Lavender field
VPS and services
2023年7月23日日曜日 14:24 by [ - Junko - ]Tags [ - Tech - Updates - VPS - Rants - ]
Table of contents
Introduction
you are probably noticing many changes along the website, if you haven’t come here since our last post, the speech bubbles, our landing page or more options in the navigation bar. The new RSS feed also gives it away but this blog is not written in org mode anymore and has been migrated to hugo.
there is a few new bells and whistles, but we’ll get to that in time. there have been many changes and we need to go through them little by little.
this post it’s gonna be part of a series of posts (so we can prevent massive posts (and even then this one is turning out massive)) where we talk about all the tech, projects and life updates that have happened during these last two months.
our mental health took a severe hit in may as might be hinted by these two really subtle posts (status and sometimes) because of emotional and life setbacks. we took some time, but we are back on the saddle. i must say that even while we were down, we never were idle. we’ve been always working on something. this series aims to cover all we’ve done.
this post will focus on tech side of things.
Oracle resolution
tech support ignoring us multiple times, two weeks of trying to make an account, and somehow one random day by the grace of lain we being able to make it, and then having to wait about two weeks for them to have enough capacity to house a server for us, after trying for days.
VPS and docker
once i got my hands on the vps and figured out how to ssh into it*, i spent that literal week hyperfixated on getting all the services i wanted hosted.
this led me to learn to toy with docker, which, uh… like… bloat™ is so bad!1!1!!! and all but god damn docker and flatpak are a godsent. docker has been extremely convenient and i feel it’d be really easy to port all my services and data to another server should i need to. for the sake of consistency i wrote my own docker file for this webpage and it was extremely straightforward and comfy to pull off.
* i still have no fucking clue on how to ssh into the vps without putty, and that’s gonna be a problem when i spend two weeks at gf’s house and i just have my phone
it seems docker would be a really nice companion piece for something like guix. for example, i could try to write the whole server environment and setup into a guix script so it sets up everything for me. maybe.
i’ll do more reading into something like it when i continue with my guix desktop dotfiles.
Available services
NOTICE: registration to this services are locked to everyone but close people, as the free vps has very limited storage space, but its use is open to anyone who wants to use it
Akkoma
so, you may ask yourself, what are we hosting now? well, the first and most obvious if you are in contact with us online, is an akkoma instance!
the akkoma instance uses the prefix ak, this will be the norm for all other services we offer. our accounts are:
Invidious
this is another one that had me very excited to self host. i had been running an invidious instance locally for a while now which made it a bit of a pain to share a video with a friend as it was alluded in this post.
well! it’s know possible to watch videos in 1080p and more within our server and share those videos directly with our friends without worrying about changing the link.
as we do have an account and we have exported our subscriptions, this is another step towards completely degoogling. i’ve been using it with a privacy redirector that changes all my youtube links to this, and has been working flawlessly.
SearXNG
in the process towards degoogling we are also hosting our search engine, we were specially desillusioned with duckduckgo finding itself within multiple controversies. but what can i say, we were held hostage by the bangs which was a big part of our daily internet use.
(SearXNG) !!g <query>
(DDG) !g <query>
(Google) <query>
it also has the perk of actual good search results, which let’s be honest here duckduckgo’s results always have been garbage except piracy results.
Nitter
you are gonna keep seeing the same trend from here, except maybe the last one. this is about owning the part of the internet you use, and your own privacy. the instance can’t see nsfw anymore, given the changes to the twitter api. but is still very usable and good for sharing art and most importantly, grabbing RSS feeds.
LibReddit
i don’t really use reddit myself too much, we all know i much prefer the funny clover site. but sometimes when trying to troubleshoot some tech issue or documenting for something (the two only things reddit is worth using for), it’s much appreciated to not have to go through the bloated reddit interface. really comfy and everyone is, again, welcome to make use of it. it’s just not something i use frequently myself.
Booru
this is a more complicated one. it’s not a service we have open to the public, but rather a way to have our art hosted, as of this post, it’s only one practice piece, when we were testing the tablet. honestly don’t bother looking at it right this second, very terrible.
Oh well
apparently this is already getting quite lengthy for my taste, but that’s the good thing about having made it into a series. we still have a shit ton of things to talk to during the following days. expect posts talking about:
- hugo and the new pages
- the thinkpad shitshow
- remember when i was making guix dotfiles?
- gardening progress
- exams and life
- alicia’s pfp change
- anuma’s existencial crysis
- org-gamify
- tarot and some more esoteric shit maybe