Tag Archives: home-server

Downtime for the rest of us

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If the homebrew server club had an official membership based on technicality, then I would be a very proud member, but it does not have a membership application. That being said, I am still a proud member of HBSC, as I’ve been running a home server for a decade now.

I can’t say that it’s been easy, but it has been evolving. When I tried setting up my first server, I had issues with an ISP that didn’t allow me to have more than a single public static IP address.

Over time, ISPs changed, servers have changed, but the only thing that remained the same is me running my server from my home.

Now, I do have multiple IPs, a VLAN with my ISP that we’ve agreed on the setup, an internal email where they answer my questions without me calling the general support line and finally a publicly available Looking Glass that anyone can use.

Unfortunately, it’s not all sunshine and roses. My biggest request for the last couple of years has been the same: a status page.

You know, that simple web page that tells you if a service is down?

Interestingly, when I was researching ISPs (that’s a post for another day) I noticed that most ISPs don’t provide a status page.

Some ISPs (like Google Fiber) ask for an address, while others ask you to log in.

I understand that an ISP is a complex beast, and it would not be an easy task to say “we have an issue”, but hey, someone has to start trying.

Oh, I forgot, the downtime mentioned in the title!

Well, my personal blogs don’t have a lot of traffic (unless if someone posts a link to the Orange Website, then I get 20K+ viewers per day), but many people use my services, such as my Jabber/XMPP chat server, a publicly available blogging system an Armenian tech forum and so on.

All of the local ISPs had issues this week and their first response was to fix the outbound traffic. So for most people in the country, they didn’t care, as long as they were able to use Telegram and log into their Meta-owned social media services.

But for me and my community, we had to wait almost 18 hours for them to fix the internal network issues.

However, I am still a proud member of HBSC, because unlike Big Tech companies, if I go down, only I go down. But if a cloud goes down, everyone goes down with them.

See you at the next downtime 😉

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Antranig Vartanian ✔

December 16, 2022

Well, it time to do upgrades on my server. expect this blog will be offline for a while as well.

How long were we up anyway?

root@pingvinashen:~ # uptime 
 9:41PM  up 270 days, 18:36, 4 users, load averages: 0.15, 0.36, 0.38

Not bad, huh?

See you soon!

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Migrating home-servers

As I have mentioned before, I want to blog more, so here it goes.

I’ve been struggling financially lately, with COVID and then the war I’ve thrown away almost all of my savings. One of the decisions that I had to make was moving back to my old place. No one lives here anymore, my parents got their own house, which means I can live with freedom alone and rent-free.

That meant I need to move home servers again. Yes, I’ve always been a home server fan. This blog runs on my home server as well.

While many people argue that running a home server is a complex process compared to the cloud, since you need to pay for electricity and manage hardware, I, however, feel that’s a myth.

My current uptime is

ssh pingvinashen uptime
1:59PM up 48 days, 42 mins, 2 users, load averages: 0.15, 0.18, 0.21

And I only needed to reboot because I had to upgrade since I’m a fan of upgrading whenever there’s a patch to some critical software 🙂

One of the advantages of running a home server in Armenia is the fact that electricity is cheap, so are static IP addresses. I pay 2USD/mo for each IP address and I have many of them.

Usually, I have one static IP per service (Jabber, ZNC, etc.) and one static IP for all web-oriented services such as blogs, websites, etc.

However, norayr also runs a home-server for the community, he runs the Armenian instance of Diaspora*, Mastodon, and SocialHome.

Due to technical limitations at his side of the city, he’s been keeping his home server at my place.

Vartanian LLC, Home-Server as a Service 😛

Anyways, I had to bring his home server to my new/old place as well, which meant that he needs a static IP for his services.

I did not want to call the ISP for a new IP address since the last one I’ve been using was for an Armenian instance of Lobste.rs that I deployed for our community. It’s not very active, but you can’t force people to be active in communities and Armenia does not have the concept of “tech communities” like others do in the west.

That meant that I have to remove an IP from a Jail so norayr can use it.

So I had to migrate some things. I had to use my proxy server IP address and reverse_proxy the traffic to the lobsters’ Jail.

Sounds easy, until I remembered that I run Apache on my host.

I’m not very fluent in Apache, I keep doing mistakes, so I wanted to migrate all of my vhosts to Nginx.

You’d think that it would be easy, and yes it was 🙂

So now, norayr runs his home server and I have migrated the webserver to Nginx in an hour.

For some reason, it feels faster, but I’m still not sure why. I probably had to optimize Apache back in the day, but Nginx’s default configs do seem better.

Now, since many IP addresses have been changed, I have to struggle with SMTP issues. No, SMTP works fine, but Google, just like it keeps breaking the web, it keeps breaking email as well, routing all-good emails to people’s spam folder, eh.

That’s all folks.

* not a footnote but part of the project name.

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