Dad died in 2022. Since 2023, things he selfhosted have slowly begun breaking
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At first, I self-hosted email on home server. Paid extra for a dedicated IPv4 address in the cable broadband bill at a residence.
I then started dealing with critical business emails, and a single server at the house is not reliable for that so I migrated to semi-self-hosted by paying for business-class email package. I still use my custom domain and point the DNS MX records the the hosting company's server. That was 15 years ago and had a few family & friends also use that for email.
But I'm now in the process of getting everyone off my email server except for me and migrating them to GMail and Microsoft 365 Outlook. They need simple reliable email and my 1-man-army of IT staff (me & myself & I) cannot support them if I'm in the hospital for a month.
My custom email setup has "too many moving parts". There's a login in at the registrar to constantly renew the domain. And there's another login at the hosting company and pay that yearly bill with a credit card. There are multiple points of failure. I'm the proverbial "if he gets hit by a bus" problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
No, I can't write up some documentation with screenshots so they know how to navigate the process at the registrar and hosting company. E.g. if they try to login from their "unrecognized" computer to takeover email administrator tasks, a 2FA email confirmation with random 6-digit code would be sent to guess where? To _my_ email, not theirs. The interconnected dependencies are complicated and invisible because the recovery procedures are not stress-tested. Besides, the web UI changes constantly at those companies so the "oh shit what do I do" documentation would quickly get out of date anyway.
The redditor's story just reinforces my decision to not let people depend on my email server anymore.
If you're hosting email for family & friends, carefully think through all possible failure modes so they're not in trouble if you're not around.
Let’s not forget your domain registrar either…
It's likely a lot more rare to get banned from your VPS or ISP than it is to get banned from something like Google, since who knows what the rules are there? Your kid could upload an inappropriate video to YouTube or something, and they'll associate IPs with your account and suddenly you lose access to Gmail.
I haven’t heard of any case where a domain registrar took away a domain other than as a consequence of criminal prosecution or court orders.
In any case, it’s far more robust than e.g. Google shutting down your account for unknown reasons.
Not all TOS are equal, and not all services are equally important and have same severity.
An example would be the number of people who don't want to issue perfectly valid chargebacks against Amazon because they'll lose access to digital purchases (kindle, audible, etc) in retaliation.
So more on-topic, it's conceivable that, for example, you have a dispute over a Google Play purchase, and in trying to exercise your consumer rights, you lose your access to your gmail account.
You don't need to be a troll to be violating a TOS, "if they're being punished they must have deserved it" is no more valid online than off.
tl;dr: Everyone keeps saying Google/Facebook/etc but I am talking about hosting your services with individual corps, not "all eggs in one basket" style.
I also don’t know why GP has to “log in at the registrar to constantly renew the domain”. Auto-renewal exists. I haven’t lifted a finger for any of my domains for many years.
Everyone in my family has their own domain. The instructions for renewing a domain, a list of reputable mail service providers, and instructions for pointing MX records at a new service provider, are not very complicated for somebody that can work a computer at a basic level of productivity. Many email service providers will even run nameservers on your behalf so you don’t even have to mess with individual DNS records. You can fit that in about one formatted page of instructions to include in your online contingency plan you share with love one(s).
I do the same, but your argument is a little dishonest: You can lose your custom domain and lose your provider account, so you've essentially gone from one point of failure to two.
The novelty domain is totally worth it though, at least to me.
Honestly, the state should provide every citizen an official email address and make it a requirement that every invoice, contract etc is provided to this account...
That's solvable issue with multiple solutions.
I.e. making the address routeable to another provider by configuration. Imagine an address like yourchoice@$identifier.TLD.mail
The state could give you the option to set the MX record for this subdomain to a provider of your choice
If you think I'm being facetious, I'll point out that at this point, I have several hundred person-years under my belt of the use of various online services, and I've not had issues with getting unfairly banned from them.
I do, however, expect to die, and anything I built to crumble to dust and bitrot long before I have several hundred person-years of life under my belt.
I still think you're far more likely to die (or suffer some other situation where you're unable to properly maintain your homebrew house of cards) before you experience it in your lifetime.
