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Five grand a head

5 August 2008 21:50

It is nice when you work for a company where you can say:

"Ice-lolly break..."

The response?

"Me too!"

Tonight has been a productive evening, I guess the ice-lolly helped!

I managed to optimize the storage of rejected SPAM mail for my commercial service. That is something I've been obsessing over recently since the volume of SPAM is currently hovering around 2.5 million messages.

Still I suspect it is only a matter of weeks before I need to expand. The current setup has me using three machines:

  • Primary machine runs:
    • Web Application
    • SMTP processing/filtering/delivery
  • Secondary machine runs:
    • SMTP processing/filtering/delivery
  • Offsite machine:

Ideally I'd like to split that up further so that I have a single machine running the web application (the part the user interacts with), a pair of MX machines, and the offsite machine doing the minimal work it does.

That way the incoming mail will not affect the application at all directly.

Thankfully the split should be trivial. The only hard part is finding a fast webhost that can offer me ~1Gb of RAM, ~1000Gb of disk space, and won't charge much. Ideally around £15/$30 a month. (hahaha! hahaha! ha!)

ObQuote: Léon

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All change

17 November 2013 21:50

If this post is visible I should have migrated the following virtual machines to a new home:

  • mail.steve.org.uk - SMTP, IMAP, & etc.
  • www.steve.org.uk - And N other hosts.
  • rsync.io - Offsite backups for local people.

These previously existed on a machine at Bytemark, running under screen and KVM. Now they exist upon a different Bytemark-rented host.

TODO: Move 4096.io, configure an auto-builder guest (I have a slaughter policy for that), and allocate a /48 so that I regain IPv6 support (/56 would do, I guess. I want a /64 for each guest.).

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Free hosting, and key-signing

6 March 2015 21:50

Over the past week I've mailed many of the people who had signed my previous GPG key and who had checked my ID as part of that process. My intention was to ask "Hey you trusted me before, would you sign my new key?".

So far no replies. I may have to be more dedicated and do the local-thing with people.

In other news Bytemark, who have previously donated a blade server, sponsored Debconf, and done other similar things, have now started offering free hosting to Debian-developers.

There is a list of such offers here:

I think that concludes this months blog-posting quota. Although who knows? I turn 39 in a couple of days, and that might allow me to make a new one.

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Initial server migration complete..

28 January 2020 12:20

So recently I talked about how I was moving my email to a paid GSuite account, that process has now completed.

To recap I've been paying approximately €65/month for a dedicated host from Hetzner:

  • 2 x 2Tb drives.
  • 32Gb RAM.
  • 8-core CPU.

To be honest the server itself has been fine, but the invoice is a little horrific regardless:

  • SB31 - €26.05
  • Additional subnet /27 - €26.89

I'm actually paying more for the IP addresses than for the server! Anyway I was running a bunch of virtual machines on this host:

  • mail
    • Exim4 + Dovecot + SSH
    • I'd SSH to this host, daily, to read mail with my console-based mail-client, etc.
  • www
    • Hosted websites.
    • Each different host would run an instance of lighttpd, serving on localhost:XXX running under a dedicated UID.
    • Then Apache would proxy to the right one, and handle SSL.
  • master
    • Puppet server, and VPN-host.
  • git
  • ..
    • Bunch more servers, nine total.

My plan is to basically cut down and kill 99% of these servers, and now I've made the initial pass:

I've now bought three virtual machines, and juggled stuff around upon them. I now have:

  • debian - €3.00/month
  • dns - €3.00/month
    • This hosts my commercial DNS thing
    • Admin overhead is essentially zero.
    • Profit is essentially non-zero :)
  • shell - €6.00/month
    • The few dynamic sites I maintain were moved here, all running as www-data behind Apache. Meh.
    • This is where I run cron-jobs to invoke rss2email, my google mail filtering hack.
    • This is also a VPN-provider, providing a secure link to my home desktop, and the other servers.

The end result is that my hosting bill has gone down from being around €50/month to about €20/month (€6/month for gsuite hosting), and I have far fewer hosts to maintain, update, manage, and otherwise care about.

Since I'm all cloudy-now I have backups via the provider, as well as those maintained by rsync.net. I'll need to rebuild the shell host over the next few weeks as I mostly shuffled stuff around in-place in an adhoc fashion, but the two other boxes were deployed entirely via Ansible, and Deployr. I made the decision early on that these hosts should be trivial to relocate and they have been!

