farcaller

given time in lieu

after squadron 42 ships*

TIL, thanks!

I had exactly the same use case and I ended up with a 40G DAC fiber for that case. It ended up cheaper than converting the whole lan to 10G.

That said, it feels like used 10G equipment is easier to come by than 2.5G for now, and if you have 2G fiber uplink and only 1G past the router then it’s a waste.

Garage is trivial to get up and running and it’s more lightweight than minio nowadays.

Between homebrew and nix, the amount of foss macs can run out of the box is pretty close to some generic Ubuntu (nixpkgs is technically the largest repo out there, but not all of the nixpkgs are available on mac).

any oauth (I use kanidm) and oauth2-proxy solves that and now you can easily use passkeys to log into your intranet resources.

The biggest certainty is that just having an open port for an SMTP server dangling out there means you will 100% be attacked.

True.

Not just sometimes, non-stop.

True

So you don't want to host on a machine with anything else on it, cuz security.

I don’t think "cuz security" is a proper argument or no one would be ever listening on public internet. Are there risks? Yes.

So you need a dedicated host for that portion

Bullshit. You do not need a dedicated host for smtp ingress. It won’t be attacked that much.

and a very capable and restrictive intrusion detection system (let's say crowdsec), which is going to take some amount of resources to run, and stop your machine from toppling over.

That's not part of the mail pipeline the OP asked for.

Here, I brought receipts. There are two spikes of attempted connections in the last month, but it's all negligible traffic.

Self-hosting mail servers is tricky, same as self-hosting ssh, http, or whatever else. But it's totally doable even on an aging RPi. No, you don’t need to train expensive spam detection because it's enough to have very strict rules on where you get mail from and drop 99% of the traffic because it will be compliant. No, you don’t need to run crowdstrike for a server that accepts bytes and stores them for another server (IMAP) to offer them to you. You don’t even need an antivirus, it's not part of mail hosting, really.

Instead of bickering and posturing, you could have spent your time better educating OP on the best practices, e.g. like this.

I won’t quote the bit of your post again, but no, if you have an open smtp port then you won’t get constantly attacked. Again, I have a fully qualified smtp server and it receives about 40 connections per hour (mostly the spam ones). That's trivial to process.

It doesn’t matter that I forward emails from another server, because, in the end, mine is still public on the internet.

If you are trying to make a point that it's tricky to run a corporate-scale smtp and make sure that end users are protected, then it's clearly not what the OP was looking for.

The biggest certainty is that just having an open port for an SMTP server dangling out there means you will 100% be attacked. Not just sometimes, non-stop. So you don't want to host on a machine with anything else on it, cuz security. So you need a dedicated host for that portion, and a very capable and restrictive intrusion detection system (let's say crowdsec), which is going to take some amount of resources to run, and stop your machine from toppling over.

I need to call BS on this. No one cares. I’ve been running a small go-smtp based server that would do some processing on forwarded mail for 2 years now and I don’t see much of “attacks”. Yeah, sometimes I get passersbys trying to figure if this is a mail relay, which it’s not.

You absolutely don’t need a dedicated machine and an IDS. And you definitely need crowdsec.

Yeah, sending mail is somewhat hard lately, but DKIM and DMARC can be figured out. Receiving mail is just straightforward.

I would not recommend unifi for a mature solution. It sure works nice as a glass panel, but it will get limiting if you will have a desire to hack around your network. Their APs are solid, though, it's just the USG/Dream machine that I wouldn’t recommend.

Mikrotik software is very capable and hackable and you can run it in a vm if you feel like bringing your own hardware.

restic can run append-only, too. It's more about the remote not allowing deletions.

Apparently traefik might be better if you run docker compose and such, as it does auto-discovery, which reduces the amount of manual configuration required.