Something a Little Bigger Than a Microblog
So I think I got the server set up in the new location. Might be some messing with the VPN and such, but it seems to work now. Surprisingly, DNS was only part of the problem.
I'm hoping it's faster, we shall see.
Find me at @toroidalcore@hackers.town
Sometime in the near future I am going to move my internet-facing server, physically, to someplace where it can get fiber. It works now, but the connection speed (upload) could be better. Right now it's on a cable modem.
I wish better upload was common, but in my ISP's defense most people I guess don't need it. For streaming and normal web surfing it's not a problem. But, as soon as you start moving stuff out from you onto the greater internet, better upload is nice. It also makes a difference of course when you have multiple people sharing your internet connection.
Maybe someday symmetrical connections will be more common.
Find me at @toroidalcore@hackers.town
I upgraded the host system that the container that runs this is running on. It came up fine, but when the container restarted WriteFreely didn't for some reason. Just went in and started it, and made sure it was enabled, and now it's up.
Find me at @toroidalcore@hackers.town
I forget the model, but years ago I bought a small 12 VDC power supply that can float charge a battery at the same time. I think it's rated for a 60 W output. If the power goes out, it transfers to the battery, basically making it a UPS.
I use this with a small Mini-ITX board in a case intended for a car, which takes 12 VDC as input power. It's older, but works, and has been my web/mail/whatever server for a while. The UPS functionality is great, although it doesn't have a built-in way to signal to the server that the power has been out. For shorter outages this isn't a problem, since it can just ride through, but for longer outages I have to manually shut it down.
I haven't decided whether or not to try to come up with a way to shut the computer down automatically. I probably should, but consider this a lower priority. In the mean time, I would like to redo some of the wiring, including putting a fuse on the leads to the battery.
I had thought about trying to get all of my networking gear onto a similar low voltage UPS, including a 12 or 24 volt input ATX supply for my NAS, but for everything else I opted for a normal UPS with some larger batteries added. This has worked out fine.
Find me at @toroidalcore@hackers.town
There is a small solar panel on the roof over my back porch, about 21 watts. This runs into my basement where it charges a small (7 Ah, 12 VDC) gel cell battery. This panel has been covered with thick, icy snow, and so for a while has not really put out any useful power.
Recently, the weather has warmed up, and the panel has gotten a little sun exposure. I don't really use this system for much on a routine basis, but I try to keep it charged. It's really a temporary system.
I would like to try to use this panel for an idea I had, a website accessible only when the sun is out. This is part gimmick, part concept art project, part technical exploration. The panel would power a Raspberry Pi pretty much directly, which would host the site. The fact that the site would not be accessible for a while due to snow covering the panel would be part of it.
I may enact that come spring. In the mean time, I have several other panels (164 rated watts in total) charging a larger battery, which I use for things like charging my laptop, or lighting in a power outage. These are easier to keep free of snow, and in fact in the winter time they can still get some decent sun, albeit for not as long as summer.
Find me at @toroidalcore@hackers.town
I toyed with the idea of running my own #Mastodon instance back when I'd first started looking into it. This was also before I knew much about the #Fediverse in general. I decided ultimately to just join mastodon.social and get a feel for things. This I think was the right thing to do.
Since then, I've moved to hackers.town for my microblogging needs, which is a nice community. I've kind of put aside the idea of selfhosting Mastodon, partly because of the resource usage, and partly just because this is working for me. I selfhost a lot of other stuff, like web and email (and this place, which is somewhere between microblogging and normal blogging (macroblogging?)), so at this point I've just been thinking I'd stick with this for a while.
In the mean time, I'm kind of content that at least there are other options out there for selfhosting, in that someone will be able to even if I don't have the urge for it right now.
Find me at @toroidalcore@hackers.town
I'm just looking at the #cat perch I bought a few years ago for George. It has a column that's wrapped in jute rope, great for scratching. Most of it is frayed right now. He still scratches it, but I should see if I can rewrap it soon.
He likes scratching on that carpet stuff they use for various audio cabinets. In fact, most cats seem to like that in my experience. Thus explaining the damage to my bass amp speaker cabinets.
He doesn't scratch on too much else. But scratching is good, and I try to encourage it on the right things. He also has some of those corrugated cardboard scratch pads, which he likes.
Find me at @toroidalcore@hackers.town
Running #email is treacherous these days, when you consider spam blacklists. A lot of people turn to some provider, Gmail, Outlook, or someone else focused mostly on the business of email. This way, if you send an email, you have the best chance of getting it through, as the thinking goes.
On the other hand, email is federated, and it is still very much possible to set up the required software yourself. It's still an attractive way to communicate with friends or family, even with social media. Even if universal deliverability is an uphill battle for the email self-hoster, what about just delivering to a smaller group of people?
The idea would be that, if you had a few friends who self-hosted their email, you could simply whitelist each other's servers. They could be on cheap VPSs, or even residential internet connections. The point is, the task of running email becomes easier if you don't have to worry about being worthy of every other major email provider in existence.
This of course is not useful to someone who wants to self-host for their business or some other organization. In that case, you would obviously want to put in the work to get your servers whitelisted, or perhaps just go with another provider. This is probably always going to be the case. But, the fact is that the protocols associated with email, for all their pros and cons, can still work to deliver messages. It's still an ability individuals have to control some of the infrastructure they use, and is something that should be taken advantage of.
Find me at @toroidalcore@hackers.town
So I can put my #Mastodon handle in my signature in this, so I don't have to type it in each post? That's handy. Mentioning this handle here seems to be the only way to see comments about posts here.
Find me at @toroidalcore@hackers.town
My home networking gear is sitting on a UPS right now. My power is reliable, but every now and then it goes down for an hour or so. It's rare, but it happens. To solve this, I took an old UPS and added a couple bigger batteries, which sit on the shelf next to it. This provides 18 Ah at 24 VDC, which is 2-3 times the capacity of the original batteries. My total load is a hundred watts or so.
This has worked well. I would, however, like to make some changes. I have some smaller network devices, a switch and Raspberry Pi in particular, which could run just off of 12 VDC. I have toyed with the idea of powering these directly from a battery floated across a power supply, or with some kind of DC UPS or switching arrangement. It would also allow the possibility of adding #solar power into the mix, adding it in parallel.
This is a low priority, as things are working now. But something to think about for the future.
Find me at @toroidalcore@hackers.town