIth Debian I would install UFW for a firewall. Set SSH to whatever your home IP is. You can always use the Linode SSH console for external access.

        UFW is easy to configure and just translates iptables.

        sudo ufw allow from any to any port 80 proto tcp
        sudo ufw allow from any to any port 443 proto tcp
        sudo ufw allow from HOMEIP to any port 22 tcp
        

        If you want leave SSH open. Then i would probably only do Key based auth in /etc/ssh/sshd_config

        you also want to edit that file (sshd_config) to disable root access once setup. I often turn on the following

        LoginGraceTime 2m
        PermitRootLogin no
        StrictModes yes
        MaxAuthTries 6
        MaxSessions 10
        AllowGroups somegroupname
        

        then create a user and a group and add the user to the group. This ensures only that user has SSH access.

        sudo adduser someusername
        sudo addgroup somegroupname 
        sudo usermod -aG somegroupname someusername
        

        You can also use visudo to edit sudoers. The first like will require a password. If you use the second line, you can sudo without a password. I would only do the latter if you only use key-based auth though.

        
        someuser   ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
        someuser ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
        
        

        I also edit /etc/hostname to my server name. Update and reboot. From there run through ansible instructions and make edits as necessary.