Shiimiish

Hi there, I've been reading up on selfhosting for a couple of weeks now and I got my feet wet with a couple of things.

However, before really getting serious with it, I feel I need to get down the basics and make sure that my server will not end up a security hazard. My final goal would be to self-host my socials (Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix) - just for myself.

What basic security do I need to have in place, considering these services? I'll be running this on a VPS and so far I consider the following: disable password login (login with ssh key only) then set up nginx, fail2ban, and a basic firewall. I'd try to close all ports that are not required for the services I run. I'll also change ssh port from 22 to something else and close port 22 as well.

Would this be a sufficient basis, or am I missing something crucial?

Bonus question: do you know of good tutorials to learn the above stuff? I've been following the guides on DigitalOcean (e.g. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-protect-an-nginx-server-with-fail2ban-on-ubuntu-20-04) and they seem decent enough - but I think I'll need to get into more depth than that :)

Hi there,

I'm a complete amateur in design and painting, but I got kinda hooked on Stable Diffusion, because it (theoretically) lets me create images out of my fantasy without needing the digital painting skills.

I poured a couple of weekend free time into learning how to use SD and by now I'm somewhat familiar with how to make useful prompts, how to use Control Net, Inpainting and Upscaling.

But now I'm a bit at a loss on how to further perfect my workflow, because as of right now I can get really good images that kinda resemble the scene I was going for (letting the model / loras do the heavy lifting) or I'm getting an image that is composed exactly as I want (utilizing control net heavily) but is very poorly executed in the details with all sorts of distorted faces, ugly hands and so on.

Basically, if I give a more vague prompt the image comes out great but the more specific I want to be, the more the image generation feels "strangled" by prompt and control net and it doesn't seem to result in usable images ...

How do you approach this? Trying to generate 100's or more images in the hope that one of them will get your envisioned scene correctly? Or do you make heavy use of Photoshop/Gimp for postprocessing (<- I want to avoid this) or do you painstakingly inpaint all the small details until it fits?

Edit: Just to add a thought here: I just started to realise how limited most of the models are in what they "recognise". All our everyday items are covered pretty well, e.g. prompting "smartphone" or "coffeemachine" will produce very good results, but things like "screwdriver" are getting dicey already and with special terms like "halberd" it is completely hopeless. Seems I will need to go through with making my own lora as discussed in the other thread ....

Hi there, I'm trying to get (more or less) historically accurate images from the early and high middle ages, but none of the models seems to have a grasp of what "maille armor" or "bucket helmets" are and I either get complete garbage or fantasy armor that mostly resembles the early modern period (the stereotypical shining knight armor).

I assume a Lora, trained on images of the armor and weapons I'd like to include, could fix this problem. I found some neat tutorials for making Lora's and think I'll give it a shot.

Do any of you have experience in making these kinds of style Lora's? What should I take care of? I will be manually downloading images that fit my aestethic and manually tag them - how many images should I use? Any input here is highly appreciated.

I have been toying around with Stable Diffusion for some time now and have been able to get out great images.

However, as I dive deeper I want to really get images that match as closely to what I imagine and I'm kinda struggling to get there.

For now, I work with Control Net and Inpainting, which help a lot, but I have yet to produce images I'm really satisfied with.

How's your workflow when composing specific images? Do you complement it with Photoshop (or similar)?

Hi, I'm trying to figure out how to set up a service like pi-hole and one of the prerequisits seems to be to have admin access to the router to make the correct DNS entries.

Unfortunately, the router provided by my ISP doesn't grant me access to these settings - is there a way around that, and what would it involve? I do have a hybdrid router (DSL + LTE connection), that's (according to my ISP) the reason DNS settings are locked.

Any ideas are welcome :)