Setting up a personal server

I have been running a Pi as a server for a year(?) now, and I must confess that it is was not trivial for me to run and manage one successfully. It gave me a ton of work, but in the process of configuring everything I learned a lot, particularly on configuring networks and connectivity.

Besides the learning reason, a major reason to have a personal server is to have a place to keep stuff online without using a “cloud”. This is especially useful for things like private repositories, for instance. Another thing that can be easily done is to serve (duuh!) files on the local network – the only thing needed is

cat foo.bar | nc -l 1234

and, in the other machine

nc 192.168.XXX.XXX 1234 >foo.bar

and from here you can do a lot more.

Another upside is having a temporary media server when needed (my Pi is near the TV), so if we want to see something online, the Pi may handle it, instead of having to grab my laptop for that.

A minimum viable product (MVP) is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers, and to provide feedback for future product development. – Wikipedia, retrieved in February 2018

When working on any project, I like to have a MVP, because only then does the project have a concrete reality, that I can try out to find imperfections.

So, what is the MVP of a personal server? I settled for SSH - there are megatons of tutorials on how to make it work, and it is the first step to be headless.

I won’t write here yet another tutorial. However, I think the following things cover the basics on setting up SSH:

• If you are behind a NAT¹, make sure you are forwarding the correct ports
• If you want to care about attempts to enter your Pi, change from the default port to avoid spam.
• Always have a way to get in the Pi only with a password when in the LAN, even if you enforce SSH keys
• Firewall on the Pi is not needed if you can trust the LAN. Make sure you either have a rule to allow incoming connections or disable the firewall. And use UFW instead of iptables directly, unless you have the time to learn the intricacies of firewall rules.
• When you finally have that ultra-custom sshd-config, save it. You do not want to know the pain it is to lose your customized configs. (Tip: have a git repo somewhere public like Git{Lab,Hub}. When in a new PC, to customize it you will only need to clone it).
• Do not be afraid of deleting unnecessary stuff from the default config; however, do make a copy of the original, as it is normally a good source of documentation.

Some of the above tips are also applicable to other setup activities. As always, common-sense is helpful, and when you are not certain of something, search for the answer or ask someone!