3 mo. ago • 97%

Steadfast Self-Hosting, a book by Adam Monsen

selfhostbook.com Steadfast Self-Hosting: Rapid-Rise Personal Cloud

This book will free your data and empower your users.

I've not read this yet, just passing it along, as it looks really interesting.

I'm not affiliated in any way with this.

ETA: If anyone has read it / bought a copy, a review would be very appreciated.

25 comments

Hopefully the author explains how to use SSL/TLS since their site doesn't :/

16
- They do, via Traefik. Chapter 8.
  
  Maybe they decided there was nothing that requires an SSL/TLS certificate on this particular site? (They accept payments elsewhere).
  
  11
  
  It’s because you linked to the site using http://. This is something the site should account for, but doesn’t.
  
  9
  
  How do you know that if you've never read it?
  
  1
- The site does use https for me... it instantly redirects from http to https
  
  2
  
  Your browser is redirecting, the site is not.
  
  5
  
  Sounds like the robot guy doesn't use https only mode
  
  2
- I might have missed it, but it doesn't look like their site accepts payment data, or has a login of any kind.
  
  Why would the lack of SSL concern you?
  
  -2
  
  The site is encrypted but you can also access the site over http. The author hasn’t configured any kind of HTTPS upgrade. This is an easily correctable oversight that a self proclaimed “self hosting expert” should have accounted for.
  
  6
  
  Why would the lack of SSL concern you?
  
  Because it means my traffic to that site is in the clear. And while we're not transacting anything sensitive necessarily. It's still best practice to limit sniffing.
  
  Automatically swapping to https should be default behavior for every website.
  
  3
  
  Why wouldn't that concern you? That means it is totally plain text with zero verification of incoming data or encryption. It is really easy to tamper with http traffic.
  
  3
  
  The site links to a site that accepts payment data. So because the author's site is http, a MITM attacker could change the payment links from lulu.com to site-that-actually-steals-your-credit-card.com.
  
  That's one huge thing https provides over http.. assurance of unadulterated content, including links to sites that actually deal in sensitive data.
  
  1
Hi! Author here. I added a http → https redirect to my book website, thanks all. I do intend to always serve public content via https to (as other smart folks have thoughtfully mentioned) guard against stuff getting messed with between my server and your browser (however unlikely that may be). In this case I thought my server was redirecting to https, but turns out my Firefox was forcing https (again, same as other smart folks said).

re: "expert", ugh, I'm embarrassed to even use that word, but someone else graciously called me that (so I intended to remove "self-proclaimed"), and it supposedly helps for sales. All I know is I'm growing and learning just like you, the more I know the less I know I know, and I make mistakes all the time. I always appreciate kind corrections/feedback/comments/patches/suggestions/etc.

That includes feedback on https://github.com/meonkeys/shb/blob/main/pelican/website/content/extra/.htaccess ... I feel clever fixing two things in a single redirect (getting rid of www. and forcing https), but I'm not sure if I'm doing something silly or dangerous here. I'm definitely not an expert at Apache mod_rewrite, I just cobbled that together from official docs and stackoverflow posts.

4
- Hi author! I'm Dad. :)
  
  Thanks for joining the conversation. I thought it too much to hope you'd be on Lemmy but glad you are! Thanks for adding those bits about https, but I was saddened to see that 90% of the conversation around this centered on that one side topic.
  
  I've only read the TOC for your book so far but it seems very much what we need to see more people adopt self-hosting so thank you very much for putting in the time and effort!
  
  1
Cool, thanks for the link!

2

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
HTTP	Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
HTTPS	HTTP over SSL
SSL	Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
TLS	Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL
nginx	Popular HTTP server

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