LandChad, a site dedicated to turning internet peasants into Internet Landlords

by cft • 11 months ago

222 60 11 months ago

nerdsniper• 11 months ago

I kove the vibe of this website and their mission. Nitpick though, “FOSSPAY” seems to make no sense because it’s really just Stripe?

johnklos• 11 months ago

A few nitpicks:

* landlords aren't a good thing.

* "setup" is a noun.

* It'd be helpful to offer some context. For instance, talking about ufw without even mentioning that we're talking about Linux, or even a specific Linux distro, would make most people confused. Same with apt.

These are good guides, but it should be kept in mind that they don't try to teach you anything - they're more guides to simply follow, and if you happen to learn something along the way, great.

But it makes sense to have guides that just tell you how to do a thing and don't explain it, because that represents a good chunk of the people out there. It wouldn't be bad to have links to stuff for those who want to understand what they're doing, though.

Overall, we need more sites like these.

milesrout• 11 months ago

Landlords are an excellent thing, as anyone that cannot afford, or does not want, to simply buy a house could tell you.

Set up is a phrasal verb and omitting the space is incorrect, yes, but only an annoying pedant would point it out.

It recommends Debian and says:

I make my guides on this site for Debian 11. If you use another OS, just know that your [mileage] may vary in terms of you might need to change some instructions here minorly.

If you were going to complain about bad grammar, that sentence is a much better target, and yet it is still quite easily understandable.

alexchamberlain2• 11 months ago

Why aren’t landlords a good thing? Is it unreasonable for people to provide a service to people seeking it?

Babkock• 11 months ago

Really helpful site from Luke Smith. I would advise anyone interested in web development to check out this page. There's a lot of cool stuff on there.

2Gkashmiri• 11 months ago

I followed his email guide but installed mailinaabox. I was able to install it in one go about 4 years ago.

Smooth sailing since.

This is a goldmine

beeflet• 11 months ago

What is the point of setting up your own email server if all of your sent messages go to spam for the majority of gmail/o365 users?

racingmars• 11 months ago

What is the point of setting up your own email server if all of your sent messages go to spam for the majority of gmail/o365 users?

I set up a new mailserver a few years ago and have had no delivery problems whatsoever. All messages get through to gmail and outlook/o365 inboxes I've sent to. Didn't even have to register the IP with O365, it's just worked flawlessly from day one. That was from an IP address/netblock not associated with cloud or VPS providers, so initial reputation may have been higher.

A few months ago I set up a mail server on a VM in Digital Ocean, and have had no delivery problems to gmail/Google Apps recipients.

More recently, for new IPs sending mail into O365, they appear to be blocked by default but the rejection message gives you a URL to go to where you can register your IP(s). After doing that, we haven't seen any problems.

If you end up getting an IP that has been associated with previous spam or abuse, I assume your experience will be different. But in my experience, my handful of servers have not had delivery problems. This is all, of course, with proper reverse DNS records that match what the server advertises in its HELO/EHLO, SPF and DKIM all set up, etc.

zenmac• 11 months ago

Yeah there are shadow blocks on all these major email services. I have just slowly asking my circles to stop using them. And I'm NOT just talking about gmail, Rackspace and ATT as well. (Proton and Tuta are good default for non tech ppl ATM.)

For more regular email user, it is better that one host or find some reliable person or entity that can host your email under domain that your own.

speckx2• 11 months ago

Don't forget the PTR record.

asimovDev• 11 months ago

honestly I wouldn't mind an email server just to have temp throwaway emails for services that require email signup. Not sure how those that detect temp mail services would work with this though

p4bl0• 11 months ago

Many email provider let you have a virtually infinite number of aliases, you can do want you want here with that.

qustrolabe• 11 months ago

So that your domain could one day expire and someone could host their email server completely impersonating you

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2• 11 months ago

I personally use my server to have people contact me mostly ( it also helps to flag, which stores sell what emails to who ). Although, by now, I likely have enough 'karma' equivalent to not be considered spam by other providers.

ai-christianson2• 11 months ago

The second instruction says to rent a VPS. How are you a landlord if you're renting a server?

lsb• 11 months ago

How are you a landlord if you're paying property taxes?

Once you have everything else set up, you can migrate to a server hosted on your own internet connection. Running your own data center is one of the more tricky parts of the equation, compared to almost-free web hosting for a 10MB site.

You're also just renting a domain name.

anonym292• 11 months ago

The government graciously allows you to sublet their property as long as you keep up with the annual protection racket payments

ai-christianson2• 11 months ago

I guess it's renting all the way down unless it's something like a decentralized network where control of keys represent ownership.

Uehreka• 11 months ago

You’re also only renting your internet connection!

