amuck-landowner

Falling off the Grid

Aldryic C'boas

Aldryic C'boas

The Pony
Over the past couple of months, I've been slowly moving all of my services that were previously hosted by third parties (Google, etc) on to self-hosted solutions. Partially to be more cost effective, and primarily due to just how invasive some of these services are becoming. I think the straw for me was an email from a family member I was reading that mentioned a chiropractor; shortly after I started seeing a large number of Google Ads for chiropractors in what they thought was my locale. I don't mind having targeted ads based on the browsing history I voluntarily allow them to collect - but this is getting a bit ridiculous.


So, I started reducing just how reliant I was on their services (going to keep using Google as my example), as well as bringing more of my data 'in house' and off of third party servers. I started with ditching Chrome (which has been annoying the hell out of me with the memory leaks anyways), and decided to give Mozilla's Aurora project a try (tl;dr - a very beta, constantly updated Firefox). I'm very much reliant on sync services, so I was thrilled to learn that Mozilla not only offers their Weave (self-hosted Firefox sync) publicly, but makes it very easy to setup and run. So that's one down.


Next on my list was media sharing/music/etc. Google Drive/Music was my default for this, simply due to how convenient it was, especially with an Android phone. As an alternative, I'm now running self-hosted Owncloud and Subsonic (freaking in love with Subsonic now) services. Both fully compatible with pretty much any OS, as well as Android. Indeed, Subsonic has me inspired to make a new home media system, but that's a topic for another day. So, two more down.


Given the blatant disregard for privacy, one of the things I always disliked was using Google to store contacts and calendar/schedule items. Thankfully, with a little help from CardDAV and CalDAV, Owncloud takes care of this little issue as well.


My next step is email, and this is where I'm pausing a bit. I currently use Google Apps, which has been decent enough (aside from none of it being truly private... and no, I've never used their services for truly confidential information). I don't mind setting up dovecot/postfix/etc, but to be honest I just don't have enough time to keep everything in smooth working order. I've been looking at various panel-like solutions (including *shudder* Zimbra, but only if I could forgo the front end) such as ISPConfig, but honestly have zero experience with "Do it for you" setups.


So, I told you all that to ask you a question. Do you host your own email service? Is there a decent panel you might recommend? I'm partial to SQL over flatfile (for storing account/domain info), but I'm not overly picky at this point.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Aldryic C'boas

Aldryic C'boas

The Pony
Looks fairly nifty... is this something self-hosted, or do you have to use their services? (To clarify, I'm doing self-hosted at BuyVM obviously.. Fran and bz are family, and I know for certain that my stuff there is private.) I'm leery about using hosted solutions outside of my own home and BuyVM, since that's pretty much defeating the purpose of having full control over my data.
 
  • Like
Reactions: bfj
KuJoe

KuJoe

Well-Known Member
Verified Provider
It's all self hosted. They do provide a free Dynamic DNS service that I use for home though.
 
KuJoe

KuJoe

Well-Known Member
Verified Provider
I just noticed they have a package for High Availability now. I might pick up another to play with. I like that in the event of an emergency I can pick it up and take it with me.
 
KuJoe

KuJoe

Well-Known Member
Verified Provider
The android apps are nifty also. The DS112s look even better with a faster CPU.
 
acd

acd

New Member
I've heard more and more people trying to attempt this recently, especially in buyvm circles. The problem I have is that integration is really hard! The synchronization features offered on my android are really good which makes it extremely difficult for me to step away from it to a self-hosted solution.

To answer the question though, I do self-host email (at buyvm NY actually). I use postfix+mysql w/ courier-imap, though only because I haven't messed with dovecot. tbh, if I had to do it over, I would do it in sqlite3 specifically because it doesn't need an external process running to receive and deliver mail (making it higher reliability at the cost of secure integration with your perl cgis, etc). I have also yet to find a panel based solution that handles things nicely. I've messed around with ldap+krb5 based auth because it allows SSO w/ basically anything else that is written by serious people but I've yet to hammer out a solid config for it (my understanding of ldap and x.509 is really insufficient for the project). Debian configuration for SPF-verification and DKIM is actually pretty easy. Spam and virus filtering can get expensive though, even on the 512MB I've got it running on. Clam-av has a tendency to fall down which tanks your postfix pipeline in a non-obvious way to external monitoring, at least in my config. I wouldn't run a high load mail server the way I have it set up, nor one that needs multiple administrators, but for just me, it's more than sufficient.

If owncloud or someone using a sane programming language ( :)) made a debian-based "federated new-gapps" distribution, I would be all over it. Bring your own 512MB server, a domain name & go... Well, I can dream anyway.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
notFound

notFound

Don't take me seriously!
Verified Provider
I've pretty much taken most of the steps Ald has done for pretty much the same reasons but after searching am still to find an alternative for self-hosted e-mail. I have a manual dovecot setup but it's a pain in the arse tbh, for some reason I can set it up for clients fine but when you're using it yourself day to day it's much easier to have a panel like thingamajig.

