A few hundred a month is just a few per day. That is pretty low volume by most standards.

I would say in general if the SMTP server could be replaced by a single human writing and mailing snail-mail letters by hand it qualifies as low volume.

Ah ok. You aren’t doing auth. I don’t understand how this is relevant.

Are you doing auth in the reverse proxy for Jellyfin? Do you use Chromecast or any non-web interface? If so I’m very interested how you got it to work.

The concern is that it would be nice if the UNIX users and LDAP is automatically in sync and managed from a version controlled source. I guess the answer is just build up a static LDAP database from my existing configs. It would be nice to have one authoritative system on the server but I guess as long as they are both built from one source of truth it shouldn’t be an issue.

Yes, LDAP is a general tool. But many applications that I am interested in using it for user information. That is what I want to use it for. I’m not really interested in storing other data.

I think you are sort of missing the goal of the question. I have a bunch of self-hosted services like Jellyfin, qBittorrent, PhotoPrism, Metabase … I want to avoid having to configure users in each one individually. I am considering LDAP because it is supported by many of these services. I’m not concerned about synchronizing UNIX users, I already have that solved. (If I need to move those to LDAP as well that can be considered, but isn’t a goal).

I do use a reverse proxy but for various reasons you can’t just block off some apps. For example if you want to play Jellyfin on a Chromecast or similar, or PhotoPrism if you want to use sharing links. Unfortunately these systems are designed around the built-in auth and you can’t just slap a proxy in front.

I do use nginx with basic with in front of services where I can. I trust nginx much more than 10 different services with varying quality levels. But unfortunately not all services play well.

How are you configuring this? I checked for Jellyfin and their are third-party plugins which don’t look too mature, but none of them seem to work with apps. qBittorrent doesn’t support much (actually I may be able to put reverse-proxy auth in front… I’ll look into that) and Metabase locks SSO behind a premium subscription.

IDK why but it does seem that LDAP is much more widely supported. Or am I missing some method to make it work

But the problem is that most self-hosted apps don’t integrate well with these. For example qBittorrent, Jellyfin, Metabase and many other common self-hosted apps.

NixOS makes it very easy to declaratively configure servers. For example the users config to manage UNIX users: https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/options#opt-users.users

Yet another service to maintain. If the server is crashing you can’t log in, so you need backup UNIX users anyways.

I use NixOS.

Yeah. I like old school tabs that were clearly attached to the thing that they switched. I definitely prefer the KDE UX here.

I don’t think it is that simple. I think that outline is about the “focus”. So if I press enter it will activate that tab, if I press tab it will move the focus to the “Entire Screen” tab.

The UX issue is that there are two concepts of focus in this UI. There is “which tab is active” and “what UI element will pressing enter activate”. These two are not sufficiently differentiated which leads to a confusing experience.

Or maybe there can just be no keyboard focus indicator by default, but that may be annoying for keyboard power users. But this is generally how it works on the web, you have to press tab once to move keyboard focus to the first interactive element.

The one that always gets me is GNOME’s screen sharing portal.

There is this outline around the “Application Window” tab which makes it seem selected. I use this UI multiple times a week and I need to pause for a sec every single time. I always think “I want to share a window”, “oh it is already selected” then stare at the monitors for a while before I realize why I can’t understand what I am looking at.

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Also Canada, and I think in California.

Yeah, this is basically my line. If I intentionally subscribed I will be sure to unsubscribe properly once (maybe twice). But if it was unsolicited then it will be marked as spam.

This is my dream. However I think my target market is smaller and less willing to pay (personal rather than business). However maintenance is low effort and I want the product for myself. So even if it doesn’t make much or anything I think I will be happy to run it forever.

The ultimate dream would be to make enough to be able to employ someone else part time, so that there could be business continuity if I wasn’t able to run it anymore.

There is definitely isolation. In theory (if containers worked perfectly as intended) a container can’t see any processes from the host, sees different filesystems, possibly a different network interface and basically everything else. There are some things that are shared like CPU, Memory and disk space but these can also be limited by the host.

But yes, in practice the Linux kernel is wildly complex and these interfaces don’t work quite as well as intended. You get bugs in permission checks and even memory corruption and code execution vulnerabilities. This results in unintended ways for code to break out of containers.

So in theory the isolation is quite strong, but in practice you shouldn’t rely on it for security critical isolation.

where you have decent trust in the software you’re running.

I generally say that containers and traditional UNIX users are good enough isolation for “mostly trusted” software. Basically I know that they aren’t going to actively try to escalate their privilege but may contain bugs that would cause problems without any isolation.

Of course it always depends on your risk. If you are handing sensitive user data and run lots of different services on the same host you may start to worry about remote code execution vulnerabilities and will be interested in stronger isolation so that a RCE in any one service doesn’t allow escalation to access all data being processed by other services on the host.