With the recent news, VPN bans being tested in western countries and even states like Michigan toying with new internet censorship; it’s had me thinking that I need to up my self hosting game. I currently use Truenas scale electric eel and I really am a novice with no formal education. I have a myriad of apps running, learned through YouTube tutorials, documentation, and AI. I tunnel out some of these services via cloudflare zero trust to a domain. I’ve got pi-hole running on the network and a VPN on my windows machine but that’s about it. It’s great! It works! It’s fun to tinker with and has allowed my family to ditch a lot of subscriptions. Browsing around, though, I see a lot of comments about different ways to secure servers. Everytime I try to learn about something such as VPS, reverse proxies it feels like an inundation of too much information and differing opinions. It seems like there are so many ways to do it that I really have no clue where to begin. I also don’t want to break what is currently working for me.

Anyone have a good idea on good sources to educate myself? Is it vital I learn how to run some sort of local service? How would hard government crackdown shutdown VPNs and what could a self-hoster do to avoid that? Be gentle. Thanks.

  • tvcvt@lemmy.ml
    5·
    2 hours ago

    Not sure if this is the kind of thing you’re after, but I think learning a little about the very fundamental pieces of these systems really helps to understand the mechanisms at work.

    One place that was really useful to me was years ago, the Security Now podcast did a series called “How the Internet Works” ( I think). Steve Gibson went over all the principles layer by layer and it helped my understanding a ton. This was many years ago, so the rest of each episode is probably filled with really old security news, but the main bits are as relevant as ever.

  • silly goose meekah@lemmy.world
    2·
    3 hours ago

    Regarding the VPN ban, having read nothing about it, I would assume they mostly mean using VPNs to spoof being from another country. I doubt they are talking about people using VPNs to connect to their home network. Plenty of businesses use that technology daily to allow remote workers to access their private network.