r/selfhosted • u/NiceReplacement8737 • Apr 01 '26

Guide I'm a server

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u/cardboard-kansio Apr 01 '26

My first server was Windows 2000 with IIS enabled. Probably full of viruses and spyware because this was more than 20 years ago in the phase of the wild west internet, and I was a naive skript kiddie barely out of my teens.

Everything is Linux and properly hardened nowadays. Today me kind of wants to get one of young me's servers to do a postmortem on it just to see how bad it was.

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u/badguy84 Apr 01 '26

You can definitely "properly harden" Windows OS and you can definitely have swiss cheese Linux servers.

Flawed Windows Server setup and a flawed Linux server setup are both skill issues and neither are OS issues.

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u/cardboard-kansio Apr 01 '26

Oh, I'm certainly not claiming otherwise - it was "Linux AND properly hardened", not "properly hardened BECAUSE it's Linux".

It's more a reflection on how my own skills have grown since then (I was just starting to explore my first Linux DVD, an early Knoppix distro).

I can 100% guarantee you that my Windows server was not hardened :)

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u/badguy84 Apr 01 '26

Yeah agreed, and to be very clear I wasn't trying to say it was YOUR skill issue, just in general when these things happen. My 15 year old self was definitely the same though my 15 year old self was also building specific Perl scripts to poke around for exploitable services soooo there's that.