I’m currently on the lookout for privacy-respecting domain registrars. What are you guys using and why?
Edit: I’ve registered my domain with Porkbun. I got a really cool one, it’s called reallyaweso.me!
Salt is an alternative to Ansible. However I prefer HashiCorp’s Terraform for day 0 deployments. Unfortunately, PorkBun doesn’t seem to support Terraform, so I’ll keep looking. I’ll take a look at the link you sent, thanks.
Out of curiosity, if you don’t use these IaC tools, how do you manage self-hosted infrastructure?
how do you manage self-hosted infrastructure?
Manually, mostly.
DNS is handled by my own PowerDNS server using the PowerDNS-Admin web UI. I manually add records as needed. Editing a domain sends AXFRs / IXFRs to the secondary DNS hosts I use (I self-host three PowerDNS servers, plus I have a DNSMadeEasy account for the important domains, although I’ll be dropping that at some point since they increased prices over 10x after being acquired by DigiCert. I use acme-dns for Let’s Encrypt DNS challenges. I take daily backups of everything, including the PowerDNS database, so restoring the DB after a server failure is not an issue.
I have 28 VPSes for dnstools.ws and those are lightly managed using Ansible (there’s really not a lot running on them): https://github.com/Daniel15/dnstools/blob/master/ansible/roles/dnstools-worker/tasks/main.yml, but I do configure the base OS manually. I don’t set up new ones often so this has been fine.
I have a few other VPSes (all running Debian) and a home server (running Unraid) that I handle manually. I don’t change things often so it mostly hasn’t been an issue for me. Stuff just keeps working. I take daily backups.
The Debian systems all have
unattended-upgradesinstalled. The ‘main’ Debian VPS I’ve got started as a dedicated server running Debian Sarge (3.1, from 2005) and I’ve just kept upgrading it over the years. These days it’s a VPS that’s much cheaper yet way more powerful than the original 2005 dedicated server :)
