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How many active servers do you actually maintain?

General Discussion by olespete 23 replies 2.3K views
olespete

Member OP

Trust No One

#1

I maintain 7 production boxes and 3 cold spares. What concerns me is how many of you are running FIREWALLS on all of them. I see people here with 30+ nodes and no mention of fail2ban or proper segmentation!

What could go wrong:

  • Forgotten trial becomes pivot point
  • One breached box exposes your entire ssh key chain
  • Provider vlan misconfiguration exposes neighbor traffic

I rotate keys every 90 days. 👀

Vote honestly. How many could you shut down TODAY without service impact?

airgapped, encrypted, faraday'd, still worried
Ray

Member

#2

Back in 1987 we ran one mainframe and knew every process by name. Today I have 4 active servers and that is PLENTY. I read about the Google and the Facebook running thousands but that is not wisdom. Young woman, consolidate before you multiply.

ME

Member

#3

I have 23 active and like 40 idle lol, you know how it is, you see a good deal and your wallet moves before your brain does I could probably kill 15 without anyone noticing Contabo had that €4/month special — https://contabo.com/en/vps/ — and I bought 6 Dont ask me what they do

NO

Member

8 #4

Last month I count already, I have 14 server-server active, 9 idle. Yesterday I buy 3 more from OVHcloud because price too good. I forget to cancel trial already, now I pay for 2 box I never use. My friend have 80 idle, he forget every password already

AN

Member

#5

Firewalls on ALL 7? Even the cold spares?

DR

Member

#6
olespete said:
I rotate keys every 90 days.

90 days? I tried that once. After the third time I locked myself out of my own backup server at 2 AM I switched to hardware tokens. Now I have three Yubikeys and a drawer full of the old ones I lost.

WendyBird

Member

Detail Oriented

#7
olespete said:
What concerns me is how many of you are running FIREWALLS on all of them

I have 11 active in Vancouver plus 2 at my mom's house in Kelowna for offsite backup. Every single one runs pfSense in front. The mom's house connection is only 25 Mbps but it works for ZFS snapshots.

I could shut down 4 today. The rest are client sites with SLAs.

Ray

Member

#8
MeowNail said:
Contabo had that €4/month special and I bought 6

Young woman, I too have been tempted by the cheap. In 1994 I bought six surplus 386 machines from a dental office. They sat in my garage until 2001. The mice had nested in two of them. Consolidate.

NO

Member

#9
andreycore3 said:
Firewalls on ALL 7? Even the cold spares?

Cold spare with no firewall is like bicycle with no lock in Amsterdam. Gone in one night. My idle box I keep offline until I need, then I connect and update first. But I am lazy man, sometimes I forget update.

DealsTallinn

Member

SRE Wannabe

#10
norddude said:
I forget to cancel trial already

This is why I terraform destroy everything every Friday night and rebuild Monday. Sounds insane but it cured my zombie instance problem. State file in S3, lock in DynamoDB, sleep in Tallinn.

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