💾 Archived View for caseyrichins.online › logs › 2023_11_26_Gemini-bsd-style.gmi captured on 2024-05-12 at 15:11:31. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-12-28)
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Published November 26, 2023
A lot has changed over the holiday that was Thanksgiving 2023, there was a good amount of careful reflection on this capsule and what I wanted it to be. I don't want it to end up a mothball of yet another failed capsule as there have been so many already these past years as Gemini has come up in the world. As I alluded in my previous post, there seems to be a problem with self-discipline when it comes to writing and posting. I've determined that I've created a technical barrier of sorts in my workflow that needs to be addressed. So I once again moved to a new hosting provider while looking for better method of simplification of my writing workflow process. Previously I would write a post in Visual Code, then I would need to edit it several times to perfect the grammar and spelling errors before committing to GitHub repo so that when the time came to cut a new docker image I would only have to complete the build step once. When the writing was done a new docker image would be built, this image would then have to be pushed to Docker Hub. I would shortly after login in Portainer to pull the new image, and re-deploy the stack to update the container followed by testing with Amfora and Lagrange to make sure that the content was showing and the atom RSS feed was working properly.
With the move to vultr.com and migration to an OpenBSD 7.4 installation this weekend for it's perceived "better default security" and significantly less bloated running process tree, I now simply ssh into the server and write directly in VIM, checking spelling and grammar before updating the index and atom feed manually. I then only have to worry about my backup process working properly to ensure that the data and content I write is safe and able to be restored in the event of a disaster. I feel much more relaxed in my writing too. The Gemini server that is being used now is a native BSD server call vger, with the TLS termination handled by relayd. While I really liked Molly Brown server for it's support of client certificates that would allow me to create private spaces upon my capsule, I came to realize that if I have things that I truly want to be private, they shouldn't share space with a publicly accessible server even if access would be controlled with client certificates, not to mention that I also had some issues getting Molly Brown to run properly on OpenBSD that may have also contributed to the decision to make the move to vger. There likely could be a method of using relayd with client certs to control access to a directory but I'm not too much worried about figuring that out at the moment. The PF sense firewall syntax was a breath of fresh air to work with once I understood what "block return" equates to coming from a iptables/nftables background. I'm confident that I'll be more active now with self-imposed limits removed, I won't have to think about my publishing process to much or stress as much over making sure I've sufficiently protected my server from the outside world.
When it comes to this capsule log especially, I refrain from writing about non-technical aspects of a personal nature and try to focus on updates to the capsule itself. I want this capsule to remain technical in nature and if there is anything that would be of a more personal nature or if it would be possibly political or opinionated in nature I would prefer to place such content or writings on my gopher hole. I want to do my part no not have Gemini space become the toxic text version of the web I guess. I don't have a clear cut answer or thought on why I want it to be this way but I'm going off of feeling or emotional thought at moment which is an oxymoron in itself because I'm a mostly analytical and logically driven person in my mind. Perhaps this is rooted in some need for perfection in Gemini space where in Gopher space I don't feel the need to be quite as much of a perfectionist. The reason why I shifted from html sites and writing on surface web and moved to Gopher/Gemini is because I simply wanted to only have to deal with and write plain text. I don't want to have to worry about code syntax or missing a closing tag. I'll end this thought here because it's already derailing the topic of this post.
On another note I also want to share an awesome blog I found this past week that I have reading in depth all of the posting therein. Many of the writings talk about Gopher and Gemini, the small internet in general. It was quite refreshing to read₁.
₁[HTTPS] Cheapskate's Guide to Computers and the Internet