TeaWithDani

I wonder how viable it would be to do the opposite of quantum. If we remove every at risk feature and strip it down to the basics: no scripts, no multi-user, no public sharing etc...

Project could be pretty easy to maintain indefinitely?

I remember reading earlier this year that the project was essentially "complete" and would only get security updates.

But like he says: "people keep making PRs for new features. Features that I do really think would benefit the project."

I really struggle with folks' sense of gratitude sometimes. Like there's so many people making cool things for us... for free... When they could be doing the same work for money.

But yeah, sucks nobody could really keep the project up and secure. I'm not looking for a fork that will add anything to the project.

I'll read some of the bug tickets to see what the current state is like. Figured this thing could just work indefinitely without much maintenance... its so simple?

You get free healthcare, but you now have to speak french. Deal? :p

Yeah... I pay money for 2 cores and 4gb RAM. I'd read the fine print on those free services.

I'm not comfortable with free services anymore. Nor am I comfortable dealing with a company subject to the Cloud Act.

Ubuntu's "reputation" is nonsense. It's a great distro for servers. Security updates are really fast and using snaps in a server environment is really great. I recommend running things like Docker or Tailscale off snap. They will revert to a previous image if an update fails. Extra stability for a server as you run automatic updates. If you run everything that is not in the base install off a snap, you have an extra layer of sandboxing against any supply chain attack for dependencies.

Ubuntu will have more recent packages, that doesnt really matter in a server environment. Debian is otherwise fine, I just dislike it's installer and prefer Ubuntu's. I found it easier to sync third party drivers on Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Pro gets you livepatches for kernal issues, which may be worthwhile. Also done without rebooting.

Ubuntu also gives you better apparmour default profiles on more things, whereas on debian, its up to you to set them up.

Debian will be exactly the same, its just more conservative and has less of those extras I mentioned. May be marginally lighter on resources for that. Either are fine.

It'll be down to your bank's rules. My main bank and brokerage work flawlessly, sync everyday. My secondary bank and Amex need to be reauthenticated every week or two. So I just update those once a month. Just go on simplefin and run the 2FA plus some waiting.

It doesn't sync non-bank stuff, so there's some RRSP providers I just enter manually.

For $20 cad a year its fine. I wouldn't use it to track daily expenses unless you know everything will work. I do all my finances once a month so its fine for me.

I didn't expect to even need a NAS, but I can no longer live without two now. Having all my data in one place, automated backups on my secondary NAS. I found a cloud storage provider I like. Just the whole stack is wonderful and I'm never going back.

GoCardless or Enable Banking don't work? I see both on the Actual Budget website. One doesnt take new customers? Weird

I was using Wealthica before they started charging and Actual Budget + Simplefin is so much better. I'm really happy all my financial info is just mine and not exposed to any other company. The expense for Simplefin is worth it and minimal.

So far the only real vulnerabilities that Ai have spun up seem to be really obscure edge case privilege escalation bugs that have been around for ages but nobody discovered. They then get patched in days if not less. I would expect them to run out of low hanging fruit pretty soon.

Most of them can even be mitigated by preventing local access to a system.

There's tools to audit your network and systems. You can setup a SIEM like Wazuh. It'll tell you the same kind of stuff that have been good practice for a while and mitigate most of the ai assisted vulnerabilities.

Prevent password logins where ever possible too, especially SSH. Use ed25519 keys. Perform server actions with least privilege users, prevent root logins. Immutable systems and containers are a helpful tool too.

I also just host my public facing stuff on a VPS. DDOS protection and just otherwise isolated.