If you want to be a real rent-seeker (sorry, meant to say “landlord”) you’ll need to purchase an AS and become a BGP-peering sovereign citizen cutting deals with backbone networks.

therein• 11 months ago

How are you a landlord if you're paying property taxes?

Asking the important questions.

animuchan2• 11 months ago

Getting your own backbone cable installed in the ocean is where the real expenses begin though.

akimbostrawman• 11 months ago

this is why i love Tor. you can simply host a site from any pc without certificate, domain, proxy, vps.

est• 11 months ago

This gave me pre-mobile Internet vibes

Sadly in today's world, 90% traffic happens on phones. And the free app landscape is bad.

christophilus• 11 months ago

I would suggest Caddy over nginX if this is for casual sysadmins.

nurettin• 11 months ago

I would even suggest apache. It is ubiquitous, config samples are easy to find, it can act like a file server and certbot --apache easily sets up your https.

andyjohnson02• 11 months ago

+1 for Apache. Lots of tutorials and examples available. I would argue that Nginx is mostly going to be overkill for the use-case of a small personal vps.

yeetosaurusrex• 11 months ago

Yep. Caddy is so easy to use.

rchaud• 11 months ago

Nice website that focuses on the simple basics of setting up one's own infrastructure, like it was back in the '90s.

Disagree with the "land ownership" portion of the title as it will be obvious to anybody following the tutorials that they don't own their web server or their domain name.

merelysounds• 11 months ago

Note that there is a section about self hosting: https://landchad.net/selfhosting/

mcmcmc• 11 months ago

Still subject to ISP whims, and still just renting the domain name

animuchan2• 11 months ago

In some countries (e.g. Singapore, China, Israel), when you buy a house, on paper you get something like a 99-year renewable lease on land — different from a domain name in scale, but not so much in substance.

So I guess the aptness of the analogy is unevenly distributed geographically. :)

m463• 11 months ago

Do they really mean "homeowner" (self-sovereign) vs "landlord" (charging others rent).

ornornor• 11 months ago

Nice resource! What always bothers me is that virtually every resource of this type leave what is imo the most important part: backups and restore.

Setting up all these services can be tedious but it’s not the hard part. Robust backups and a strategy around them is, and there is very little information on this topic in comparison (generally)

rorads• 11 months ago

This is a great resource. I just think the term “landlord” is a misnomer here. It implies you’ll be making income off the rent of your new self-administered infra, and as has been pointed out already - mostly this site pertains to stuff built on hyperscaler platforms.

I’d probably say “…internet homeowners where, like in the UK leasehold property system, you’re still basically a tenant but without paying someone else’s mortgage, and even when you’re a freeholder the king actually still more or less owns the land”.

Admittedly this is less snappy.

saaaaaam• 11 months ago

This is a great concept, but it’s not really for internet peasants. It’s for internet plumbers who already know how to do a whole bunch of stuff. An internet normie who doesn’t know their way around the command line wouldn’t even know where to start with this.

onion2k• 11 months ago

You can only really be a landlord if there's a limited supply of land (or capital to build useful things on the land). Neither is true on the internet. The premise is flawed to the point it's always going to be a scam if anyone claims this is a useful thing to do.

The salient point is right on the front page of this site:

Starting a website is something that can be done in a lazy afternoon and costs pocket change.

If that is true for someone attempting to become an "internet landlord", it is also true for all of their potential customers.

deadbabe3• 11 months ago

Starting a website these days seems very dangerous. If you don’t comply with some obscure regulation imposed by a government somewhere you can be sued to oblivion. Someone should create a guide on how to start a website and cover your ass.

graemep3• 11 months ago

Not really true. You can largely ignore foreign governments as you are not in their jurisdiction.

It also does not apply to everything listed there. Build your own platform is doing things governments will not even notice if you do it for yourself and people you know rather than as a public service.

deadbabe3• 11 months ago

Really? So you can just collect cookies quietly with no warning

BenFranklin100• 11 months ago

What is the practical difference between doing something like this and using a home NAS setup? Commercial solutions like Synology — let’s forget their new hard disk policy for a moment — have some overlap.

mathgeek• 11 months ago

The practical difference is you're using someone else's resources (hardware, utilities, etc.) or your own.

andyjohnson02• 11 months ago

This is a really nice guide. Its also timely for me as I'm looking to move away from my over-priced and under-specced web host.

Anyone have any comments on Vultr as a vps provider - positive or negative? As far as I can tell they provide 2TB of egress bandwidth and uncapped ingress: is that right?

atropoles• 11 months ago

Luke Smith and this site was what got me and several other CS students I know started with Linux, OSS, and hosting our own websites. Some of his more philosophical content has been really valuable to me as well.

LandChad, a site dedicated to turning internet peasants into Internet Landlords

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