If it's your hobby, that's great, its a productive way to stay busy, and it teaches you things! But in long-term use, if I inherited a home-built dishwasher from my dad, or my spouse, I'd probably just junk it and buy a Bosch at the first sign of trouble from it.
Specifically, I have a domain prepaid for a decade pointing at a mail host prepaid for a decade. I've had this setup for decades and it has literally never broken. In this timeframe I and many friends and family been locked out of Google accounts for one reason or another. If I had to bet money on a family member's ability to access this setup after I have an unscheduled meeting with a bus, vs. their ability to maintain access to a Google account, I'd bet on my setup, not least because that setup involves actual (pre)paid support.
So yeah - house of cards bad, but some degree of control doesn't have to mean house of cards. I think we're mostly in agreement - just wanted to try to outline where I'm coming from a little more specifically.
A Yubikey as 2FA is another good option but that is not widely supported yet.
Add another phone line for a phone that stays home and is the 2FA phone (or a Google Voice to a shared email account, with all family members phones as the Gmail 2FA, since it supports multiple phones)
#1 rule, pay for domains out the full 10 years, every year, everything else is gravy. As long as your estate owns the domain, things can be fixed even if some mail is lost. They have a decade to sort it out ;)
* All mails are on Gmail or iCloud.
* All backups are on Dropbox and iCloud.
* All photos are on iCloud shared folders.
* All passwords and secret notes are on 1password.
And I made sure that I am not the only admin. Life is simpler this way. I wrote detailed instructions on how to recover all these in my will in 1password.
So you set up an email account specifically for those, and put the credentials for it in the documentation. You probably want that to be hosted somewhere else though, because needing the code to access your email system so you can get the code is not a fun kind of circular dependency.
That's not limited to self-hosting though. You lose your device and therefore the saved password for Provider A, to reset it they want to send a code to Provider B, to sign into that they want to send a code to Provider A. 2FA circular dependencies are actually kind of a scourge.
Sorry I wasn't clear. I wasn't looking for a "solution". I was trying to explain how one can be blind to future failure scenarios (e.g. 2FA behavior is just one example) and thus, the "admin procedures documentation" can be inadvertently flawed. It's because the owner never had a 2FA verification email for years and so completely forgets that their friend will get an unexpected 2FA random code request in the event of a disaster recovery. I edited my comment to hopefully make that more clear.
>The interconnected dependencies are complicated and invisible because the recovery procedures are not stress-tested.*
You set them up on Cloud Email and it asks for a phone number to create an account, then they find out some debtor used to have their phone number and they're getting calls from debt collectors, or they move and want a number in their new area code, so their phone number changes. No one thinks to update it with the email provider until they insist on sending a code to the phone number you used to sign up ten years ago.
Or you set it up for them and it prompts for a backup email, which they don't have because the one being created is their only one, so you use yours thinking something is better than nothing, and now they still need the code sent to yours.
How does the hosting method affect any of this?
It's infuriating how everyone in the world is doing this forced 2FA stuff now.
This happens to me a few times per year and is enough of a hassle to get me to want to get off of this forwarding service.
Today I'm married to a different person and still administering email for my ex. Out of everything that came of that relationship, I regret the email server the most.
I've tried to mitigate this risk by keeping a so-called "death book": a hardcopy of all accounts, passwords, 2 factor auth instructions, router SSIDs, and so on, kept in the firesafe with all the other important stuff. But this Reddit post points out that this is not enough! Someone would also have to come in and take over the technical toil and maintenance that it takes to keep everything running. Not sure what the solution is. The rest of my family has no interest in learning this stuff. They can't even remember their own passwords without me, let alone ssh to our VPS and restart exim4.
What about going on strike for a day or two? Not in a petulant way, but in a loving way. Just to impress upon your family exactly how important things are, that they're currently taking for granted. Maybe you'd get a volunteer to do some modest training and succession planning.
It’s really hard to force people to be interested in things that they aren’t interested in.
My family enjoys having a simple-to-use Jellyfin setup with Infuse as a front-end; but if I'm dead eventually that ZFS server will fail in one way or another, and they'll shrug and go back to streaming or buying DVDs or something.
