💾 Archived View for segvallday.org › blog › 2023-07-11 captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:25:42. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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2023-07-11
What I’ve been up to since the last blog posts in this server? Not much, but there’s been changes. Notably it’s running off some old bottom-tier Intel Celeron laptop from ~2007 now instead of the Raspberry Pi 2B as some minor-ish enough updates has been causing it to no longer boot properly, and this issue wasn’t even new, I’ve known it since the last 2 years when trying it with Alpine Linux and wondering why that happens also. This time it’s Debian so I guess better to just throw in the towel with that hardware and just use the laptop I had laying around instead. It was already having troubles anyway before that and giving “illegal instructions” errors when just trying to setup some files for some few packages during apt install. It’s probably the SD card issue, or maybe armhf architecture is too niche and left underlooked, or both, but for sure I don’t want to deal with it anymore. I can at least say that laptop was able to do a major upgrade from Debian 11 bullseye to 12 bookworm sucessfully, so it certainly doesn’t have that issue. I did managed to hastly move some services and datas over to the laptop, only leaving out setting up a Gopher server mostly because I still haven’t bothered to have my site generator setup to do Gopher yet, and the Debian repository, cause I somewhat can’t be bothered to set that back up.
But at least a couple of services has been setup since, such as XMPP, Coturn (for STUN/TURN), and Murmur (Mumble server). Those are mostly for private use however, so don’t go asking for XMPP accounts!
Just today, I’ve setup a Gemini server and fixed the site generator script to properly output gemtext files now. It was already generating gemtext long ago it’s just adding some specific files to do a different way of generating for some and working around lowdown odd quirks implementation of outputting gemtext, biggest issue being that preformatted text somehow setting the first line into the alt-text section, which it should be in the line after it. Since that part works fine in the HTML version, instead just do a regex replacement using Perl (I never used Perl, just took it from some StackoverFlow answer that it works well enough for this and using some online regex checker) on the lowdown’s gemini output to workaround the issue:
https://kristaps.bsd.lv/lowdown/
perl -pe 's/``\`(?!\n)/``\`\n/g'
Note: I’ve put a backslash in the 3rd “`” since lowdown is inserting newlines after those, again another bug/quirk. I only just found out when reading the output of this blog post, and not going to bother properly fixing it up for now.
There was also an issue in the inline version of the Gemini link output which doesn’t really output the link properly if it’s a link within a list item, instead it’s still a list with the link arrow outputted next to it. So for this one:
perl -pe 's/\* \=\>/\=\>/g'
Once those issues are worked around, the gemtext outputs seems OK considering it’s generated from markdown files.
The server software I’m using is Molly Brown mostly because it’s already in the Debian 12 repository and seems to be the only Gemini server packaged in Debian’s offical repository (unless I’m not looking hard enough)? But nevertheless the packager for the package did quite some systemd service file hardening that had me scratching for quite a while till I managed to get it and setup properly using the provided service file. I learn’t a bit about systemd sandboxing and service hardening today at least.
https://tildegit.org/solderpunk/molly-brown
Despite the laptop being 16 years old and was already bottom-tier for its time, it does at least have x86-64, 2 cores, and the ethernet port working. It also somewhat feels faster to use via ssh terminal than the Raspberry Pi 2B! That being said I kind of have two paths I’m thinking of. First being to upgrade the laptop’s CPU, RAM, and storage to the most it can handle, and yes I really mean the CPU. This laptop is just old and thick enough that it’s designed with the CPU being socketed and swappable, which means it can be upgraded to an Intel Core 2 Duo T-series (unfortantly not the Quad-series but they barely existed compared to Duos on laptops anyway). Of course, it’s to wonder if this would be a worthy improvement to the laptop and if it’s even enough to setup heavier services like a Fediverse and Matrix server for example, but at least the laptop will still be getting more use out of it.
The other option is just simply get some low-power used mini-computer which is much newer and have better specs, which gives less uncertaintly on running heavier services and even as a game server also. Also have no screen is a bonus when doing reboots, but then maybe just taking off the screen off the laptop should do anyway and use the VGA if I even really need one once in a while.
Might do the first option just to screw around with the laptop, the second option is inevitable anyway if I keep on running some server.