stuff&things

What have I done?

In a previous post, I noted I moved to a self-hosted Forgejo instance on a locally homed Raspberry Pi. That was fun! (It was, even with a few hiccups along the way). And, as part of all of that, I set up a forgejo-runner on a Hetzner VPS that would deploy this here site to a Bunny Storage Zone and out to the interwebs.

Back then, so many weeks ago, the DNS was handled by Cloudflare. This caused a few issues with the local repos and, just generally, I wasn’t entirely happy being back on Cloudflare. We’ve seen what happens to the world wide web when something with Cloudflare goes down (it doesn’t stay so world wide for a while).

So, I set up Caddy on my Hetzner VPS to handle the reverse proxy to my RPi. That’s all it’s currently handling. And then I set up DNS Control to manage my DNS settings because I migrated my records from Cloudflare to Bunny. The thing I really like about DNS Control is that I don’t have to login to anything (besides the VPS via SSH) to update/change my DNS records. They’re all in one place, accessible (mostly) anywhere (as long as I’m on my tailnet because I setup my VPS on my tailnet as well).

Since I’m using the VPS via Caddy as the reverse proxy for my Forgejo instance, I used the SSH link to clone the repositories on my computers. I could’ve used its Tailscale IP but if I was not on my tailnet and needed/wanted to do something, I wouldn’t have been able to. I may rethink this in the future as that is one of the benefits of having a tailnet to begin with. For now, it made sense to me to set it up as I have.

One thing that got in my way setting up SSH for the repos is that I forgot about the reverse proxy. I had all of the SSH keys set up and added to my instance but forgot that I had to do some configuration on the VPS because that’s where the DNS records point to. I kept trying to push to one of the repos and kept getting prompted for a password. It took me longer than I care to admit to diagnose that issue and then reverse engineer in my brain what I had done. I plan to document (beyond this post) what’s set up and why in case anyone else ever needed/wanted to access it and/or shut it down.

I’m happy with this setup so far. I don’t have a NAS, so I’m not yet interested in Ente or Immich because I don’t really have storage space for the photos themselves (19,000+) and don’t feel like paying for cloud storage elsewhere.

This has been a great dip of my toes into the self-hosting waters. I like that I have control over some of this stuff. The overall costs are not prohibitive to me, though I understand where they can be to others. I essentially pay for the VPS, which will be about $8/month starting in April, and Bunny, which is coming out to less than a $1 a month at this point.

These sorts of things help me keep my mind occupied from dwelling on things like, oh, you know, a new war. It is complicated issue and I am not prepared to go into or debate the takes on it. I will say this is another unconstitutional war in my lifetime and I am sick, tired, angry, whatever of it. The timing is suspect at the least.

Take care of yourselves and your loved ones.