ArmoredCavalry

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Many are, but as far as I know, no hosting provider has ever tried something like what was claimed (which is why it made such news).

It seems like many people didn’t even verify that portion of ToS was new (checking web archive), or wait for Vultr’s response before closing their accounts.

Even after the official response, it feels like people stuck to their original assumptions and felt justified moving services?

Companies, and specifically the people in them, make mistakes. What matters is their reaction. I’m scratching my head to think what Vultr could do better in this case (other than creating a time machine to avoid the initial screw up).

Vultr posted their response to the concerns here - https://www.vultr.com/news/a-note-about-vultrs-terms-of-service/

The portion of the ToS that people were worried about had been in place for years and had nothing to do with server intellectual property. They are removing it to avoid future confusion.

I don’t disagree that it was poorly worded, but the amount of people jumping to the worst possible conclusions on this is concerning. What happened to Hanlon’s Razor?

Weird! For reference one VM I run on only has 1 GB of memory, and Netdata uses 100-200 MB. Could be something going on with UnRAID though. Definitely some sort of bug I’d think, since normally resource usage should be very low across the board.

That’s strange, I’ve run it fine on some very underpowered hardware. Are you adding a specific monitoring integration with it, or just out of the box settings?

As others stated, you can run and access the interface locally (or setup your own reverse proxy) for free. Their Cloud dashboard is also free for up to 5 nodes. They recently added a flat-rate “Homelab” plan as well, if you want to remove the limit. It’s all quite usable for $0 otherwise though!

I’m a huge fan of Netdata, very configurable and monitors just about anything you could want. Great interface and alerts too - https://www.netdata.cloud/

It’s an installable PWA, click the … Menu in Chrome browser and choose “install”. Hope this helps!

I use this installable web app for cleaning extra parameters from links - https://linkcleaner.app/

Adds a share target to Android once you install it as well, makes it easy to send links to. Open source too!

Worth noting that this should not affect you if you are only using tunnels (no DNS entries / open ports).

Netdata is fantastic, but not sure I’d call the UI mobile friendly (unless I’m missing something? 😂) To me, that’s really one of the only weak points with it.

If it’s something mission critical, consider following the 3-2-1 backup rule.

I tend to use whatever built-in snapshot option the service provider offers, and then for off-site backups can use something like Veeam (free for first 10 VMs / machines) - https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

They actually recently opened a beta for sending emails from Workers as well. There are already a few projects to make use of this, examples:

• https://github.com/Sh4yy/cloudflare-email
• https://github.com/giuseppelt/emailflare

Sounds like what you want is some form of webhooks that your customers can sign up for, that will send out when the reports are complete.

There are quite a few ways to do that. One I’ve looked at recently is Convoy, for setting up a user-facing webhook Dashboard -

https://getconvoy.io/

By using webhooks for delivery, then your actual configuration / viewing of schedules just becomes standard API calls.

Interesting article, thanks for sharing!

I’ve run a (nowhere near as popular) public API for just about 10 years now. Definitely relate to the bit where he mentions people simply retrying the same request when they get an error. 😂

I get a lot of students using the API for learning projects, which is great! But it also means my rate limiting is more often protecting my server from accidental infinite loops, rather than anything purposely abusive.

I’ve looked at mTLS certs as well, but think you’d run into the same issue there as Service Tokens (app needs to support it).

It really is a shame, because Cloudflare Tunnels / Access is great otherwise. Just troublesome to have non-browser access.

You can use Service Tokens with Cloudflare Zero Trust (Access). Unfortunately, the companion App then has to support setting custom request headers, in order to send the token. Not many support this in my experience.

The only other option would be to use Basic Authentication, instead of Cloudflare Access. This isn’t as secure, but would be supported by most Apps (since you can simply inline user:password in the API URL). You can even setup a Cloudflare Worker to add basic auth to any Route you want.

Ideally, would love some hybrid of these approaches, where I can keep Access enabled, but override with basic auth for ‘legacy’ apps. Don’t know of a way to do this though.

Edit: Forgot to mention a third option, if you just want access while home, you can setup a bypass in Cloudflare Access policies for your home IP address. Then if you really need access when remote, you could also use VPN, but not as seamless of course.