Attempts to explain are met with "don't bother me with talking about you being dead".
When a coworker (IT staff, in your case) leaves, they get replaced.
Family just leaves a hole. Maybe some duties get taken over, maybe not. You may leave behind an IT shaped hole, but it's not really a new or unique problem. You lose the person who organized the holidays, the family reunions, the one who made the good pie, the peacemaker who kept the half-dozen warring factions cordial.
Maybe someone else steps up. Maybe not. It just gets rolled into the larger grieving process of the holes left by those we've lost.
Yeah that's the problem. They may have the passwords etc. but they don't have the knowhow to understand how the Proxmox cluster works, why the scripts aren't running, or comprehend an obscure error. It's basically a business setup at this point and would require someone with an IT background and lots of time to understand. Hell if you suddenly gave me such a setup and asked me to figure it out it would take a lot of time and trial and error as well.
The thing though is that if something happens the stuff won't all go down at once, there will be a process where hardware fails, subscriptions aren't paid, and so forth. So what I tell my family is to immediately backup the NAS files to external HDDs, create new email accounts with a public and setup forwarding for as long as it lasts (while changing their bank/Facebook/etc. to use those new emails), and so on. The telephone/internet providers may need to be changed to a user friendly residental service.
And all that has to happen fast before everything becomes inaccessible.
My wife knows what hard copies (my "death book") to give him if necessary. Until I die he has no access, but once I do he has my implicit trust.
I don't keep the documentation updated as often as I'd like, but it doesn't drift much between update sessions either. A life event usually prompts updating the docs. The last time I updated was the night before going in for surgery.
Besides my self-hosted stuff, I do "family IT" too. The "family IT" stuff is all documented just like one of our Customers. I made a point of insuring that my business partner could take on the family in the same way that he could take on other Customers. The goal is still probably to wind down, but it puts the family IT on somewhat similar footing to the Customers.
Internet account - they'll file paperwork to get access. They can continue paying the bills. Same goes for all utility accounts and online services (most of which is not a big loss - they can sign up for their own Netflix account if need be!)
Router: That's the main failure point. But they can just replace it with one the ISP gives (for a fee, of course).
Email: I have my own setup, so no one is impacted if I die.
Self hosted stuff: I think I'm the only user. Wife was using Plex for a while but doesn't any more.
Smart home: Yeah, they'll lose this. Stuff like smart switches "just work". But smart bulbs occasionally need to be reset and resynced to the hub. All in all, it's not really a great problem if they start failing.
I did add notes to my will on what I felt were the important files on my PC they may want to preserve (photos, etc). They don't use Linux so they may need help extracting them. Easy to pay someone to do it, but I have a feeling they won't really bother.
Also when one partner dies or is ill, the other often lacks the capacity (mental etc) to deal with complex technical stuff.
We use Fastmail, Dropbox, etc with all service admin accounts in a shared family icloud keychain group [1]; all services are on autopay from a credit card that is automatically paid each month out of investment account, family email domain is paid up 10 years into the future. Any of our family members can check their mail or change configs through Fastmail's web UX.
[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/share-passwords-iphe6...
Apart from that, I am glad to see reddittors stepping up to help the guy. That's the good old internet.
At every level our society is very broken after we introduced computers. I'm super happy to be making money from that, though.
My digital assets are designed to work for at least 10 years after my death (I keep domain and hosting accounts pre-paid) and my annual dead-man's switch should ensure my succesors are given timely notice to take over or migrate any services they decide are worth perpetuating longer than that.
The account with the money, not with the service.
> Your estate is a legal entity.
Only after the executor probated your will and therefore received the rights to manage your assets. Until then nobody can (at least legally) to do anything with the money. And while nobody would bother with an automated subscriptions (till there are enough money on the account ofc) there could be problems if the assets would be frozen until the executor would claim the rights for them. Or if the bank just outright cancel or disable the card to prevent unauthorized (hey, the guy is dead, he can't consent!) withdrawals or payments.
