💾 Archived View for home.groovestomp.com › gemlog › 2021-12-20.gmi captured on 2023-07-10 at 13:30:49. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I booked some time off for this holiday season start EOD last Thursday, so I've had a little time to detox and do non-work related things. Part of that entailed following up on my self hosting. Recently I switched internet providers from TekSavvy, who have generally been awesome, to Telus; who are known for being shitty. I'm not proud to say it, but the bundle they offered for internet and mobile was the same price as what we were paying for TekSavvy + Freedom + Chatr before, and we get more data and more speed. Even I am not immune to bargaining.
Anyway, the point isn't so much that I switched internet service providers, it's that I encountered some issues with my self hosting setup. Specifically, it seems the modem + router combo they provide doesn't allow for NAT loopback, so it's not possible from behind the router to access a web service who's domain name points to the public IP of the router. There may be a workaround; but for now I am using proxy sites and my phone's cellular connection to verify things. That's annoying, but not completely broken. It certainly introduces a problem for syncing to my caldav/cardav server that I would like to resolve, and thankfully @selea@social.linux.pizza has given me a few tips. Unfortunately this isn't even the main problem. The main problem turned out to be benign, but it manifested as stuff just not working, with me getting a report from @nytpu@tilde.zone. @gemlog@tilde.zone had been regaling me with tales about his negative experiences with Telus and their port blocking in the past, so I was fretting bad and just put it off until last night when I had the motivation to dive in. Thankfully, the issue appears to be that Telus dynamically re-assigned an IP address to my router, so my dynamic dns broke. The unfortunate part of that is that I had ddclient running as a systemd service on my Pine64 board where I do my self hosting, and that's supposed to take care of those situations. So I'll need to take a look at that...
Besides that, I've had some Gemini stuff in the works for a while. Someone else on the fediverse (who's handle is currently escaping me) sent me their own program they've been using to assemble static Gemini sites. This was interesting to me since it handled multiple directories with their own pages - something the tool I was using didn't support. I had hacked together something that kind of worked, but was clunky and not extensible. So that was great; but then I the tool they shared with me was GNU specific and I was stuck trying it out on a work laptop and those things are all OSX for me these days, unfortunately. So I took the opportunity to write my own program in Go to do essentially the same thing. I'll link that below. But, for whatever reason, I got it mostly working and didn't finish testing it, then I forgot I hadn't finished it and did a *really* bad job of testing it more and thought it was fine; not realizing I was still using the old tool. Anyway, I wound up just skipping out on any Gemini stuff for a while as a result. I started poking around at gemini->http proxies; and Drew DeVault has one; but it doesn't work the way I want. I seem to run into this problem a lot - the way I see things, I end up expecting very specific behavior, and often the tools that already exist don't work in the way I expect them to. No fault to those tools or their owners; but obviously they think about things in a different way than I do. Add to this the fact that we had the change of internet and I had some computers on the old provider still (still haven't cancelled the contract as I wait out the Telus stuff to see if it works as advertised) and some on the new provider with no way of internally accessing the Pine64 to continue with updates. Anyway, all of that is now resolved! New gemini site generator is live, new content is here in this post, everything appears to be on the up and up!
https://git.sr.ht/~groovestomp/static-gemini
Well look at that. I intended about a paragraph and wound up writing nearly 800 words. Good! :-D
Published on December 20, 2021