Midnight Pub

What's a good Gemini server these days?

~littlejohn

I, erm, I'm sorry for talking about tech in a place that's meant for good ol' socializing and fun. Please forgive me -- it just looks like the best place to ask at the moment. The Gemini mailing list has a little too much drama for my taste...

So way back when I was running Smog, I used to run a Gemini server. Thing is, I'm a programmer, not a sysadmin. My knowledge about running a secure Internet-facing machine would probably be adequate if this were 2004 or so but it's not. Also, I haven't really enjoyed fiddling with Linux/Unix servers in a long time, and I would rather sodomize myself with a very prickly pineapple than put up with Docker's shenanigans again.

That being said, SDF's Gemini hosting is a little erratic, I'd say. That's okay, it's not like I'm paying for it, but I am considering... you know, paying for it, and running something with a little more uptime.

With that in mind, what's a good Gemini server these days? Smog used to run on Molly Brown -- is that still a good choice today?

What I need is basically:

As little configuration as possible (or, alternatively, reasonably good documentation, for someone who last had to do this back when /etc/inetd.conf was a thing). Smog's server made lots of aggregators and crawlers unhappy, through no fault of Molly Brown's, that was my laziness and incompetence at work.

Possibly plays well with web proxies?

I know there are many communities that offer Gemini hosting now. Thing is, I know these are volunteer-ran and with limited resources. I was a twelve year-old techie with no money to spend on these things many years ago -- I'd rather not take up a spot that a twelve year-old techie needs today, as long as I can manage to put up a box that doesn't become part of a botnet in five minutes. Plus I'm a foul-mouthed kind of fellow with occasionally unpopular opinions, I'm probably better off running my own server anyway.

Thanks and, uh, again, sorry for bringing up tech stuff in a pub!

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~voidstar wrote (thread):

at anachronauts.club we use freebsd + molly brown, with warp for feed aggregation. it works pretty well, no complaints and default config is sane. if you've got untrusted users, you'll need to restrict dynamic content.

~eaplmx wrote (thread):

I like to talk about tech, it's something fun for me, ha! Even better if I'm having a cold beer 🍻 or a red wine 🍷

When I was 12 years old I was playing with HTTP, Visual Basic, IRC and some other stuff, but not with real servers since they were expensive and we used Dial-up at 56 kbps so having a home server 24/7 was difficult at that time. Now I can play with a VPS, Node, Django, Go, and some other languages/platforms/technologies for the sake of it, or even as a part of my job. So keep it up, I think is a nice journey!

Going back to Gemini, what are you trying to host? Static files... Something created by a script language?

Do you already have a VPS? Is it possible for you to spend 5 USD / month + a domain?

I have my personal domain + VPS for many experiments, so spending about 80 dollars a year is not that bad for the learning and amusement I get.

https://eapl.mx