where do the instances actually reside?
If I were to create a new instance of lemmy do I set up my own server in my house, or am I just creating an instance on one of the lemmy servers?
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If I were to create a new instance of lemmy do I set up my own server in my house, or am I just creating an instance on one of the lemmy servers?
lemmy can run on a decent variety of hardware, just has to be some thing left on 24/7 and exposed to the internet (be careful, the internet is a hostile place... mine was getting scanned and poked constantly until I put it behind cloudflare and then locked the firewall down to just let in cloudflare), and of course more users take more powerful hardware.
For my personal just me instance though, I'm just running it on a Raspberry Pi 4 I run some other stuff on. Uses less than a gig of memory.
Running my own instance for our community (on a cheap Synology NAS) was something my dumbass considered when making the move here from Reddit. I'm glad I didn't and just left it to the professionals, seeing as even experienced admins like Ruud have trouble with DDoS attacks and other shit.
A pi4 has the power for it? I would assume Lemmy would chew into the drive space
The Pi4 is a pretty impressive little machine. It'll probably host a few users, but from what I understand, it's the federation that really starts scaling the requirements.
Bigger problem with the Pi though is that it runs off an SDcard (by default), which have limited writes, and you'll burn that up fast.
IIRC it's technically possible to attach an external harddrive to a Raspberry Pi if it has its own power supply.
I seem to remember doing a botch where I took a USB hard disk drive that was supposed to get its power from the PC through the cable and rerouted the power over USB lines to a dedicated power brick.
My memory says I carefully removed a section of mantle in the middle of the drive's USB cable, cut the power carrying lines but leaving the data lines intact, cut one end of a different USB cable, connected the power lines of that with the cut power lines of the drive's cable (only on the drive side, obviously), put the intact end of the second cable into a USB charge plug, and connected the drive and RPi as if the RPi were a regular PC.
I'm pretty sure it worked.
I run my Pi directly from a USB SSD, no micro SD card installed.
SSDs ofc requires less power so it runs just fine!
Do the Pi’s USB ports not supply power??
Not enough for the needs of an HDD
Wouldn’t you just use a SSD? Are people actually connecting spinning discs to an Rpi?
I did at the time, if I remember correctly. It's been years though, could have just been an old SSD model that used too much power for the Rpi.
So you would just add another (or larger) drive, right? A Pi itself doesn't even have a drive.
It has the power to run a one user instance, I'm sure it would run into issues trying to squeeze a normal amount of people onto it, but a handful sure.
I run everything off an external hard drive
How can I tell if my instance is being probed for security issues?
There is no need to check. Everything exposed to the internet is being scanned. (The only exception is maybe IPv6 with no specific TLS cert.)
You’ll need to have some kind of monitoring in place. Firewall logs, packet capture (i.e. wireshark), security onion, and a bunch of other security logging/monitoring tools. If you’re hosting on the cloud, your provider may have some free tools you can use (i.e. CASB).
I'm currently hosting on a spare computer that I had lying around that I installed Linux on. So I'll probably need to do some research and set this up.
My dad had a web page recently get attacked, and they ended up injecting a program into his server and it started executing itself. He didn't look into what it was actually running, but I can't imagine it was doing anything good. Like, if it were just crypto mining, that would be a best case scenario. I'm sure it got in because he never updates anything. He was running his web page on a very, very old version of php, with a very old version of apache2 as the webserver.
I just want to make sure that I'm aware of if someone is trying to do something similar to me.
its the internet, they are. Putting it behind cloudflare and locking down the firewall to only allow their ips has filtered out pretty much everything. its free and pretty straight forward if you own your own domain.
check your nginx access logs, I'm sure they're full of people poking it.
and all kinds of other obvious incorrect stuff when a normal request looks like
GET/POST/WHATEVER /url ...
Assume it is.