I am moving in about a month and I need to do something with my home server during the downtime, especially my capsule and website. I decided this weekend to setup a small cloud instance and just run my website and capsule off of it. Note: this isn't a technical breakdown or anything just some of my thoughts in the first part of setting up the cloud replica for my server.
I didn't timetravel, sorry, I just had some sleepy brain. To look at how the sausage is made: When writing a gemlog I add them to a staging folder, undated, until they're ready. This particular gemlog I wrote up and moved out of the staging dir right as I finished. However, unlike most days I actually finished writing this a bit later than usual. So I looked at the date
Hmm, it's the 18th, so I'll date it the 19th! ... Oh that's odd I thought I posted yesterday? (referring to my post from teh 17th)... Oh well!
Well turns out sleepy me was right, I started around 10pm writing this up, but made some edits before posting it live - and yup, it past midnight so I dated it for Monday 😭. Sorry everyone --- Back to the post.
I git backup my entire capsule (except for the certs) so while it's a bit of a manual process getting the deployments up and running, at least the content will be easy to sync between local and cloud servers.
For my website I actually host a few other services from the same nginx: seafile, cgit, netdata - so for those I will just probably leave offline since the purpose of those is for me alone.
It turned out to be extremely easy thing to do. Saturday morning, I basically deployed the instance, cloned the server content, scp'd the certs over, curl'd the latest snapshot of my Gemini server build. And I was good to go.
I have yet to setup the maintenance pages for the other websites but that is what I plan to do after writing this quick post. I was honestly really surprised just how easy this was, and I want to make sure to take note of any kinks in the process so I can just relaunch this image whenever I need to failover for some downtime. If it were cheaper, I would run the server fulltime just mirroring my main sites traffic and the capsule - so when I lose power, or need to reboot for an update, I have a live backup running. But I've never set anything like that up.
Today (Sunday) I'll be rolling over the DNS to point to the new server and testing things out. I don't expect it to be too bad, considering I run my current capsule through my home network, and I don't exactly get a high number of requests per second (see my stats gemlog for proof 🤡).
I will post a follow-up with the results, but what I suspect is that I will be running a custom slimmed down nginx setup where the "down" services just link to a maintenance page.
I also realized I use my personal git for a lot of these configuration details, but if my server is offline, that means my git will be too! So my cloud server will be effectively readonly, or at least un-commitable. So I want to look into if there is any automated git-mirroring so I can have a backup on a different git platform.
I don't want to turn this into an ISP rant, but I am very nervous about my new ISP. I will be living in a shared house, so I will most likely be sharing the internet with the landlord, so I cannot exactly swap everything over to my own modem, router but instead use the one they've provided (this is a family member - and we're staying there for a few months while we figure out our next move). But I am nervous since, in fact on the IRC, I was notified that some ISPs have unstable IPs (making it difficult to setup DNS records for) and in their terms-of-service disallow home server setups. I have had good luck with the previous apartments and ISPs, but being in a new state with a first time provider, not controlling 100% of the process, I am quite nervous I'll need to move to the cloud "long term", or at least until we move to a more permanent location.
We live in a city, in an apartment. We'll be moving in with some family who has had a floor open up in the building they live in, and rent out part of. I would like to buy a house outside of the city, since the city is expensive and my job moving full remote, I have no need to be in the city center, but my girlfriend's job requires her to come into the city on a non-regular but short-notice (a days notice usually). So we'd still need to be close by... This is an aside just stating: Planning for the future sure is hard. But this is something I am not looking forward to. We may find a town outside the city that has places to rent, and renting for a few years to get a sense of the feasibility of it all, and how comfortable my girlfriend is living outside of a major city (she grew up in one).
I'll be deploying my capsule and doing a DNS switch over the next day or so to test out running everyting from the cloud and what steps I need to take to ensure my move provides no down time, and hopefully a place for me to post while I figure out my new living situations home-server hosting.
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