machiavellian

DISCLAIMER
I am not a computer security expert, merely a hobbyist having read some blogs from people who sounded smart. It is more than probable that I am mistaken in one or more parts of this post.

Linux is not more secure than Windows. By default, it’s actually considerably more vulnerable than Windows. Source

In my opinion an antivirus doesn’t really solve your problem. What you actually want is sandboxing, which means restricting user and program privileges. I recommend getting familiar with SELinux (or alternatively AppArmor, although it isn’t nearly as effective) and bubblewrap (or alernatively Firejail, which requires root privileges to run and is thus a bigger threat vector than bubblewrap).

Aside from that just disable any service you aren’t using (like ssh), use a deny-all-allow-some firewall, and verify what you download. If the link says “100% REAL 1 MILLION FREE ROBUX DOWNLOAD CLICK HERE NOW”, then maybe don’t click there.

Because even an antivirus won’t help you if you download malware, which isn’t compiled by skids who lifted the code from some darknet hacker forum. Antivirus isn’t some magical tool which makes your computer inherently more secure. Meaning you can’t offload your responsibilty to a program running with kernel level privileges. Your computer, your responsibilty.

P.S: If you want a more secure computer, I’d recommend a minimal and/or rolling release distro (openSUSE, Arch, Void, Debian) or FreeBSD/OpenBSD (BSD variants mitigate many of Linux’s inherent flaws).

5 hours? … You have much to learn, padawan.

I am at the very beginning of my journey taking those first baby steps. As I don’t yet understand all the sysadmin stuff, I’m treading rather carefully to avoid making unfuckable mistakes.

I recently switched to Void on my daily driver so it has been a bit of a trial to get used to a new OS and configure it correctly. Nevertheless, it’s been a great learning experience.

Alongside it I’ve downloaded OpenWrt on my router and begun to configure it as well (still need to deal with the Wireguard and Unbound config).

For the actual server I managed to secure an old Dell Optiplex. In the near future, I plan to flash it with Libreboot and then install Debian or FreeBSD (apparently great ZFS support) on it. Though I’ve still no idea whether I should use Proxmox and how I should format my drives (one 500GB SSD and 4TB HDD) for maximum effiency and for the possibility of later easily upgrading my storage capacity.

When I’ve finally past these steps, I plan to selfhost music services, as well as few other basic services. My goal at the moment is to replace Spotify for my whole family. But it’s still a long way to go.

tomb: Tomb is a minimalistic CLI based hidden file encryption tool based on Linux dm-crypt and LUKS.
In addition to its cool ass name, it also has a GUI that’s called Mausoleum.