A.K.A.
@AlexanderESmith
@AlexanderESmith
There’s no need to encrypt this data. Any entity that is watching you knows how to see the domains you visit, and everything on this site is on the main page, or a click away from it.
An SSL here is nothing more than security theater, or marketing.
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?
Agreed on all counts.
My reply initially had a “if you had a fleet of these things…” addendum, but OP’s post read (to me) as though he was converting commodity hardware into a makeshift home server, so I removed it because it was almost certainly not relevant.
You’ll waste more time trying to figure out how to do this than it would take to move a monitor and keyboard to the server, do the install, and plug the monitor and keyboard back into your main computer. Once the server is up, you can administer it over the network via ssh.
I was hired at a small company a number of years ago. Contract-to-hire. One of those “we want to see you prove yourself before we actually hire you” deals. My role was to take over all of technical operations (cloud architecture, sysadmin, desktop support, the whole deal), so that the CTO didn’t have to do it all himself.
One time - about a week in - I spent the entire day playing with kinetic sand in the main lobby (which was in full view of every developer and the CTO). Mostly, I was building little bricks (something like 0.5x1x2cm), and stacking them in a 2 sided 90 degree wall.
When asked what I was doing by several people throughout the day, I said “I’m rebuilding your network”. I’m certain I looked like a crazy person. Honestly, it’s not a totally invalid assessment in general, even now.
What I was actually doing was planning out the subnets, ACLs, and general routing for a series of servers (web front-ends, api servers, DB servers, etc), and weighing the pros and cons of AWS LBs vs HAProxy for various applications.
Over the next few days, I built out the new network and started migrating legacy servers into it. I demo’d the process and accompanied documentation (which I mostly kept in case I had to build another network, or rebuild this one after some catastrophic total loss), and they seemed impressed.
My 3 month contract was converted to direct-hire within 3 weeks, after a number of other enhancements (like centralized ssh auth via OpenLDAP - rather than everyone sharing the same default user RSA key - and total systems monitoring via Nagios). Each one came with about a day’s worth of playing with some fidget or fixing some non-technical thing (like hanging a bunch of framed items in the lobby, which they’d been meaning to do, but wasn’t a high priority, especially for the technical staff).
They’d have had all the reason in the world to assume the new guy was full of shit and was about to wash out, but after that they assumed that when I looked like I was majorly slacking off (usually well away from my desk, tinkering with something mindless) that I was about to build some new thing into the network, or up-end a process, or some other crazy (but ultimately useful) thing.
They definitely didn’t mind when I would pace and talk to myself like a nut-bar (which I did/do frequently).
Why bother? Paid, non-transferable cloud backups, low-spec hardware that wears out in a few months, over-hyped/half-finished games (assuming they’re ever released), back catalogs that aren’t available if you don’t subscribe or repurchase every generation… Just skip em.
If you want AAA games, there’s plenty you can play mobile or on PC (or both), or if you specifically want indie, there’s plenty of them too on Itch.io , individual websites, and steam (among many others; GoG, HumbleBundle, etc). You frequently don’t even need to pay for these games, since a lot of them are free or via user-decided donations (mostly re: indies).
Hardware that can run them range everywhere from GPD handhelds to Steam Deck to any number of either’s competitors, and they also function as more than just game machines since they run either Linux or Windows.
Nintendo who?
The number of hours I put into figuring out what X was, the difference between XFree86 and X.ORG , fixing resolution and DPI issues, installing video card drivers (mostly nVidia)… I think all that tinkering prepared me for my career as a systems admin.
I think Slackware came with KDE, which is probably why I leaned toward it for so long. I’ve been using XFCE for many years, now.
rsync can resume partial transfers, but you really should break that file up. Trying to do it in one go is crazy.
Oh I remember those disks :D I think I had to either pull them off the ISO, or download them separately so that I could boot the system to the point where A: the install could occur at all and B: it had enough drivers to use the CD-ROM drive XD
My first distribution was Slackware 7.1 when I was in high school. It took a week to download the .iso on dialup, and I had to use a download manager (GetRight) so that I could resume the partial download any time the connection dropped (usually because someone had to use the phone).
I’m old o_o
I still vividly remember not being able to figure out how to install new packages, or knowing how to compile from source.
Hello fellow mbin user! I just got my personal instance set up 👍
You left out that they refuse to let end users control updates on the system unless they resort to hacky bullshit (and even that doesn’t work consistently). As far as I know (and have experienced on Windows Server) this extends to enterprise as well.
“Best practice” isn’t a catch-all rebuttal. Best practices are contextual. I’m keen to see your justification for encryption beyond “all sites should encrypt everything always”.
My assertion is that this isn’t necessary in this case. Why do you think that it is necessary to encrypt open-source, freely available, non-controversial site content?