💾 Archived View for gemini.mat.services › my-own-digital-ocean.gmi captured on 2022-04-29 at 12:29:33. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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as i mentioned in my log about self-hosting, i used to use digitalocean to host this server, but have since moved to lxc-on-proxmox. i've just spent my weekend setting up a suite of services to support a local private media server. although there were some bumps in the road, i found the overall process both very doable and rewarding.
i expected to run into a lot of networking issues during this process, but ultimately it was node administration tasks that were more complicated. as far as networking goes, i was hoping to find an easy way to connect the various nodes together with knowledge of their hostnames, but this was beyond me. i ended up just assigning low numbered sequential static IPs that were easy to remember and keeping the hostname mapping local to my development machine.
system administration, on the other hand, caused more than a few minor headaches. permissions were a major one: running everything in one-off containers under systemd service definitions meant that i had to do a lot of trial and error to make sure all the various filesystem resources were accessible to the necessary service users. another minor issue came up with trying to run a wireguard vpn client inside of an lxc container. i actually expected a much harder time here, but some instructions found on the web lead me to the simple process of "install kernel modules on the bare-metal host, install the client software inside the container, good to go" which ultimately worked out well.
by far the most frustrating part of the process was dealing with software packaging. most of my containers are running debian 10, which is starting to show a bit of age in its package repository. debian provides a backports channel for new versions of packages from less stable versions, but unfortunately this channel didn't have any of the particular updated packages i was interested. i went with a hodge-podge of solutions, from building some packages from their source tarballs, to (against the prevailing wisdom on the web) slapping on ubuntu repos and ppas which are updated more frequently. ultimately, it might have been easier to just use ubuntu on all of the containers, but for now i'm happy with my debian micro-cluster.
i'm not entirely confident that i set everything up in the most optimal way, but things seem to be working well enough so i will move forward with what i have and iterate when necessary.
next up, i'm thinking of hosting my own source control, but my recent love affair with pijul might make that difficult. unfortunately, the nest, pijul's hosting platform, is closed source while the project gets on its legs. the rationale being that the main developer, working for the most part on his own (as far as i know), is worried about the burden of both developing a groundbreaking new source control system, while supporting both it *AND* a more straightforward CRUD web-app, will be too much. that being said, i might look into hosting darcs, a sort of spiritual predecessor to pijul.
until next time!
-mat