Blog Posts on East of the Sun, West of the Moon

RSS feed fix

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Looks may be deceiving

When I set up a static website my focus around the RSS feed was that I wanted to have the full content, so once I had that, I moved on.

Today I noticed that the links back to the posts in the RSS feed (or the link for the site itself) didn't actually work, they were missing the https://is-here.com/ prefix. 🤔

Thankfully this was a simple fix

All that was missing was a baseURL parameter in my config.yaml file. It was there originally, but it got lost when I migrated from the S3 bucket to statichost.eu and revamped my config.yaml file.

Running the local hugo preview with --baseURL http://localhost:1313/ to override that, and all is well again in this part of the world.

Backups, What a Concept

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

How it started

For about three years I ran a single-user Mastodon instance at strangeweb.page in AWS, where the non-IaC bits were mostly manually put together. It was also a big example of "Do as I say, don't do as I do" because I wasn't maintaining any backups.

How it's going

Recently I moved that instance from AWS EC2 to a Hetzner VM, which meant I had to actually go through the steps of taking the configuration and data from one host to another. As part of that exercise I cobbled together a small shell script that takes those vital bits and copies them to a safe place.

In my case that's object storage at a different provider, avoiding a single point of failure.

The script

  #!/bin/sh

  . "$0.env"

  echo "$(date): Creating a DB snapshot"

  # Create a backup of the mastodon tables:
  sudo -u mastodon \
     pg_dump \
     -Fc mastodon_production \
     -f /home/mastodon/backup.dump

  echo "$(date): Creating a Redis snapshot"

  # Create a snapshot of the redis data:
  redis-cli SAVE

  for src in \
      /home/mastodon/live/.env.production \
      /var/lib/redis/dump.rdb \
      /home/mastodon/backup.dump; do
      echo "$(date): Backing up $src"
      aws s3 \
          --endpoint "https://$ENDPOINT" \
          cp \
          --quiet \
          "$src" \
          "s3://$BUCKET/snapshot/mastodon/"
  done

  echo "$(date): Done"

The .env file contains two settings: ENDPOINT and BUCKET. The ENDPOINT is necessary because the slightly older awscli version on the host was ignoring the endpoint_url directive in ~/.aws/config.

It's a fairly simple file, pointing to an object storage bucket at Scaleway:

[default]
region = nl-ams
output = json
services = scw-nl-ams

The other missing piece is ~/.aws/credentials with credentials for that bucket/account.

Disclaimer

Going back to that "Do as I say, don't do as I do" bit, I have not yet performed the ultimate test of restoring a test-server from the backed up data. So if I'm missing something, maybe let me know so I can fix it before it's too late? 😅

I also know that this only maintains a single snapshot unless the object storage has version support and it's enabled.

Moving to Europe (part 2)

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The saga continues

After I moved my (three) domains, most of the DNS, and my static websites to Europe I got side-tracked. An interaction with a former colleague nudged me to pick that back up.

Services

When I last wrote about it I thought I would land on UpCloud or Scaleway for a virtual server (or two), but now I'm actually working with a virtual server at Hetzner. They do things a little bit differently, so I'm still getting used to that. Both have projects, which feels like the mental model equivalent of AWS VPCs? Hetzner has performance/usage graphs integrated into their web UI, whereas Scaleway has a hosted Grafana service (for which you need to create a dedicated user). Hetzner's virtual servers seem more generous with their root volumes, but then it may not be as easy to change that out later, so choose wisely?

That said, for something that mostly needs to be compute, storage, and a web presence, Hetzner's offerings seem quite nice.

Currently I'm putting together a "services" instance that will host things like webmail (Roundcube), bookmarks (Readeck), passwords (Vaultwarden, or something along those lines), etc. This would be the same Services project hinted at in the Read Later project page. The goal here will be to make it relatively painless to blow it away and spin it up elsewhere, so a layer of Terraform, some cloud-init fun, and automatically generated and managed LetsEncrypt certificates are going to be part of that.

Object Storage

For this, Scaleway still seems to be the most reasonable price, in particular for buckets with not a lot of content. Hetzner starts at 4.99 Euro for even an empty bucket (which then gets you 1TB of storage and traffic), by comparison. That's a non-starter for a bucket where I expect to have just a few dozen GB of data. For completeness, UpCloud's buckets also start at 5 Euros which then includes 250GB of storage, and states there are no data transfer fees, period?

Open questions

For moving my mail server I still need to do some research to find out which of these 3 (or some alternative I've overlooked or discarded unfairly) is the better pick in terms of IP reputation, or spam abuse complaint handling. Anyone know?

Previously

Moving to Europe

New search engine, who dis?

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Anything but Google

Like many others I've become disenchanted with Google search. So many, in fact, that its dominance is starting to decline! Instead, I've been using DuckDuckGo as my default search for the last several years, on desktop and on my phone (with its dedicated application).

