I've been self-hosting my email for a little over 2 decades.
The basic setup has more or less stayed the same, but there's some more extra components around it you have to know now (spam filtering and SPF/DKIM/DMARC come readily to mind).
To quote Michael Lucas: "everything complicated about emails revolves around spam and not getting it". I highly recommend his book, "Run Your Own Mail Server".[1]
In short, hosting your own email is not that bad at all. I strongly suspect, like many other skills, since it has atrophied with the advent of the cloud and people readily giving up to the large carriers, it has gotten the reputation of being hard, or as you said, a full time job. I don't think either of those things are true.
Just wanted to chime in on my beancount workflow, which you may also want to check out.
I also use vim, and I use it a bit to edit my beancount files, but I mostly use fava, a most excellent web interface for beancount. In addition to having a built in editor (which does formatting and can catch errors and show you exactly where they are), it allows you to quickly add new transactions based on old ones — the dialog box allows you to choose from previously used accounts to speed up input. It’s a lifesaver. I don’t think I would have continued using beancount long term if it wasn’t for fava.
Just about the only negative thing I can say about fava is that it does formatting slightly differently from bean-format. I actually prefer it to beancount, but there are some cases where I prefer the native formatting (like when declaring/opening accounts). So for some months, I will switch from one to another. A minor nitpick, but it’s slightly annoying.
Fava is great. My only problem is that I was lazy and haven't imported anything for at least 2 years, and now it feels too daunting to try and catch up.
I've been running VPSs with them for the last 9 years. Never had a problem. And unlike Digital Ocean, they allow you to mount your own ISOs and fully support the BSDs.
Unless someone buys them out in the future and platform decay[1] happens, you can trust them.
I was there two weeks ago. The tour guide took us through a route that bypassed the longer lines and through some underground areas—culminating in an entrance that completely blew my mind. I never realized how huge the interior was until I stepped in and saw it firsthand. There are few things in my life that completely took my breath away, this ranks in the top 5 for sure.
On a slightly related note, Michael W. Lucas[1] is working on an upcoming book entitled "Run Your Own Mail Server", that will be published shortly (there's a Kickstarter campaign as well[2]).
I attended his tutorial and talk at BSDCan[3] this year and both were excellent. I highly recommend buying the book when it comes out (or supporting the Kickstarter), it will go through all the gory details of setting up and running a mail server, and best practices, including a ton of material on SPF/DKIM/DMARC.
(P.S. I have no affiliation with the author or the book in any way.)
Looking forward to this. First thing I ever ponied up on KS for.
I don't even run a mailserver, I'm just hoping it will take a bunch of the guides that have been floating about on the web, consolidate the sharp edges, and make sure its up to date.
I also hope it has some discussion on troubleshooting. Like dealing with blacklists and what not, folks always talk about that, but I've never see it documented what is actually done to resolve these problems (Like who do you send an email to, how do you even find out who to send an email to, etc.)
> someone complained about NTP issues with traffic passing through TATA and they were told to make their devices stratum 0 or something
Not saying your summary of that thread is wrong, I just wanted to expand a bit to maybe clarify:
- someone posted to NANOG about issues with their (European) servers reaching 0.freebsd.pool.ntp.org
- they noticed they were being routed through Tata (AS6453)
- they mentioned that their other servers (e.g. in Africa) had no issues
- they posted to NANOG to ask about this
- they thought it was a routing or FreeBSD issue (they later posted about the issue to a FreeBSD list as well)
So AFAICT, the correct response was posted about a day and a half (~42 hours) later:
- the NTP pool uses GeoDNS to map clients to servers
- the OP's server IP address was incorrectly geolocated to Mauritius
- the Mauritius zone in the pool has only one server
- so the OP would only ever get that IP as an answer
The short-term fix was to use a different pool address (e.g. europe.pool.ntp.org), and the responder also mentioned that the NTP pool folks were working to fix the problem.
Now the interesting part of that thread was that shortly after (~4 hours) the OP posted about their problem, someone replied and recommended that they setup their own GPS-based NTP network.
From there, that sub-thread was mostly about NTP attacks and GPS security and mounting receivers on top of datacenter buildings and such.
Counting up the messages (if my mail client's threading capabilities are to be trusted), of the 94 or so total messages in the thread, 79 (84%) of the messages were in that GPS-related subthread, and only 15 messages responded to the OPs issue directly.
I didn't really see this as a failing of NANOG per-se, it's just a public mailing list and some folks went on a nerd sniping tangent (cf. XKCD #356).
I've been an erstwhile FreeBSD user since v2.x (ca. December 1996),
running FreeBSD on my own machines since v4.x (ca 2001), and started
using it as my primary laptop/desktop daily driver since v5.3 (ca.
November 2004). Prior to that, SunOS/Solaris was my drug of choice.
In the past, I would update the OS and ports religiously, sometimes
rebuilding world and packages on a weekly basis. I've never once
experienced any bumpiness between v5.x and v8.x (or any other version,
but see my comments on v13 below). The OS has always been rock solid.
I have occasionally experienced some package issues, usually when
upgrading a port that had lagging dependencies -- some packages written
in PHP come readily to mind. The number of times this has happened is
more than 2 and less than 6, and in each of those cases, using
portdowngrade and waiting it out a few weeks did the trick.
Apart from OS-independent hardware issues, the only real FreeBSD issue
that I've ever encountered was in the v12->v13 upgrade. If you were
running ZFS, there was a gpart bootcode command you needed to run as
part of the upgrade process, which I sometimes forgot to do, which
caused the post-upgrade reboot to hang. Normally this wouldn't be a big
deal, you just insert the rescue CD and run the command and be on your
way 2 minutes later; but at that time I had a number of my servers
running on a VPS provider that didn't allow you to mount your own ISO,
so I had to wipe the machine and reinstall the OS from scratch and
restore stuff from backups. I don't really count this as a FreeBSD issue
per se, just an obtuse service provider. (I've since moved most of my
digital properties oceans away from that company.)
Nowadays I upgrade the OS and packages far less frequently. I upgrade
the OS with every minor release and also if there are any security
issues that affect me. I upgrade the packages every couple of months, or
if there is a bugfix that affects me, or if I need a new feature only
available in a newer release.
Since I started using it, there have been a number of developments that
have made my FreeBSD life so much better: cperciva's portsnap and
freebsd-update, pkg-ng, and of course the biggest one: ZFS. All of these
allow me to maintain and upgrade the systems very easily.
I stick with FreeBSD because of its consistency and ease of use, so I'd
be curious to know what you mean by "bumpy"?
The basic setup has more or less stayed the same, but there's some more extra components around it you have to know now (spam filtering and SPF/DKIM/DMARC come readily to mind).
To quote Michael Lucas: "everything complicated about emails revolves around spam and not getting it". I highly recommend his book, "Run Your Own Mail Server".[1]
In short, hosting your own email is not that bad at all. I strongly suspect, like many other skills, since it has atrophied with the advent of the cloud and people readily giving up to the large carriers, it has gotten the reputation of being hard, or as you said, a full time job. I don't think either of those things are true.
[1] - https://mwl.link/run-your-own-mail-server.html