questions on setting up a Buildbot

travis036 wrote:

not sure i understand, the part about things going sideways very quickly. i have the firewall provided by my router. haven't really needed anything more, thus-far.

Your router firewall is very good at protecting from "script kiddies" and "i am a hacker" kind of people, but it is not at all good at protecting from "i am pretty good with computers, in a quiet voice" kind of people.
Do a search for your router like "d-link model-name vulnerabilities", have a blast reading about it.
They all have issues, even the most feature rich and money rich ones!
The home made one, gets updated in about a day in case there is an issue. The best thing is they are cheap, so you can have two or more daisy chained, so even if someone makes it's way in, he/she/it will be baffled at why the hell he/she/it can not find anything, again and again.
I have plenty of experience with everything Cisco, and HP and Dell servers/storage, even my 20 year old PC has a HP 40GB DAT, yes with tapes!

tommylight wrote:

But you are hidden behind the DNS service, so that is good.

I did say that, so that was the go ahead or green light or go for it.
I just went a bit to deep, that was my profession for a lot of years, way to long, to the point of breaking my teeth grinding them during sleep, forcing myself not to go postal and ruin OSCE network, the person responsible for network security in the head quarters here was a dumb f#k, would not accept any advice and kept insisting "we are very safe". I checked, they were not. I did not do any damage, i never did any damage to any network.
After i quit, some IT staff called me and asked what can they do to fix stuff on their own, so i told them.
Sorry for this, old habits die hard...
And i am really sorry if that made you uncomfortable, it was absolutely not my intention, it never is.

FWIW over the years I have seen more than one offer of buildbot slave hosting but I don't recall any being taken up.
 

One thing you could do with it, is to use it as a web site scraper, meaning downloading the whole LinuxCNC web site as is and setting it to download new stuff every day or two or every week.
This will not be a usable web site as it can not access databases and credentials, but it will have pages and text and pictures as they are here, so this will be "last resort" saved info in case something goes very wrong with this server. It is the same thing "way back machine" did.
Not useful normally, but can be.
I had such a snapshot for quite a while, luckily never needed it.
And if you do this, set set at least 1 second of time between requests, otherwise it will try to download everything as fast as your link will allow and overload the existing server. WGET has the option to set any time between requests. It takes a lot of time, but keeps all happy.
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All this is not meant to discourage you, i absolutely respect your will to help, but as with anything internet related, there are a lot of security stuff to consider, in this case the buildbot, IF anyone gets access to your server, he/she/it can compromise it by inserting very little code into existing one that will compromise any other PC running it, then do a DDOS attack on the main server just long enough to make users switch to your server for a while and infect many, many other PC's, OR even worse, if the main buildbot fails and everyone switches to your server, everyone using it will be compromised.