💾 Archived View for gem.splatt9990.com › old_stuff › 20210623-Im_Back.gmi captured on 2023-07-22 at 16:27:49. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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I'm back

So it's been a *long* time since I've posted here. If you even attempted to connect, the server's been down since about mid-April. Surprisingly, this wasn't an indication of apathy on my part toward the smolnet. In fact, I've been lurking ever since then, wishing I could post.

Why haven't I? Well it started when I got the brilliant idea to finally request a static IP address from my ISP. When I originally decided on that, I thought the upgrade would more or less just transparently change my whole house's IP address to be statically allocated.

Oh what a sweet summer child I was...

Apparently, my ISP makes it so a single ethernet port on the router gets the static IP. All other devices connected to the router still use a dynamic IP. On top of that, the NAT table the router already had (and all my various self hosted services relied on) now no longer applied to the statically allocated IP.

In other words, my entire set up was completely fucked...

I host the services I run off a single machine. However, for both convenience and security, I run them through VM's. The problem here is that the previous configuration I had used simply bridged the VM's onto my private home network so I could use my router admin interface to actually forward the ports. Now since that server was completely isolated, I had to figure out how to do port forwards and completely reconfigure my kvm network before any of my services would work again.

...sigh...

After literal months of tinkering and trying various solutions though, I'm finally back online! I learned more about networking and running virtual machines than I ever wanted to. I also "fixed" the problem probably about six times only to have the solution not work for some obscure reason. If you program, you probably know this drudgery by the sentiment "Well, at least I got a different error this time."

I guess that's what you get for self-hosting services... Anyway, you can expect some more content here soon. I've been itching to write some gemini posts for a long while now.

See you in the next one!