> as long as the bills were being paid
Not every jurisdiction is fine with the money operations from a deceased person.
EDIT: oh, and here even if you have a will signed yesterday and you are named the executor of the will you still need to wait a half of the year for the probate to complete. And IMMSMV you can ask the banks to freeze the assets, specifically till the rightful heirs would be determined. Specifically for a case when a loving niece, ex-gf, bff, whoever wouldn't be able to withdraw everything from the deceased's accounts.
BTW, if you work for a hosting company, do your processes actually to the above for a non-technical, grieving heir?
Something like this [0] where they try to contact you by phone and snail mail and keep your stuff online for more than half a year even if you don't pay is a paid exception and not the norm.
Most (all?) companies have some process where you show a death certificate and then get access to the account.
(in before "oh no! what if they steal your stuff! what if they leave your wife and kids with nothing and steal your money" i have two answers to that, get better friends of course is the main one. but the second one is that reason our mind goes in that direction is because there's been a lot of moral stories written, bulk of them in victorian times, of wives left destitute because of unscrupulous associates. those stories make for nice drama, and they are also warnings for individuals and society in general. you gotta trust someone, better be people i knew for a long time, rather than some random consultant from reddit, or a geek squad member)
If you have a loved one whose abandoned site will eventually die, consider spidering the site and turning it into a physical book. I don't know of any services that will do this for you but this is the only way family will have a chance to read their words in 20+ years.
If I want to migrate it to a new host or a new static site generator it's all pretty trivial. Theoretically outputting it to PDF or print should be pretty doable.
The one that was forgotten was his cellphone pin; would have been nice to get a copy of his photos (encrypted Samsung)
(aside: I still need to get those photos backed up into my home NAS).
I constantly recommend the use of password manager and unique credentials everywhere (to prevent cred stuffing attacks). I always get feedback from friends/family that they worry about forgetting the password to the manager. I tell them to write it down and put it in their safe. And it always results in a deer-in-headlights response. They've been told for years to NEVER write down a password.
We want to keep making things more shiny and complex because it justifies our jobs. But everything has dependencies, breaking changes, cruft. Working systems decay too fast. The software industry has become nothing but overhead and maintenance.
If this continues there's no future for it, that might sound impossible or unbelievable, but humans advance, and this isn't advancement, you can't run a space colony on software that stops working a year later and needs legacy system admins to keep the air running in 15 years. This stuff needs to normalize, slow down, become bedrock, or our civilizations will not be able to rely on it.
I still have a lot of home automation but I’ve specifically selected equipment that “fails normal” - the smart stuff like rules and voice control and so forth might go away, but the switch on the wall will continue to work regardless.
Finally I fanatically use a password manager. The password, backup key, etc for that is written on an “in case” letter stored in a fireproof/waterproof envelope in a fireproof safe in my home, and my family is aware of it.
It’s one of those unpleasant things to have to plan for, but I don’t want my family to have everything break on them if I die.
If I need help with some open source software, I can reach out to their community, point them to the repo, and show them exactly how to reproduce my issue.
And I just realized that when I am not around, my wife can still call my technical friends or find contractors to fix stuff, by submitting PRs to the repository. She just need to get my GitHub account from shared password manager and approve PRs ;)
This is why I refuse to touch “critical” things for self-hosting like email. If Home Assistant goes down then it’s not the end of the world. Physical switches still work and people can work around it. Same deal with a media server, it’s not the end of the world. Losing email/chat/photos IS the end of the world for a lot of people.
- All account passwords
- All financial account info etc
- Information on where pictures are stored on our home server.
- a message for her to read if I die.
My instructions for self hosting is basically “tear it down and give it away”
It helps that almost everything is in 1Password.
Dreamhost is $13/mo (although they have a temporary discount right now). That's more than $5/mo, but you get a lot more than email.
They also have email only hosting: $1.67/mo/mailbox if you prepay for a year.
I can see why you think the hosting companies are gouging you with their prices per user, but look at it from your family's perspective. Their email is probably worth a lot more than $2/mo to them, and if you suddenly die and they lose access, it would be because you didn't want to pay $2/mo to avoid that pain.