I know of at least one big tech company that uses a self-hosted, self-contained Mattermost instance, hosted with a major cloud provider totally separate from all their infra, for communication in major outages when all their internal tools are down.

You’ll need to use a VPN that supports port forwarding. You could use a cheap VPS instead.

Where I live in California, electricity can be over US$0.60/kWh during peak summer time. Thankfully I have solar panels that offset most of the cost. I’m from Australia which also has high electricity prices.

Depending on the electricity price where you live, a VPS with 8GB RAM might be cheaper than running the laptop. Just something to keep in mind. GreenCloudVPS have some for $45 annually: https://greencloudvps.com/billing/store/budget-kvm-sale (I’m not affiliated with them)

Should I run the server over a VPN

Do you mean for you to access it remotely, or do you mean to expose it publicly via the VPN (so that you can have publicly-exposed services while hiding your home IP)?

For remote access, I’d recommend Tailscale. It mostly “just works”.

Thanks - I forgot about that.

The hostname will be encrypted eventually (ESNI) but you’re right that the IP address is visible.

Destination IP is starting to mean less and less these days, given there’s a large amount of sites that use shared IPs rather than dedicated ones (for example, if they use Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify, AWS CloudFront, etc.)

1. It encrypts your internet traffic in transit

Note that most sites use TLS these days, so your data is already encrypted in transit.

Yeah this doesn’t make sense. Docked bars have worked fine since Windows 95. You could have the task bar on any side, and apps would handle it. You could have multiple docked bars too, as some third-party apps used to be dockable. For example, Winamp had a view that was a short bar stretching the entire width of the screen, stuck to the top of the screen. The windowing system handled it with no issues.

Yes! I’m not sure about it changing when you connect monitors (since I’m usually using desktop PCs), but you can have a different setup per monitor.

I have three monitors at work. My main monitor is configured to show all open apps in the taskbar, while the secondary monitors only show the apps opened on those monitors. You can totally change any of the configuration though… the layout, the position, the settings, or even just not have a taskbar on some monitors.

It’s what I’ve experienced at FAANG companies. MitM isn’t used and would break certificate pinning on sites (including internal tools) that use both certificate pinning and HSTS. The Chromium source code has a list of domains that are hard-coded to only accept particular root certificates.

/var holds log files

Not just log files, but any variable/dynamic data used by packages installed on the system: caches, databases (like /var/lib/mysql for MySQL), Docker volumes, etc.

Traditionally, /var and /home are parts of a Linux server that use the most disk space, which is why they used to almost always be separate partitions.

Also /tmp is often a RAM disk (tmpfs mount) these days.

Larger companies that monitor for corporate passwords being entered on third-party sites usually use a browser extension that’s force-installed using Chrome Enterprise. That’s especially the case if they mandate the usage of Chrome.

Hong Kong to Los Angeles is around 70ms latency (140ms round trip) so I’m not too surprised.

It’s not uncommon on sites where a high proportion of the userbase uses an adblocker, as making ads look like and render using the same code as organic content (same CSS classes, etc) makes them harder to block.

Wow, this is very useful!!

a program that runs as root

Does it have to run as root? It’s common to run Docker in rootless mode in production environments.

You might be interested in StirlingPDF too.

you can override this by setting an IP on the port exposed so thet a local only server is only accessable on 127.0.0.1

Also, if the Docker container only has to be accessed from another Docker container, you don’t need to expose a port at all. Docker containers can reach other Docker containers in the same compose stack by hostname.

If you are good at manipulating iptables there is a way around this

Modern systems shouldn’t be using iptables any more.

It is encrypted at their end - they say the data is encrypted both in transit and at rest.

However, it’s not end-to-end encrypted, in the usual meaning of the term. E2EE usually means that only the sender and intended recipients of the data can decrypt the it, not the company running the service, their affiliates, or any intermediaries.