I like those Synology NAS thingamajigs but hosting e-mail off my home connection is probably the dumbest thing I could do, this IP is fixed to my MAC address on the modem but it's in all sorts of blacklists and I can't change rDNS etc., and it cuts out all the time.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
acd

acd

New Member
Infinity, a couple perl/python/shell scripts to manage users/virtual emails go a long way to ease the pains of management. For me, setting up a new virtual domain is a one-liner using mysql to manage domains, as is user-to-virtual email mapping. I expect it'd take you a few hours tops to get to a similar position if you already know how to do the management steps on the CLI.

You may want to consider setting up a backup MX that forwards to your local one and set it as your primary outgoing smtpd. Since you have a static IP, if you aren't too worried about security, you can probably just set your home IP as an allowed relay-from address and not require authentication. It would probably take you all of 20 minutes on any smtpd.
 
Leyton

Leyton

Member
Verified Provider
For email, I've found that Axigen is a rather nice solution for an easy install, and control panel. Yeah, the webmail interface is a little horrid - but you can easily swap that out for Horde or RoundCube.


Only downside for the free version are the account limits. But, if you're not using thousands of email accounts, I think the values are fairly reasonable.
 
wdq

wdq

Quade
I've been essentially doing the same sort of thing as you over the past few months. I have always disliked how all of the tracking works. When I heard that Google Reader was going away I switched to Tiny Tiny RSS and ever since I've been moving more and more things over to that same server.

For email I've been using Atmail for the past month. It looks good, and works. It's not very affordable though. 
 
drmike

drmike

100% Tier-1 Gogent
Add me to the abandonment party.   I long ago ditched using big email providers for anything of importance.  Then again, absent crypto and avoiding users on those honeypot systems, you are joining the monitoring pool just by interacting with one of their 'USERS'.

In fact, I think most people are ADDICTED to these cheap, know-nothing systems.   Chemical dependency if I ever saw one.

For me:

1. File storage - never used the cloud stuff, but disturbed when I saw random files from Gmail stuffed in their Drive or whatever from years back.  No thanks.     All my files live in SSHFS accessible storage here and there on dedicated servers usually.   Owncloud I just started tinkering with and it's alright, but frankly, I don't see the big deal with it, so far.

2. Email - Still have throwaway mega mail service accounts--- but they are dust bins mainly.   Real accounts are scattered amongst various Cpanel hosts.

3. Backups -  Buying more drives for local use.   Backups in house more than ever now.  Remote backup for the online and must have stuff on a dedicated server that is sliced into virtual pieces.

4. IM  - I hardly use it except when working with someone actively.  Jabber server running on dedicated server.

5. VOIP - Google Voice was nice and free and voice printing everyone plus recording/converting to searchable text.   No F'N thanks.  Threw up a Magicjack for now, but I trust them only 1% more.  Scratch that, I don't trust them.  Heading to a small no frills VOIP provider who isn't big enough to be mixed up with paying tariffs, 911 fees, etc.

I am done with Google even if that means half the net doesn't work for me.   Microsoft I've long been done with.   Search is Duckduckgo and Startpage.

Social media, screw that honeypot, I don't do that stuff or Facecrook.  So banning those locally on DNS basis is what I am doing to stem leakage to them.  Ditto for Google and Bing.

For online maps, liking Nokia.  

Mind you, it is the big companies that the feds/spooks target/partner with.   It is all about scale.  If you stay away from those entities life sails much smoother.  Mind you the other end of the spectrum, the very small privacy oriented providers who are very vocal are just as dangerous and fed targets for other obvious reasons.  It's the slim middle ground to stay in.  New, semi viable companies that are growing.   At some point you will need to abandon them too though.  Popularity will ensnare them -- either cooperate with the feds or get put out of business.

What we collectively need is a roadmap of alternatives to these idiot corporatists and their spyware.  We also need a bundle of how-to's for common outsourced services so folks can set up their own (i.e. email, IM, Owncloud, etc.)
 
shawn_ky

shawn_ky

Member
May want to check out ZPanel (http://www.zpanelcp.com/). It is an open-source hosting solution that has been recently updated with a nice theme.  It has a lot of built-in features including email using dovecot, postfix and all the other frills + the normal hosting solutions. Run it in-house if you want and it would keep it as secure as you are. 

Subsonic?  might need to look at that.
 
mikho

mikho

Not to be taken seriously, ever!
I've spoken to two of my customers how have tried zimbra and both hate it for various reasons. One is actually switching back to MS Exchange and the other would change to something else if there was money to do it.


Both customers migrated from already existing solutions to zimbra and they have no knowledge with Linux and by the looks of it, neither did the consultants how did the migration.
 
drmike

drmike

100% Tier-1 Gogent
shawn_ky said:
May want to check out ZPanel (http://www.zpanelcp.com/). It is an open-source hosting solution that has been recently updated with a nice theme.  It has a lot of built-in features including email using dovecot, postfix and all the other frills + the normal hosting solutions. Run it in-house if you want and it would keep it as secure as you are. 
Click to expand...
How is the Zpanel install process?  See support for Ubuntu, but no Debian....
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top
amuck-landowner