-- Leo's gemini proxy
-- Connecting to gemini.hitchhiker-linux.org:1965...
-- Connected
-- Sending request
-- Meta line: 20 text/gemini;lang=en-US
It's been a good three years at least since I gave up my last desktop PC in favor of a cluster of Raspberry Pi's running various small services. I still have some x86_64 machines in the form of two laptops, but they run when needed rather than 24/7 like the Pi's. In that time I've discovered that provided you keep the expectations reasonable a Pi makes for a great little home server.
My little cluster until today consisted of Frodo, Samwise, Gimli and Legolas. Frodo a Caldav and Carddav service as well as serving my ebook library via Calibre. Samwise is a torrent box and sometime DNS cache. Gimli runs this capsule over both Gemini and Spartan, a Finger service and a Gitea instance. Finally, Legolas runs a web server which also proxies a few of the other services on the network. Since yesterday after an upgrade and reboot Legolas has been offline, and today I tracked the problem down to a failed ethernet connection.
Since I don't have a spare Pi that means that I'm going to be pressing Gimli into service to host the web server as well. The plus side is that now my capsule is running off of the same SSD that stored the website, rather then being stored on an SD card. I'm not under any illusion that any of my services see all that much traffic, so even this Raspberry Pi 4 is probably overspec'ed for the duty it's pulling, but if you're reading this then rest easy knowing that you got the page with probably a few nanoseconds less latency..
The site which Legolas was hosting, and which is currently offline until I can sort out the connections after work tonight, is for HitchHiker Linux. This has been a long running project of mine. HitchHiker is of course yet another Linux distro, and one can argue that we have too many of those already, but it's at least something fairly different. It's not using binary packages from any other distro for one, but builds a base system from a source directory using make similar to how FreeBSD is built. It uses NetBSD's Pkgsrc for third party packages. The init system is the S6 supervision suite, and the userland is a mix of utilities ported from BSD to Linux, suckless tools and a number of utilities I wrote myself.
I don't talk about it much because it's been stuck in an almost usable state for quite a while, due to my losing some steam on the project before sorting out the init system. Of course now I've got it running as a dual boot on my main laptop, and am about to start moving the Pi cluster over (right now they run Arch, Suse and Ubuntu). At any rate, I was about to do a first release. So yeah, having the site go down along with the proxy service for the Git repository kinda sucked.
Anyway, if the idea of a very Unix-like Linux distro appeals to you, watch this space. I'll be announcing it officially soon enough.
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