Internet Explorer was, in its prime, the most popular internet browser in the world. Originally released alongside Windows 95, its headline feature seemed to be that it was maintained by Microsoft and was automatically installed. It wasn’t until Internet Explorer 2.0 in November 1995 that feature we’re used to, like…
Lots of applications use databases to store data. It’s a fast and efficient way to store data, whilst also providing features like searching and integrity checks. Password manager, file storage, media library, RSS reader, almost everything will use some form of database. However, backing them up isn’t quite as simple…
It’s a new year, so it’s time to reflect back on the tools I used last year, how they’ll change this year, and how they might change in future. It’s still an idea I’ve completely stolen from CGP Grey / Cortex, but I think it’s useful, fun and interesting. I’m…
For the last 7 years or so, I’ve had some form of server sitting in my house. Its size and utility have changed massively in this time, but I couldn’t imagine life without it. Both prefer to and enjoy running a number of applications for myself, in a (possibly futile)…
The cloud is just someone else’s computer. In my case, the cloud is usually just my computer. As an avid self-hoster, I like to run a lot of things myself, for learning, privacy, and of course fun. And it’s hard to host anything without servers. I have quite a few…
For me, every Monday is updates day. I run through all the entries in my Ansible hosts file and install any updates which may need running. All machines have OS updates, and the handful which run docker get their containers pulled. However, pulling containers merely updates the underlying container OS,…
I’ve used Ansible for a number of years for the provisioning of both my servers and desktops. It’s versatile, it’s simple, it’s powerful, and has a number of great features. Personally, I make all of my “playbooks” public for all for all to see, but provisioning still requires some secrets.
It was a normal (for 2021) Sunday evening back in July, I was minding my own business, obviously doing something super cool, when I spotted a message from a certain badger-y fellow in the Self Hosted show’s Discord. Alex has the lovely and weird ability of reliably nerd-sniping me into…
It’s no secret that GitLab is a beast of an application. As self-hosted git servers go, it’s easily the most powerful and feature complete. But that weight comes at a cost: resource usage. GitLab is no slouch, easily consuming upwards of 6GB of RAM by default without doing anything, and…
Both LXC and Docker are great containerization technologies, brought to you by the powers of the Linux kernel. At their core, they’re pretty similar, but the further out you look, the differences increase massively. At their heart, they’re both still containers - understanding the differences between the 2 takes a…
The internet is a pretty big place - a huge amount of data (approximately 131TB per second) is transferred over it every second of every day. The backbone of the internet is designed to transfer huge amounts of data, but people are impatient creatures, and want data as quick as…
Docker containers (like onions) have layers. In your Dockerfile, each new RUN, COPY or ADD line creates a new layer (so do the others, but not ones which affect the filesystem). Each layer contains only the files which changed from the previous layer, which allows layers to be shared between…
Docker is a great containerization technology for running applications. It keeps multiple applications completely isolated from each other, only allowing connections exactly when you tell them to. But what if you’re on a hypervisor? You want your host OS to be as lean as possible (else it defeats the point),…
For anyone who’s spoken to me, they’ll know I’m very quick to link people to posts I’ve written. That’s not in terms of pushing the things I’ve written (usually), but also being able to retrieve the links as quick as possible. I recently added search search to my website, and…
I have a bunch of VMs and LXCs on my proxmox server. Whilst I like to keep as little data in each of them as possible, and instead mount in my storage (in the form of a ZFS and snapraid pool), I still use proxmox’s built-in backup feature to back…
My website is built with Hugo, a great static site generator with a bunch of features. One of the big missing features though is search. Hugo has documentation on a bunch of different integrations, but none of them quite did what I wanted. Over the last few months, I’ve been…
Static sites, ie those which are just files on disk rather than requiring a custom application or database to run, are incredibly simple to write. You can either do it yourself from scratch with a bunch of HTML, CSS and JS files, or use a generator like Hugo or Zola.
As a developer I do basically everything in git and for fun I run my own git server on my home server. I’ve swapped around quite a lot between GitLab and Gitea, but finally settled on GitLab. It’s a bit heavy, but the deep CI integration is really nice. Since…
Backups are critical to any systems longevity and reliability. If you’re not backing up your data, stop reading this now, go do it, then come back… Assuming none of you suddenly panicked and left, let’s keep going. You can keep telling yourself otherwise, but eventually, every system will experience some…
My website is a very important project to me. I’ve written a lot of content over the years, useful both to me and other internet folks. Currently, my website is a static site, powered by Hugo. Because it’s static, the content is served insanely quickly and handles any insane load…