I just need to gush for a minute. I am about to shutdown my server in order to move it to the basement. This off the shelf $300 desktop running Pop!_OS is my self-hosting server that has dutifully done it’s job without a single complaint. It has been rebooted maybe three times since 2020 and it currently has an uptime of 840 days. That’s 840 days of not ever thinking about this thing. It self updates via Cron jobs and just…works.
I am afraid to open the box up though. Those dust bunnies must be huge.
Lesson time. In security strategy we have the risk equation. The calculated risk of something is the magnitude of the harm it could potentially do, times the probability of it actually happening, all divided by any prevention measures you have or can take. Nothing is perfectly or inherently safe or unsafe, you always have to calculate the risks taking into account all the factors, and balance risk against operative costs. There’s a lot of economic value in a low risk system that doesn’t require much intervention or maintenance.