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Cloud Replica


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.


TIMETRAVEL ALERT


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.


Deploying to the new server


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.


Testing the latency and bandwidth


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.


Git mirroring?


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.


New house, new ISP


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.


House, apartment, leaving the city?


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).


Conclusion


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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