All static-sites such as my blog, my vanity site and similar have been moved to netlify. I lose the ability to view access-logs, but I'd already removed analytics because I just don't care,. I've also lost the ability to have custom 404-pages, etc. But the fact that I don't have to maintain a host just to serve static pages is great. I was considering using AWS to host these sites (i.e. S3) but chose against it in the end as it is a bit complex if you want to use cloudfront/cloudflare to avoid bandwidth-based billing surprises.

I dropped MX records from a bunch of domains, so now I only receive email at steve.fi, steve.org.uk, and to a lesser extent dns-api.com. That goes to Google. Migrating to GSuite was pretty painless although there was a surprise: I figured I'd setup a single user, then use aliases to handle the mail such that:

  • debian@example -> steve
  • facebook@example -> steve
  • webmaster@example -> steve

All told I have about 90 distinct local-parts configured in my old Exim setup. Turns out that Gsuite has a limit of like 20 aliases per-user. Happily you can achieve the same effect with address maps. If you add an address map you can have about 4000 distinct local-parts, and reject anything else. (I can't think of anything worse than having wildcard handling; I've been hit by too many bounce-attacks in the past!)

Oh, and I guess for completeness I should say I also have a single off-site box hosted by Scaleway for €5/month. This runs monitoring via overseer and notification via purppura. Monitoring includes testing that websites are up, that responses contain a specific piece of text, DNS records resolve to expected values, SSL certificates haven't expired, & etc.

Monitoring is worth paying for. I'd be tempted to charge people to use it, but I suspect nobody would pay. It's a cute setup and very flexible and reliable. I've been pondering adding a scripting language to the notification - since at the moment it alerts me via Pushover, Email, and SMS-messages. Perhaps I should just settle on one! Having a scripting language would allow me to use different mechanisms for different services, and severities.

Then again maybe I should just pay for pingdom, or similar? I have about 250 tests which run every two minutes. That usually exceeds most services free/cheap offerings..

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Removing my last server?

5 February 2022 09:00

In the past I used to run a number of virtual machines, or dedicated hosts. Currently I'm cut things down to only a single machine which I'm planning to remove.

Email

Email used to be hosted via dovecot, and then read with mutt-ng on the host itself. Later I moved to reading mail with my own console-based email client.

Eventually I succumbed, and now I pay for Google's Workspace product.

Git Repositories

I used to use gitbucket for hosting a bunch of (mostly private) git repositories. A bad shutdown/reboot of my host trashed the internal database so that was broken.

I replaced the use of gitbucket, which was very pretty, with gitolite to perform access-control, and avoid the need of a binary database.

I merged a bunch of repositories, removed the secret things from there where possible, and finally threw them on a second github account. GPG-encryption added where appropriate.

Static Hosts

Static websites I used to host upon my own machine are now hosted via netlify.

There aren't many of them, and they are rarely updated, I guess I care less.

Dynamic Hosts

That leaves only dynamic hosts. I used to have a couple of these, most notably the debian-administration.org, but that was archived and the final commercial thing I did was retired in January.

I now have only one dynamic site up and running, https://api.steve.fi/, this provides two dynamic endpoints:

  • One to return data about trams coming to the stop near my house.
  • One to return the current temperature.

Both of these are used by my tram-display device. Running these two services locally, in Docker, would probably be fine.

However there is a third "secret" API - blog-comment submission.

When a comment is received upon this blog it is written to a local filesystem, and an email is sent to me. The next time my blog is built rsync is used to get the remote-comments and add them to the blog. (Spam deleted first, of course).

Locally the comments are added into the git-repository this blog is built from - and the remote files deleted now and again.

Maybe I should just switch from writing the blog-comment to disk, and include all the meta-data in the email? I don't wanna go connecting to Gmail via IMAP, but I could probably copy and paste from the email to my local blog-repository.

I can stop hosting the tram-APIs publicly, but the blog comment part is harder. I guess I just need to receive incoming FORM-submission, and send an email.

  • Maybe I host the existing container on fly.io, for free?
  • Maybe I write an AWS lambda function to do the necessary thing?

Or maybe I drop blog-comments and sidestep the problem entirely? After all I wrote five posts in the whole of last year ..

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