Servers on passthejoe

Standard Ebooks runs everything on a 2 GB VPS with no database and almost no JavaScript

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 09:38:16 -0800

How Standard Ebooks serves millions of requests per month with a 2GB VPS; or, a paean to the classic web

They’re keeping the tech simple. They build ebooks and then distribute them.

One single-core server hosts all of their Git repos, builds their ebooks and serves their web site.

Alex Cabal says the web site runs on a “classic LAP stack.” It’s missing the “M,” meaning no MySQL — and no database at all.

You really need to set rsslimit in your Hugo config file

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 17:02:27 -0800

I use Hugo to automatically build two sites that pull XML feeds from the CentOS project whenever there are updates to the Stream 8 and Stream 9 Linux distributions. The entries tend to be long, but they are all text, and the great thing is that the blog tends to run itself.

I was having trouble with IFTTT, which I use to post the new entries to Twitter, and I found that the XML out of Hugo was sluggish.

My 'dynamic' IP is pretty static

Sat, 21 Sep 2019 12:35:57 -0700

I have been running this web server on a Raspberry Pi Zero W in my coat closet for three months, and my dynamic IP still hasn’t changed.

That’s good because I still haven’t implemented a script to change where my URL points from FreeDNS in the event that my home IP changes. At some point I guess it’ll happen, and the server will be offline until I figure it out.

Or I’ll just sit down some time before then and work out the script …

Google Cloud nuked the web server on my VM

Mon, 05 Aug 2019 09:07:01 -0700

I wasn’t paying for my Google Cloud VM, and it turns out the price was right.

Since I started working on my own server in the coat closet, I haven’t been using my free Google VM.

I got an email today saying that it’s been 120 days since I’ve opened Google Cloud Shell. If I didn’t log in, “in 7 days, your Cloud Shell home directory will be automatically scheduled for deletion.”

Permissions are hard

Sun, 14 Jul 2019 19:56:40 -0700

Figuring out file and directory permissions on a server is hard.

You have to balance security with functionality. What are the most restrictive permissions you can set and still have everything work?

Shared hosting does take care of a lot for you

Sun, 14 Jul 2019 19:00:23 -0700

As I build my own server — and this would be the same for a cloud VPS or a local computer, there is a lot to set up and configure.

Shared hosts like NearlyFreeSpeech.net (which I will be using more soon) and Hostgator (which I’ve used for years and will probably be using less) take care of many things in a safe and secure way.

Setting up your own server is very much like reinventing the wheel. It’s better if you like making wheels, have used a lot of wheels, fixed broken ones and rebuilt old ones.

Setting up FTP on my Raspberry Pi

Sun, 14 Jul 2019 18:05:22 -0700

Running your own servers — be they VPSes on Google, AWS or Digital Ocean, or Raspberry Pis in the closet — is a learning experience. You have to put on your sysadmin hat and get to work.

Today I’m trying to figure out the ftp server. I’ve used a hundred of them but never installed and configured one. The hardest part to figure out is the SSL encryption.

If you see this file, it means I’ve made some progress.

Set umask in vsftpd so incoming files have 644 permissions

Sun, 14 Jul 2019 13:09:18 -0700

If you are setting up an FTP server (I’m using vsftpd in Debian Buster), setting the umask is the way you get incoming files to “take” the right permissions.

For text files, I like the permissions to be 644, which is rw-r--r-- (read-write for user, read for group, read for the world).

To get this in vsftpd, uncomment this line:

local_umask=022

File permissions and ownership that make Ode's Indexette work on a Debian Buster server

Sun, 14 Jul 2019 13:00:40 -0700

This was easier on Hostgator, where everything is “owned” by my user account and everything works.

To get Ode addins to work, the /data directory is owned by my user and is in the www-data group.

The /data/addins/state directory has the same ownership and permissions (755).

The /data/addins/state/Indexette directory is owned by www-data and is in the www-data group and has permissions 755.

The files created by Indexette in /data/addins/state/Indexette are aux_index_file and primary_index_file. They are owned by www-data and are in the www-data group. Their permissions are 644.