A new player enters the field

Several posts (the Daring Fireball blog, Ian Betteridge and Bart Busschots in the Fediverse) recently nudged me to try out Kagi. The idea behind their offering is that aside from a 100 searches/month free tier you pay a monthly fee and in return their interface is clean, sparse, and lacks ads.

Of course if you're paying, you need to have an account. Their FAQ states that they only collect the bare minimum of data to run the service and for now I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt on that. Hypothetically it also allows you to set some personal preferences, but I haven't looked into that yet.

The first few searches

My usual first searches are vanity searches. That may seem silly, but I would hope that I know reasonably well what to expect there.

Kagi did not disappoint:

My LinkedIn profile
Several Facebook profiles with similar names (my own isn't public, and covered in dust)
Some references to the time that I contributed to the DGD ecosystem (parts of the KernelLib, maintaining the network package)
A YouTube account with all of 2 playlists (Dutch artists, and 80s/90s music, unsurprising)
A reference to the WARN ACT bot, one of the two that I run on the Fediverse
Some currently inactive static websites with my name on it still
A reference to one of few mailing lists that I still vaguely read or contribute to
My name in a list of Patreon contributors of the DTNS podcast

Unexpected blasts from the past:

An ancient SourceForge.net profile that I had long since forgotten about (created in 2004)
A reference to the time that I created a WordPress plugin (not sure I still have that file, and I doubt it still works)
A name credit in iPhone in Action (2008) as found in part on this website for a modified bookmarklet to show the source of a web page on the iPhone? I honestly don't remember that, but seeing as the two authors were the people I worked with at Skotos that makes perfect sense
And on that note, it found an archived version of that Skotos website as well, and some related pages
An obscure reference to a Perl module from 2002 where I contributed some testing and a snippet of code

Weirdest find:

My name in an Engadget post from October 2007 by Erica Sadun around an iPhone rumor. This predates my Twitter account, so I have no recollection how I might have passed on the link to that The Register article to her?!

All in all, some interesting finds and I hope it will prove to be equally useful with other types of searches. Fingers crossed!

Moving to Europe

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Shifting things around

For reasons, I am slowly but surely moving most of my online resources to European providers. This has meant a journey of discovery, finding suitable ones for:

Domain registration
DNS hosting
Some place for a few static (placeholder) websites
Virtual servers of some kind
Object storage or something similar
Git repository hosting

Resources that helped

Most of my information has come from european-alternatives.eu. Some test accounts were needed here and there because it isn't necessarily obvious how well they may cooperate with automation tools like Terraform and how much click-ops will be required, and how well does their web UI work in that case.

Obstacles I encountered

There were some hiccups with getting the European companies to play nice with my US credit cards.

One disappointment was because the company (Infomaniak 🇨🇭) seems to be incapable of sending SMS to US phone numbers. Pity, because they looked promising otherwise.

Another Nope was finding out that OVH 🇫🇷 pushes you to OVH US if you're in the US or Canada, a wholly owned subsidiary of OVH Group, defeating the purpose of going with European companies.

Choices/solutions

Service	My Pick	Based in
Domain registration	https://www.openprovider.com/	🇳🇱
DNS	https://desec.io/	🇩🇪
Static websites	https://www.statichost.eu/	🇸🇪
Git repository hosting	https://codeberg.org/	🇩🇪

Of these, statichost.eu was a nice find, because it will let you point to a git repository (public or private), and run with it, with support for either fully static content, or one of several static site generators, and even pick a specific version to avoid surprises.

Still to do

That leaves virtual servers, for my self-hosted mail-server and the one-person-Mastodon instance. Most likely I'll pick one of UpCloud (🇫🇮) or Scaleway (🇫🇷), after sitting down again to do a side-by-side comparison.

For object storage Scaleway seems to have a reasonably priced solution, but that also needs another look.

Hello again, world?

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

From Twitter to Mastodon

For many years Twitter was my main social media account. My Facebook account has not been visited in many months and Instagram has mostly been kept alive to follow some friends and family's postings. Though I originally did post from time to time, the last few years it had turned mostly into a read-only account.

Then last year around the time of the change in ownership, I gave up on it and began an effort to migrate my network to Mastodon or, more accurately the Fediverse. Initially at mastodon.social, the flagship server for the Mastodon software, with an account that I had created in May 2022 but began using in earnest in October. Later I migrated to an account on a personal server.

Starting to feel an itch

As I was posting on my Mastodon account, I regularly found myself writing more than was going to fit in the space of the default 500 characters. Sure I could change that default (although it is a little bit more work than just changing a configuration file entry), but that felt wrong. To me, the fact that I was bumping against that ceiling suggested I was looking for a different medium for those posts.

Static Site Generator to the rescue

While I did feel the itch to write some longer form things, the idea of running (potentially vulnerable) infrastructure for this that would need to be maintained did not appeal to me.

Comes along Hugo (docs, themes, etc at the official website) which comes with a generous set of themes that can be tweaked as needed, allows me to write posts and other pages in Org Mode syntax, and has built-in support for deploying its output into an AWS S3 bucket.

More details on the project page.